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Issue III: Digital Actors from Influencer to Creator
The digital age and the rise of Web 2.0—and now 3.0—has ushered in new forms of affect, public life, celebrity, and advertorial labour dependent upon platformized cultural production. And those inhabiting these new digital workplaces are, as a diverse collective, known as creators.
If there’s one thing that has been thoroughly covered in research, the press, as well as visible across all social media, it is people who have risen to fame through social media. From influencers, to youtubers, twitch streamers, to instapoets, booktubers and booktokers, and the like. Content creators. The centering of social media as platforms for user generated content has facilitated the rise of content creators, across the world.
Interesting in studying or writing about creators? Check out this list of research resources covering the rise of these social-media-made workers.
Issue II: Digital Activism Online & Beyond
The digital age has ushered in a new generation of activists who have been gaining notoriety worldwide—the magnitude of which would be otherwise inconceivable without the help of social media. Movements like #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter, and #MilkTeaAlliance have become everyday topics of dinner conversation (and arguments!)—and have resulted in sweeping historical, cultural, and legal changes around the globe…
In a country like Iran, where streets have been taken away from people by the governmental force, and peaceful protests are responded to by armed police force, and in the time of enforced lockdowns during COVID-19, online activism is one of the most pressing areas in need of further research that humanities scholars must consider studying…
For this issue, we asked media scholar Natalie Krikowa to share her top reading recommendations on activism on social media. A lecturer at the University of Technology Sydney, Krikowa researches and teaches in digital and social media with expertise in media representation including identity politics in screen studies and popular culture…
Issue I: The Digital Turn
The whole world is “filtered” on and through social media, we might say, ironically following Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s famous 1944 rumblings about popular culture. The pioneers of critical theory argued that the “world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.” That is, through magazines, music, movies, and other mass-produced cultural forms…
In reviewing Mike Chasar’s Poetry Unbound (Columbia University Press, 2020), it is first necessary to ask how does this book, in many ways, represent the start of a novel project concerning social media and popular culture? It is neither about social media and pop culture in particular, nor the digital and cultural expressions in general. It is a book about poetry…
Instasociety has also provided a list of further introductory reading on the many different streams of digital cultural studies. These varied pieces explore the rise of digital culture, how culture has, in turn, transformed, and where culture may be headed next…