Jacqueline Ryan Vickery

The Curious Case of Confession Bear: The Reappropriation of Online Macro Image Memes

‘Advice animals’ are popular user-created, image-based, and online meme formats. The memes include a humorous image of an animal juxtaposed with text offering advice and/or making a joke. One such example is known as ‘Confession Bear’, which features a sad looking Malayan sun bear ‘confessing’ to something silly, shameful, taboo, or embarrassing. Confession Bear was first circulated through the online community Reddit and was intended to be humorous. However, users unexpectedly started creating and sharing more serious confessions involving topics such as rape, abuse, and addiction. These more serious confessions juxtaposed with the Confession Bear image spurred lengthy in-depth conversations on the Reddit message boards about the validity, authenticity, and appropriateness of such confessions. Some users argued advice animals were not ‘supposed’ to be serious, claiming these confessions were an inappropriate use of the form; as such, some users attempted to regulate the participatory culture created by the production of image-based memes. Others sought to find the ‘truth’ in the claims; some argued the confessions were false and therefore inappropriate, while others defended the confessions as authentic, and therefore appropriate. This paper argues anonymity allows users to appropriate and repurpose humorous image-based memes in ways that simultaneously challenge and reproduce hegemonic culture.

‘I don't have anything to hide, but … ': the challenges and negotiations of social and mobile media privacy for non-dominant youth

Drawing from interviews and focus groups with teens in a low-income and ethnically diverse high school in central Texas, this paper explores the unique social privacy challenges and strategies of low-income and non-dominant youth. Situating the research in a broader context in which non-dominant teens are increasingly surveilled, I demonstrate how teens manage social privacy in at least three ways. First, they negotiate liminal boundaries of what constitutes a communal or shareable mobile device, which are structured around financial constraints. Second, through nonuse, they actively resist the ways mobile and social media reconfigure social and physical spaces. Third, they deliberately use multiple platforms as a way to cope with evolving privacy settings, social norms, and technological affordances; this is a deliberate strategy intended to resist social convergence. Because low-income and non-dominant youth are increasingly surveilled by adults, peers, and institutions, it is imperative that they find spaces that afford greater freedom of expression, interest-based communities, and privacy.

The Role of After-School Digital Media Clubs in Closing Participation Gaps and Expanding Social Networks.

This article considers how after-school digital media clubs, as an example of informal learning, can provide meaningful opportunities for youth to participate in the creation of interest-driven learning ecologies through media production. Ethnographic research was conducted in two after-school digital media clubs at a large, ethnically diverse, low income, public high school over the course of an academic year. The after-school clubs provided students with opportunities to develop digital literacies that could be leveraged for the acquisition of cultural and social capital. Although participation in the clubs expanded students’ offline social networks, restrictive school policies blocked access to social media and video sharing sites. Students were unlikely to share their work online and missed opportunities to develop network literacies that are crucial to more equitable modes of online participation.

Talk Whenever, Wherever: How the US Mobile Phone Industry Commodifies Talk, Genders Youth Mobile Practices, and Domesticates Surveillance

Mobile service provider commercials afford insight into contemporary expectations and norms of cell phone use within the family structure and reveal current tensions and gendered expectations related to the domestication of technology. This article analyzes forty-two US cell phone commercials from 2005 to 2014.The sample only considers commercials that include parents, youth, and families. Discourse analysis considers the themes, gendered representations, and constructions of technology as portrayed by the cell phone industry. I identify three dominant themes throughout the commercials: (1) the commodification of talk, (2) gendered stereotypes of teens, moms, and dads, and (3) the legitimization of surveillance, mostly around teen girls. Additionally, I argue the sociotechnical shift from talking to texting to data plays a significant role in the evolution of how mobile practices are constructed and gendered.

Conclusion: What Can We Do About Mediated Misogyny?

We conclude with a series of questions and answers about how different stakeholders can help combat mediated misogyny and contribute to a safer world: digital platforms, journalism, the law, and universities. Experts in each of these fields present tangible advice, ethics, and guidelines for changing systems of power and challenging misogyny.

This Isn’t New: Gender, Publics, and the Internet

This chapter maps the historical relationship between gender, publics, and the Internet via a discursive and feminist analysis. Drawing from the author’s personal experience, it contextualizes online harassment within “networked publics” alongside a broader history of gender-based harassment in physical spaces. Historically, the public sphere was constructed as a patriarchal space that “belonged” to men; contestations of space continue and are extended to online publics. The harassment of women has gained increasing visibility within media, academia, popular culture, and feminism, yet early Internet research reveals that women have experienced and been concerned about harassment from the earliest days of Internet adoption. Through a review of academic scholarship and the press over the past two decades, this chapter briefly traces and analyzes the longer history of gender-based online harassment of women in order to map a trajectory of continuity and change.

The Persistence of Misogyny: From the Streets, to Our Screens, to the White House

In the introduction, the book’s editors introduce the topic of mediated misogyny. They begin with a brief analysis of the 1913 Women’s Suffrage March and the 2016 U.S. presidential election as a way to contextualize the current moment of misogyny. They do this with a specific focus on how Trump uses media and Twitter to target, humiliate, and harass women. The chapter outlines how mass media, including advertising, film, journalism, and television, have a long history of marginalizing and trivializing women’s roles in society through the objectification and sexualization of their bodies. This provides context for analyzing how the Internet contributes to ongoing harassment of women. They identify the gendered nature of women’s online experiences and examine trends in gender-based harassment. The chapter also introduces the aims and scope of the book alongside some key takeaways.