Living in virtual communities: an ethnography of human relationships in cyberspace

This paper outlines some of the issues involved in the development of human relationships in cyberspace. Set within the wider context of the Internet and society it investigates how geographically distant individuals are coming together on the Internet to inhabit new kinds of social spaces or virtual communities. People 'live in' and 'construct' these new spaces in such a way as to suggest that the Internet is not a placeless cyberspace that is distinct and separate from the real world. Building on the work of other cyberethnographers, the author combines original ethnographic research in Cybercity, a Virtual Community, with face-to-face meetings to illustrate how, for many people, cyberspace is just another place to meet. Second, she suggests that people in Cybercity are investing as much effort in maintaining relationships in cyberspace as in other social spaces. Her preliminary analysis suggests that by extending traditional human relationships into Cybercity, they are widening their webs of relationships, not weakening them. Human relationships in cyberspace are formed and maintained in similar ways to those in wider society. Rather than being exotic and removed from real life, they are actually being assimilated into everyday life. Furthermore, they are often moved into other social settings, just as they are in offline life.     

What is Real in the Age of Virtual Reality?“Retraining” Frame Analysis for a Technological World

How do social actors determine what is really happening and what is not? This distinction, analyzed in such depth by Erving Goffman in Frame Analysis, now requires further analysis as technologies such as virtual reality become ever more affordable and available, transforming many aspects of everyday life and, inevitably, the definition of the “real” experience itself. This article considers the ways that experience is generated and organized in modern social life, arguing that a “refraining” of frame analysis and a “reconceptualization” of reality itself is necessary to help us understand the ways in which social worlds involving highly sophisticated technologies are created and endowed with meaning by actors, as well as the subtle, long-term effects of such technologies.     

The Segregation of Social Interactions in the Red Line L‐Train in Chicago

This study documents how residential segregation is visible in social interactions in the (semi) public space of the red line L‐train in Chicago. While public spaces are often celebrated as spaces of cosmopolitanism, people tend to interact mainly with people who look similar and appear to be living in the same area in Chicago. People of different race and class, represented by the station where they board the train, do not encounter each other much in the L‐train because of the existing residential segregation in the city of Chicago. Blacks ride from the south to downtown while whites ride from the north to downtown. Different time frames are reserved for different people. Furthermore, on the train itself people prefer to be interacting with and sit next to people who appear alike; who seem to be from the same part of the city. Hence, I argue that social interactions on the subway are mainly an expression of geographical and social exclusion in the city. Residential segregation is visible in the “segregation of social interactions” in the red line L‐train. Consequently, while de jure segregation has been abolished in the 1960s in Chicago, segregating practices are still going on de facto in everyday life.     

The opportunity to contribute: disability and the digital entrepreneur

ABSTRACT

A range of scholarly work in communications, informatics, and media studies has identified ‘entrepreneurs’ as central to an emerging paradigm of digital labor. Drawing on data from a multi-year research project in the virtual world Second Life, I explore disability experiences of entrepreneurism, focusing on intersections of creativity, risk, and inclusion. Since its founding in 2003, Second Life has witnessed significant disability participation. Many such residents engage in forms of entrepreneurship that destabilize dominant understandings of digital labor. Most make little or no profit; some labor at a loss. Something is being articulated through languages and practices of entrepreneurship, something that challenges the ableist paradigms that still deeply structure both digital socialities and conceptions of labor.

Disability is typically assumed to be incompatible with work, an assumption often reinforced by policies that withdraw benefits from disabled persons whose income exceeds a meagre threshold. Responses to such exclusion appear when disabled persons in Second Life frame ‘entrepreneur’ as a selfhood characterized by creativity and contribution, not just initiative and risk. In navigating structural barriers with regard to income and access, including affordances of the virtual world itself, they implicitly contest reconfigurations of personhood under neoliberalism, where the laboring self becomes framed not as a worker earning an hourly wage, but as a business with the ‘ability’ to sell services. This reveals how digital technology reworks the interplay of selfhood, work, and value – but in ways that remain culturally specific and embedded in forms of inequality.     

Now the Orgy Is Over

Based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork, this study explores the intersections between embodied flesh and digital (re)presentations by examining how participants experience virtual sex on Second Life. We explore how and to what extent Second Life avatars mediate personal desires and fantasies with others who, collaboratively, construct sexual adventures in forms of playful deviance that allow for the emergence of secret sexual selves, as well as how those sexual adventures are ultimately fashioned and experienced in a “diffused life” that is neither of Second Life nor of first but a tightly bound combination of the two. Despite the enormous freedom of Second Life residents for seemingly boundless creative self‐expression, we conclude that these experiences are more bound to and confined within disciplined practices than they first appear.     

