Sander De Ridder

Commenting on pictures: Teens negotiating gender and sexualities on social networking sites:

This inquiry shows how youths negotiate sexualities and gender when commenting on profile pictures on a social networking site. Attention is given to (1) how discourses are constituted within heteronormativity, and (2) how the mediated nature of the SNS contributes to resistance. Using insights from cultural media studies, social theory and queer criticism, self-representations in SNSs are viewed as sites of struggle. A textual analysis is used to show how commenting on a picture is a gendered practice, continuously cohering between the biological sex, performative gender and demanded desire. Although significant resignifications are found, they are often accompanied by a recuperation of heteronormativity. Therefore, this inquiry argues for continued attention to current contradictions in self-representations.This inquiry shows how youths negotiate sexualities and gender when commenting on profile pictures on a social networking site. Attention is given to (1) how discourses are constituted within heter...

Youth and intimate media cultures: gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire as storytelling practices in social networking sites

This paper investigates how young people give meaning to gender, sexuality, relationships, and desire in the popular social networking site (SNS) Netlog. In arguing how SNSs are important spaces for intimate politics, the extent to which Netlog is a space that allows contestations of intimate stories and a voicing of difference is questioned. These intimate stories should be understood as self-representational media practices; young people make sense of their intimate stories in SNSs through media cultures. Media cultures reflect how audiences and SNS institutions make sense of intimacy. This paper concludes that intimate stories as media practices in the SNS Netlog are structured around creativity, anonymity, authenticity, performativity, bricolage and intertextuality. The intimate storytelling practices focusing on creativity, anonymity, bricolage and intertextuality are particularly significant for a diversity of intimacies to proliferate.

Emerging trends in small acts of audience engagement and interruptions of content flows

This chapter develops a set of findings around audiences’ small-scale acts of engagement with media content made available through digital media technologies. We identify and discuss three articulations of these small acts: (1) one click engagement, (2) commenting and debating and (3) small stories. In contrasting them with more collaborative and convergent productive practices, we further conceptualise these engagements in relation to two main dimensions: effort and intentionality. Lastly, we suggest a conceptualisation of the outcome of these acts which we have labelled interruption. Content flows can be challenged, if not transformed, due to the volume of small acts, which is realised by the producing audiences as well as by mainstream media. Profound changes in the way information is produced and distributed are fuelled by small acts of engagement, and these trends are likely to continue into the futures this book speaks about.

Interruption, Disruption or Intervention? A Stakeholder Analysis of Small Acts of Engagement in Content Flows

This chapter builds upon central findings arising from consultations with stakeholders about audiences’ engagement in the content flows, defined as an ever evolving ecology of online and offline content produced by a number of more and less institutionalised content producers, ranging from news organisations to YouTubers. First, we note that increasing use of audience analytics tends to fragment the monolithic audience into tangible sub-communities. Second, we discuss how production routines of legacy media change in response to small acts of engagement via digital interfaces. Third, audience creativity enters economic relations and amateur production struggles with a tension between being creative and economic logic of production. Fourth, we look at transformations related to (dis)trust as a mutual dynamic that not only concerns audiences’ trust or mistrust in legacy media, but which is increasingly significant in regard to media’s trust in content produced by audiences as well, making it more difficult for audiences to engage with the content produced by media institutions.

A Different Point of View: Women's Self-Representation in Instagram's Participatory Artistic Movements @girlgazeproject and @arthoecollective

ABSTRACT This article explores the political potential of self-representation in Instagrams participatory artistic movements. It understands this political potential in a broader sense of “everyday politics” in which seemingly mundane issues, like Instagram self-representation, have the potential to enact societal change, affecting the politics of mass media representation. It uses as examples the @girlgazeproject and the @arthoecollective Instagram accounts. These on-going projects share a curated selection of artworks, submitted by aspiring artists usually underrepresented in the traditional mass media industries and mainstream commercial art world—young female photographers and creative women of colour. The article explores how these shared self-representations can reclaim agency and position women as active creators of art, functioning as a form of “everyday activism.” Both accounts are concerned with questioning intersectionality and diversity in visual cultural representation. Although they are grounded in a Western Anglophone context, with mostly participants from the US and Western Europe, they encourage a broad transnational adherence, sharing representations from several countries from the global South. This theoretical reflection on the political potential of self-representation is based on a close reading of the Instagram feeds of both accounts, combined with an analysis of the online media discourses produced about these accounts.

Social media and young people’s sexualities : values, norms, and battlegrounds

This article explores how young people are making sense of sexuality in the context of social media, considering social media’s material as well as symbolic operations. Drawing on 14 focus groups (...This article explores how young people are making sense of sexuality in the context of social media, considering social media’s material as well as symbolic operations. Drawing on 14 focus groups (n = 89, conducted in 2012 and 2015) with young people between 14 and 19 years of age in Dutch-speaking Belgium, this article is informed by young people’s discussions, meanings, values, and norms on sexuality and social media, situated in everyday life peer group settings. The results argue how young people are making strong value judgments about sexuality in the context of social media and how they use a sharp hierarchical system to distinguish between “good” and “bad” sexual practices in social media. Therefore, young people draw on essentialist sexual ideologies. This article discusses these value judgments not only in relation to how social media functions but also in relation to social media’s symbolic operations, namely how they are meaningful for young people’s sexualities. The role of social media is discussed in relation to broader cultural dynamics of young people’s changing sexual cultures, which are characterized by risk, resistance, individualization, and mediatization. The article concludes how young people’s consistent need for making value judgments about sexuality in the context of social media may point to a conservatism that is driven by social media’s overwhelming role in culture and society. Social media have become a crucial battleground for sexual politics; they need to be taken seriously as spaces that produce values and norms about sexuality, deciding what kind of sexualities are supported, repressed, or disciplined.

Resistant masculinities in alternative R&B? Understanding Frank Ocean and The Weeknd’s representations of gender:

With the emergence of alternative R&B, contemporary R&B and hip hop culture are being confronted with a subgenre that challenges its key characteristics. One of the aspects that typify alternative R&B is the emergence of an alternative masculinity. The aim of this study is to research whether the alternative masculinities represented in alternative R&B resist the hegemonic masculine ideal established within R&B and hip hop culture. To this end, this study conducts a textual analysis of the representations of gender in the work of Frank Ocean and The Weeknd, artists considered representative for alternative R&B. The analysis reveals that Ocean’s work features successful nonnormative masculine identities, whereas The Weeknd refrains to representing postmodern exaggerations of the hegemonic male. Despite divergent representational strategies, both artists do engage in questioning what it means to be a man in R&B and hip hop culture and thereby at least attempt to challenge the supremacy of hegemonic masculinity.