social media

Individuals all over the world can use Airbnb to rent an apartment in a foreign city, check Coursera to find a course on statistics, join PatientsLikeMe to exchange information about one’s disease, hail a cab using Uber, or read the news through Facebook’s Instant Articles. In The Platform Society, Van Dijck, Poell, and De Waal offer a comprehensive analysis of a connective world where platforms have penetrated the heart of societies—disrupting markets and labor relations, transforming social and civic practices, and affecting democratic processes. The Platform Society analyzes intense struggles between competing ideological systems and contesting societal actors—market, government, and civil society—asking who is or should be responsible for anchoring public values and the common good in a platform society. Public values include, of course, privacy, accuracy, safety, and security; but they also pertain to broader societal effects, such as fairness, accessibility, democratic control, and accountability. Such values are the very stakes in the struggle over the platformization of societies around the globe. The Platform Society highlights how these struggles play out in four private and public sectors: news, urban transport, health, and education. Some of these conflicts highlight local dimensions, for instance, fights over regulation between individual platforms and city councils, while others address the geopolitical level where power clashes between global markets and (supra-)national governments take place.

How have our ideas about reading and writing poetry been transformed by digital media? In "'Borrowed Country: Digital Media, Remediation, and North American Poetry in the Twenty-First Century," I discuss five American poets who have variously discussed and made use of particular forms of digital media in their work: John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Kevin Young, Steve Roggenbuck, and Patricia Lockwood. I am interested in these poets because they circulate work via traditional sites and networks of publication-individual volumes and poetry journals in print-while maintaining investments in the ways digital modes of writing and publishing have both changed these conventional sites of transmission and created additional venues in which to circulate poetry: e-books, web sites, social media networks.The poets surveyed here all write about cultural objects as they change over time: they demonstrate how works are overshadowed or otherwise obscured by historical imperatives that desire broad strokes and tidy narratives, fragmented or erased by poor care or inattention over the passage of time, reprinted and resituated across various print and digital editions. Their writings document what is ignored, lost, and transformed in the various acts of remediation they survey and participate in, as they make their own decisions to remediate particular texts and figures, transporting older figures to contemporary contexts or highlighting the distance between an earlier historical period and our own. And they are variously interested in forms of digital media: composing work on word processors, scanning and fragmenting digital images, mimicking digital sampling patterns, and circulating texts and videos on social media networks. The work of Ashbery, Carson, Young, Roggenbuck, and Lockwood reminds us in various ways that constant remediation is a condition of our hypermediated lives.

The possibilities for interaction in electronic literature (e-lit) are heavily shaped by the platforms on which that interaction occurs, yet audiences are rarely aware of the extent to which the digital interface may influence, if not define, their sociality. These limitations take the form of community moderation tools and explicit censorship (such as in the case of profanity filters), but also in the designs of emote systems and content popularity systems, and achievement and reputation systems, and even in gameplay design. Often players, users, and audience members must oscillate rapidly and continually between determining the affordances of the tools available to them and evaluating the capacity of those tools to provide the social aims they desire.

This panel explores the current limitations of contemporary literary and art criticism when applied to interactive narratives in order to build a richer dialogue attentive to sociological factors affecting platform-based literary activity. A diffusion of social and literary perspectives, we argue, is ultimately more appropriate for understanding the complex role networked communication and collaboration plays in the very fabric of these works. Considered together, the presentations on this panel will look deeply into how social media platforms generate increasingly innovative experiments in narrative structure by adapting interpersonal communication and live social exchange to online writing and reading practices. Digital network culture, dating back to the earliest text adventure games and first BBS servers, marked a fascinating conjunction between art works and participatory activity, aligning in the process many established literary and artistic aims with an array of diverse social behaviors and habits. The narrative structure of interactive fiction tends to offer the same points of reference key to any story, beginning with its setup followed by examples of conflict and resolution. Upon migrating to platform-managed media tools, narrative design has continued to sponsor a variety of coordinating behaviors among users, including what we’ve identified as consistent patterns of aggregation, accumulation, and competition. In addition, as critics like Manuel Castells, Lev Manovich, and more recently Manish Mehta have shown, networked media platforms invoke powerful programmable determinisms in the process of managing, and, in some cases, defining our cultural and social interactions.

