"Information, Communication and Society"

Ilich, Katie Louise; Hardey, Mariann

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1478983pmid: N/A

The phenomenon of ‘unboxing’ purchases has confidently and prolifically emerged into popular culture, with consumer-generated images of the branded and stylised shopping bags, boxes, and parcels from new acquisitions now ubiquitous in the social media world. Bringing this relatively unexplored phenomenon from popular culture into the academic literature, this netnographic investigation coupled with in-depth semi-structured interviews aims to understand the motivations, intentions, and marketing implications of such image sharing. Four distinct but interwoven uses and gratifications emerged, driven by identity presentation, documentation, socialisation, and aesthetics. Actions appeared to be rooted in hedonic and symbolic play for both the self and others, but also had significant ability to actively and incidentally influence brand communities, brand perceptions, and consumption intentions. Findings confirmed and extended current uses and gratifications theories surrounding both conspicuous brand association and Instagram involvement and suggested the multi-directional impact of secondary image sharing for individuals, peers, and brands.

Joel-Edgar, Sian; Holme, Ingrid; Aramo-Immonen, Heli

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1485721pmid: N/A

Social media and the data it produces lend itself to being visualised as a network. Individual Twitter users can be represented as nodes and retweeted by another Twitter user, thereby forming a relationship, an edge, between users. However, an unbounded network is a sprawling mass of nodes and edges. Boundary settings are typically applied, for example, a time period, a hashtag, a keyword search or a network substructure of a phenomenon of interest. Thus, the particular visualisation created is dependent upon the boundaries applied, enabling productive visual consumption, but concealing its social shaping. To explore this question of boundary setting and its associated issues, we draw on an example from the Twitter discussions about the UK Minister for Health, Jeremy Hunt, and the media debate surrounding the contractual hours of junior doctors during 2015–2016. We discuss the role and impact differing stakeholders have in setting these boundaries. We seek to provide a set of ‘questioning lenses’ in which we ask why these boundary settings were selected, what effect they have, and what are the potential implications of these boundary setting techniques on the visualisation consumer.

Fang, Kecheng

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1485722pmid: N/A

A cultural phenomenon called ‘mo ha’ (toad worship) has been increasingly popular on the Chinese Internet since 2014, with ‘the toad’ referring to former Party and country leader Jiang Zemin. His memes have gone viral. To examine the toad worship fever, I propose a two-dimensional framework: on the one hand, it differentiates the political and apolitical aspects of the content, and on the other hand, it draws from James Carey’s two views of communication to examine the functions. I collected and analyzed more than 100 toad worship memes, interviewed 24 creators and sharers of the memes, and conducted participant observation in two toad worship online communities. The framework yields four aspects of the phenomenon: implicit criticism toward the current leadership and the regime, ritual satire among groups of dissidents, playfulness, and a shared community with cultural capital and rituals. The motivations of participants are not only multi-faceted, but also fluid. This study contributes to the study of Internet memes and online expression in authoritarian regimes.

Jensen, Minna S.; Neumayer, Christina; Rossi, Luca

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1486866pmid: N/A

This article explores user motivations for sharing and creating internet memes in a crisis situation. For this purpose, we investigate the kitten memes in #Brusselslockdown on Twitter, following the Brussels security lockdown in November 2015 that resulted from information about potential terrorist attacks. We use a social network analysis to identify three user groups: content producers, content sharers, and conversationalists. On the basis of interviews with users from these three groups, we argue that the motivations for sharing and creating memes range from personal involvement in the crisis situation to acts of resistance to creative self-realization. We conclude by arguing that a combination of motifs and activities employ the visuality of internet memes to express popular internet culture, resistance, and solidarity as well as a humorous means of coping with the crisis situation. As a form of solidarity beyond the political, internet memes create tension between a crisis event, the mundane, terror, resistance, and humor.

