“Robot got future, i don’t”: black femme liminal performance in SZA's “Ghost in the Machine”

Authenticity, Captioned: Hashtags, Emojis, and Visibility Politics in Alok Vaid-Menon’s Selfie Captions

On social media platforms such as Twitter and Instagram, Black women create counternarratives to reclaim ownership of their representation from the anti-Black and misogynistic mainstream media. One example of their efforts is the proliferation of the hashtag #Blackgirlmagic, which has become a device to herald Black women’s unseen accomplishments. When Black femme social media users employ #Blackgirlmagic, they feel a sense of control over their imagery, which contributes to the hashtag’s value as a political product. However, the technology underlying #Blackgirlmagic is bound to corporate missions and deliberate algorithmic limitations. This coupling of neoliberal capitalist interests and Black femme liberatory politics causes the author to pause and interrogate the political and cultural efficacy of the hashtag. With an Afrofuturist womanist framework, the author examines the vitriolic responses by #Blackgirlmagic adherents to Linda Chavers’s 2016 article, “Here’s My Problem with #Blackgirlmagic: Black Girls Aren’t Magic. We’re Human.” The author argues that these #Blackgirlmagic online adherents demonstrate the conflict between liberating Black femme imagery and the self-commodification of Black womanhood via industrialized content creation. The marketability of the current iteration of #Blackgirlmagic diminishes the possibility of radical digital praxes such as protecting and holding virtual space for unpalatable and unprofitable Black femme affective performances.

SPEP Co-director's Address: Progress, Philosophical and Otherwise

This essay is a narrative about how Black femmes of the twenty-first century are eclipsed by the pornographization and ruptured mediascape of the public as captured by the fantasies of a prefixed Humanism; aspects of both their private and public life are commandeered for a variety of purposes and repurposes such as the cautionary tale, moral panic, necrocapital, and other derisive formulations tethered to social-sexual location, Black femme subjectivity, spectacular violation, and death. I analyze the logics of the party as a geographic space of sociality that is imbibed by a perceived deviance. I track the material and digital logics of a Black teen femme and “turn up queen” who sought pleasure in a worlding committed to shaming femmes for those desires. Additionally, I consider the sexual and political implications of the party and Black social living, the documented recordings of Kenneka Jenkins and her friend Irene Roberts, the perceived ghettoness and filthiness of Jenkins, Roberts and her friends as interpreted through the work of artist Deana Lawson’s Axis (2018).

“My Little Influencer”

Aim: To review and discuss the use of social media platforms as digital marketing tool and promotional strategy by brands. The digital age inevitably brings changes and increased competition in ways businesses target, reach and recruit customers. This phenomena raises the question of which medium or media do businesses adopt in the marketing effort to reach, inform and convert customers; ultimately for survival? This review is an attempt to address this question within the context of the promotional activities of a beauty brand, Taliah.Approach: A review was conducted on the social media marketing activities of Taliah. It discusses different social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and YouTube which the brand has combined to target, reach, persuade and convert their customers. In addition, the review identified four factors that reasonably affect the social media marketing as time and date; personality, call to action and post type. Consequently, this logical approach towards the subject-matter would help to provide knowledge and facilitate reaching the best-fit decision that can optimize the marketing activities of brands and businesses; considering the increasingly evolving technological era.Findings: The review considers the evolving changes in business as a result of the presence of various digital and interactive platforms and technologies. The study recognizes that the social media platforms provide opportunities for media content; including information on products and services to be processed and distributed to the targets. There is a worry that the market space is increasingly becoming competitive; particularly as consumers are empowered by the digital technologies to make informed choices among different brands and businesses. Arguably, this is one of the major factors that triggered the competition in the market and among brands.Review limitations/implications: The characteristics of the impact of the social media marketing on brands and businesses have recently been widely discussed because of their general applicability. Consequently, it is impossible to review and cover all the important aspects of the subject-matter in this review. This review focuses on the Taliah brand and how it has particularly conducted its social media and digital marketing management. It also examines four factors that reasonably affect the social media marketing; namely, time and date; personality, call to action and post type. The review examines and provides its own views based on content analysis of the social media marketing activities of Taliah brand.Practical implications: The review highlights the activities, benefits and challenges of applying social media as a marketing and promotional strategy. Social media platforms provide the channel through which brands and businesses can develop and disseminate information about their activities to their targets in an easy, less expensive and convenient manner. On the other hand, if brands and business understand the factors affecting the social media marketing; namely, time and date; personality, call to action and post type – they would be better prepared to checkmate these factors; including been able to aptly adapt the strengths of the social media in their marketing activities. This complement would strike the balance and potentially present a practical means through which brands could coordinate their marketing efforts in using various social media platforms. It is also crucial to gain insight into other factors that potentially impacting the activities of social media marketing strategy.Value: The review considers that the increasing changes in the market is itself an opportunity for the brands to rethink strategy on how various digital technologies and networking platforms can be optimized in marketing their activities and information. It is crucial and beneficial to emerging businesses and academics to understand how Taliah brand combined and utilized diverse social media platforms to target, reach out and recruit target customers; ultimately boosting its market shares.

