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Digital Storytelling Project - The Salient Office (Assignment 3)

If the embed doesn't work for you, here is a direct link to the project:

https://cdn.knightlab.com/libs/timeline3/latest/embed/index.html?source=1yt0dRnkRRuCWu4gwZKdiDiZA_DfsSSta2NdmdKFsb0U&font=Medula-Lato&lang=en&initial_zoom=2&height=650

REFLECTIVE ESSAY ON THE SALIENT OFFICE PROJECT

I have been writing for Salient, the student magazine of Victoria University of Wellington, since 2015, providing reviews and commentary on video games as well as several features. In 2017, I transitioned to a paid role as the magazine’s Arts Editor, giving me an opportunity to work in the magazine’s offices located in the university’s Student Union Building. Salient, its contributors and indeed the office hold a special place in my heart, though few people ever get to see much of it apart from the magazine put out each week, so I have put together this digital storytelling project to examine the space and some of the things that not only make it special to me but also to the Victoria University community.

     Within the cultural field that is the university, as defined by Schirato et al, Salient has a number of roles (21-22). As a news publication, the magazine has an obligation to report on events within the university and hold the university’s power structures to account, including the governing bodies such as the University Council and the Students’ Association (the latter being the magazine’s principal funder). It also serves as a way to expose talented writers and artists to a large and informed audience. Because the magazine has been in existence for 80 years, in that time it has acquired a certain amount of cultural capital, with work being published within it having some prestige. This is not always taken seriously, with the long running joke being that Salient is an “alternative source of free toilet paper”. As a (now former) staff member I acknowledge that I have a role to play in the perception of Salient, wanting to have it seen in a positive light as I have, but if I didn’t try and represent it in a certain way it would likely be disparaged, possibly as a “lefty rag”.

     The office is therefore something of a symbol of all of this, complete with heirlooms and historical items. However, it is something that only staff members such as myself will ever really get to experience; while the space is available to our volunteer contributors as a place where they can hang out, this is rarely taken up. It has taken an opportunity such as this assignment and the widespread availability of devices capable of Internet access for the story of Salient as something more than a magazine to be told; the magazine is merely the product of the work done in the space and as such is irrevocably shaped by it. As Farmon puts it, “We are neither passive in how space is produced nor in how technology plays a vital role in such spatial productions,” meaning that it is people who make a space special, and that they must play an active role in this using the technology at their disposal (104).

     In creating this project I hope to enlighten those who see Salient as merely a magazine for light entertainment between lectures to perceive it as something greater, to embolden its place within the university ecosystem and to put a full stop on what has been a significant part of my life for the past three years.

WORKS CITED

Schirato, Tony, et al. “Cultural Field and the Habitus.” Understanding Bourdieu, SAGE Publ., 2010, pp. 21–44.

Farman, Jason. “Stories, Spaces, and Bodies: The Production of Embodied Space through Mobile Media Storytelling.” Communication Research and Practice, vol. 1, no. 2, Mar. 2015, pp. 101–116., doi:10.1080/22041451.2015.1047941.

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#MeToo: Is It Slacktivism?

Over the past week, the accusations of rape and sexual assault against Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, and the prevalence of such predatory activity both within the entertainment industry and in general, have dominated discourse across the various social media platforms. One of the more notable responses to the scandal has been the Twitter hashtag “#MeToo”, which has now been trending for the past day or so.

If you’ve been sexually harassed or assaulted write ‘me too’ as a reply to this tweet. pic.twitter.com/k2oeCiUf9n

— Alyssa Milano (@Alyssa_Milano) October 15, 2017

The hashtag was created in response to this tweet by actress Alyssa Milano, who has worked with many of the actresses accusing Weinstein, and encourages those who have been victims of sexual harassment or assault to come forward to “give people a sense of the magnitude of the problem.” Many would take the opportunity to explain what happened to them, or to offer support.

#MeToo And I was blamed for it. I was told not to talk about it. I was told that it wasn't that bad. I was told to get over it.

