Review of The Everest Effect: Nature, Culture, Ideology by Elizabeth Mazzolini

Book review of The Everest Effect: Nature, Culture, Ideology. Elizabeth Mazzolini. Tuscaloosa: The University of Alabama Press, 2015. 183 pages. ISBN 9780817318932. Reviewed by Jolynna Sinanan

Visual generational genres

Chapter 7 considers the role of generational literacies and etiquettes around visual genres. For example in our study, younger participants tended to take and share more pictures, while older participants tended to take less but comment more on their children’s images. Here, generational understandings of co-present gift giving rituals can be found

Friendly social surveillance

Chapter 3 seeks to frame Digital Kinship in terms of debates around the effects of media especially in terms of emotion, intimacy and surveillance. Bringing discussions around emotion and media by scholars, along with debates around social surveillance, mobility and transnationalism, this chapter considers the ways that different forms of mobility (chosen and enforced) are recalibrating familial ties

Personal visual collecting and self-cataloguing

Chapter 6 analyzes the growing role of the visual in social media practices in terms of tensions between sharing, impression management and self-cataloging

“Choose yourself?” : communicating normative pressures and individual distinction on Facebook and Instagram

Social media is often assumed to espouse ego-centred networking. Yet by comparing posts to Facebook and Instagram, it becomes apparent that the experience and aspirations of the individual are often embedded in structures of family and other institutions that have been historically determined. This article locates images posted by women to two social media platforms, Facebook and Instagram, within the Caribbean island of Trinidad’s wider history of the significance of visibility and visuality. What individuals choose to make visible and its consequences form a visual language in which Trinidadians are entirely fluent. By extension, images are used to communicate forms of differentiated identity that are made visible through social media

From social media to media socialities in mobile work : aspiration in the cases of Australian mining and Everest tourism industries

This chapter contributes to the emerging framework of mobile socialities by examining digital media as communicative affordances of portability, availability, locatability and multimediality (Schrock, 2015) within socialities created by new forms of labour and leisure. Imbricated in relationships within home, work and leisure, mobile media have been theorised in terms of the different forms of privacy and intimacy they enable. As ‘scalable sociality’, social media varies degrees of communication between sizes of social groups and levels of privacy (Miller et al., 2016). In this chapter, I critically revisit theorisations of mobile and social media to argue that in addition to facilitating new forms of socialities, digital media have also created the potential for shifting aspirations within these new socialities, based on the intimacies they enable. I draw on case studies of from two industries that are sustained by mobile livelihoods, where workers commute regionally for weeks at a time: Australian coal mining and Mount Everest tourism. Digital media’s role these forms of work facilitate intimate socialities of temporary and enduring relationships, and emotional geographies created by sustained periods of time at home and work

Visualising intimacies : the circulation of digital images in the Trinidadian context

This article examines images circulated through mobile media to emphasise the emotion work invested into familial relationships that are defined by place. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Trinidad, the article contributes a cross-cultural perspective to literature in digital visual communication and digital media in family relationships that has typically focused on peer-to-peer relationships between youth or that has focused on nuclear households in predominantly Western contexts. The consequences of uses of digital media platforms are strongly intertwined with the category of relationship (mother and daughter, or couples for example), their cultural inflections, relationship hierarchies and the life-stages of individuals. Digital visual communication functions to navigate, maintain and acknowledge relationships that varies across different platforms. The more public uses of images over Facebook to the more private circulation of images over WhatsApp provide examples that illustrate positive aspects of intimacy through constant contact as well as ambivalent feelings of obligation to reciprocate communication compelled by the availability afforded by mobile media. This article advances the understanding of the relationship between emotions, intimacy and mobile media by revealing how norms, ideals and expectations of familyhood and digital practices that are often essentialised are context-driven and specific

Social Media in Trinidad: Values and Visibility

Drawing on 15 months of ethnographic research in one of the most under-developed regions in the Caribbean island of Trinidad, this book describes the uses and consequences of social media for its residents. Jolynna Sinanan argues that this semi-urban town is a place in-between: somewhere city dwellers look down on and villagers look up to. The complex identity of the town is expressed through uses of social media, with significant results for understanding social media more generally. Not elevating oneself above others is one of the core values of the town, and social media becomes a tool for social visibility; that is, the process of how social norms come to be and how they are negotiated. Carnival logic and high-impact visuality is pervasive in uses of social media, even if Carnival is not embraced by all Trinidadians in the town and results in presenting oneself and association with different groups in varying ways. The study also has surprising results in how residents are explicitly non-activist and align themselves with everyday values of maintaining good relationships in a small town, rather than espousing more worldly or cosmopolitan values

Book review : Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Cultures and the Force of Negation

Book review of Geert Lovink, Social Media Abyss: Critical Internet Cultures and the Force of Negation. Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2016; viii + 220 pp. ISBN: 9781509507764, A$42.4

Book review : Research Methods and Global Online Communities

Alexia Maddox’s Research Methods and Global Online Communities arrives at a critical moment in the development of scholarship in the areas of digital sociology and digital ethnography. In this volume, Maddox revisits and gives in-depth critical discussion on approaches in sociology for mapping communities, while drawing on her own in-depth ethnographic research conducted among herpers-reptile collectors who are a black-market connected network through the exchange of reptiles and money and through websites, online forums and digital technologies. The volume is concerned with identifying the characteristics of community in the digital age and then exploring how to research such communities. In the chapters that follow, Maddox is meticulous in setting out that she is not aiming to define community in the information era, but to understand how communities are bounded, mediated, composed and retain a sense of cohesion