Jenna Jacobson

Hungry for the job: gender, unpaid internships, and the creative industries

This paper examines the experiences of young Canadian women working in Toronto and New York who have undertaken unpaid internships in the creative sector. Interviews focused on their internship experiences, ability to secure paid employment, knowledge of the legal status of unpaid internships, and familiarity with emergent activism against unpaid internships. Findings reinforce the class-based privilege of unpaid internships in the creative sector. Despite the economic precarity of unpaid internships, the young women articulated strong desires to find meaningful, secure, and paid employment.

Movember: Twitter Conversations of a Hairy Social Movement

Movember is an annual “month-long celebration of the moustache” where men grow a mustache and raise money in the largest philanthropic endeavor for men’s health. Movember is predominantly an online campaign, and consequently, participants have actively embraced social media; this is evidenced in the 1,879,994 tweets collected during Movember 2012 in this research project. This article presents an analysis of Movember that examines how individuals use the numerous syntactical features of Twitter to engage in conversation and share information in order to develop a nuanced understanding of how people are utilizing social media as part of the social movement. While Movember has been successful in gaining traction on social media, the Twitter data point to surprising conclusions that have implications for understanding non-profits and social movements online. The following study provides two main contributions to existing sociotechnical social movement literature using a mixed-methods approach. First, the findings suggest that there is limited true conversation taking place although the stated purpose of the campaign is to facilitate conversation. Second, the findings identify that participants are more engaged with Movember as a branded movement than engaged in health promotion. While the tweets are conversational in form, they are largely not conversational in function, which points to Twitter being used as a broadcast tool in this context. These findings have broad implications for understanding how social media is used to engage individuals in social campaigns and engage with each other and share information.

Understanding communities in an age of social media: the good, the bad, and the complicated

Not only does this special issue of Information, Communication and Society bring you seven fascinating articles, it also brings together contemporary thinking about community and social media. The study of community no longer must keep to a parallel track with the study of digital media. We intertwine and integrate the two, celebrating the people who are connected in a community, by whatever means. Once upon a time, we thought we knew what communities were: small knots of people in local areas (‘neighborhoods’) where people knew each other and were mutually supportive. This golden narrative is repeated throughout time: nearly 80 years ago, American authors such as Thornton Wilder wrote romantic pieces about ‘Our Town’ (1938), and the play has been in production ever since. Even in 2016, U.S. presidential candidate John Kasich’s campaign is based on anecdotes about community’s social supportiveness. Yet, such pastoralist nostalgia for community is wrong in two ways. First, most people in neighborhoods do not know one other –much less like or support one other. Second, if we focus on the sociability and supportiveness of community ties, rather than on their putative neighborhood location, it turns out that in the developed world, most of the ties people have will stretch well beyond their neighborhoods and often well beyond the sea. All of this was shown to be true well before the advent of the internet (Darin, 1959; Fischer, 1976; Wellman & Leighton, 1979). Several things have happened to affect our understanding of ‘community’ over time. For one thing, politicians use the word to refer to aggregates of people with similar attributes or characteristics (such as ‘the gay community’) even if few of these people have ever met. That is quite different than a community based on connectivity and support. Political scientist Anderson (1991) expanded the term even further: ‘imagined communities’ which referred to nations to which people thought they were members. In Anderson’s imagined communities, ‘the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (p. 6). Anderson’s concept has served as an illustrative lens through which to understand and appreciate online communities, such as World of Warcraft, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game that brings people together around the world in short or long-term clans or conflicts (Nardi, 2010). Even in such amorphous, less-bounded milieus, people may need to imagine that they belong to a community; in this way, community is a mental conceptualization of the people with whom they are

Social Media for Social Good or Evil: An Introduction

In the heyday of social media, individuals around the world held high hopes for the democratizing force of social media; however, in light of the recent public outcry of privacy violations, fake news, and Russian troll farms, much of optimism toward social media has waned in favor of skepticism, fear, and outrage. This special issue critically explores the question, “Is social media for good or evil?” While good and evil are both moral terms, the research addresses whether the benefits of using social media in society outweigh the drawbacks. To help conceptualize this topic, we examine some of the benefits (good) and drawbacks (evil) of using social media as discussed in eight papers from the 2017 International Conference on Social Media and Society. This thematic collection reflects a broad range of topics, using diverse methods, from authors around the world and highlights different ways that social media is used for good, or evil, or both. We conclude that the determination of good and evil depends on where you stand, but as researchers, we need to go a step further to understand who it is good for and who it might hurt.