— Najwa Zebian (@najwazebian) October 16, 2017

Men, Don't say you have a mother, a sister, a daughter... Say you have a father, a brother, a son who can do better. We all can.#MeToo

— Nick Jack Pappas (@Pappiness) October 16, 2017

While some might want to dismiss this campaign as little more than “slacktivism”, an epithet used to describe “political activities that have no impact on real–life political outcomes, but only serve to increase the feel–good factor of the participants” (Morozov qtd. in Christensen), due to it having been disseminated mostly through Twitter, I would hesitate to do so. The goal of the hashtag — to raise awareness of the prevalence of sexual assault — is simple enough that so-called “real-life” action is not exactly necessary, yet broad enough to potentially inspire such action related to the issue.

If the attention being paid to #MeToo in mainstream media is any indication, it is working.

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Space and Salient

Salient is Victoria University’s student magazine, one which I have been contributing reviews and feature articles to since 2015 (I’m not a first year, believe it or not). Here’s the cover of this week’s issue, which you can read here:

Salient serves as a space for the creatively and/or journalistically inclined within the university community to display their talents and refine their skills in a semi-professional environment. The magazine is distributed for free every week during term time, while its digital presence consists of a website with every article from recent years and various social media accounts, including Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

When Farman claims that “The place where a person is (locationally, culturally, and interpersonally) will shift how they experience the internet” (104), this can be applied directly to Salient. It is a vastly different experience reading the magazine’s content online at home compared to picking up a physical copy on campus or at a cafe. The magazine is ultimately a conversation starter, something to entertain yourself between lectures; us paid staff recognize that we cannot control how people read the magazine and so simply focus on making each issue the best we possibly can.

While Salient aims to be an influential part of the university ecosystem, this role is never taken too seriously. The long-running joke that it is an “alternative source of free toilet paper” is one the magazine has maintained for many years, because pretentious is alienating, and we want Vic students to keep reading.

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A Place to Belong: An Analysis of Reddit

Reddit is one of the most popular social media sites in existence, with an estimated 250 million users making it the eighth most popular website on the Internet (alexa.com). The site combines news and media aggregation, content rating, and community building features to create some akin to a bulletin board system, catering for a wide variety of interests while generating a culture of its own. Reddit’s numerous affordances have enabled the creation of individual communities with their own norms, while at the same time generating possibilities for social surveillance of the wider user base. While some of these have led to unintended and even negative consequences, there is no denying that Reddit is a popular platform for those looking for a place to belong.

This is what the front page of Reddit typically looks like:

Reddit’s structure is designed so that the interests of an individual user define their experience with the site. Content is divided into categories, called “subreddits”, which are devoted to individual topics with varying levels of mass appeal. There are currently over one million subreddits. Once a user is registered, they can subscribe to subreddits that align with their interests and submit content such as links to external webpages, images, videos, or “self” text posts. These submissions are then voted on by other “redditors” using an “upvote/downvote” system; the most popular recent posts are shown on a subreddit’s front page. The front page of Reddit itself shows popular posts from the subreddits a user is subscribed to, while /r/all aggregates the most popular content from the entire website. Posts can be commented on by registered users; individual comments are also able to be voted upon. Some of the most popular subreddits take advantage of the site’s features, such as /r/IAmA, which is dedicated to open question-and-answer sessions with notable or interesting people using the comment system:

The site has numerous policies and guidelines which dictate what kinds of content can be posted and how users are expected to behave. “Reddiquette” is perhaps the most important of these, as it is “an informal expression of the values of many redditors, as written by redditors themselves”; users are generally expected to follow these guidelines for the benefit of others, although it is not necessarily compulsory. Reddiquette is a standard of good behaviour and post quality which would generally go unsaid on most other social media services, set by the community to keep Reddit an enjoyable platform to use. Notably, the first guideline is to “remember the human”, an acknowledgement that although Reddit’s users are generally anonymous, they are real people with real feelings, and thus posts and comments should reflect a certain level of empathy. Subreddits are policed by volunteer moderators who have a range of tools and near total discretion as to the enforcement of sitewide and subreddit-specific rules, including reddiquette. Moderators generally monitor subreddits for anything which breaches reddiquette or the subreddit’s own rules, while administrators hired by Reddit assist moderators and authorise punishments for serious breaches.