Conceptual artist Kenya (Robinson)’s 2021 Patriot Games series of works explores the dynamics of Black femme iconicity and citizenship. Patriot Games layers iconographies of US nationalism with fragmented clips of performances by Whitney Houston, social media content, and at times her own performances of racialized sexuality and enfleshment. The result is a haunting bricolage that provokes consideration of how virtuosity, visibility, and celebration ultimately fall short in creating conditions in which Black femmes can survive and thrive in the United States. Through manipulation of sound and imagery, in addition to performance and sculptural installation, (Robinson) complicates Black femme icons to critique majoritarian forms of cultural consumption that exploit Black femme performance for national service. Patriot Games instead emphasizes how such performances can foment alternate forms of belonging and radical imaginaries of freedom.

Danielle “StrugglingToBeHeard” Cole is a Black nonbinary femme who was launched from the relative safety of their Tumblr famous social justice online community into infamy via a viral video reposted to the notoriously unjust, WorldStarHipHop gossip blog. In this excerpt from my book, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press May 2021), I asked Cole about her vision for a social media platform built on Black feminist principles. What would it look and feel like when #BlackLivesMatter was a central tenet of the platform, with queer, trans, nonbinary, agender and gender variant Black folks to the front?

“I Need You All to Understand How Pervasive This Issue Is”: User Efforts to Regulate Child Sexual Offending on Social Media

Digital health and technologies are essential to curbing the novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic especially with shelter-in-place and social distancing orders. Epidemiologists and public health officials are tapping into frequently used technologies like wearables, digital devices, digital and social media data to detect and validate COVID-19 symptoms throughout the pandemic, especially during early stages when symptoms were evolving. In this article, we review how digital technologies and social media platforms can identify and inform our understanding of COVID-19 pandemic surveillance and recovery efforts. We analyze Reddit narrative posts and comments on r/covidlonghaulers to demonstrate how social media can be used to better understand COVID-19 pandemic. Using Reddit data, we highlight long haulers' patient journeys and shed light on potential consequences of their condition. We identified 21 themes, of which the following were significantly associated with valence: COVID-19 Symptoms (r = −0.037), medical advice (r = −0.030), medical system (r = −0.029), bodily processes (r = −0.020), questions (r = 0.024), physical activity (r = 0.033), self-differentials and negations (r = 0.040) and supplements (r = 0.025). Our brief literature review and analysis of r/covidlonghaulers narrative posts demonstrate the value of digital technologies and social media platforms as they act as modern avenues for public health, safety, and well-being.

Purpose: Overwhelmed by the huge rise in the number of social media (SM) platforms, B to B firms have been increasingly using multiple social media (SM) platforms to enhance their relationships with their customers. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of the competitive pressure to use SM on B to B firms use of multiple SM platforms, organization and individual SM competences and on relationship sales performance. Method: An online survey is implemented to collect data from B to B firms from different industries in an emerging market, i.e. Kuwait, to produce 152 usable questionnaires. Structural equation modeling is carried out using Smart PLS 3. Findings: The main findings show that competitive pressure to use SM fully influences relationship sales performance through individual social media competence. It also influences relationship sales performance through two mediations (1) organizational SM competence, (2) on a less important level, through the use of multiple SM platforms and organizational SM competence. Additionally, both organization and individual SM competence are found to significantly influence relationship sales performance. Implications: This study uncovers the complex mechanism through which competitive pressures to use social media influence both individual and organization social media competence and their relationship with their customers. It demonstrates that the use of multiple SM platforms significantly increases relationship sales performance, but this influence is weak. Therefore, top managers must choose the right number of SM platforms and design clear SM strategies. Originality: This study sheds light on the influence of competitive pressure to use SM on B to B firms’ relationships with their customers i.e. relationship sales performance. This coercive pressure could potentially spread B to B firms’ resources over a large number of SM and lead to poor SM presence. The study also emphasizes the role of top management in choosing the optimal combination of SM platforms and developing their organization SM competence.