Journalists’ Use of Social Media to Infer Public Opinion: The Citizens’ Perspective

Journalists increasingly use social media data to infer and report public opinion by quoting social media posts, identifying trending topics, and reporting general sentiment. In contrast to traditional approaches of inferring public opinion, citizens are often unaware of how their publicly available social media data are being used and how public opinion is constructed using social media analytics. In this exploratory study based on a census-weighted online survey of Canadian adults (N = 1,500), we examine citizens’ perceptions of journalistic use of social media data. We demonstrate that (1) people find it more appropriate for journalists to use aggregate social media data rather than personally identifiable data, (2) people who use more social media are more likely to positively perceive journalistic use of social media data to infer public opinion, and (3) the frequency of political posting is positively related to acceptance of this emerging journalistic practice, which suggests some citizens want to be heard publicly on social media while others do not. We provide recommendations for journalists on the ethical use of social media data and social media platforms on opt-in functionality.

Stringtern: springboarding or stringing along young interns’ careers?

ABSTRACT Young people are repeatedly promised that internships will pave the way to the career of their dreams by providing the ‘hands-on experience’ necessary to differentiate themselves in a fierce job market. However, in many industries, internships – and increasingly unpaid internships – have become the obligatory norm. Young people quickly learn that the internship is not an opportunity, but rather a ‘necessary evil’ that, for many, strings them along in the hope that it may lead to a less precarious paid opportunity. In this article, our findings are based on 12 in-depth interviews with young female interns in the creative industries based in Toronto and New York City. Our participants recognise that in the current economic climate, they need to ‘pay their dues’; however, they often enter into a system of sequential – or string – internships, and become, what we label, a stringtern. In an evolving internship market in North America, we develop a typology of internships including (1) paid/underpaid/unpaid, (2) academic credit/not-for-credit, (3) for-profit/non-profit, (4) full-time/part-time and (5) on-site/off-site to develop a common language to critically analyse the culture of internships. By valuing young people’s perspectives as gleaned from our interviews, the typology aims to provide a more nuanced way to approach the complexity of unpaid internships and the transition from education to the workforce. Furthermore, three interrelated implications of the culture of internships are identified: internship as a free trial, internship as conveyor-belt labour and internship as displacing paid employment.

Social Media and Society: Introduction to the Special Issue:

As a scholarly domain, social media research has come a long way since the term “social media” first appeared in the literature in the early 2000s. Since then, researchers across disciplines have been actively examining the impact of social media on society. According to Web of Science, there are currently over 19,000 academic articles that include the term “social media.” This special issue of American Behavioral Scientist adds to this rapidly growing body of social media research with a focus on exploring (1) networked influence, (2) transmission of (mis)information, and (3) online and offline, which points to an unstated struggle between top-down attempts by governments and large organizations to influence society and bottom-up citizen articulations of needs and actions.

Introduction to the 2016 International Conference on Social Media and Society

This paper is the Introduction to the 2016 Proceedings of the International Conference on Social Media and Society, an annual gathering of leading social media researchers from around the world. Now, in its 7th year, the 2016 conference is hosted at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK from July 11 to 13. The conferences intensive three-day program features 24 full papers, 65 work-in-progress papers, 8 workshops, 4 panels, and 34 posters. The Proceedings features 24 full papers grouped into five broad categories: Politics, Visual(izing) Social Media, Business, Places & Spaces, and Online & Offline Communities.

Hacking the storage and preservation of social media data

The growing availability of social media has afforded researchers the ability to conduct large-scale research projects using social media data. Social media platforms will come and go, but what is constant is the fact that in order to foster the sharing of data and encourage research innovation, there is a pressing need for the research community to develop a strong set of data stewardship principles, standards, and protocols around social media data preservation. The hackathon will bring overlapping research communities of Information scholars together to identify the major challenges, opportunities, and possible interventions to address the preservation and storage of social media data.

Introduction to the 2015 social media and society conference

The Social Media & Society Conference is an annual international gathering of leading social media researchers from around the world. Now, in its sixth year, the 2015 conference is being held in Toronto, Canada, on July 27-29. The conferences intensive three-day program provides 18 full papers, 78 work-in-progress papers, 5 panels, and 52 posters. The wide-ranging topics in social media showcase research from nearly 400 scholars from 28 different countries working in many fields.