The culture that has emerged from Reddit, as well as the individual cultures of each subreddit, can be considered a kind of cultural field, defined by Schirato et al as “a series of institutions, rules, rituals, conventions, categories, designations, appointments and titles which constitute an objective hierarchy, and which produce and authorise certain discourses and activities” (21-22). Essentially, the structures in place encourage the building of a community, complete with certain normative practices acted upon by users such as memes. Because subreddits are devoted to a single topic, they can be reflective of other cultural fields, such as fandoms for sports and artistic endeavours, usually adopting the norms of using Reddit while retaining their own distinct habitus. Much of Reddit’s appeal lies in the fact that a subreddit can foster a user’s “sense of belonging, as well as a feeling of validation when a submission or a comment is upvoted” (Anderson); many subreddits are indeed welcoming towards new users who may not necessarily understand reddiquette or the expectations of that particular subreddit.

This image is of /r/SquaredCircle, a subreddit devoted to professional wrestling - an example of a niche community fostered through Reddit:

The “upvote/downvote” system of Reddit is tied to a unique feature which serves as a form of social capital, known as “karma”. Whenever a user posts a link or makes a comment, it generates a score by calculating the number of upvotes minus the number of downvotes; as an example, if a post has five upvotes but two downvotes, it has a score of two. The post’s score is then added to the contributing user’s overall karma scores; the scores for links and comments are kept separate from each other. “Self” text posts cannot generate karma, no matter how many votes such a post may receive. A user’s karma scores are displayed publicly on their profile page, which contains every post and comment that user has made. While some have characterised karma as being little more than “meaningless internet points”, others can become obsessed with maintaining their karma scores, whether through posting high amounts of content or providing less frequent content that is of a higher quality. Such high quality posts can also be recognised through a system called “Reddit Gold”, a premium membership which costs US$3.99 and gives access to a number of features, such as removing advertisements, custom avatars and an exclusive subreddit; Gold is frequently gifted to users for an exceptionally high quality post, known as “gilding”.

Karma can be considered a form of social surveillance because it is a way for Reddit users to monitor each other. While the use of anonymous usernames differentiates Reddit from other social media services which are “designed for users to continually investigate digital traces left by the people they are connected to”, such as family and close friends, posts there are nevertheless still “broadcast to be looked at, and as such, people can look closely”, as a person’s interests and opinions can be discerned from the subreddits they post on and the posts themselves (Marwick). Social capital is normally an intangible quality, but a karma score makes it tangible by putting a numerical value on a user and their actions. A high karma score will generally indicate that a user has a level of popularity among other users, and indicates that they consistently contribute in a positive manner to discussions; some subreddits even require a user to have a certain amount of karma before they are allowed to post there. Respectively, a low or even negative karma score may indicate several things: usually that a user is relatively new to the website, but also that their contributions are seen to have little value by others and are thus to be avoided.

Reddit’s core features have a number of affordances, or “possibilities that they offer for action” (Hutchby 447), that have established the website’s reputation. It should be noted that an affordance is not the feature itself — it is the interpretation of how the feature is meant to be used by a user, such as a handle on a cup providing an affordance for holding. Perhaps the most obvious example of where affordances can be seen in Reddit is in the upvote/downvote system. Reddiquette maintains that the purpose of the system is to acknowledge posts and comments which “contribute to conversation” and to disavow posts which “[do] not contribute to the subreddit it is posted in or [are] off-topic in a particular community”. However, it is all too easy to see the downvote button in particular as a “disagree” button, which someone can use to try and bury posts or comments which they do not like or agree with; the inverse can also be said for the upvote button. While such an interpretation might be frowned upon or indeed seen as an abuse of the system, the design of the voting tools (usually in the form of arrows) makes such a reading possible, since a downwards arrow is frequently interpreted outside of Reddit as a sign of disapproval. 