Aligning these behavioral patterns with new literary guidelines and frameworks, the panel will look critically and, we hope, provocatively at narrative construction as collaborative digital network interaction. As these technologies continue to entwine human agents into increasingly complex actor-network systems, the resulting shift in writing practices and attitudes compares well to the new linguistic consciousness Russian theorist Mikhail Bahktin attributed a century ago to the emergence of the novel within modern literature. Panelists Kirill Azernyi, Stephanie Jennings, Andrew Klobucar, Rebecca Rouse, and Kate Tyrol will contribute presentations covering a variety of perspectives on these considerations, including online conspiracy theory, classroom gamification, player and user experience, interactive sculpture, and the role of debate in public discourse.

The panel will consist of traditional oral presentations, and attendees will also be invited to concurrently experience the panel through a custom-built Twine narrative.

A primary interface pattern of contemporary software platforms is the infinite scroll. Often used to deliver algorithmically-selected personalized content, infinitely scrolling feeds are one of many design decisions seen as responsible for compulsive use of social media platforms and other information-rich sites and apps. During the COVID-19 pandemic, a time marked by a substantive increase in time spent online, the infinitely scrolling feed has been implicated in a new negative pattern: “doomscrolling.” Doomscrolling refers to the ways in which people find themselves regularly--and in some cases, almost involuntarily--scrolling bad news headlines on their phone, often for hours each night in bed when they had meant to be sleeping. While the realities of the pandemic have necessitated a level of vigilance for the purposes of personal safety, doomscrolling isn’t just a natural reaction to the news of the day—it’s the result of a perfect yet evil marriage between a populace stuck online, social media interfaces designed to game and hold our attention, and the realities of an existential global crisis. It may be hard to look away from bad news in any format, but it’s nearly impossible to avert our eyes when that news is endlessly presented via designed-to-be-addictive social media interfaces that know just what to show us next in order to keep us “engaged.” As an alternative interface, the author’s artwork, titled The Endless Doomscroller, acts as a lens on our software-enabled collective descent into despair. By distilling the news and social media sites down to their barest most generalized phrases and interface conventions, The Endless Doomscroller shows us the mechanism that’s behind our scroll-induced anxiety: interfaces—and corporations—that always want more. More doom (bad news headlines) compels more engagement (via continued liking/sharing/posting) which produces more personal data, thus making possible ever more profit. Using concepts from Christian Ulrik Andersen’s and Søren Pold’s Metainterface, Wendy Chun's analyses of habitual new media, Geert Lovink’s theories of how sadness gets coded into platforms, and Matthew Fuller’s software studies guidance to perform deep analyses of small computational things, this paper will examine how the infinite scroll has intersected with pandemic-era platforms to create a world full of unhappy and unrelenting doomscrollers. Why don’t users look away from the scroll? Who most benefits when they can’t stop? And how might text-focused digital artworks intervene? Can an artwork that asks users to read *more* bad news headlines create an opportunity for mindfulness or enable a sort of exposure or substitution therapy, a way to escape or replace what platform interfaces want from and do to us? What if, in this age of pandemic platforms, the only way out of too much doomscrolling is endless doomscrolling?

(Source: Author's own abstract)

Toward the end of 2020, one of the most culturally impactful web games of all time shut down—at least, the original, Flash-based version did. FarmVille, by social game studio Zynga, was not outstanding for its gameplay mechanics nor for its imaginative qualities. In fact, social games like Farmville are defined by game designer and scholar Ian Bogost as “games you don’t have to play.” Rather, FarmVille was special because it tapped into 2009-era Facebook’s lax user-generated notification system, and its developers succeeded in creating a user-operated spam cannon disguised as a game. What made FarmVille a cultural phenomenon is best represented by the metanarrative about how it manufactured and sold compulsive behavior to a new audience. By targeting ludic luddites with its folksy facade and “freemium” business model, FarmVille ushered in a new era of games that encouraged users to exchange money for in-game effects. Farmville is just one example of plethora experiences made possible by digital platforms that everyday people inhabit—and increasingly rely on for work and social connection during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic—that demand constant attention. While it may not be a matter of your digital crops dying or your digital cows going unmilked, the gamification of real life has other, more tangible consequences. With questions circulating for years now on the extent of digital surveillance and abusive, intrusive advertisements disguised as entertainment, contemporary artforms must engage. To what degree can electronic literature exist in the same spaces (platforms) as applications that profit from artificial as well as human limits? And if new social platforms are needed to improve access to electronic literature, to what extent can they or should they resemble the status quo? Germane to this line of questioning is the advancements in computing power that have made imagining virtually limitless, uncompletable digital experiences possible. When a work is untethered from meaningful material limitations, new possibilities arise and—as is the case with impositions on an audience like FarmVillian microtransactions that reveal a naked pecuniary interest—certain possibilities are foreclosed upon; in other words, what form does a genre take when it can be “bottomless”? Asynchronicity is another element that must be better grappled with as individuals and institutions become more adapted to remote work and play. In what ways future platforms can address the breakneck kairos of art, either by accommodating or deviating from recent mass cultural reprogramming and the by-now prosaic ever-splintering, ever-accelerating pace of media consumption will be explored.

