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This week’s post focuses on Dr Stijn Peeters. Stijn is now a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, working on research and research tools that focus on online political subcultures, as part of the Odycceus project and the Digital Methods Initiative.

Stijn completed his PhD with the Ego Media project. His study focused on the history of platforms like IRC (Internet Relay Chat) and Twitter, and the ways in which the features that shape how we present ourselves on these platforms have evolved through the years.

Before starting with the project, Stijn studied both Media Studies and Industrial Design. He was attracted to the Ego Media project because of its interdisciplinarity, and the opportunity it offered him to design his own research project.

Platforms and self-presentation

“My point of departure,” he explains, “was that when we present ourselves online, we always do so on a platform. So, this can be Twitter or Instagram, or if you go back a few decades it could be Usenet or ICQ. My project aimed to shed light on the relation between platforms and people’s self-presentation, or self-expression on them. The people and organisations that made those platforms obviously had some ideas about how people will use them, and what they could do with them. So they provided a certain set of affordances and features. My goal was to find out how that process works.”

“How do people start with ideas about what other people may do with the platform or the site they are making? And what happens when people actually start using that platform? Do they follow those initial ideas? Do they find our own uses for it? And is there a significant difference between platforms, between design philosophies?”

Stijn found that the combination of Twitter and IRC offered a useful set of differences and similarities to work with. “The idea was that I then could see how the design of those platforms and what people did with them relate to each other, and how that process works.”

Design & self-expression

His main focus was the role of the platform design: “that means the design in terms of the actual features: the buttons and the text fields and how the software is designed. And very practical things, like the character limit on Twitter, for example, which obviously has an influence on what you can do with it, how you express yourself.”

One of the issues that he – like many Ego Media team members – needed to contend with was the fact that he platforms he was researching are still evolving. “This was less the case with IRC, obviously, but Twitter is being changed all the time, and that affected my research in a very practical way. For example, I had a paragraph about character limits, and then halfway through my research that changed from 140 to 280 characters. So I had to rewrite part of my thesis! On one hand, that’s a challenge. But it also underlines how relevant studying and documenting all this subject matter is.”

Watch Stijn discussing his research

When Stijn started his research, he hoped that he’d be able to interview people at Twitter, and track down the people that created IRC. But this turned out to be impractical. “In the case of IRC a lot of the people either aren’t around anymore, or are very hard to find. And Twitter is now a very big company that doesn’t want to really reveal too much about itself and its design process.” But luckily, Stijn discovered a lot of material from the time these platform were designed. “Design documents, blog posts, mailing lists and netzines were still online. And, in a lot of cases, these hadn’t really been covered in research. So that was an opportunity for me, one which also provided great sources of data about what went into the design of the social media platforms, written by the people who did the design work, at the time that they did it.”

Stijn’s research – which looked at specific use cases including citizen journalism, memes, cybersex and online harassment – yielded interesting results. “Paradoxically,” he says, “there’s a limit to how far these platforms actually shape our expression and identities. While there are clear differences between the shapes these use cases take – Twitter, as it supports videos and images is, of course far more visually oriented than IRC, which is text based – you still find examples of citizen journalism on both platforms, and you find examples of harassment and organised harassment and ways of organizing that harassment on both platforms that are remarkably similar. Memes exist on both platforms and even though IRC has far less potential for things to go viral, there are still instances of humour and memetic content being shared in a very similar way to Twitter.

Testament to human creativity

So if you look at the specific genres within which someone may express an identity or express themselves, I think these exist on all platforms. And even if there are qualitative differences, people are remarkably creative in how they appropriate these platforms for their own needs.

My research is testament to our creativity in expressing ourselves.”

This week’s post focuses on Dr Rob Gallagher. Rob is a postdoctoral researcher with the Ego Media Project and a teaching fellow in literature and the digital at Royal Holloway, University of London. His book Videogames, Identity and Digital Subjectivity was published by Routledge in 2017.

Rob’s Ego Media research has explored the cultural functions of digital avatars and the nature of the networked voice, and has broken down into five subprojects:

“There’s my work on ASMR videos on YouTube, there’s some work on grime music and gaming, there’s the book project – which is about videogames and identity – there’s a project called Moving Past Present, that was a collaboration with Janina Lange and looked at reanimating the Gaiety Girls as digital avatars. And there was a project with Ana Parejo Vadillo, which produced a digital edition of a poem from 1892 that we thought about as part of the prehistory of digital identity work and avatar play.”