An Interactional Space of Permanent Observability: WeChat and Reinforcing the Power Hierarchy in Chinese Workplaces

Does digital media empower or disempower workers? In existing studies on how information and communication technologies influence work, researchers investigate work–life boundaries and how workers use digital media to obtain more control. This article focuses on how digital media influences daily interpersonal interactions in the workplace: how does social media use influence workplace hierarchies and power dynamics? Based on 56 in‐depth interviews with WeChat users in Chinese workplaces, I find that lower‐ranked individuals were compelled to constantly express loyalty and appreciation, and publicly submit to their superordinates by clicking “like” or commenting on their WeChat posts. They also had to provide immediate and polite responses to their superordinates in WeChat group chats after work hours or to non‐work‐related issues. The distinctive features of online interaction—lack of physical interaction spaces, recordability of past conversations, and n‐adic nature of online disclosures—created an environment where past encounters were omnipresent and accessible, and placed workers under permanent observability. This social interaction environment leaves little room for forms of resistance and, in response, employees retreat into cynical performances of submission. This study finds that, under certain circumstances, WeChat use actually intensifies workplace hierarchies and power dynamics, thereby sharpening social inequality, rather than eliminating it.     

Family and nation: Brazilian national ideology as contested transnational practice in Japan

Studies of Brazilian Nikkeis (Japanese emigrants and their descendants) living in Japan tend to conceptualize ‘family’ and ‘nation’ as two distinct entities. Such distinctions are filtered through mutually exclusive discourses and understandings of national and ethnic identity. In this article, however, I view national attachments and migrant experiences in Japan through the lens of ideology, embodied experience and kinship relations. Treating national ideology as lived process sheds fresh light on the dynamics of state—society relations in transnational social spaces. I suggest that the ability of Brazilian state actors to impose social, moral and economic regulation on its citizens in Japan is compromised by the extent to which such discourses are ontologically grounded in the social relations of migrant family life. It is through these kin ties, I argue, that people set the tone and rules of play for state interests to encroach or otherwise on their everyday lives in these transnational social spaces.     

Outline of a sociology of decisionism

I propose an agenda for empirical research on decision, choice, decision‐makers, and decision‐making qua social facts. Given society S, group G, or field F, I make a twofold sociological proposal. First, empirically investigate the conditions under which something—call it X—is taken to be a decision or choice, or the outcome of a decision‐making process. What must X be like? What doesn't count (besides, presumably, myotatic reflexes and blushing)? Whom or what must X be done by? What can't be a decision‐maker (besides, presumably, rocks and apples)? Second, empirically investigate how decision/choice concepts are used in everyday life, politics, business, education, law, technology, and science. What are they used for? To what extent do people understand and represent themselves and others as decision‐makers? Where do decision‐centric or “decisionist” understandings succeed? These aren't armchair, theoretical, philosophical questions, but empirical ones. Decision/choice concepts’ apparent ubiquity in contemporary societies calls for a well‐thought‐out research program on their social life and uses.     

Sandboxes and Heavenly Dwellings

ABSTRACT

Finnish housing was fundamentally transformed during the postwar period of (re-)construction. The emergence of new kinds of urban spaces entailed radical changes in the landscape, housing customs, and details of everyday life. The article explores suburbs as lived spaces, where architecture, environment, and inhabitants come together. I consider the built environment, discussions in the media regarding the new suburbs, and the written memories of inhabitants collected between 1995 and 2000. In the 1950s and early 1960s, the new suburbs symbolized a new way of life and were described enthusiastically in the media. However, from the late 1960s onwards criticism grew increasingly louder. By contrast, inhabitants' accounts present a multifaceted and mainly positive view in tension with media representations, offering a radically different perspective on suburban habitation. In my article, I explore the relations of suburban space and gender through two cases: the modern dwelling described as “heavenly” in the written memories; and the playground with the sandbox as its nucleus. These sites were crucial both in the narratives of suburban living and the planning of new residential environments. I pay particular attention to the figure of the suburban housewife and the agency of inhabitants as well as suburban social networks (claimed to be nonexistent in the then current criticism). My analysis proposes that meaningful social relations were formed in the suburbs, but they were constructed mainly by women and children. I suggest that instead of being the antithesis of modernity, suburbs were key spaces for the formation of the postwar Finnish housing environment, society, and gender relations.     