The subreddit system affords the opportunity to build a community around a topic, even those which some may find distasteful, offensive or even dangerous. A frequent criticism of subreddits Is that they tend to develop a herd-like mentality or hivemind, where one view on a topic is dominant even if opposing views may help to contribute to discussion. This has led to situations where subreddits based around legally questionable or otherwise controversial material have been allowed to flourish. A recent example can be seen with /r/The_Donald (WARNING: OFFENSIVE CONTENT WITHIN), a subreddit dedicated to supporting Donald Trump originally created for his 2016 presidential campaign. The subreddit’s rules were generally lax with regards to racism and other forms of bigotry, and its moderators would generally ban anyone who did not “fit in” with the views the subreddit’s members generally held. r/The_Donald would gain notoriety when it manipulated Reddit’s voting system in order to get its posts onto the website’s front page, to the frustration of many users who did not support Trump or were otherwise not engaged with politics, to the point where Reddit changed its algorithm to make the subreddit less visible. While many subreddits can be insular, /r/The_Donald was toxic to the point that many wanted the subreddit banned, yet its existence shows how open a platform Reddit can be.

There is perhaps only one appropriate word to categorise Reddit and its users: diverse. No one community defines what Reddit is about, nor should it. Anyone can and should be able to find a subreddit that caters to them, and while there are inherent issues with this, sometimes all we need is a place to feel welcome. There is simply no other website like Reddit.

WORKS CITED

Anderson, Katie Elson. “Ask Me Anything: What Is Reddit?” Library Hi Tech News, vol. 32, no. 5, June 2015, pp. 8–11., doi:10.1108/lhtn-03-2015-0018.

Hutchby, Ian. “Technologies, Texts and Affordances.” Sociology, vol. 35, no. 2, 2001, pp. 441–456. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/42856294.

Marwick, Alice E. "The Public Domain: Social Surveillance in Everyday Life."Surveillance & Society, vol. 9, no. 4, 2012, pp. 378-393, ProQuest Central; Sociological Abstracts, https://search-proquest-com.helicon.vuw.ac.nz/docview/1314689547?accountid=14782.

“Reddiquette.” Reddit, Reddit, Inc., www.reddit.com/wiki/reddiquette.

Schirato, Tony, et al. “Cultural Field and the Habitus.” Understanding Bourdieu, SAGE Publ., 2010, pp. 21–44.

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Keep Your Friends Close: Can anyone find my personal info on Facebook?

Facebook may know pretty much everything about you, but that doesn’t necessarily mean a user is not in control of what personal information is on display there — at least in principle. In practise, changing a Facebook profile’s privacy settings can be unintuitive and confusing (who knew there was a difference between friends and followers?), potentially leading to unintended results.

I like to think I run a pretty tight ship when it comes to my profile, considering I don’t post very often and only add people I’m close to. At the very least, most posts from the last two years, plus information that could be directly used to contact me such as my phone number and address, should only have been visible to my Facebook friends.

After logging out and trying to view my profile, I instead got this error message:

Perhaps I’ve done too good of a job, and my profile is only visible if a user is logged in to Facebook! I did, however, find this option within the Facebook settings menu once I logged in again:

This is quite a useful feature for those concerned with their privacy. Using it, I found that my settings were largely as expected, although I’m not sure if I really want to have my current city and education visible. There’s also lots of posts from around two years ago that I’m not sure I want visible anymore.

Overall, it’s not too bad, but there’s some improvement to be done.

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How Sonic the Hedgehog Gets Social Media Marketing Right

The Sonic the Hedgehog franchise has had a rather storied history, maligned in recent times for the video games at its core having noticeably dropped in quality. The Blue Blur has been, as a consequence, meme’d to death.

But the brand does have one heck of a Twitter profile.