The Gaiety Girls

The Gaiety Girls project came about, in part, because of Strandlines – the online archive that runs out of the Centre for Life-Writing research here at King’s. Strandlines looks at all aspects of the history of the Strand.” Rob had seen works of Janina’s that used digital motion capture technologies to remediate performances by early female film comediennes like Sarah Duhamel. “I knew that the Gaiety Theatre been on the Strand, and that the Gaiety Girls were, in some sense, early mass media personalities, and through our discussions we thought it would be fun to do a project reanimating them digitally, and drawing out some of those parallels between 1890s media culture and contemporary self-branding and performance.”

Rob and Janina looked primarily at two performers: Constance Collier and Ellaline Terriss.

Both women began their careers on the stage, and transitioned into film as that technology developed. “Obviously, with early film, there’s no sound, there’s a certain kind of stutter that has to do with the frame rate. So there were all these ways in which the technology writes itself into the performance – something Janina’s very interested in as an artist.

And that resonated strongly with a lot of critical work on digital media, and how aspects of technologies – whether it’s resolution or frame rate, whether it’s the 280 character limit on Twitter, other kinds of affordances, and limitations – elicit certain kinds of performance and modes of identity work.”

Michael Field

Rob’s project with Ana Parejo Vadillo – an academic at Birkbeck who researches proto-modernist poetry, and has looked at the role of railways and photographic reproductions in connecting cosmopolitan cultural networks – developed after he read her work on the possibility of using digital technologies to reframe fin-de-siecle literature. “We were both very interested in poets Edith Cooper and Katherine Bradley who wrote together as Michael Field, and in how, in some respects, their work anticipates digital culture. They wrote poems using Renaissance paintings, figures from Renaissance paintings, as avatars, really, for exploring some of the questions around identity that mattered to them. They’ve become queer icons online for certain communities. So we wanted to explore that relationship.” See some of the gifs from the edition.

ASMR

ASMR stands for ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’. The term was coined to describe a tingling sensation that certain people seem to experience in relation to particular audiovisual triggers. Having begun to share accounts of this sensation and given it a name, online communities started creating and sharing media designed to elicit it using platforms like YouTube and Reddit. Part of Rob’s research has entailed exploring that culture and talking to people who make those videos.

“I became interested in ASMR in part because I don’t experience it myself, so I only had this kind of second-hand access to it through these accounts that people were sharing online, through which they determined that they were describing the same thing. I had done some work on videogame role-plays, where people on YouTube perform as their avatars, because I was quite interested in how the voice was being used there, where it’s obviously the person’s actual voice, but they’re performing a role, but the role is one they’ve created for themselves. And there turned out to be overlap between this genre and the actually much bigger online genre of ‘whisper videos’ or ‘trigger videos’ that people with ASMR consume. And at that point I thought, oh this is a fascinating phenomenon, this whole culture has sprung out of the internet, I should look at it.

So I worked with two ASMRtists who make videos on YouTube, and produced a series of texts that they read for a podcast, and then we talked about the ideas in the texts.”

In all three collaborations, Rob found it really valuable working with people who employ technologies with which he isn’t particularly familiar. “You can obviously get people to talk about their process, or about these platforms and technologies in the abstract. But if you’re working together to produce a particular product, it gives it a frame of reference and a concrete goal. And that’s really illuminated types of practice and types of technology that I didn’t know too much about.”

Combining theory & practice

For Rob, theory and practice both have a role to play in studies of digital culture. “There’s sometimes a tendency to place too much emphasis on practice at the cost of theorizing and thinking. It was a useful duality for me to try to address the ideas both of the level of abstract arguments in articles, and at the level of these projects, or these artworks, or performances that try to convey them in another form.

Also, working with both theory and practice, provides you with at least one example of what you’re trying to talk about. And I also think there’s an ethical dimension with studies of digital culture where rather than appropriating something someone else has made, and not necessarily knowing the context from which it emerged, or whether they would be happy with what you’re doing with it or saying about it, you’re inflicting that on your own creations.”

Watch Rob speaking about his Ego Media collaborations

This week’s blog focuses on Dr Rebecca Roach. Rebecca was a postdoctoral researcher on the Ego Media Project, and is now Lecturer in Contemporary Literature at the University of Birmingham. Her book Literature and the Rise of the Interview is available now from OUP.

As someone who has always done interdisciplinary research, Rebecca’s work spanned the whole Ego Media project. She developed the questions for and interviewed the participants in the study exploring how people with epilepsy interact with health-related information online; initiated the work with the Mass Observation Archive and worked on her own project exploring the relationships between computing and literature. Her role also involved reflecting on Ego Media’s methodology(ies) which – given the range of the project’s work, proved a huge undertaking.

Mass Observation

Rebecca explains how the project with the Mass Observation Archive came about: “We were trying to explore how we might get self-reflexive material from social media users because we very much wanted people to reflect on their own social media usage and practices, which is quite a tricky thing to do. And I had known about the Mass Observation project – which has been running on and off since the 1930s – through which willing participants are asked to keep diaries and/or reflect on a topic of interest in writing, and then contribute it to an archive where it’s stored anonymously. It’s a really valuable resource and their responses provide incredibly rich, detailed life writing and reflections on different topics.”