New York City's Latino ethnolinguistic repertoire and the negotiation of latinidad in conversation

Latino collective politics has received greater attention from scholars and policy analysts than the micro‐processes of everyday interaction among U.S. Latinos – the stuff with which collective efforts are constructed. In this article, I argue that latinidad – a sense of shared Latino identity – is best understood by taking into account the negotiations of collective identities in everyday, situated social practices. I ask: how do Latinos invoke latinidad in their everyday interactions, and to what end? In doing so, I present a conversation between two New York City Latinos, Roberto and William, who subtly invoke latinidad as they explore a possible business connection. Through discourse analysis of their exchange, I show that within one conversation two people can invoke latinidad through the adoption of different strategies of affiliation. Drawing on Benor's ( 2010 ) ethnolinguistic repertoire framework, I show some of the linguistic resources that New York City Latinos access to index latinidad. I find that Benor's framework could be expanded to account for the arsenal of distinctive linguistic features used by members of panethnic groups. For U.S. Latinos, such an arsenal includes features of multiple varieties of both Spanish and English. The results further suggest that shared Latino identity implies a basis for cooperation, in this case, cooperation with the potential to yield economic benefits.     

Looking at Digital Art: Towards a Visual Methodology for Digital Sociology

Over the last decade there has been a call for a new kind of sociological gaze, a digital sociology for a digital age. Has there been fundamental change in the key principles, the nature, and functions of social life in a digital age? In social and cultural theory, there is a long history of looking at how technology transforms art. In this article, I will use the medium of digital art to consider the unique nature of the digital age, the demand for a digital sociology, and the interrelated speculative imagination of such claims. Broadly situated within the sociology of art the methodological contribution of this article is to offer an analysis of artworks themselves, via the construction of a digital visual methodology. What digital culture, politics, and revealed in digital art? How can looking at digital art expand the tools for understanding digitally mediated lives?     

Routinising research: academic skills in analogue and digital worlds

This paper explores research routines which are so mundane that they are rarely noticed and may be hard to even verbalise. How does one acquire the bodily dexterity of rifling through a filing cabinet, skimming Google lists or judging a book by holding in it one’s hands? Drawing on interviews with and observations among scholars of both the analogue and digital generations, mainly in the social and cultural sciences, I look at how such routines are established, naturalised and transformed. They may be seen as methods slowly turning into inconspicuous habits. To what extent do such practices, which are often seen as intensely personal, actually mirror norms and cultural conventions of specific academic settings? With a focus on materialities and sensibilities, I discuss three arenas of everyday academic activities: writing, reading and handling information.     

Contested affordances: teachers and students negotiating the classroom integration of mobile technology

ABSTRACT

This paper extends an emerging approach emphasizing contextual variation in the affordances of digital technologies and new media through an empirical application focused on relational dynamics of power and resistance. Specifically, I focus on the case of student and teacher negotiations over smartphones and social media in the classroom ? a case where actors on either side of a power relationship assign conflicting meanings to the same technology. Interviews were conducted with 37 students and 19 teachers at a public high school with a technology policy designating students’ personally-owned smartphones as educational devices. As the affordance of contextual mobility allowed students to access shared online social spaces within the classroom, smartphones threatened the cultural logic of separation bounding the social from the educational. With their sense of control threatened, teachers sought to re-constitute separation through strategies of restriction and differentiation. Viewing online-offline integration as a taken-for-granted part of social life, students used strategies of adaptive resistance to combat school policies and maximize technology use. However, students also worked to re-constitute separation through peer cultural norms limiting the in-school consequences of online peer social interactions. Underneath the contestation between restriction and resistance, both teachers and students worked to set conditions on the affordance of contextual mobility.     

The multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life: uncovering the performative hybridity of the iconic object

This article looks at the Apple iPod as an iconic and hybrid music object and explores the multiplicity of iPod cultures in everyday life. It reviews the existing literature on the iPod and advances two main paradigms on iPod culture – the individual cognition enabled by the Apple object during private and mobile listening practices or the algorithmic socialization afforded by the use of the Genius recommendation system for example. Tackling these two existing paradigms, I pose the hybridity of the iPod as the basis of its iconicity. Thus, the iPod allows its users to associate its materiality with various sorts of activities in everyday life (individual mobile listening, music sharing, algorithmic connections), and with other material objects (computers, earphones) and media (music social media). As an iconic object that accompanies the various moments of users’ everyday lives, the iPod embodies the new possibilities and directions of music consumption in the digital age of technologies and entangles issues that emerge in contemporary society, such as the increasing blurry separation between individual experiences and social structures.     

#IAmNotAfraidToSayIt: stories of sexual violence as everyday political speech on Facebook

ABSTRACT

The debate about the power and influence of networked publics often focuses on large-scale political events, activist campaigns and protest activity – the more visible forms of political engagement. On the other hand, digitally mediated activism is often questioned and sometimes derided as a lesser form of dissent, as it is easier to engage in, highly affective, and offers few assurances of sustainability of the change it calls for. But what about everyday political speech online, where social media platforms can contribute to a personalisation of politics? Can social media users express their views online and make a difference? This paper analyses around 3500 Facebook posts stemming from the #ЯНеБоюсьСказати (Ukrainian for #IAmNotAfraidToSayIt) online campaign that was started in the Ukrainian segment of Facebook in July 2016 by a local activist to raise awareness of how widespread sexual violence and sexual harassment are in the Ukrainian society. The paper argues that networked conversations about everyday rights and affective stories about shared experiences of injustice, underpinned by the affordances of social media platforms for sharing and discussing information and participating in everyday politics, can emerge as viable forms of networked feminist activism and can have real impact on the discursive status quo of an issue, both in the digital sphere and beyond it.     