It was in Summer 2020 that Seraphine - a ‘virtual influencer’ in the mould of Brüd’s Lil Miquela – began building an audience on Twitter, Instagram and Soundcloud. Each of her posts served to flesh out her persona: that of an anxiety-prone aspiring musician with an ‘adorkably’ girly personal style and a cute pet cat. In September it emerged that Seraphine was a new playable character in e-sports giant Riot’s League of Legends (Riot 2009), a free-to-play ‘multiplayer online battle arena’ funded by the sale of sale of ‘skins’ and cosmetics items that allow players to customise the appearance of their chosen characters. While the character proved highly popular, the launch was not without controversy, with some pundits finding Riot’s bids for ‘relatability’ clumsy and their portrayal of the Seraphine’s mental health issues ‘perverse’ and ‘offensive’ – especially when set against the backdrop of a worsening pandemic (Jackson 2020). The controversy intensified when, in a post published two months later, Medium user Step-nie (2020) recounted her ‘brief relationship with a Riot employee’ and outlined her belief that the company had essentially plagiarised her online persona to create Seraphine, a character who ‘looks like me, and talks like me, and sounds like me, and draws like me’. 

The Seraphine incident highlights how shifts in the development, distribution and monetisation of digital games driven by the rise of ‘platform capitalism’ (Srnicek 2017) are fostering new approaches to characterisation and storytelling - approaches informed by (and often modelled on) the ‘self-branding’ strategies (Duffy and Hund 2015) and ‘small storytelling’ practices (Georgakopoulou 2016) of young social media users. For a sense of how these approaches diverge from previous paradigms we might look to The Last of Us Part II (Naughty Dog 2020). Naughty Dog’s blockbuster sequel confirms that gaming has yet to shake the case of ‘cinema envy’ that Eric Zimmerman diagnosed it with almost two decades ago (2002, 125). If the game’s photorealistic visuals and its use of state-of-the-art performance capture techniques mean it often looks like a film, its approach to plotting and characterisation is similarly steeped in Hollywood conventions, and entails subjecting protagonists Ellie and Abby to a series of life-threatening trials and life-changing tests of character set in motion by a shocking inciting incident. But while the game was one of the highest-grossing releases of last year, as a story-led singleplayer console game it is also a specimen of what many consider a dying breed. Drawing on accounts of fictional characters as ‘quasi-persons’ (Frow 2014), studies of transmedia characterisation (Thon 2019; Steinberg 2012; Azuma 2009) and work on games and social media, this paper asks what Ellie, Abby and Seraphine can tell us about the functions of fictional characters in an entertainment ecosystem being reshaped by platformisation.

This paper explores two mobile app narratives that deal with the issue ofperilous irregular migration, Survival (2017, Omnium Lab) and Bury me, my love(2017, The Pixel Hunt/Figs/Arte France). This paper explores the way in whichthe mobile app form lends itself to elevation of migrant narratives and exploresthe capacity of such works to generate empathy.

The paper will analyse the way in which migration and its subjects are treatedand placed into relation with the notion of the game. The paper will also addressthe comparison between game-style apps and other online modes wherebymigrant experience is being represented, such as that of humanitarianphotojournalism and portraiture as it arises in social media apps, such asInstagram.