When Aaron Webber, a social media manager at Sega, took the reins of the Sonic brand’s social media portfolio in mid-2015, he knew exactly what he was in for. Rather than posting the typical bland corporate copy over and over again, Webber opted to instead inject some trademark Sonic personality into the profile, beginning with this exchange with games journalist Jim Sterling:

@JimSterling The TV show is doing really well. P.S. - We have a giant Sonic Colors poster here... you interested? #neverforget

— Sonic the Hedgehog (@sonic_hedgehog)

June 9, 2015

From then onwards, @sonic_hedgehog became a haven for content that seemingly proved that marketing a brand and mocking it were not mutually exclusive. From snide comments on the series’ past transgressions…

@TrevorBurgan Nope. Never happened. Nope nope nope.

— Sonic the Hedgehog (@sonic_hedgehog)

June 11, 2015

…to referencing Sonic-related memes…

@TheWickedWild You know there's only one correct answer. pic.twitter.com/quJuPOo0DA

— Sonic the Hedgehog (@sonic_hedgehog)

June 9, 2015

…and even taking on other game franchises…

Congrats on the launch, @MightyNo9! It's better than nothing. pic.twitter.com/WsXHWtAlaX

— Sonic the Hedgehog (@sonic_hedgehog)

June 21, 2016

…this one profile has done its part to help rebuild the Sonic brand after years of negative perceptions.

Sonic is a brand built on the strength of marketing alone, the character having been created as part of Sega’s efforts to win the hearts and minds of gamers in the early 1990s. However, the “hierarchical, one-sided communication model applied to mass media” (Christodoulides 141) used back then cannot work in the Web 2.0 age. @sonic_hedgehog, by embracing memes and other user-generated content, therefore shows a very successful example of how to do social media marketing right, or at least entertainingly.

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A Brief Reflection on Social Surveillance After Only Using Twitter For Three Days

Over the course of the past few days I have engaged in an experiment - sort of.

While I actively use various social media services, such as Facebook, Twitter and Instagram, I rarely create posts on these accounts. Instead, I tend to engage in what Alice Marwick calls “social surveillance”: seeing what other people are up to. Even then, I rarely engage using the tools available, only contributing when I feel I have something worth contributing.

This is the last post I made on my personal Facebook page - well over a month ago!

I chose to only use Twitter for the purposes of the experiment, replacing my regular social media browsing while maintaining my usual posting habits. The overwhelming majority of the people I follow on Twitter are public figures who reflect my interest in media issues, certain politicians and political parties, as well as a few select friends. Even when I do post, the majority of these are about video games, giving my opinions on games or the industry surrounding them.

Despite some misgivings about how it might affect my communication with loved ones, this turned out to be a complete non-factor as only one person attempted to contact me — a Salient colleague congratulating me on a feature published in this week’s issue. I ended up only posting once throughout the three days (see below). Sticking to Twitter did make information about current events, such as the incident in Charlottesville, more easily available.

In the end, apart from just not using other services, I felt nothing was much different from my usual habits. Perhaps I’m just a unique case?

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Social Media, Affordances, and Public Figures

The medium is the message. When Ian Hutchby writes of affordances, the “functional and relational aspects which frame, while not determining, the possibilities for agentic action in relation to an object”, it ties in nicely not just with how a public figure can use the resources at their disposal, but how using one resource over another can affect statements (444).

The social media presence of newly-minted Labour leader Jacinda Ardern speaks volumes about the affordances that different platforms can offer. I will be specifically looking at pages run by her, or on her behalf, on Facebook and Twitter respectively.

Ardern’s Facebook fan page, with 72,805 likes, is well populated with content. Facebook is estimated to have over 2.9 million users in New Zealand, making it a preferred platform for major announcements of policies. Ardern appears to post or share Labour Party-related content multiple times a day, using photos, pre-recorded/live streaming video, and lengthy text posts to get her messages across.

In contrast, her Twitter profile is relatively sparse, despite having more followers — approximately 74,300. After the announcement of her taking over the Labour leadership, she did not post between 2 and 7 August 2017.

While Twitter has many of the same multimedia features as Facebook, and offers slightly more direct communication with a mass audience, the 140-character limitation does not allow for much nuance when making statements, something necessary for politicians. Ardern’s heavier use of Facebook is wise, especially during an election campaign, since its greater affordances help messages disseminate easier.