Medical Selfies: Emotional Impacts and Practical Challenges

Medical images taken with mobile phones by patients, i.e. medical selfies, allow screening, monitoring and diagnosis of skin lesions. While mobile teledermatology can provide good diagnostic accuracy for skin tumours, there is little research about emotional and physical aspects when taking medical selfies of body parts. We conducted a survey with 100 participants and a qualitative study with twelve participants, in which they took images of eight body parts including intimate areas. Participants had difficulties taking medical selfies of their shoulder blades and buttocks. For the genitals, they prefer to visit a doctor rather than sending images. Taking the images triggered privacy concerns, memories of past experiences with body parts and raised awareness of the bodily medical state. We present recommendations for the design of mobile apps to address the usability and emotional impacts of taking medical selfies

Performing the Digital Self: Understanding Location-Based Social Networking, Territory, Space, and Identity in the City

Expressions of territoriality have been positioned as one of the main reasons users alter their behaviors and perceptions of spatiality and sociality while engaging with location-based social networks (LBSN). Despite the potential for this interplay to further our understanding of LBSN usage in the context of identity, very little work has actually been done towards this. Addressing this gap in the literature is one the chief aims of the article. Drawing on an original six-week study with 42 participants utilizing a bespoke LBSN entitled ‘GeoMoments’, our research explores: (1) the way that territoriality is linked to self-identity; and (2) how this interplay affects the interactions between users as well as the environments they inhabit. Our findings suggest that participants affirmed their self-identity by selectively posting and claiming ownership of their neighborhood through the LBSN. Here, the locative decisions made related to risk, hierarchies, and the users’ relationship to the area. This practice then led participants to discover and interact with the digital information overlaying their physical environments in a playful manner. These interactions demonstrate the perceived power structures that are facilitated by identity claims over a virtual area. In the main, our results reaffirm that territoriality is a central concept in understanding LBSN use, while also drawing attention to the temporality involved in user-to-user and user-to-place interactions pertaining to physical place mediated by LBSN

Rogue diva flows: Aoi Sola's reception in the Chinese media and mobile celebrity

Theorizations of celebrity often contend with questions of the constructed nature of star persona. This is more so the case when discussing divas in Japan, as they are subject to a wide range of gender regimes that mould the ways in which their persona is produced and consumed. Contemporary forms of transnationalism in East Asia, however, have created media flows and fan bases that provide new opportunities for Japanese female celebrities to re-construct their star personas, transcending their celebrity status in Japan. Focusing on the case of Aoi Sola, a Japanese adult video actress turned celebrity, this article demonstrates how transnational East Asian flows problematize our static theorization of celebrity. Sola's interactions with her Chinese social media fan base have afforded her a cosmopolitan persona that has been celebrated as a cultural bridge between China and Japan. At the same time, her star persona leaves her vulnerable to re-inscriptions into transnational politics as played out in everyday media flows. This dynamic is best demonstrated in Sola's attempts to quell anti-Japanese sentiment in China as well as in her efforts to reinscribe her star persona using nostalgic associations of cultural similarity and a shared past. Based on analyses of Sola's celebrity trajectory from adult video to online Chinese mediascape Diva, this article suggests that contemporary star persona status is better understood in terms of gender, movement and ‘meshworks’

La pelle del selfie

This is an essay about power and faces. Specifically, it about the faces that manifest in the global self-imaging practice referred to as “selfie culture.” More specifically still, it is about circulation of selfies featuring the face of Sandra Bland, an African American activist with the group Black Lives Matter, who police claim hung herself in a cell after being imprisoned after a routine traffic stop

Scarlett Johansson Falling Down: Memes, Photography and Celebrity Personas

Daniel Palmer and Kate Warren’s chapter explores the place of celebrity in online visual culture. It hones in on a single image of Johansson falling over while filming a scene in Under the Skin (Jonathan Glazer, 2013). As Palmer and Warren highlight, this image provides significant insight into celebrity culture in the era of digital malleability and social media shareability as it was promptly transformed into the viral meme “Scarlett Johansson falling down” and shared widely online. Through analysis of this meme and its rapid proliferation, Palmer and Warren explore the relation between contemporary celebrity culture and online photosharing practices. They highlight the central role of photography and online image-based sharing in producing and critiquing celebrity personas

FGF21 modulates mitochondrial stress response in cardiomyocytes only under mild mitochondrial dysfunction

International audienceThe mitochondrial integrated stress response (mitoISR) has emerged as a major adaptive pathway to respiratory chain deficiency, but both the tissue specificity of its regulation, and how mitoISR adapts to different levels of mitochondrial dysfunction are largely unknown. Here, we report that diverse levels of mitochondrial cardiomyopathy activate mitoISR, including high production of FGF21, a cytokine with both paracrine and endocrine function, shown to be induced by respiratory chain dysfunction. Although being fully dispensable for the cell-autonomous and systemic responses to severe mitochondrial cardiomyopathy, in the conditions of mild-to-moderate cardiac OXPHOS dysfunction, FGF21 regulates a portion of mitoISR. In the absence of FGF21, a large part of the metabolic adaptation to mitochondrial dysfunction (one-carbon metabolism, transsulfuration, and serine and proline biosynthesis) is strongly blunted, independent of the primary mitoISR activator ATF4. Collectively, our work highlights the complexity of mitochondrial stress responses by revealing the importance of the tissue specificity and dose dependency of mitoISR