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New research alert! Research about research, actually!

A couple of years ago we recruited here (and elsewhere) for interview participants for a research study about fat people's experiences online. As part of that study we also asked for thoughts about how to ethically conduct such research, both in online communities and in human-computer interaction research more generally. This short paper was presented as a poster at the ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing. Led by PhD student Blakeley Payne, this also won the conference's Best Poster Recognition! <3

"How to Ethically Engage Fat People in Research"

(1) Choose respectful language. Use participants' own self description in conversation and reporting. Consider the connotations of euphemisms and medicalizing language. We recommend "fat" as a default term to use until participants or the context indicates otherwise.

(2) Consider positionality and practice reflexivity. Fat people are not a monolith but are experts in their own lived experiences. Engage with the history of fat oppression, especially as facilitated by research and medical institutions. Consider your positionality with respect to this history.

(3) Rethink assumptions around weight loss. Don't assume fat people are unhealthy and/or want to lose weight. Interrogate "weight loss" as an embedded design value and its potential for harm. Use notions of health that are weight-neutral such as Health at Every Size.

(4) Engage fat people in research. Fat people want to be engaged in technology design and research! Center fat people's voices, needs, and desires when choosing research questions and methods.

Citation and (open access!) link to full paper: Blakeley H. Payne, Jordan Taylor, Katta Spiel, and Casey Fiesler. 2023. How to Ethically Engage Fat People in HCI Research. In Companion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '23 Companion). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 117–121. https://doi.org/10.1145/3584931.3606987

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Tumblr is not dead, long live Tumblr!

Last month a French journalist asked me whether Tumblr was experiencing a revival in the wake of migration from Twitter, especially in the context of fandom. It turned out to be an interesting article! Reproducing below as translated into English by Google (so my apologies for errors in the translation - link to the original above).

Tumblr is not dead, long live Tumblr by Hélène Paquet

In December 2018, Tumblr announced a ban on all adult content . Disappointed with the new rules as well as a shoddy moderation algorithm, many users started to prefer other platforms. Now, with Twitter having a hard time under new management by Elon Musk and TikTok at risk of being banned in the United States, all eyes are once again on Tumblr. Could the platform be experiencing a revival? And besides, had she been so dead in recent years?

No, if we are to believe the virality of the Goncharov phenomenon : last November, the social network, then the rest of the web with it, fell in love with "Goncharov", a supposedly obscure but brilliant film by Martin Scorsese on the Neapolitan mafia. It was actually a meme, a vast joke shared by Internet users who started talking about the film as if it were real, until Scorsese himself got into the joke. Not really the work of a deserted social network.

Who's left on Tumblr?

“There was a drain in 2018 when they banned adult content, but I think there has always been a fairly active user base,” said Casey Fiesler, associate professor at the University of Colorado, specialist. online communities and technology ethics. According to various sources compiled by FinancesOnline, Tumblr could have lost between 27 and 33% of its users in 2018. However, the platform remains active, and the company announces 9.1 million new posts every day. "It may have become less mainstream, but the people who are still there are very active," continues the researcher.

However, with changes. “There were a lot of sex workers on Tumblr, and sex-positive communities geared towards education,” notes Casey Fiesler. They had to leave the platform with the banning of explicit content . The rules have since been relaxed somewhat, but generally remain in place to allow Tumblr to be available on the App Store.

Emma*, who has been very active on the platform since 2011, has also noticed changes in the profile of users : “Often, when people talk about “Tumblr culture”, they are talking about either fandom culture, like Supernatural, Sherlock, Doctor Who, either from the “hipster” culture who were fans of Lana Del Rey or Taylor Swift. Honestly, I haven't seen hipster culture since 2015." Interestingly, the fashion-heralded return of the “Tumblr girl” isn't happening on Tumblr itself. The fandoms, on the other hand, are still active. Some have migrated to Twitter, but as Mania*, also a longtime user, notes,“People are always looking to meet, to share content, to imagine scenarios around the characters we love”.

The smaller user base may even become an advantage for fandoms. “We don't necessarily want the creators to see us,” explains Emma, ​​who participates in the fandoms of several mobile video games . Several very popular series on Tumblr, such as Supernatural and Sherlock , had featured very cartoonish "fangirl" figures, which were poorly experienced by fans.

For Casey Fiesler, Tumblr could become a haven for Twitter fandoms, and some have even started or resumed using it: “Tumblr seems like a more natural place to go than Facebook, for example. There's also TikTok and Instagram, but those kinds of interactions lend themselves more to text than videos or images." Emma, ​​​​for her part, meets many new users from Twitter: “Those who have understood the culture of the site integrate easily. Others may have a more unpleasant experience.”