I thought why are we trying to reinvent the wheel when we could write a ‘directive’ – a series of prompts which the people who contribute to the Mass Observation Archive could respond to?”

The project worked well. “We got these wonderful responses from people we would not otherwise have been able to reach. While the Mass Observation Archive participant group is not reflective of the population as a whole, it’s really good for getting people who might not actually have engaged in social media at all, and those who are older, who are from a very different social group to those who one might expect to engage with social media.” The responses were rich in detail, and sometimes quite surprising. “I was really pleased with what came out of it,” says Rebecca.

Methodologies and ethics

“I’ve had quite a large role in sort of thinking through methodological question and was also responsible for the ethics application for much of Ego Media’s research” This meant that Rebecca had to do a lot of thinking about different methodological and ethical questions an about how to conduct research. “What kind of methods do literary studies use, versus social science? Do literary studies have methods? How well do we articulate them? How are all these questions changing with the advent of digital media?”

Rebecca also collaborated with Anneleen Masschelein on a special issue of the journal “Biography” focused on the role of interviewing and interviews in life writing. “With the advent of social media, there’s been something of a crisis in the social sciences. Why do interviews when you can use all this social media data? What can interviews tell us that big data can’t? We were interested in responding to this perceived crisis in the social sciences by looking at interviews from the perspective of literary studies, the arts and life writing, and considering the role and place of interviews as part of a larger discussion about methods and practices and the digital realm.”

Literature and computing

Rebecca’s project on the relationships between literature and computing is still on-going. During her time on the Ego Media project, she investigated what’s happened – and is happening – to conversation in the era of computation. “I looked at the author, J M Coetzee, who worked in computing before he worked in literature, and published some research based on his archives, exploring the conceptual influence of his computing on his notion of what literature is and does in the world.”

She also worked on chatbots: “While Ego Media is interested in self presentation, what I’m interested in is interaction. So, for example, in literature and life writing more generally, we tend to be more comfortable with single-authored texts. I’m interested in what happens when you look at dialogue, or conversation. What that does that do to muddy our assumptions? What might that tell us about literature, or, particularly, processes of reading and writing?”

Rebecca is especially interested in the assumptions built into chatbots, how they are conceived historically. “There’s a lot of research to be done into how chatbots are gendered and racialized in really unfortunate ways, into how they are increasingly utilised in a way that isn’t always visible online. I think it’s worth literary scholars thinking about these forms. We have a lot of skills and expertise to bring to these new objects.”

As well as writing about literature and computing for the Ego Media digital publication, Rebecca has also written about the cybernetic metaphor of black boxing, that is increasingly adopted by other fields. As she explains, ‘this is the notion that you look at the inputs and the outputs but can’t see inside the box. It evolved from the notion that, maybe, the box is a missile, so you don’t want to open it up, because it might explode. So you can only analyse input and output.

In terms of methods, that’s a really interesting question for what is we’re doing when we’re analysing something as literary scholars. What happens to our notions of subjectivity and interactivity when we’re thinking about digital media? We’re now in a situation where digital technologies can move faster than human cognition. We don’t necessarily know what’s going on inside the black box of the algorithm. How do you think about analysis or critique in those situations? Those I think have been really formative questions for me. I still don’t have a great answer. But I think they’re interesting questions.”

Previously, we listed the themes the Ego Media team will cover in the essays in our digital publication. This week, we’re highlighting our work on Time. The lead author of this essay is Professor Clare Brant, and this post offers a brief outline of some of the questions the essay will explore.

Time, Clare writes, “is arguably one of the most important concepts in digital and social media”, and this theme essay reflects on our ideas of and research into the phenomenon of time, investigating how the digital age privileges immediacy and the present tense, the “what’s happening”, rather than the what has happened, or will happen. The main areas we will explore in this essay include:

The global reach of digital time

The local offices of international businesses often had several analogue clocks on their walls, showing the time in, say, London, New York and Tokyo. Now a few clicks brings us three time zones on our smartphones or laptops. What does global digital time do to our sense of time? Our bodily rhythms?

Always on, or the rise of 24-7

What’s the relationship between always on-ness and authenticity? How can you find the most interesting 24-7 webcam accounts … and how interesting are they?

Time and space

How does digital time – and our attention to it – impact on our relationship with space? How can we navigate effectively when we’re looking down at our phones. And what about the physical space (and energy resources) required to service those giant data centres powering our online experiences, and concealed the “Cloud” and other nature-friendly metaphors.

