Visual communication in practice: A texto-material approach to WhatsApp in Mexico City

With more than 2 billion users, WhatsApp is one of the most important mobile technologies in the world. Accordingly, scholarly interest in WhatsApp has grown in recent years. However, studies have tended to separate WhatsApp’s visual and textual elements from the analysis of its technological infrastructure. Alternatively, we argue for a “texto- material” approach that examines the links between both dimensions. We elaborate on the analytical gains that come from this approach by examining the use of WhatsApp in Mexico City. We posit that considering how textual/visual elements and technological features are interwoven is crucial for understanding the cultural specificity of WhatsApp’s development and use in places like Latin America.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM

“The most aggressive of algorithms”: User awareness of and attachment to TikTok’s content personalization

This paper examines how a group of TikTok users in Costa Rica made sense of the workings of its algorithmic content personalization, how they came to this understanding, and what the implications of their self-proclaimed awareness are for establishing a particular affective relationship with the app. Drawing on actor-network theory, we argue that the awareness that these users have of algorithms shapes their affective attachment to TikTok (which they often describe as a form of “addiction”). The paper examines how users carefully enacted various practical roles in order to maintain the affect associated with personalized content on the app. In this way, we add nuance to dominant accounts of the user-algorithm relationship. Rather than viewing it as constant, fixed, and universal, we argue for considering it as “always in the making.” The paper shows how this relationship undergoes multiple “passages” through which distinct capacities for both users and algorithms emerge.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM

A la fe por la duda: Una lectura metafísica de la paradoja en “El Hombre Que Fue Jueves” de G.K. Chesterton

The paper examines the metaphysical meanings of paradox in Chesterton’s novel The Man Who Was Thursday. Biographical insights are taken into account to understand the writing process of his novel. Finally, it discusses both Chesterton’s use of paradox as well as his religious and philosophical postures.El artículo discute el significado metafísico de la paradoja en la novela El hombre que fue Jueves de G. K. Chesterton. Se consideran datos biográficos del autor con el fin de explorar el proceso de gestación de la obra. Finalmente, se analiza el uso de la paradoja por parte del autor así como sus posturas religiosas y filosóficas.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Artes y Letras::Facultad de Letras::Escuela de Filosofí

Blogs and bloggers

This entry discusses the main characteristics of blogs and bloggers and their coevolution since the start of blogging in the 1990s. Blogs are a kind of website that can be used to present introspective ruminations or an overview of daily events. A blog can serve as an instrument for political mobilization, a journalistic endeavor, an open-ended literary project, or a means for constant exhibition of the self, and in some cases combines more than one of these functions. However, there is little agreement about what features make a blog a blog. Most authors emphasize features such as the frequent publication of content, a reverse chronological order to display blog posts, and archives of previous posts.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM

Voicing the Web: The Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France

The World Wide Web has turned into an important means to share voice, that is, the narratives through which individuals give a public account of their lives. This dissertation analyzes how this key cultural process came into being and discusses some of its main implications. To this end, it studies one specific technology of subjectivity that embodies this process in fundamental ways: the blog. This dissertation examines the processes that have shaped practices of subjectivity on the Web in two countries (the United States and France) from the mid-1990s to the early years of the 2010s. The focus is on three processes: the emergence of the blog; its constitution into a means for intervening in the public sphere and a commodity; and the identity crises triggered by the rise of novel media technologies (such as “microblogging”) designed to replace or extend it. A theoretical framework is developed that makes four analytic contributions: (a) it considers media technologies as assemblages of both textual meaning and material artifacts; (b) it analyzes both the production and use of media technologies; (c) it adopts a process-orientation to make sense of the temporal development of the Web; and (d) it implements a comparative approach to identify the similarities and differences between the cases under study. Drawing on interviews with key actors, content and artifact analyses of websites, traditional archival research, and online archival research, this dissertation examines how users and software developers have enacted particular notions of the self, conceived the publicness of their Web appropriation and development practices, and built and utilized media technologies such as websites and software programs to these ends. The analysis reveals that the cultural identity of blogging as a practice of subjectivity in these two countries is neither inevitable nor neutral. In the United States, particular liberal notions and neoliberal assumptions have informed the imaginary surrounding blogs in crucial ways. The study also shows how and why actors in France have gradually abandoned traditional makers of exceptionalism that were key in the development of the country’s national identity and favored notions that characterize the United States instead.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM

Le blog en controverse : analyse du blog comme support d'une communauté en réseaux informatiques

