From “Networked Publics” to “Refracted Publics”: A Companion Framework for Researching “Below the Radar” Studies

Abstract

Reflecting on a decade (2009–2020) of research on influencer cultures in Singapore, the Asia Pacific, and beyond, this article considers the potential of “below the radar” studies for understanding the fast evolving and growing potentials of subversive, risky, and hidden practices on social media. The article updates technology and social media scholar danah boyd’s foundational work on “networked publics” to offer the framework of “refracted publics.” While “networked publics” arose from media and communication studies of social network sites during the decade of the 2000s, focused on platforms, infrastructure, and affordances, “refracted publics” is birthed from anthropological and sociological studies of internet user cultures during the decade of the 2010s, focused on agentic and circumventive adaptations of what platforms offer them. “Refracted publics” are a product of the landscape of platform data leaks, political protests, fake news, and (most recently) COVID-19, and are creative vernacular strategies to accommodate for perpetual content saturation, hyper-competitive attention economies, gamified and datafied metric cultures, and information distrust. The key conditions (transience, discoverability, decodability, and silosociality) and dynamics (impactful audiences, weaponized contexts, and alternating publics and privates) of “refracted publics” allow cultures, communities, and contents to avoid being registered on a radar, register in misplaced pockets while appearing on the radar, or register on the radar but parsed as something else altogether. They are the strategies of private groups, locked platforms, or ephemeral contents that will continue to thrive alongside the internet for decades to come.

Feminist Postdigital Inquiry in the Ruins of Pandemic Universities

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The hidden hierarchy of far-right digital guerrilla warfare

“…What follows is an attempt to identify hidden hierarchical power structures typical of post-Fordism by articulating: (a) the unintended, "under the radar" yet systemic effects of platform architectures (Abdin 2021;Gray et al 2020), (b) the hidden power structures stimulating conflict, converting social media into a "war zone" whose "terrain" is favorable to cyber guerrilla and (c) struggles for political power underlying such cyber-operations, involving post-Fordist competition among economic agents (i.e., the corporations and nations which will control capital accumulation, nationally and internationally).…”

Relational Communication Spaces: Infrastructures and Discursive Practices

“…In refraining from presupposing a certain spatialisation of public communication, we do not suggest a "wholeness" of publics, encompassing everyone in a territory or a perfectly connected network. This can make our framework attractive to research looking into disconnections (Pfetsch, 2018), public communication of marginalised groups in counter publics, or "refracted publics" (Abidin, 2021).…”