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Social Enterprise to Empower Women in Indonesia

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.

The Challenges of Federation, in Social Media and Elsewhere

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?

Governance Challenges for the Fediverse

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.

The Invite-Only Dynamics of Clubhouse’s Rise and Fail

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.

Fans’ Complex Resistance against the Commercialisation of Fandom

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.

Twitch Streamers’ Compunctions about Streaming That Wizard Game

The next speaker in this AoIR 2023 session is Kyle Moody, who shifts our focus to branding and consumption markets in cultures; much fandom is tied up with such branding activities. In particular, the focus here is on Twitch, where affective labour and fan work collides with the gig economy of media content creation.

Analysing the Demographics of Fan Fiction Communities through the Distribution of a Community Survey

The next speakers in this AoIR 2023 session are Lauren Rouse and Mel Stanfill, whose interest is in fan communities on Tumblr. The latest overall demographic information for fandom communities is now ten years old, which is not particularly helpful; the team therefore developed a survey covering user demographics that was distributed via the r/Fanfiction subreddit, Tumblr, and Twitter; fans are still mostly cisgender women, but nonbinary gender identities and bisexual, asexual, and queer sexual orientations now dominate in this community.

Towards a Reparative Media System

It’s that time of the year, and I’m in Philadelphia for the 2023 conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (continuing my 21-year streak of attending AoIR), which starts in earnest with the keynote by Aymar Jèan ‘AJ’ Escoffery. His focus is on reparative media, and he begins by noting that it feels like our collective harms are intensifying. This is exacerbated to some extent by corporate media, who often distribute the equivalent of fast, globally consumable food rather than slow and locally relevant content. This perpetuates injustices which require a particular approach to repair, including grassroots (re)distribution.

Power in the media and cultural industries is located in their cultural distribution systems (from development through production, distribution, and exhibition, to audiences, and thence repeating the cycle. This is true for all major platforms, including for example Netflix and other streaming services, which are often integrated with the major production studios to create a Hollywood-style streaming studio system (if not yet as well established).

The creators involved in these processes usually have no right of ownership over their creations; this is especially problematic for women and minority groups, and does not tend to produce diverse content. Minorities also remain underrepresented at the executive producer level. This also produces various other harms to them, for instance at personal, physical, and psychological levels; it also results in reductive storytelling that privileges a handful of major and often simplistic narratives.

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