Richterich, Annika

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1486867pmid: N/A

This paper reflects on the ethics of internet research on community controversies. Specifically, it focuses on controversies concerning gendered, social interaction in hacking communities. It addresses the question how internet researchers should treat and represent content that individuals controversially discussed online. While many internet sources are likewise technically public, they may yet suggest distinct privacy expectations on the part of involved individuals. In internet research, ethical decision-making regarding which online primary sources may be, e.g., referenced and quoted or require anonymisation is still ambiguous and contested. Instead of generalisable rules, the context dependence of internet research ethics has been frequently stressed. Given this ambiguity, the paper elaborates on ethical decisions and their implications by exploring the case of a controversial hackerspaces.org mailing list debate. In tracing data across different platforms, it analyses the emerging ethico-methodological challenges.

Romney, Miles; Johnson, Rich G.

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1486868pmid: N/A

Social media is a growing space for interpersonal and masspersonal communication, and the shared image that often accompanies these messages has become a factor in increasing audience engagement. This study seeks to understand what types of images generate more engagement from social media audiences. A group of communication scholars argue that narrative is the most basic form of human communication and therefore messages with strong narrative themes more easily connect the message from the communicator to the audience. This study performed a content analysis of nearly 2000 images shared by Sports Networks on Instagram. Operating under Kress and van Leeuwen’s (Kress, G. R., & van Leeuwen, L. T. (2006). Reading images: The grammar of visual design. London: Routledge) methodology for determining a narrative in an image, the study found that images that contained narrative or metacommunicative messages (Bateson, G. (1951). Information and codification: A philosophical approach. Communication: The Social Matrix of Psychiatry, 168–211) resulted in greater interest and engagement by audiences through the manifestation of likes and comments. The study offers a methodology for organizations seeking greater engagement from social media audiences.

David, Yossi; Baden, Christian

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1486869pmid: N/A

This study examines the role of digital media within the Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Israel, a conservative closed community, whose leadership is unable or unwilling to control the effects of digital media on the rank-and-file. Over the past decade, digital media have played an important role for challenging authoritarian rule around the globe. Especially in ideological communities sustained by strict taboos, digital media hold the potential to subvert hegemonic discourses. In this study, we make use of an incident that forced Israel’s Ultra-Orthodox community to address its long-standing taboo and hateful attitudes toward LGBT and Queer issues. In July 2015, an Ultra-Orthodox community member attacked participants of the Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade, murdering one and wounding six. While traditional community media attempted to ignore the event, two major Ultra-Orthodox news websites fell outside the control exercised by the community leadership, and enabled subversive discussions within the Ultra-Orthodox community. Through a process of negotiating the meaning of the attack, these discussions resulted in a reframing of the boundaries of the community, breaking a path for further contestation and debate. Using grounded theory analysis, this article contributes to a better understanding of the role of digital media in enabling contestation and challenging established power structures within authoritarian closed communities.

Obar, Jonathan A.; Oeldorf-Hirsch, Anne

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2018.1486870pmid: N/A

This paper addresses ‘the biggest lie on the internet’ with an empirical investigation of privacy policy (PP) and terms of service (TOS) policy reading behavior. An experimental survey (N = 543) assessed the extent to which individuals ignored PP and TOS when joining a fictitious social networking service (SNS), NameDrop. Results reveal 74% skipped PP, selecting the ‘quick join’ clickwrap. Average adult reading speed (250–280 words per minute), suggests PP should have taken 29–32 minutes and TOS 15–17 minutes to read. For those that didn’t select the clickwrap, average PP reading time was 73 seconds. All participants were presented the TOS and had an average reading time of 51 seconds. Most participants agreed to the policies, 97% to PP and 93% to TOS, with decliners reading PP 30 seconds longer and TOS 90 seconds longer. A regression analysis identifies information overload as a significant negative predictor of reading TOS upon sign up, when TOS changes, and when PP changes. Qualitative findings suggest that participants view policies as nuisance, ignoring them to pursue the ends of digital production, without being inhibited by the means. Implications are revealed as 98% missed NameDrop TOS ‘gotcha clauses’ about data sharing with the NSA and employers, and about providing a first-born child as payment for SNS access.

Xu, Yu

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1651371pmid: N/A

Justie, Brian

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2019.1651372pmid: N/A