Breaking news: ‘happening now’

While Facebook’s timeline colonises the (recent) past, and its “memories” hoik past moments into present attention, Twitter’s “What’s happening?” occupies its users’ now. What’s happening to those of us living in a world where news is constantly breaking? What does it mean when news breaks?

Streaming

Streaming services allow us to watch, when we want: to make media, at least. happen in a “now” of our choosing. What does this do to our sense of “what’s happening”.

Surveillance

We surveil ourselves and others via health apps and social media and are surveilled. What light can surveillance art – the use of technology intended to record human behaviour in a way that offers commentary on the process and tools of surveillance – tell us about not only about power, control and the attractions of voyeurism, but also the nature of time?

Time short, long, too much, compressed

Have you read this far down the page? How long are our attention spans? How long do we take to decide whether something is worth devoting our time (attention and money) to? What impact does adding reading times to an online text have on people reading that text? #longreads, short forms and acronyms: how has the way we read – the way we think – changed with digital time? How far have digital media have recreated ideas and practices of instaneity?

And finally…

To what extent is the Ego Media team’s research complicit with particular models of time in terms of choice of methodologies? The interview, for instance, catalyses retrospection in relation to a present established and bracketed by the interview itself; the questionnaire similarly plays on a time transactionality between actions (past and present) and reportage (necessarily presentist.) Academic arguments tend to acquire authority by referencing arguments made authoritative by being recently published: given this, how far have scholars anticipated social media users in valuing keeping up with the latest?

Ego Media projects with an explicit time focus

Moving Past Present
Imagining the Future
Dear Diary
Life-writing of the moment: The Sharing and updating self on social media
The Use of Self-Tracking Technologies and Social Media in Self-Representations and Management of Health

Watch Professor Clare Brant talk about her Ego Media projects

This week we’re featuring Mikka Lene Pers’s work on the Ego-Media Project. Mikka – a clinical psychologist who has studied and practised narrative therapy – is completing her PhD, which focuses on the phenomenon of mummy vloggers.

Mummy vloggers

“Mummy vloggers,” Mikka explains, “are a genre of social media microcelebrity that has emerged in social media. They started appearing on YouTube around 2006-2007, making YouTube vlogs about everyday life as mothers. And since then this whole community has emerged online.” These followers, Mikka argues, are invested in practices related to following and making sense of mummy vloggers’ personal lives. 

Mikka has been conducting a focused case study of how the lives of seven mommy vloggers are emplotted. In other words, “how stories about them are told and the plots are circulated in social media.” This also involves exploring how people adopt different kinds of participation roles in these stories, and how they negotiate the ownership and entitlement to tell these stories in social media.  

“When I started being interested in the storytelling activities surrounding mummy vloggers,” Mikka says, “the communities that gathered around them, and their channels, were still quite small.” This, Mikka explains, was in 2013. “Since then, many of the mummy vloggers have become very well established, quite well-known, and treated a bit like celebrities”.

Watch Mikka discussing her research

Growing professionalisation of mummy vlogging

Over the past five years, Mikka has observed a change in the sharing and following practices surrounding mummy vlogging. Mummy vlogs have become increasingly professional and commercialised. “Nowadays,” she says, “as a mummy vlogger you can become a celebrity and gain social status and also make a living from vlogging. 

So suddenly there’s a lot at stake. What I’ve seen is that mummy vloggers suddenly face new kinds of challenges. Because vlogging has, in a way, become their job, they have to invest a lot of time in it. This kind of investment in something that actually started out as a hobby can be quite hard because they live off showing a life in which they carry out a very labour-intensive form of motherhood. It means they have to be professional mothers, and professional vloggers at the same time.”

Narrating (M)others’ Lives

The risks of mummy vlogging

In order to stand out online, mummy vloggers face the challenge of having to produce content and establish a personal brand that sets them apart from other vloggers.  “That,” says Mikka, “can be dangerous, because it makes them vulnerable to accusations of being inauthentic, or being a bad mother. So, for instance, kids’ suffering makes for high value content. But, at the same time, the vloggers have to find ways of showing this sort of thing while still appearing to be a good mother.”

Losing control of the stories of (m)others’ lives

The version of their lives that mummy vloggers share online in mummy vlogs is scrutinised, shared and discussed by their followers. “This,” says Mikka “is basically what interaction in this particular community is all about – trying to make sense of the information that the vloggers offer.” This level and mode of audience involvement means that mummy vloggers are often unable to keep control of their stories, and sometimes “the stories that vloggers put out are taken apart and reconfigured in ways that can surprise them.” In some cases, Mikka argues, “this can lead to quite interesting discussions about what it means to be a mother. Which kind of experiences are hard? Which kinds of experiences are hard to talk about and share?” 

Blog summer break

The Ego-Media blog is taking a break for the summer, while we focus on completing our digital publication. See you back here in September!