There’s no limit to your love – scripting the polyamorous self.

This article explores how the polyamorous self gets storied on NSFW (not safe for work) blogs of tumblr., and the ways the scripting involved in this practice reconfigures the meanings attached to one’s self, body and sexuality. The article relies on case-based narrative analysis, where I work the interface of ethnographic material (two year field study), textual blog content, images and individual and group interviews with polyamorous bloggers. I contextualize it via concepts of sexual scripting (Gagnon & Simon, 1973), elements of Foucault’s (1988) technologies of the self - particularly critical self-awareness and self-care - and Koskela’s (2004) concept of ›empowering exhibitionism‹. Sexual and romantic behaviors are often cloackd in silence and executed in privacy because of feelings of guilt and anxiety, especially so in the case of practices that fall outside of the mono-normative grand narrative still cultivated in our society. Online one can challenge the scripted norms that regulate sexual behavior and our identities as sexual beings

Perceptions of participation and the Share Button

This article analyses Estonian youth's perceptions of their own political participation and their practices of participation on social media. We analysed 60 interviews with Estonian informants in a MYPLACE study and relied on a conceptual broadening that acknowledges the political potential of everyday. We relay on theories of standby citizenship and spiral of silence to understand signing petitions, commenting, liking and sharing politically minded content online. Based on this we suggest that young people in Estonia are interested in political issues and public opinion and their social media use represents a diversification of how citizens take part in civic matters. However, youths do not necessarily believe in the efficacy of social media in enacting political change and their reasons for not participating can be seen as indicative of a desire for both impression management and being affected by the spiral of silence

Locating sex: regional geographies of sexual social media

Contributing to the field of the geographies of digital sexualities, this article explores the geosocial dimensions of digital sexual cultures by analyzing three regionally operating, linguistically specific social media platforms devoted to sexual expression. Drawing on case studies of an Estonian platform used primarily for group sex, a Swedish platform for kink and BDSM, and a Finnish platform for nude self-expression, we ask how these contribute to and shape sexual geographies in digital and physical registers. First, we focus on the platforms as tools for digital wayfinding and hooking up. Second, we consider how the platforms help to reimagine and sexualize physical locations as ones of play, and how this transforms the ways of inhabiting such spaces. Third, we analyze how the platforms operate as sexual places in their own right, designed to accommodate certain forms of display, relating, and belonging. We argue, in particular, that these platforms shape how users imagine and engage with location by negotiating notions of proximity and distance, risk and safety, making space for sexual sociability. We approach geographies of sexuality both through the regional and linguistic boundaries within which these platforms operate, as well as through our participants’ sense of comfort and investment in local spaces of sexual play. As sexual content is increasingly pushed out of large, U.S.-owned social media platforms, we argue that locally operating platforms provide a critical counterpoint, allowing for a vital re-platforming of sex on a regional level.</p

Littles: Affects and Aesthetics in Sexual Age-Play

This article explores the experiences and practices of self-identifying female sexual age-players. Based on interviews and observation of the age players’ blogged content, the article suggests that, rather than being fixed in one single position, our study participants move between a range of roles varying across their different scenes. In examining accounts of sexual play, we argue that the notion of play characterizes not only their specific routines of sexual “scening” but also sexual routines, experimentations, and experiences more expansively. Further, we argue that a focus on play as exploration of corporeal possibilities allows for conceptualizing sexual preferences and practices, such as age-play, as irreducible to distinct categories of sexual identity. The notion of play makes it possible to consider sexuality in terms of transformations in affective intensities and attachments, without pigeonholing various preferences, or acts, within a taxonomy of sexual identities. In doing so, it offers an alternative to the still prevalent categorical conceptualizations of sexuality that stigmatize people’s lived experiences and diminish the explanatory power of scholarly and therapeutic narratives about human sexuality.</p

Affordances, Affect and Audiences - Making sense of networked publics, introduction to AoIR 2017 special issue on Networked Publics

The 2017 annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers took place in Tartu, Estonia, and was focused on networked publics, which, as the call for papers highlighted, “play an important role in shaping the political, social, economic, cultural but also moral, ethical and value-laden landscapes of contemporary life.” This special issue is comprised of papers presented at the conference (AoIR 2017) and its doctoral colloquium, and engages with the affordances that networked communication technologies (social media platforms, websites, internet based governmental or corporate infrastructures for voting or banking) have for the emergence or maintenance of networked publics; but also, and more specifically, the affordances that these networked publics  have for manifestations of human affect, sociality and sociability. Our collaborators undertake analyses of networked publics of solidarity and hate (Nikunen, this issue; Kuo, this issue), connection and disconnection (Dremljuga, this issue), democratic participation and authoritarianism, tolerance and intolerance (Sikk, this issue; Kuo, this issue), as well as the affordances of networked publics for reaching one’s imagined audiences (Tikerperi, this issue) and whether these imagined audiences evoke individual and institutional trust (Männiste & Masso, this issue)

Editorial. Affordances, Affect and Audiences - Making sense of networked publics, introduction to AoIR 2017 special issue on Networked Publics

The 2017 annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers took place in Tartu, Estonia, and was focused on networked publics, which, as the call for papers highlighted, “play an important role in shaping the political, social, economic, cultural but also moral, ethical and value-laden landscapes of contemporary life.” This special issue is comprised of papers presented at the conference (AoIR 2017) and its doctoral colloquium, and engages with the affordances that networked communication technologies (social media platforms, websites, internet based governmental or corporate infrastructures for voting or banking) have for the emergence or maintenance of networked publics; but also, and more specifically, the affordances that these networked publics  have for manifestations of human affect, sociality and sociability. Our collaborators undertake analyses of networked publics of solidarity and hate (Nikunen, this issue; Kuo, this issue), connection and disconnection (Dremljuga, this issue), democratic participation and authoritarianism, tolerance and intolerance (Sikk, this issue; Kuo, this issue), as well as the affordances of networked publics for reaching one’s imagined audiences (Tikerperi, this issue) and whether these imagined audiences evoke individual and institutional trust (Männiste & Masso, this issue)

Has Instagram Fundamentally Altered the 'Family Snapshot'?

This paper considers how parents use the social media platform Instagram to facilitate the capture, curation and sharing of ‘family snapshots’. Our work draws upon established cross-disciplinary literature relating to film photography and the composition of family albums in order to establish whether social media has changed the way parents visually present their families. We conducted a qualitative visual analysis of a sample of 4,000 photographs collected from Instagram using hashtags relating to children and parenting. We show that the style and composition of snapshots featuring children remains fundamentally unchanged and continues to be dominated by rather bland and idealised images of the happy family and the cute child. In addition, we find that the frequent taking and sharing of photographs via Instagram has inevitably resulted in a more mundane visual catalogue of daily life. We note a tension in the desire to use social media as a means to evidence good parenting, while trying to effectively manage the social identity of the child and finally, we note the reluctance of parents to use their own snapshots to portray family tension or disharmony, but their willingness to use externally generated content for this purpose