“Live Social Work”: How to Bring Life Back into Social Work

Abstract

In this article I discuss how professional social work can entail critical, reflexive work. This is accomplished by adapting the concept of “live sociology”. It is mainly an exploratory article, trying to raise suggestions that can be adopted and be further developed. I argue that people coming into contact with contemporary social work are sometimes reduced to being “dead” objects, as they are pinned down into static categories. The demand for developing evidence-based social work risks substantiating this tendency even further. In contrast, I claim that social work needs to move away from these kinds of explanations and instead turn towards developing “live social work”; that is to say, social work where everyday life, agency, and what people do in what context needs to be the focus, not what people are.     

Lighting,signing, showing: The circulability of Pink Dot's counterpublic discourse in Singapore

Pink Dot, a homegrown LGBTQ activist group based in Singapore, has been treated as a social movement since its inauguration in 2009, and they organise an annual event to advocate for LGBTQ individuals. In 2020, due to the coronavirus pandemic, the twelfth edition of the event (PD12) took place online as a livestream on YouTube. The highlight of PD12 was the unveiling of a ‘digital pink dot’ via a virtual map of Singapore, where the permeability of its discourse in virtual and physical spaces became much more apparent in comparison with previous physical iterations of the event. Approaching the data with counterpublic and citizenship theory, I outline the circulability of discourse as the key feature of a counterpublic, and argue that PD12 achieves this in two ways: (i) the semiotic fragmentation of its physical signs and online discourse; and (ii) the deployment of intertextual elements in a drag performance.     

Urban multiculture and everyday encounters in semi‐public,franchised cafe spaces

This paper engages with an emergent literature on multiculture and concepts such as conviviality and negotiation to explore how increasingly ethnically diverse population routinely share and mix in urban places and social spaces. As part of a wider ESRC funded, two‐year qualitative study of changing social life and everyday multiculture in different geographical areas of contemporary England, this paper draws on participant observation data from three branches of franchised leisure and consumption cafe spaces. We pay particular attention to the ways these spaces work as settings of encounter and shared presence between groups often envisaged as separated by ethnic difference. Our findings suggest that corporate spaces which are more often dismissed as commercial, globalized spaces of soulless homogeneity can be locally inflected spaces whose cultural blandness may generate confident familiarity, ethnic mixity, mundane co‐presence and inattentive forms of conviviality.     

Digital identities – overcoming visual bias through virtual embodiment

ABSTRACT

This study sheds new light on the role of identity in virtual environments when virtual representation of self is in support of disabled individuals and the potential impact of their virtual identity on work opportunities. It is widely understood that individuals who live with disability often experience a lifetime of bullying, exclusion, marginalization and rejection. They often experience workplace bias and discrimination. Yet, when they can create an identity and experience embodiment in virtual environments, the results can be extraordinarily powerful – even life-changing. This research builds on nearly a decade of ethnographic research in 3D online immersive social virtual worlds; seven of those years working with disability communities to answer the following: RQ1: In a virtual world where one can choose any avatar form, how does that visual sense of self-representation influence one’s ability to gain access to a social network, to be a leader in that network, and to find work? RQ2: How does realism in representation influence work experiences in these digital worlds? The results reveal the importance of choice in online representation of avatars in creating work and online social engagement. Implications contribute to our understanding of visual bias in the workplace and how emerging virtual reality technologies may open new avenues for meaningful work and social interactions for people with disabilities.     

Crafting social change: former global factory workers negotiating new identities in Sri Lanka’s villages

This article explores how former factory workers negotiate new identities in villages, as new brides, mothers and daughters-in-law, after 5–6 years of employment in an urban Free Trade Zone. I argue that their performances of self-discipline and disavowal of transgressive knowledges allow them to make use of the limited social, economic and political spaces available while gradually reshaping local understandings about the good daughter-in-law. Former workers’ strategic deployment of social conformity represents the foundation on which their entry into village social, economic, political spaces is based on. Although individual social conformity would conventionally be identified as everyday politics, I argue that former workers’ performance of self-discipline and social conformity is strategic and leads to changes in gender norms and village social hierarchies and thus represents a form of politics that is in between everyday and transformative politics – politics that creates conditions of possibility for social transformations.