Leslie Regan Shade

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.

“Honestly, We’re Not Spying on Kids”: School Surveillance of Young People’s Social Media

Social media is one of the top activities and sites for young people’s socialization in North America, raising concerns over their social privacy, because of reported instances of cyberbullying and sexting, and their informational privacy, because of commercial data collection. A trend in schools and school districts in the United States is to monitor and track, through third party applications and software, student social media during and after school, in an attempt to prevent or reduce the perceived dissemination of violence, bullying, threats, or hate instigated by students and directed toward other students or entire schools. This article will provide an overview of four of these US companies (Geo Listening, Varsity Monitor, Snaptrends, Digital Fly) and consider the policy and ethical issues of data monitoring with respect to young people’s rights to privacy and their freedom of speech.

Wanted, Alive and Kicking

In 2008 Katharine Sarikakis and I co-edited Feminist Interventions in International Communication. The collection offered a refreshing range of feminist scholarship unabashedly championing a political economic framework onto diverse issues including culture, representation, technologies, labour, and policy that were not integrated nor acknowledged enough in international communication literature. In our introductory chapter we adopted the trope of the Curious Feminist, coined by Cynthia Enloe, in which she “admonishes feminists to be curious about the world around them and to ask questions about their everyday political and social life that not only warrant consideration but that are also often dismissed or ignored by the mainstream media—and often by feminists themselves” (Katharine Sarikakis & Leslie Regan Shade 2008, p. 3). In this short article I want to take up this call of the Curious Feminist and dig deeper into one research sphere we identified as needing more interrogation, that of “education and awareness, advocacy, and activism around intersections of local, national, and international media and cultural policy . . . knowledge of and participation in media policy forums is central; dissecting the policy language and distilling it for communities is crucial” (Sarikakis & Shade, p. 14). Towards this end, I want to reflect on the sorts of questions that the Curious Feminist might ask about digital policy issues and their role in the media reform movements in North America. Feminist media studies should engage more in digital policy, critiquing and calling for accountability at local, national, and international governance regimes, and provide education and advocacy on digital policy in our classrooms and through grassroots and formal structures of policy participation.

Digital Surveillance in the Networked Classroom

This chapter examines the ways in which digital surveillance has disrupted experiences of, and relationships between, students and teachers in the networked classroom. We then explore the impact of what Zuboff calls ‘surveillance capitalism’ on schools, through the lens of two emerging trends: the use of commercial software to police students on social media and the collection of students’ personal information by educational software companies. We argue that the current escalation of big data programmes and analytics in schools for the purposes of tracking academic progress and for monitoring their social media communication to ensure safety creates an unnecessary incursion into student’s lives that threatens their rights, as well as those of parents and teachers.

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.

Children’s digital playgrounds as data assemblages: Problematics of privacy, personalization, and promotional culture

Children’s digital playgrounds have evolved from commercialized digital spaces such as websites and games to include an array of convergent digital media consisting of social media platforms, mobile apps, and the internet of toys. In these digital spaces, children’s data is shared with companies for analytics, personalization, and advertising. This article describes children’s digital playgrounds as a data assemblage involving commercial surveillance of children, ages 3–12. The privacy sweep is used as a method to follow the personal information traces that can be expected to be disclosed through typical use of two children’s digital playgrounds: the YouTube Kids app and Fisher-Price Smart Toy plush animal and companion app. To trace the data flows, privacy policies and other publicly available documents were analyzed using political economy and privacy informed indicators. This article concludes by reflecting upon the dataveillance and commercialization practices that trouble the privacy rights of the child and parent when data assemblages in children’s digital playgrounds are surveillant.

Sexting panic: rethinking criminalization, privacy, and consent

The final section, Digital History is History, has two contributions focusing more on the details of research theory, with Synthia Sydnor exploring the nature of sport, and Fiona McLachlan and Douglas Booth discussing how sport historians engage with the Internet and, in particular, swimming. McLachlan and Booth conclude sport history “is now firmly enmeshed in an internet era,” and it “is forcing historians to ask new questions about their discipline and its practices” (p. 241). This is an effective final chapter to the book’s roll of contributions. Osmond and Phillips state their intended audience is sport historians, and scholars of sports studies, the sociology of sport, and the digital era. This wide-ranging title satisfies those aims and provides a thoughtful exploration of the strengths and weaknesses of online sport history, which is especially valuable for those reluctant to embrace the digital age.

Low power to the people: pirates, protest, and politics in FM radio activism

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My So-Called Social Media Life

This short essay offers a personal reflection on social media and some of the challenges related to corporate ownership and policy issues of privacy and surveillance.