Produsage Communities

The next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 session is Jessica Crosby, whose focus is on Tumblr. She is interest in online audiencing through Tumblr, especially amongst millennial audiences; platforms such as this enable a performance of the self, but are also complicated by a context collapse between performance and private interactions.

Tumblr is used to think out loud for an anonymous but receptive audience; it has accumulated a cult status amongst creative communities and has accumulated a particularly young, queer, and creative audience. Tumblr presents a continuous stream of content from the Tumblr blogs users follow, and …

And the next speaker in this Social Media & Society 2024 conference session is Damien Renard, whose interest is in the power dynamics between platform operators and user communities. The focus here is on StackExchange, where moderators went on strike in protest against the platform’s May 2023 policy change to allow AI-generated content.

Moderators saw this as breaking an implicit contract between platform operators and moderators; they were worried about the impact on content quality and concerned that this policy change was implemented without consultation with the platform community. This is an example of digital power struggles on platforms, which …

The next session at COMNEWS 2023 that I’m attending is on social media and activism, and starts with Pierre Mauritz Sundah, whose focus is on independent women in social media. Traditionally, women in Indonesia and elsewhere have often been depicted in stereotypical roles representing household and child-rearing activities, and have therefore not been expected to have high levels of education. Many societal stigmata remain, as a result of the country’s patriarchal culture.

This paper focusses on a community of women weavers in rural Indonesia, who have been empowered by their participation in Du Anyam, a social enterprise aiming to empower …

It’s Wednesday, I think, and I’ve made it from AoIR in Philadelphia to the COMNEWS 2023 conference in Bali, Indonesia, where I’m giving one of the opening keynotes this morning. Here are the slides:

And the final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Jim Brown, whose interest is also in Mastodon’s Fediverse. The move from Twitter to Mastodon following Twitter’s muskification was slow and halting in part because it was seen as a new silo whose community was smaller that Twitter’s, which ignores the federated aspects of Mastodon as a platform – why is this so, and how may it be overcome?

There are many historical examples of federation, from FidoNet and other past platforms to labour unions and other offline community practices; these are concerned with person-to-person but especially also with group-to-group …

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Aram Sinnreich and Rob Gehl, whose focus is on governance challenges for Mastodon’s Fediverse. Other social media platforms tend to fail due to the clash between the profit motives of platform operators and the community interests of users; this should enable it to bypass some of the pitfalls for civic engagement on corporate social media. Yet there may be other challenges for community-driven, federated social media like Mastodon – indeed, there are a number of other platforms that now build on the ActivityPub protocol that is best-known for underpinning Mastodon.

For …

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Cindy Fang, whose interest is in the early days of the Clubhouse social media platform – an invite-only audio app that became popular during the COVID-19 pandemic and attracted a number of high-profile users (including Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk). This userbase can be understood as a networked public, structured by the platform’s affordances – or in this case, networked listeners and active producers of content.

Clubhouse also provided a sense of community, with audio streams and comments on that content; this produces some social capital for prominent participants which is …

The final speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Allegra Rosenberg, whose interest is in fan art. This is now a big business, with fan-created fiction and fan-created imagery being provided for pay on various platforms. This is not uncontroversial, however; the fan site Archive of Our Own (AO3) has a long-standing ban against linking to for-profit sites, for instance.

But there has also been a slower commercialisation of fan content from the bottom up; this shows the increasingly normative acceptance of commercial exploitation. Fan sites for specific cultural phenomena are often run in collaboration with commercial interests, for instance …