Alimentary Politics and Algorithms: The Spread of Information about “Healthy” Eating and Diet on TikTok

Social media has been identified as an important venue for the spread of diet trends, especially those that promote disordered eating. Meanwhile, existing research on diet and alimentary politics points to deeper societal issues at stake in food choice, such as notions of personhood and what it means to be healthy. This research involves a deeper study, through interviews with users and extensive observation of content, of the types of information about diet being promoted on TikTok and the ways in which it spreads on the app. TikTok emerged as its own social world, a place of interaction where both identity formation and community formation took place. Messages about eating “healthily” were woven into identities and communities, allowing them to become central to personhood, identity, and morality. Additionally, in interviews and in the observation of content, several ways of demonstrating authority and credibility that were important to the spread of this information became evident. Complex social rules and processes governed the construction of knowledge and the regulation of potentially harmful content or discourses. The dynamics of how people interact with TikToks and how these processes work are key to understanding the ideas about diet that are spreading on the app and knowing how to account for and respond to them in future public health and health communication efforts

Practice, Community, and Algorithms: How YouTube Creators Learn Through Making

In this thesis, I answer the following questions: How do YouTube content creators learncontent creation through their practice and participation in communities of practice? How do these communities help creators form identity? And, lastly, how do the YouTube’s automated systems shape creators’ practice and impact their identity? To explore these questions, I observed a community of new creators to understand how creators learned about content creation from others. I interviewed 11 YouTube creators that ranged in size of viewership and experience to understand how they personally adapted their content to the platform of YouTube as they create videos. I find that creators create a situated practice drawing form a bricolage of information coming from many sources. I also find that this individual practice and communal practice in creator communities contributes to the process of identification. Both practice and identification are influenced by the strategy that YouTube puts in place through its complex automated systems and algorithms that incentivize creators to make content that is in line with the platform

Video Vortex reader : responses to Youtube

The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media. After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives

intimacy and trust among teen vloggers and followers in Portugal and Brazil

UIDB/04647/2020 UIDP/04647/2020This paper analyzes how female teen YouTubers manage intimacy and trust in the narration of their personal lives and the ways in which this is perceived by followers. The analysis of two case studies of popular teen YouTubers from Portugal and Brazil–SofiaBBeauty and Manoela Antelo, respectively–revealed that their presentation is anchored in discourses about whom they are with and where they are, what they are doing, and their personal tastes and styles. Through their comments on the videos, followers express trust connections with the vloggers, based on a sense of proximity, a desire for exclusivity in their relationship, relatability with banal aspects, and recognition as cultural intermediaries. These case studies have demonstrated strong similarities in the vloggers’ practices of constructing intimacy and consequent trust with peer audiences, bearing great resemblance with older YouTubers from central cultures. Although Sofia and Manoela put forward different class performances, the trust they inspire in their followers is a fundamental form of capital for both.publishersversionpublishe

Big Black Beasts : Race and Masculinity in Gay Pornography

Although there is a good foundation of feminist research at the intersection of performative labor, pornography, and sexuality, there are few (if any) published studies that examine race in porn content intended for gay men’s consumption. What’s more, existing research samples solely from corporatized porn, which is expressly produced, scripted, and directed. Bound by the conventions of the market, however, corporate pornography must abide by a consumer demand that reflects white machinations of black sexuality rather than the self-proclaimed sexual identity of African American men. Instead, I employ an exploratory content analysis of pornographic videos categorized as “ebony” on a popular user-submitted porn database. I am interested in 1) the character of pornographic representations of queer black masculinity and 2) how these representations vary between corporate and non-corporate producers. I find that representations of black men in gay porn rely on stereotypes of black masculinity to arouse consumers, especially those which characterize black men as “missing links” or focus excessively on their “dark phalluses.” Moreover, these depictions consistently separate gay black and white men’s sexuality into bifurcated discursive spaces, thereby essentializing sexual aspects of racial identity. Lastly, though such depictions are less prevalent in user-submitted videos, overall, both user-submitted and corporate content reify stereotypes about black masculinity

Private Platforms, Recommendation Algorithms and Agency: A Study of Tinkerers on YouTube