Twitter Archives and the Challenges of "Big Social Data" for Media and Communication Research

Uued loomevõimalused internetis. Märkmeid sotsiaalmeedia kirjandusest / New Creative Practices on Internet. Some Remarks on Social Media Literature

Objects of Narrative Desire:An Unnatural History of Fossil Collection and Black Women's Sexuality Samantha Pinto (bio) Since history is a recorded or remembered event, theatre, for me, is the perfect place to 'make' history—that is, because so much of African-American history has been unrecorded, disremembered, washed out, one of my tasks as a playwright is to—through literature and the special strange relationship between theatre and real-life—locate the ancestral burial ground, dig for bones, find bones, hear the bones sing, write it down. Suzan-Lori Parks, "Possession" In the 2015 book The Sixth Extinction, regarding the current eco-historical moment of great extinction due to manmade climate change, Elizabeth Kolbert mentions in passing an astounding confluence for scholars of race and black feminist theory: the rivalry between Thomas Jefferson and George Cuvier, two of the most infamous historical exploiters of black women's sexuality, for a set of fossils—the bones of a giant mammoth—in the mid-1790s (27–28). Jefferson, then vice president of the United States, had already begun his forty-year sexual entanglement with a woman he enslaved, Sally Hemings. He was also an avid amateur naturalist and collector of fossilized bones unearthed in expeditions of settler colonialism across what was to become America. Cuvier, a young French scientist, would extend his scientific interest in and findings on fossils, eventually positing the first theory of extinction on which the work of Darwin himself is based. Cuvier would also be the person responsible for immortalizing [End Page 351] Sarah Baartman, the early nineteenth-century African performer otherwise known as the Hottentot Venus, in his drawings and racial science claims about her anatomy during her life and, following his 1815 public autopsy of her body, after her death. This seemingly unrelated convergence of the two men who represent the most infamous and intimate links between white supremacy and black women's embodiment reveals the shared material space between the fields of natural history and black feminist theory. Jefferson's and Cuvier's traffic in 'extinct' bones and in black women's bodies was engendered by systems of settler colonialism and chattel slavery, and today both fossilized bones of extinct animals and black women's historical bodies are mobilized to critique these systems in the cultural work of remembrance, knowledge production, and other labors for scientific and historical narratives of progress. This article argues that in analyzing the twinned com-modification of fossils and black women's bodies we might both trace the strange connections between their exploitation in the service of the seemingly opposed narratives of white supremacy and liberal progress and imagine the methodological possibilities of reading objectification not as the end point of our critique of scientific racism and the misogynoir of Western political thought, but as the generative space from which we can reimagine an embodied history of black women. The evidence of the scientific, sexual, and political desires that append to black women's historical bodies animates this piece as a companion object to fossils and as a way to think through the 'fossilization' of race, gender, and sexuality that happens in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as well as in contemporary discourses around black women's history. Fossils stand as objects that are spectacularly rendered into the deep time of 'prehistory,' a temporal category that, as Dana Luciano reminds us, often serves to obscure and provide an alibi for contemporary practices of racialized and gendered violence and violation ("Tracking Prehistory" 174). This article excavates these unnatural narratives of natural history and black women's objectification through three sites. First, I read the convergence between Jefferson and Cuvier, Baartman and Hemings, and the circulation and display of fossils and black women's bodies through their shared participation in eighteenth-century collection as a performance and a narrative of progress. Second, I turn to an investigation of the scientific and public cultures formed in the wake of this earlier era, including [End Page 352] the institutionalization of racial science in the spaces of the museum and the expedition in the late nineteenth century, to imagine how collection and objectification were re-narrativized in these spaces. Here, I focus on...

Digital Authoritarianism in the Middle East: Deception, Disinformation and Social Media