The appeal of an “old-fashioned blog”

“Tumblr's structure is one of the last that allows for an old-fashioned blog, a place where you can go about your business without constantly being the target of advertisements,” Mania notes . “I who can't put my thoughts in a single tweet, I find Tumblr more practical, adds Emma. You can also easily organize your posts and find them.”

“A lot of social networks today give the impression of being oriented towards the creation and consumption of content rather than the construction of communities, depicts Casey Fiesler. Tumblr is one of those places that allows people to interact and share things without feeling like everyone is motivated by having more followers.” At a time when networks rely more and more on the highlighting of personalized content by algorithm , Tumblr offers the option of seeing only the publications of the blogs that we follow, organized chronologically.

On Tumblr, the most common action is the reblog, namely the fact of sharing someone else's post, enriching it with their comments or not. But unlike Twitter, some posts can circulate even years later. “On Tumblr, we often say that Twitter is where the art goes to die. You have to be lucky for the first five minutes when you post your fanart. Whereas on Tumblr, we redo stuff that has been there for almost ten years,” remarks Emma.

It is from this culture of reblogging and sharing that phenomena like Goncharov can be born. “Somebody started it, and it goes from there, with people reblogging adding something, until a hashtag pops up and even more people share. Tumblr allows this creation of a kind of shared mythology”, analyzes Casey Fiesler.

A culture of jokes

“Tumblr's humor hasn't changed – you won't find this kind of comic mayhem anywhere else,” notes Mania. A culture of jokes that extends even to the site's rare monetization tools, as the "blaze" experience shows. "You pay for your post to be promoted to a certain number of people," says Emma. A lot of people use it as a joke, like “I paid to show you a picture of my cat”, or “Here's a stupid joke”.

Even the team that manages the site regularly gets in on the joke : following the highly criticized implementation of Elon Musk's Twitter Blue program, Tumblr introduced its own checkmark system : presented as perfectly useless, it allows users to pay to accumulate up to twenty blue marks next to their nickname, for no other reason than to support the site and make fun of Twitter. "You can never be too big on the internet ," headlined the post announcing the update . It's a bargain, at 7 dollars 99 – cheaper than elsewhere – [Twitter Blue costs 8 dollars, editor's note],especially since you get not one but TWO checkmarks for your blog. […] For what? Why not? Nothing matters.”

“No social network is particularly durable, explains Casey Fiesler. But I think Tumblr has as much resilience as the rest of what's out there, whether it's Twitter, Facebook or whatever."​​​

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Thank you!

Thanks so much to everyone who participated in and/or shared our research study about Twitter.  We got a lot more participants very quickly (both from this and other platforms) and so unfortunately we’ve had to close the survey to further participation due to the constraints of our university ethics approval.

BUT!  Watch this space because the Twitter Eulogy Project will be coming back in another form. :)

And in the meantime, if you would like to share your feelings about Twitter in a non-academic-research way, the folks at Better Platform are also running a similar survey of their own. Check it out! 

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EDIT: omg you all CAME THROUGH!  We got a bunch more participants from Tumblr, and now we’re nearing the cap on the number of total participants we can have based on our IRB approval. 

PLEASE WATCH THIS SPACE though because after we close the survey I think that we can still take eulogies for the planned public website. More later!

Calling (current or former) Twitter users!

Would you miss Twitter if it were gone? What would you say at Twitter’s funeral?

We are researchers at University of Colorado Boulder conducting a survey about how people think about the role of Twitter in their lives, given recent changes to the platform. If you are at least 18 years old and a current or former user of Twitter, we’d love to hear from you! (And feel free to share!)  

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Calling (current or former) Twitter users!

Would you miss Twitter if it were gone? What would you say at Twitter’s funeral?

We are researchers at University of Colorado Boulder conducting a survey about how people think about the role of Twitter in their lives, given recent changes to the platform. If you are at least 18 years old and a current or former user of Twitter, we’d love to hear from you! (And feel free to share!)  

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I wrote this.

Love or hate TikTok for whatever reasons, I think that for any social media platform it’s really important that we contextualize the risks with the benefits. So this is just a little reminder that TikTok (like Tumblr, or Instagram, or any place where people still gather) DOES have benefits and that there would also be harms if it were suddenly gone. 

Social media is bad for us. Social media is also good for us—both of these things can be true at the same time. And I hope that everything that’s happening can lead us toward meaningful regulation that will get us to more of the good and less of bad, far beyond just TikTok - because I’d like to see platforms be better, not gone.

