Jenny L. Davis

Context collapse: theorizing context collusions and collisions

The collapsing of social contexts together has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves. Academic literature is starting to address how the meshing of social contexts online has many potentially beneficial as well as problematic consequences. In an effort to further theorize context collapse, we draw on this literature to consider the conditions under which context collapse occurs, offering key conceptual tools with which to address these conditions. Specifically, we distinguish two different types of context collapse, splitting collapse into context collusions and context collisions. The former is an intentional collapsing of contexts, while the latter is unintentional. We further examine the ways in which both technological architectures and agentic user practices combine to facilitate and mitigate the various effects of collapsing contexts.

Architecture of the personal interactive homepage: constructing the self through MySpace

From a symbolic interactionist perspective, this work looks at the construction of self and identity through MySpace. Using ethnographic methods, I look to answer two questions: (1) how does the physical architecture of the personal interactive homepage (PIH) facilitate interaction and self presentation in particular ways? (2) How does self presentation through the PIH impact processes of negotiated self construction more largely? I discuss three architectural aspects of MySpace which influence the self construction process in particular ways. First, self presentation is predominately overt rather than covert. Second, the structure of MySpace allows for actor contextualization of ambiguous symbols. Third, MySpace facilitates a presentation created temporally prior to negotiation. These findings imply that through the PIH, actors may be granted greater control over the ways in which their self presentation is received, negotiated and interpreted.

Theorizing Affordances: From Request to Refuse

As a concept, affordance is integral to scholarly analysis across multiple fields—including media studies, science and technology studies, communication studies, ecological psychology, and design studies among others. Critics, however, rightly point to the following shortcomings: definitional confusion, a false binary in which artifacts either afford or do not, and failure to account for diverse subject-artifact relations. Addressing these critiques, this article demarcates the mechanisms of affordance—as artifacts request, demand, allow, encourage, discourage, and refuse—which take shape through interrelated conditions: perception, dexterity, and cultural and institutional legitimacy. Together, the mechanisms and conditions constitute a dynamic and structurally situated model that addresses how artifacts afford, for whom and under what circumstances.

Prosuming Identity The Production and Consumption of Transableism on Transabled.org

Prosumption refers to the blurring of production and consumption. Although this has always been present (Ritzer, 2009), the contemporary era creates an environment in which prosumption can flourish. Specifically, the presence of Web 2.0 has led to an abundance of user-generated content, produced by those who consume it. I wish to argue here for an extension of the theoretical idea of prosumption into the arena of identity. Currently, prosumption is conceptualized in a way that understands as separate the prosumer of content, and the content that is prosumed. I argue that this is a false distinction, as content that is prosumed can also signify an identity for its prosumer(s). I illustrate this argument by qualitatively analyzing the introduction statements, subsequent entries, and public comments of the bloggers and participants on transabled.org , a user-generated website for people who believe that they were born in incorrectly-able bodies. By prosuming the content on transabled.org , members of this online community simultaneously prosume their own transabled identities, and construct transableism as a culturally available identity category.

Social Media and Experiential Ambivalence

At once fearful and dependent, hopeful and distrustful, our contemporary relationship with technology is highly ambivalent. Using experiential accounts from an ongoing Facebook-based qualitative study (N = 231), I both diagnose and articulate this ambivalence. I argue that technological ambivalence is rooted primarily in the deeply embedded moral prescription to lead a meaningful life, and a related uncertainty about the role of new technologies in the accomplishment of this task. On the one hand, technology offers the potential to augment or even enhance personal and public life. On the other hand, technology looms with the potential to supplant or replace real experience. I examine these polemic potentialities in the context of personal experiences, interpersonal relationships, and political activism. I conclude by arguing that the pervasive integration and non-optionality of technical systems amplifies utopian hopes, dystopian fears, and ambivalent concerns in the contemporary era.

Narrative Construction of a Ruptured Self: Stories of Transability on Transabled.org:

Transabled.org is an online community for people with body integrity identity disorder (BIID). People with BIID believe that they were born in incorrectly abled bodies. By analyzing the Introduction statements of twenty-two bloggers, the author shows how BIID is collectively constructed and individually articulated. Specifically, the author shows how bloggers essentialize their impairment-needs, painting a picture of a ruptured self. Through self-narratives, bloggers describe their impairment-needs as existential and deeply intrinsic. They support this description in several ways: (1) focusing on childhood, (2) grappling with “why?”, (3) painting a detailed picture of the “correct” body, and (4) denial/surrender stories. The author argues that the essentialist narrative locates impairment-needs within a “natural” frame and in doing so acts as a form of moral stigma resistance. The author then connects this stigma management strategy with the political and material goals of medical recognition and a path to legal ability re-assignment surgery.

Accomplishing authenticity in a labor-exposing space

The present work, through an ethnographic study of MySpace (N=96), examines the ways in which authenticity is accomplished within a labor-exposing space. To maintain authenticity, actors must make invisible the extensive labor of self-presentation. Certain online spaces, such as social network sites and personal interactive homepages, can be thought of as labor-exposing spaces, in that they give actors clear and explicit control over self-representations, making impressions of spontaneity difficult to accomplish (Davis, 2010; Gatson, 2011a; Marwick & boyd, 2010). I discuss and delineate several strategies used by participants to maintain authenticity on MySpace. I conclude that while the priorities of identity processes remain stable over time, the ways in which we accomplish identity are culturally, historically and materially contingent.

Morality Work among the Transabled

In the present article, I address the process of moral stigma resistance using an accounts studies framework. Specifically, I delineate and illustrate the concept of morality work. I demonstrate morality work empirically through a qualitative analysis of 17 years (1994–2011) of blog posts, archived content, and links to and from Transabled.org. Transabled.org is a website, blog, support group, and interaction forum for people with body integrity identity disorder (BIID)—a highly stigmatizing condition of incorrectly abled embodiment. Detractors accuse people with BIID of deep moral failings, including sexual perversion, dishonesty, greed, and attention seeking. In turn, persons with BIID neutralize claims of immorality through medicalization and biologization, and locate themselves on a moral high ground with a discourse of authenticity. In deconstructing transabled bloggers’ moral battle, I examine the process underlying deviant accounts.

The Effect of Status on Role-Taking Accuracy

We conducted two experiments to test the effects of status on the relationship between gender and role-taking accuracy. Role-taking accuracy denotes the accuracy with which one can predict another’s behavior. In Study 1, we examine self-evaluative measures of role-taking accuracy and find they do not correlate with actual role-taking accuracy. In addition, women were more accurate role-takers than men, regardless of interaction history. In Study 2, we disentangle gender differences from status differences, hypothesizing that role-taking accuracy is structurally situated. To test this hypothesis, we examine variations in role-taking accuracy when interaction partners are assigned differential status. Results indicate that status differentials account for variations in role-taking accuracy, whereas gender and gender composition of the dyad do not.

Curation: a theoretical treatment

ABSTRACT Curation is a key mechanism of sociality in a digital era. With an abundance of information, sifting, sorting, selecting, hiding, and standing out become laborious tasks. While researchers have diligently documented people’s curatorial strategies, digital curation remains undertheorized in its own right. I therefore theorize digital curation by disentangling productive curation from consumptive curation, addressing how people curate content that they share, and that which they consume. I embed these agentic curatorial practices within structural bounds, both social and technological. In doing so, I offer a basic theoretical model that captures a dynamic relationship between individual curators, their social networks, and technological design.