The internet and the algorithms designed by private technology companies have become an important sub-field of social science concerned with agency online. The purpose of this research is to examine contemporary online platforms and the predominance of their recommendation algorithms on users to better understand the techniques online users employ to enact agency. This research develops as a response to apprehension for agency in an online world driven by advertisement-based algorithms, as well as the social problems associated with the sentiment of lack of agency that emerges from these models. This research aims to examine two questions: First, do platform users have agency online when considering the functions of recommendation algorithms? Second, what role, if any, do recommendation algorithms play in that possible agency? Questions of agency necessarily raise in importance as communication and information sharing moves to online platforms that use algorithms to classify and effect human action. This research is pertinent because its goal is to create knowledge so that we may better understand and act online. The methodology is a combination of three stages of data collection; initial documentary research of available information provided to the public by Google and independent sources; documentary and case study research of data generated from YouTube and Google; a judgement sampling method to select YouTube users and a thematic analysis of their experiences. This method considers chosen users as expert informants in cases of controversy that help explain collective existence on the platform. The findings of this research support previous research critical of the manipulative nature of algorithms. This research also contributes to a nuanced view of agency online by finding that agency does occur within technology-literate collaborative groups of users. Conceptualizing content creators and recommendation algorithms as a network of actors within a social context better explains cases of agency experienced by users. The findings support that greater knowledge of technology allows individuals greater affordances of agency. The research proves that platform content creators are fertile informants for a study of platforms. The typology of content creators is an expansion of previous tinkerer research that supports the continued pertinence of a tech-knowledgeable user typology in sociology concerned with a lack of agency online

Teaching from the Tent: Muslim Women\u27s Leadership in Digital Religion

Muslim women’s accounts of their own religious leadership have been consistently absent from historical documents and present-day reporting. The absence of narrations does not necessarily indicate the absence of women, however, and today more and more women are leading and becoming public figures using new platforms provided by the Internet. In order to understand the essence of their leadership, this study sought to discover and describe the religious leadership lives of Muslim women, to disentangle the relationship between feminism and feminist work per Muslim women religious leaders, and to understand how digital religion influences their leadership. This qualitative study is a feminist phenomenology of seven Muslim women who are public figures and religious leaders. Using long interviews, document analysis of their publications, public teaching observations, and netnographies. I gathered data about the essence of their leadership. I further triangulated the data with a six-week study of a WhatsApp chat that happened between 75 Muslim women religious leaders who remain anonymous in this study. The feminist theories of bell hooks (2000), Nell Noddings (1985), and feminist theologians, along with Aristotle’s theory of knowledge as expressed by al Farābi, and Chaos theory as applied to social systems as described by Fritjof Capra (2002) came together to form the theoretical underpinnings of this study. Careful analysis of the data resulted in a model of Muslim women’s religious leadership that can be used to both appreciate the unique aspects of their leadership and improve education and training for Muslim women who wish to enter into the field

From BookTok to Bookshelf: Algorithms and Book Recommendations on TikTok

TikTok, a social media platform focused on short-form videos, is gaining a reputation for renewing interest in books (Bateman 2022; Harris 2021). While reviewing and recommending books is not new, the ability to do so on a large scale used to be limited to a select group of critics. Social media allows readers to voice their opinions, and by gaining followings these readers can then influence at a similar scale as traditional reviewers. This raises various questions as to how culture is created and curated. Today, this curation is done largely by algorithms through recommending and promoting content. The rise of BookTok emphasizes this, combining recommendations with TikTok’s algorithm to boost the popularity of certain books. In particular, BookTok has made headlines by repeatedly raising backlist books back onto the bestseller lists. This increases the shift from traditional curators of culture to a community of fellow readers, which can in turn popularize specific genres. Thus, the main question this thesis aims to answer is: what distinguishes BookTok from other digital platforms, enabling it to have such a cultural impact going beyond the online book community? The BookTok phenomenon will be explained by using a mixed-method approach looking at how creators use platform affordances, aesthetic features, and their algorithmic imaginaries to appeal to both users and the TikTok algorithm. The data used in this thesis consists of 148 BookTok videos gathered over a two-week period from the “For You” page. A content analysis was conducted to find patterns in the construction of the videos, the use of specific aesthetic features, and the selection of recommended book titles. Based on this data, it was possible to detect and describe different genres of BookTok videos and to identify the use of relevant platform affordances. This was complemented by a thematic analysis of interviews with three video creators, selected from the authors of the material in the dataset. The interviews gave insight into the algorithmic imaginary of the creators and how the construction of the algorithm informs the creative process. The analysis showed that while the algorithm is what makes the recommendations popular by distributing them to a receptive audience, the TikTok format is what makes the recommendations memorable and has a positive impact on book sales. As the algorithm informs every aspect of the book recommendations, from the creator’s decisions of picking a certain book to the decisions on when to make the video and who the algorithm subsequently recommends the video to, the book recommendations on BookTok can be examined as examples of algorithmic curation. By taking up the topic of literature and literary readership from a digital culture perspective, this thesis aims to contribute to the greater discussions on algorithms, personalization, and its’ effect on cultural production and curation.Master's Thesis in Digital CultureDIKULT350MAHF-DIKU