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Nice popular press article about fandom migrations (with a focus on LiveJournal and Tumblr) from someone who was clearly there! In case it hasn’t been obvious already, I was also there, though I confess, I’ve never been brave enough to mention Pornish Pixies by name in an academic article LOL.

For more on this from me: 

“Moving Across Lands: Online Platform Migration in Fandom Communities” (the published academic article version)

“The Life and Death of Fandom Platforms” (YouTube video essay)

“Mass migration from Twitter is likely to be an uphill battle – just ask ex-Tumblr users“ (the recent “how does this apply to Twitter” piece)

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“Her name is Irene Adler,” said Mycroft. “There are many names for what she does, but she prefers the term sacrifice.” In honor of Sherlock Holmes’ official entire entrance into the public domain, I wanted to share a fanfiction that I wrote almost a decade ago, for Yuletide. It is based on a short story that also exists because of public domain works (Sherlock Holmes and the Lovecraft mythos): “A Study in Emerald” by @neil-gaiman​ which is a favorite of mine. :) 

This was fun to write because it brought together so many different elements of other people’s stories. But borrows the most heavily from “A Scandal in Bohemia” and “A Scandal in Belgravia” in addition to the short story.

(Also this is the AO3 account that I used when wanting to share something using my real identity, like here. :) )

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Happy “Sherlock Holmes is finally in the public domain” day!

Because the character of Sherlock Holmes did not originate in a single work, but rather a series of short stories that were published over time (between 1887 and 1927), though the character has been in the public domain due to expired copyright for some time, only as he appeared in the early stories. 

So though e.g. BBC paid licensing fees to the Conan Doyle estate to be on the safe side, there have also been lawsuits splitting hairs about whether a particular portrayal of the character contained elements that were still under copyright. A 2014 U.S. Court of Appeals case established that yes, Sherlock Holmes the character was in the public domain, copyright protection would still apply to elements that only appeared in later stories--for example, Holmes’ love of dogs and Watson’s marriages.

So what about this guy?

Conan Doyle’s estate actually sued Netflix over the film Enola Holmes because they claimed that Sherlock’s character was too “warm” and had “more respect for women” than he did in the earlier, public domain stories. The lawsuit went away - rightfully, because I cannot imagine any world in which Netflix lost that case - but as of today, we no longer have to worry about such silly lawsuits. Because as of today every one of Conan Doyle’s portrayals of Sherlock Holmes is officially in the public domain!

Of course, keep in mind that this applies to Conan Doyle’s work and not other portrayals of Sherlock Holmes that might have their own copyrighted elements. So if you’re writing Johnlock fanfic that is very clearly based on the BBC version, maybe keep it noncommercial. :)

Also here’s a video if you want to hear me talk about this for 3 minutes instead!

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I have a question for you! What do you think today’s biggest fandoms are, and which fandoms are biggest on which platforms?

The image above was made for a 2018 Slate article based on survey data from our migration study (conducted in early 2018). In the survey we asked respondents what their primary fandom was for each platform they reported using. 

I was just thinking about how this would look different if we did the survey today! What new platforms and new fandoms would be on here... what do you think? 

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This is my TENTH year of sharing my favorite novels I’ve read each year on social media. (I was doing it before it was cool I guess. :-p ) Anyway, here’s my list for 2022! And at the link you can find every other year’s recs. (Also yes I know that the John Green book is cheating because it’s not fiction but it was a really important book for me so wanted to include it. <3 )

FIREKEEPER’S DAUGHTER by Angeline Boulley. A gripping mystery/thriller starring a college student and set in a Native American community. I hear this is being made into a Netflix series, and I can’t wait!

AKATA WITCH by Nnedi Okorafor. This falls into the category of “slightly embarrassed I hadn’t read it sooner” after hearing such good things about this book for years, but I’m glad I finally did! YA fantasy featuring the magical community in Nigeria.

TOMORROW AND TOMORROW AND TOMORROW by Gabrielle Zevin. Favorite novel I read this year, hands down. It’s hard to describe, but in addition to being a nostalgia blanket for gamers my age, it’s also a story about friendship and life and the tech industry.

BOOK OF NIGHT by Holly Black. I got to read an ARC of this a bit early, and really wasn’t disappointed by her first adult book. The system of magic was *fascinating* and I really liked the mystery plot.

BLOOD LIKE MAGIC by Liselle Sambury. Fantasy AND science fiction! It’s about witches in 2040s Toronto, and so manages to have a cool magic system while also featuring an evil tech CEO.

