From usernames to profiles: the development of pseudonymity in Internet communication

Nagel, Emily van der

doi:10.1080/24701475.2017.1389548

Cited by 33 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 32 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…It is plausible that those Twitter users engaged in talk about emotions may be more likely to use pseudonyms. As Van Der Nagel (2017: 312) has documented, pseudonymity and platform or profile differentiation continue to be used to ‘deliberately compartmentalise identities’, and potentially in this case to open up spaces for talk about emotions.…”

Section: Methodology: Following Feelings Onlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Empathy Rituals: Small Conversations about Emotional Distress on Twitter

Brownlie

Shaw

2018

Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

There is growing research interest in the sharing of emotions through social media. Usually centred on 'newsworthy' events and collective 'flows' of emotion, this work is often computationally driven. This article presents an interaction-led analysis of small data from Twitter to illustrate how this kind of intensive focus can 'thicken' claims about emotions, and particularly empathy. Drawing on Goffman's work on ritual, we introduce and then apply the idea of 'empathy rituals' to exchanges about emotional distress on Twitter, a platform primarily researched using big data approaches. While the potential of Goffman's work has been explored in some depth in relation to digital performances, its emotional dimension has been less fully examined. Through a focus on Twitter conversations, we show how reading small data can inform computational social science claims about emotions and add to sociological understanding of emotion in (digital) publics.

show abstract

Section: Methodology: Following Feelings Onlinementioning

confidence: 99%

Empathy Rituals: Small Conversations about Emotional Distress on Twitter

Brownlie

Shaw

2018

Sociology

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…The visibility of participants’ bodies and faces, as well as their “real” name differed by platform, and allowed them to “negotiate platform expectations and segment audiences” (van der Nagel, 2017, p. 327). For those on Facebook, each woman used their real name and shared at least one photograph with their face.…”

Section: Negotiating Mental Illness and Visibilitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Young Women’s Mental Illness and (In-)visible Social Media Practices of Control and Emotional Recognition

Hendry

2020

Social Media + Society

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

What “counts” as a mental illness–related image matters. Most research attention has focused on distressing or recognizable mental illness–related visual practices, yet this offers partial insight into youth mental health. Using visibility and practice theories, I share an in-depth case study exploring the social media practices of four young women, aged 14–17 years, engaged with an Australian adolescent psychiatric service. They describe how being visible to others on social media potentially produces anxiety and burdens them to respond to others’ questions or unhelpful support. In response, they engage in practices of control to manage the vulnerability of mental illness and burdensome sociality. Their mental illness–related media practices are often invisible; they rework mental illness through ambiguous, supportive or humorous practices or, through imagined intimacy, engage with images that feel relatable to them even if the images do not depict recognizable mental illness content or employ recognizable hashtags or titles. These insights complicate “what counts” as mental illness–related content or practices on social media and challenge researchers and practitioners to consider the sociotechnical contexts that shape young people’s mental health.

show abstract

“…The only certainty with this form of big data is that it will be used in ways not immediately clear on the day that the data is captured. Moreover, the design of these devices which encourage intimate surveillance can displace other narratives of care, and encourage parents to continue digital surveillance of their children in other forms as they grow (Rettberg, 2014). Situating the generation of children's big data as part of co-creation might allow parents to better imagine the choices they are making when using these devices, and the possible ramifications for their children's right and privacy in the future.…”

Section: The Owlet and Infant Wearables Typify What I Have Defined Elmentioning

confidence: 99%

Co-Creating Birth and Death on Social Media

Leaver¹

2019

Preprint

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

While social media is, by definition, about connecting multiple people, many discussions about social media platforms and practices presume that accounts and profiles are managed by individual users with the agency to make fully-informed choices about their activities. When discussing children, especially younger children, their agency is at times characterised as partial, or emerging, but with the presumption that with sufficient time they will eventually reach the same (presumed) status and ability as adult users (Livingstone & Third, 2017). At the other end of life, at the moment of death, the social media traces and online presences that persist after a user has passed away also present challenges in terms of agency. While there is an increasing push to include some sort of instructions about digital property in wills, these instructions are currently few and far between. Some platforms have deployed algorithmic solutions which have begun to address the reality of deceased users, but these are, at best, partial and largely insufficient responses. With these two figures in mind, I argue that the very young—from conception to birth and early infancy—and the recently deceased both act as liminal figures where the question of their (lack of) agency on social media highlights some of the ongoing challenges in presuming that social media traces can always be the responsibility of users with full, or even partial, agency. Rather, using a range of examples, I argue in this chapter that more encompassing ways of thinking about the relationship between social media, networked selves and identities, are needed. Drawing on work from the creative industries, I suggest that the term co-creation can be reframed to emphasise the way that social media almost always entails creating other people’s identities as much as our own. Parents and carers are the first arbiters and co-creators of a young person’s life, making a large number of important choices about what sort of private or public online presence a newly born baby will have, how that presence will develop over time, on which platforms, and under which circumstances. Parents, in effect, can choose to name their children into being online, and in doing so must navigate the parental joys of sharing whilst balancing this against the rights of the child to, amongst other things, privacy in the present and future. At the other end of life, but in functionally similar ways, the loved ones left behind by the recently deceased will often need to make decisions about which social media profiles and traces persist after that user has died, how these traces will be (re)framed, and what online spaces will persist (if any), possibly in the form of online memorials. Moreover, both ends of life are now situated in an online context where real identities and real names, which persist over time, are both expected and demanded by the policies and practices of online platforms. The use of real names on social media amplifies the impact and longevity of social media traces, whether early or late in life. In outlining the challenges inherent in framing the very young, and the recently deceased, online, I argue in this chapter that a broader sense of agency and impact is needed across all life-stages on social media. A wider lens in terms of the way users contribute to the stories of each other on social media may well assist us all in making decisions about online material that inevitably impact the lives and legacies of other people.

show abstract

From usernames to profiles: the development of pseudonymity in Internet communication

Cited by 33 publications

References 32 publications

Empathy Rituals: Small Conversations about Emotional Distress on Twitter

Empathy Rituals: Small Conversations about Emotional Distress on Twitter

Young Women’s Mental Illness and (In-)visible Social Media Practices of Control and Emotional Recognition

Co-Creating Birth and Death on Social Media

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About