Life of a Fatso : Young, Fat and Vulnerable in a Scandinavian Society of Perfection

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Exploring the impact of an evolving war and terror blogosphere on traditional media coverage of conflict

This article analyses the evolution of a war and terror blogosphere between 2001 and 2011. It identifies seven areas where blogs and related online genres could provide ‘alternative’ accounts to traditional media narratives of conflict. The article also assesses the challenges and opportunities of blogs in each area from the perspective of the working journalist in order to deepen our understanding of the changing influence of blogs on traditional media narratives of conflict. Parallel accounts and interpretations of conflict will collaborate and compete in a war and terror blogosphere in the future, but it has been significantly influenced by the adoption of blogging by military actors since 2008. The war and terror blogosphere is no longer a relatively unmonitored online space which is having an impact on both the production of ‘alternative’ accounts of conflict and the incorporation of these accounts into traditional journalism

‘ASMR’ autobiographies and the (life-)writing of digital subjectivity

For years now, a growing online subculture has been exchanging videos designed to induce ‘autonomous sensory meridian response’ (ASMR), a mysterious, blissfully relaxing tingling sensation held to alleviate anxiety, pain, insomnia and depression. Emerging from online health forums, ASMR culture today centres on YouTube, where ‘ASMRtists’ have used the feedback mechanisms built into social media platforms to refine a repertoire of ‘trigger’ techniques. Exemplifying a wider trend for using ‘ambient media’ as mood modulators and task facilitators (Roquet, 2016 Ambient Media: Japanese Atmospheres of Self. London: University of Minnesota Press.), ASMR culture’s use of the word ‘trigger’ is telling, gesturing towards what Halberstam ((2014) You Are Triggering Me! The Neo-Liberal Rhetoric of Harm, Danger and Trauma. Bully Bloggers. Available at: https://bullybloggers.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/you-are-triggering-me-the-neo-liberal-rhetoric-of-harm-danger-and-trauma/ (accessed 8 August 2018)) sees as a shift away from the Freudian notion of ‘memory as a palimpsest’ towards one of memory as ‘a live wire sitting in the psyche waiting for a spark’, whereby digital subjects become black-boxed nodes in a cybernetic circuit. This shift has serious implications for the humanities and is particularly resonant for scholars of life-writing. As McNeill ((2012) There is no “I” in network: Social networks sites and posthuman auto/biography. Biography 35(1): 65–82.) argues, digital technologies ‘complicate[] definitions of the self and its boundaries, both dismantling and sustaining the humanist subject in practices of personal narrative’ (p. 65). The resulting friction is highlighted in ‘ASMR autobiographies’: texts narrating the author’s experiences of ASMR and their discovery of online ASMR communities. Echoing familiar auto/biographical forms, from medical case histories and coming out narratives to tales of religious conversion, these texts show that the models of subjectivity we have inherited from Enlightenment philosophy, religion, psychology and Romantic literature retain some cultural purchase. But they also suggest digital media are fostering new understandings of personhood informed by cybernetics, evolutionary psychology, behaviourism and neuroscience. Focusing on works by Andrew MacMuiris, Andrea Seigel and Jon Kersey while also addressing a range of other texts, this article asks what ASMR autobiographies can tell us about digital subjectivity

Life of a Fatso: Young, Fat and Vulnerable in a Scandinavian Society of Perfection

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CODA: Towards a Visual Sociology 3.0

In this final chapter, we summarize the preceding chapters and point towards future directions for visually based sociology. We argue for a space where technologically afforded understandings of social reality and the multiple ways this ‘reality’ is presented to us are considered critically and methodologically. In conclusion, we suggest that we need to further explore different ways of seeing in tandem with an ever-increasing image dependency in our hyper-visual society

Becoming a personal style blogger:Changing configurations and spatialities of aesthetic labour in the fashion industry

The increasing pervasiveness of social media and digital technology has had a particular impact on the geographies and nature of work in the fashion industry. A new segment of entrepreneurs – fashion bloggers – are utilizing these digital technologies, such as blogs and social media, to transform their personal lives and style into online businesses. This article draws on an in-depth case study analysis of an American personal style fashion blog; tracing its nine-year evolution from an ‘outfit-of-the-day’ personal style blog, to one that encompasses her entire personal life, including diets, fitness, home décor and pregnancy. By focusing on one blog, we provide an in-depth exploration from its roots as a hobby for personal expression to a means of full-time employment in the fashion industry. Through this examination, emphasis is given to the process of becoming a blogger and the intensification of the ways in which the self is presented and commodified over time. We argue that personal style fashion bloggers provide an illustrative case study, not only for expanding our understanding of aesthetic labour in the digital age, but also highlighting the spaces and temporalities of work that these new formations and engagements of work give rise to. These processes highlight the changing configurations and spatialities of aesthetic labour online