THE DEAD ROMANTICS by Ashley Poston. I actually don’t read much romance, so two books making it on this list is pretty unusual for me! This was Ashley’s adult debut, and it was *charming* and has this sort of flavor to it that I often get from writers that I know “grew up” in fanfiction communities. Also such a cool premise: a ghost writer who can see ghosts!

ONE LAST STOP by Casey McQuiston. I actually think it’s a bit of a spoiler to give away the main premise, so I’ll just say that it’s about two women who meet and fall in love on the subway. Except now you know there’s a twist, and I’ll note that (similar Dead Romantics) I almost never read romance that doesn’t have some kind of speculative fiction element.

THE ANTHROPOCENE REVIEWED by John Green. I know this is cheating, because this is a list of fiction reads. But I needed to put this book on my list because it was so deeply important for me this year. I read it during a really difficult time for me, and it sort of kept me going in a way that’s kind of hard to describe. And I think I got out of it something quite similar to what I get out of the best fiction that makes me reflect on my own life. Anyway. Read it.

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OK I had to respond to this comment (thank you! haha) with a story. 

About a year and a half ago, I was on a Zoom web panel with folks from the Electronic Frontier Foundation about online copyright issues. It was live streamed, so there were a LOT of people there (not to see me lol) and there was a live chat feature where those of us on the panel could see the comments. The panel consisted of myself and two other women, one of whom had very cute chunky black glasses.

At some point during the panel a comment appeared that said (this is from memory, so not exact):  “I really agree with a lot of points being made on this panel. However, I am very concerned that two out of the three panelists are wearing man hater glasses, because everyone knows that feminism derails all legitimate policy discussions.”

I WISH I WAS MAKING THIS UP. (Also my glasses are *highly* polarizing. Though I think my favorite comeback on TikTok was when someone called me “Ms. Blue Glasses” and I said “Actually it’s Dr. Blue Glasses.”)

Anyway if you too would like man hater glasses they’re from Zenni.

I recently made a couple of videos about an interesting group project in my Online Fandom class a few years ago, so I thought I would share here, too!  

TL;DR A group of students who knew nothing about fanfiction before this class really wanted to study sports fandom, so they did a study about sports RPF. Their research question was: What factors contribute to which athletes are most commonly written about?  In case you don’t want to watch the video, answer below the cut…

Keep reading

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So this is indeed an excellent end to the year, but weirdly enough, it’s also an excellent lesson in digital privacy. I’m reminded of the “consensual doxxing” account on TikTok where she shows how easy it can be to find information about your real identity based on small online clues. If you really don’t want people to know where you are, you’ve got to consider even things like pizza boxes.

So let me get this straight

1. Elon Musk buys Twitter

2. Elon Musk unbans Andrew Tate

3. Andrew Tate picks a fight with Greta Thunberg

4. Greta Thunberg ratios the shit out him

5. He gets mad and posts a video response

6. There's a Romanian pizza box in the video which twigs Romanian police of his location

7. He is raided and arrested for human trafficking

That is some fabulous fuck-around-find-out shit and a great end to the year.

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TL;DR Fans are very good at collective action. Like, remember how Archive of Our Own started with a LiveJournal post saying: hey can’t we do this ourselves? I’m always just amazed by what fans can accomplish. :)

Here is a link to the video I’m referencing, about a recent incident where fans banded together to help folks whose fanfic was being stolen. 

Also here are links to my Slate story and paper about AO3 referenced here.

I hope y’all don’t mind the occasional TikTok share! Sometimes there are nice prompts for talking about fandom stuff over there.

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Someone does not know how murder mysteries work.

P.S. I really, really liked this movie. And if you’ve seen it, I’m sure you know on whose behalf he is offended (re: “politics”) and well, based on some of my recent Tumblr posts you’re probably not surprised to hear that I especially liked that part. :)

[Screenshot of tweets from Ben Shapiro: “I regret to inform you that ‘Glass Onion’ is actively bad. I will discuss first the actual writing of the movie followed by the politics of it. Both suck. SPOILERS follow. First, the writing. The first hal of the movie is a complete misdirect and waste of time.]

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How it’s going:

Yesterday really was a good day to leave Twitter.

I’ve heard a number of theories about this, that he was already planning to step down anyway, that he’s being forced to step down because of a lawsuit, that a successor is already picked out and waiting. I think all these things are entirely possible, but I also think it’s entirely possible that he actually thought he would win this poll. 

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