Stephanie Alice Baker

From the criminal crowd to the "mediated crowd": the impact of social media on the 2011 English riots

Purpose – This article aims to explore the impact of new social media on the 2011 English riots.Design/methodology/approach – The paper suggests that discourse on the riots in the news and popular press is obscured by speculation and political rhetoric about the role of social media in catalysing the unrest that overlooks the role of individual agency and misrepresents the emotional dimensions of such forms of collective action.Findings – In considering the riots to be symptomatic of criminality and austerity, commentators have tended to revive nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century crowd theories to make sense of the unrest, which are unable to account for the effect of new social media on this nascent twenty‐first century phenomenon.Research limitations/implications – Here, the notion of the “mediated crowd” is introduced to argue that combining emotions research with empirical analysis can provide an innovative account of the relationship between new social media and the type of collective action that took ...

The Mediated Crowd: New Social Media and New Forms of Rioting:

Commentary on the recent riots largely reflects ideological differences with political discourse reviving traditional debates of social inequality and moral decline. While the 2011 riots resemble former incidents of rioting in twentieth-century Britain, it is argued that the recent unrest was significantly enhanced by the development of new social media, requiring new understandings of mediated crowd membership in the twenty-first century. I introduce and outline a model of the ‘mediated crowd’ commencing with the impact of new social media, and develop this paradigm in conjunction with emotions research, to account for the emotional dimensions of collective action, and the social and political effects these technological developments have on contemporary forms of rioting. Here, it is argued that attempts to understand the causes of the recent riots must recognise that while social media contributed to the speed and scope of the unrest, emotions play a crucial role in motivating and sustaining collective action as the structures of feeling that intersect geographic and virtual public space. This innovative approach provides insight into the particular conditions in which the English riots emerged, while demonstrating how social media contributes more broadly to new forms of collectivity in the media age.

Mediating mega events and manufacturing multiculturalism: The cultural politics of the world game in Australia

Contemporary global politics is characterized by intense debate about the status of multiculturalism. Framed within discourses of crime, counter-terrorism and moral decline, multiculturalism has been declared redundant just as the Australian government has rehabilitated the term in local citizenship legislation and policy making. Tensions between the local and the global are complex and multifaceted, taking place beyond the formal political arena, with the multicultural image of international mega events, such as the FIFA World Cup, conflicting with local representations of association football in Australia. Our case study of FIFA’s Sydney Live Site (in 2010) investigates latent tensions involving the representation of national interests at mediated local events with global implications. Ambivalence towards multiculturalism in sport is symptomatic, we argue, of a wider conflictual politics of national identity and fealty, with football (soccer) in Australia operating as a specific site where anxieties about multiculturalism are publicly expressed and new forms of governmentality ‘trialled’.

The selfie and the transformation of the public–private distinction

ABSTRACT The selfie is a contemporary form of self-portraiture, representing a photographic image of the human face. The selfie is created for the purpose of reproduction and to communicate images visually with others from a distance. The proliferation of web 2.0 technologies and mobile smart phones enables users to generate and disseminate images at an unprecedented scale. Coupled with the increasing popularity of social media platforms, these technologies allow the selfie to be distributed to a wide audience in close to real time. Drawing upon Erving Goffman’s approach to the study of face-to-face social interaction, this article presents a discussion of the production and consumption of the selfie. We draw upon Goffman’s dramaturgical approach, to explore how the ‘presentation of self’ occurs in the context of a selfie. Next, we consider how the selfie as a form of visual communication holds critical implications for mediated life online as individuals go about doing privacy. We conclude by reflecting on the role of the selfie and its impact on the boundaries between public and private domains in contemporary social life.

The "fall" of what? FIFA's public viewing areas and their contribution to the quality of public life

Much conventional scholarship considers “the public” to be in decline in the modern Western world, following a range of cultural developments believed to encourage withdrawal into the private domain. Public Viewing Areas devoted to communicating live events may be interpreted as countering such a trend by attracting audiences to the public sphere. This article examines how the world governing body of association football, FIFA, recently aimed to achieve such an objective by broadcasting the 2010 World Cup at six designated international Fan Fest sites. Drawing on theories of “spectacle” and sociality, the implications of FIFA’s initiative are interrogated by examining whether the environment and surveillance measures characterizing the “global spectacle” facilitated social interaction. In the process, established understandings of the “fall” and “quality” of public life are canvassed to propose how these collective fora might engender “meaningful” public communication beyond crowd assimilation through spatial co-presence and shared mediated imagery alone.

The power of popular publicity : new social media and the affective dynamics of the sport racism scandal

Sociologists have tended to take insufficient account of the importance of emotions to the social power of the institution of media, particularly as altered by the emergence of social media in the current media ecology. This paper compensates for this neglect by means of a brief illustrative case study of the effect of social media on the public reception of the 2011 Sepp Blatter racism scandal and of other ‘race-related’ scandals in the UK. In proposing media scandals’ wider sociological significance regarding the dynamic, multi-accented relationships between emotions and power, it analyses how England’s prevailing climate of ‘postcolonial guilt’ was reinforced and conveyed through social media networks.

'Good Morning Fitfam': Top posts, hashtags and gender display on Instagram

Social networking sites are important platforms for visual self-presentation online. This article investigates how content producers present their gender identities on the social networking site, Instagram. We draw upon and develop Goffman’s analytic framework to understand the self-presentation techniques and styles users employ online. Conducting a visual content analysis of clean eating–related top posts, we examine how users deploy clean eating hashtags and how the architecture of Instagram constrains and enables certain identities around shared lifestyles and commercial interests. Our findings reveal the symbolic significance of hashtags for group membership and the degree to which gender identities on Instagram are configured around platform interfaces.

Introduction: Plato’s Challenge

For centuries, tragedy has been the source of debate and speculation. To evaluate tragedy’s effect on the audience is itself predicated upon beliefs regarding the genre’s composition, including by whom, and for what purpose, the tragedy in question is composed. It is a debate regarding the relationship of mimetic art (in this case, poetry in general and tragedy in particular) to knowledge, emotions, and truth—what Socrates described to his interlocutors as an age old “quarrel between philosophy and poetry” (Plato, [1935] 2006: 465). Contemporary vocabularies and academic scholarship tend to reduce tragedy to a literary genre. For the Greeks, however, to interrogate the value of tragedy was not merely a question of aesthetic pleasure, but whether such representations could benefit the polis (city-state) and “all the life of man.” To examine the significance of tragedy then is not a topic limited to the realm of literary theory, philosophy, and aesthetics (though these fields are integral to the genre). It is a sociological issue concerning what constitutes a tragedy, how tragedy is constructed, and the consequences of representing tragedy in society.

Performing the postcolonial: the ‘migrant’ body as a site of veneration, repugnance and blame

Historically, football in France has reflected broader processes of transmigration with sporting success and failure reified in terms of the ‘migrant’ body in its various forms (e.g., with regard to ‘race’, gender, ethnicity and religion). This process of reification applies particularly to major sporting events, such as the FIFA World Cup, where icons and scandals provide opportunities to explore the corporeal discourses through which the body is represented, experienced and performed. In this paper, I employ a series of media scandals involving ethnic players from the French national team to examine how emotions influence attitudes towards migration in contemporary France. As a transgression of society’s moral order, the media scandal is used as a paradigm to interrogate the social consequences of representing the migrant body as the source of moral outrage. With ‘race’ relations at the forefront of French football, and the country’s political terrain more generally, I argue that the athletic performanc...