Jenny Kennedy

Conceptual boundaries of sharing

Sharing has been subjected to continuous re-imagination and positioning throughout networked cultures history. Recently, there has been specific emphasis on user-generated content and social media platforms. Particular social actors, such as social media platforms, attempt to cultivate an imaginary of sharing in networked culture. They do this by appropriating positive social values associated with common understandings of sharing, such as community, generosity, shared values of cooperation, and participation. While there has been a recent surge of interest in sharing, conceptual gaps remain. Though sharing is a central concept of networked culture, in this paper I show how its boundaries with other social theories of exchange have not been sufficiently established nor has the concept itself been adequately critiqued. Most significantly, this paper problematizes how sharing is implicated and positioned in studies of networked culture. I argue that a framework for a theory of sharing is needed and identify three distinct perspectives in the literature: sharing as an economy driven by social capital; sharing as a mode of scaled distribution; and sharing as a site of social intensification. It is shown how the use of the term sharing in the description of practices in networked culture is fraught with ambiguity. The paper concludes by elucidating how a focus on sharing practices can advance the field.

Digital housekeepers and domestic expertise in the networked home

This article examines the distribution of expertise in the performance of ‘digital housekeeping’ required to maintain a networked home. It considers the labours required to maintain a networked home, the forms of digital expertise that are available and valued in digital housekeeping, and ways in which expertise is gendered in distribution amongst household members. As part of this discussion, we consider how digital housekeeping implicitly situates technology work within the home in the role of the ‘housekeeper’, a term that is complicated by gendered sensitivities. Digital housework, like other forms of domestic labour, contributes to identity and self-worth. The concept of housework also affords visibility of the digital housekeeper’s enrolment in the project of maintaining the household. This article therefore asks, what is at stake in the gendered distribution of digital housekeeping?

Regulation and social practice online

This article argues that everyday media practices are foundational to regulation on social media platforms. Beginning from a practice theory perspective, supported by qualitative research conducted on Facebook and Reddit, this paper shows how individual interactions with the platform and with other people on the site shape central regulatory norms on these sites. We suggest that our focus on practice complements existing studies that consider how regulation operates on social media platforms and shows how both practices and algorithms operate in conversation with one another in order to govern these sites. This research sets out an alternative trajectory of regulation, which is not based in law or privately established processes (such as EULAs, ToS or ‘flags’) but instead one grounded in the everyday practices of sociality, reciprocity, and perhaps even the maintenance of a particular community ideal.

Methodological and Ethical Concerns Associated with Digital Ethnography in Domestic Environments: Participant Burden and Burdensome Technologies

This chapter reflects on methodological and ethical issues arising in a digital ethnography project conducted in domestic environments. The participatory aims of the methodological approach required participants to produce a series of videos exploring domestic digital environments. The videos were then uploaded using an ethnographic software application. Early in the project it became evident that researchers had limited control over important aspects of the technology, and that the technology itself was having disruptive effects in households. Further, although the study was designed to be engaging and playful for participants, the tasks of producing the videos was perceived by some participants as requiring onerous levels of creativity and digital media literacy. The chapter discusses these methodological and ethical issues, and how they were largely resolved.

Situating research, situating practice: new voices in cultural research

This special section follows on from the Cultural Studies Association of Australasia (CSAA) intermezzo symposium ‘Doing Cultural Studies: Interrogating Practice’. The symposium was held at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, on 3 December 2013 and co-hosted by CSAA and the Swinburne Institute for Social Research. We organized the event in order to provide emerging cultural studies scholars with a space to interrogate both practice, in relation to practice theory, and the notion of ‘doing’ cultural studies scholarship more generally. Associate professor Katrina Schlunke opened the event with a short provocation titled ‘Unnatural Practices’, to an audience of around 60 scholars at various stages of their academic career. Then postgraduates and early career researchers delivered papers, which addressed a range of issues, from community and location to gender and creativity. The day ended with a series of round-table discussions exploring research practice and methodology as well as (perhaps unavoidably, these days) the practice of successfully establishing an academic career. ‘Situating research, situating practice’ continues this conversation by providing a space for emerging cultural scholars to critically reflect on their own practice as researchers, and on practice more broadly. Subsequently, this collection offers accounts of a diverse selection of social and cultural practices, from surfing to breakdancing, as well as a series of important methodological interventions. Contributors propose new ways to think about institutions, bodies, regions and genders (amongst other things) and show how their own research practices can reveal, alter or impact these concepts, as well as the very practices they are seeking to study. Therefore, in addition to standing as a body of emerging cultural research around practice, this special section also features postgraduate students and early career researchers critically engaging with their own position as scholars and articulating what it means to ‘practice’ or ‘do’ cultural studies. In the first article featured this section, titled ‘Regulation and Social Practice Online’, we argue that everyday practices contribute to the regulation of social media platforms. Through case studies of Facebook and Reddit, we show how people tend to defer to established forms of practice on social media, using these norms to guide their interactions with and through the platform. This analysis stands alongside existing studies of platform politics and usefully illustrates the ways in which practice helps to entrench online norms, alongside more formal regulatory structures.

Proxy Users, Use By Proxy: Mapping Forms of Intermediary Interaction

Within Human-Computer Interaction and Internet Studies there is a growing interest in non-users, which articulates the increasingly diverse modes of digital media engagement that slip between established categories of user/non-user, online/offline and self/other. In this paper we aim to build on these concerns and their disciplinary intersections to map emerging forms of computer interaction and social media participation that can be grouped together under the concept of proxy users -- intermediaries that act on behalf of others. This preliminary mapping work, surveying a number of research projects and studies involving the authors, begins to trace the diversity of agents, roles, contexts, and motivations of proxy users.