Mémoire numérisé par la Direction des bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal

Introducción

Introducción de libro Tecnología e Innovación en Costa Rica: repensando la comunicación en la era digitalLa producción de tecnologías de comunicación se ha desarrollado significativamente en los últimos años en Costa Rica. En un texto publicado recientemente, el periódico francés Le Monde analizaba las posibilidades del país de convertirse en “el Silicon Valley de América Latina” (Saliba, 2014). El artículo destacó “el dinamismo de las altas tecnologías en Costa Rica, las cuales se han convertido en el primer exportador de este sector en América Latina” (Saliba, 2014, párr. 2). Según estimaciones de El Financiero, la creación de software en Costa Rica representa el 1,3 % de la producción local (Cordero, 2013). En 10 años, afirma el artículo, la economía costarricense habría crecido un 1,03 % como resultado directo del desarrollo de este sector. Según un mapeo de actores realizado recientemente por la Cámara de Tecnologías de Información y Comunicación (CAMTIC, 2015), el país vive un crecimiento exponencial en el sector de producción de tecnologías como el software, videojuegos, e-learning, la animación digital y la creación de aplicaciones para teléfonos celulares, entre otros.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Ciencias Sociales::Escuela de Ciencias de la Comunicación Colectiv

A la conquista del mundo en línea: Internet como objeto de estudio (1990-2007)

Este artículo explora el desarrollo de la investigación sobre Internet (principalmente anglófona) entre 1990 y 2007. Para esto, se analizan los principales ejes temáticos de los estudios sobre tal medio a lo largo de casi dos décadas, y se presentan diversos debates que han definido su evolución como objeto de estudio. Se sugiere, a final de cuentas, que los estudios sobre Internet constituyen un campo de conocimientos en proceso de construcción, con creciente legitimidad académica.This paper explores the development of internet research (mostly anglophone) between 1990 and 2007. To do so, some major theoretical topicsof internet studies are analyzed, and several key debates are described in order to show the internet’s evolution as an object of study. It is suggested that internet studies have become a field of knowledge under construction with increasing academic legitimacy.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Docencia::Ciencias Sociales::Facultad de Ciencias Sociales::Escuela de Ciencias de la Comunicación Colectiv

Networked selves: Trajectories of blogging in the United States and France

Solo cubierta del libro. Documento relacionado: Tesis "Voicing the Web: The Trajectories of Blogging in the United States and France" http://hdl.handle.net/10669/75155Networked Selves is an original analysis of one of the most defining cultural features of our time: how people turn to the Web to construct a public self. It examines the trajectory of a practice that embodies this sociocultural shift in fundamental ways: blogging. The book traces the evolution of the Web as a means to publicly perform a self through an analysis of the emergence, development, and transformation of blogging from the mid-1990s to the early years of the 2010s. It discusses processes that have shaped practices of subjectivity on the Web over two decades in two countries: the United States and France. Through this comparative analysis, the book shows that the cultural identity of blogging as a practice of subjectivity in these countries is neither inevitable nor neutral. Instead, it demonstrates that the development of the Web required the forging of various articulations between specific conceptions of self, publicness, and technology. These articulations were responses to both transformations in the daily life of actors and larger economic, political, and cultural processes―notably neoliberalization. The book also explains how the cultural imaginary around blogs came into being in the United States and how it has also functioned as a model for actors in other countries, such as France. Networked Selves discusses how and why actors in the technology field in France have gradually abandoned traditional makers of exceptionalism that were key in the development of the country’s national identity and favored notions that characterize the United States instead.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM

Comunidades en línea: Historia, Comunicación y Tecnología en la emergencia de colectivos mediáticos

Desde las comunidades orales hasta aquellas basadas en intercambios hipertextuales, el artículo discute primeramente la historia de los grupos de usuarios de medios de comunicación que se han articulado a partir de un objeto técnico bajo el nombre de comunidades. Posteriormente, se presenta un panorama general de los colectivos que emergen en el contexto concreto de las redes informáticas, con el fin de comprender más a fondo sus principales características y algunos de los grandes debates contemporáneos del tema.From oral communities to groups based on hypertextual exchanges, the article discusses first the history of user groups of communication mediums that have gathered around a technical object under the name of communities. Second, a general landscape of online groups is presented, in order to understand their main characteristics as well as some of their most important contemporary debates.UCR::Vicerrectoría de Investigación::Unidades de Investigación::Ciencias Sociales::Centro de Investigación en Comunicación (CICOM