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Chapter 4 examines how digital traces produced through locative media and geo-location technologies can be read as performative rather than precise and highlights some of the ways that cultural studies and humanities scholars can add value and insight to discussions of locative and location-based social media. Several of the projects discussed in this chapter surface personal, and/or collective memories and ontologies, and incorporate digital stories and situated knowledges into the practice of moving through the city. These examples evidence re-placeing the city by urban residents or travelers at the scale of the street. The chapter begins with a brief examination of the ways in which people utilized early (and now defunct) locative media projects and continues with an analysis of more recent incarnations of location-based social media to examine shifts in digital storytelling and performances of place evident in these projects. Check-in and location-announcement services such as Foursquare and photographic social media such as Instagram are analyzed through participatory observation and textual and discourse analysis to understand how people imagine and express their sense of place through these services.

This chapter provides a detailed analysis of the social media activity surrounding the London 2012 Olympic & Paralympic Games, widely discussed as the first social-media Olympics. It examines how social media platforms were instrumental in generating news content during these Games – not just distributors of the news of others - while also discussing how the organizing committee, stakeholders, and audiences contributed to generating the record breaking volume of social-media content that came out around these Games.

This chapter exposes the deep cracks in narratives of social media leisure and amateurism. It looks at how forms of value-generating, gendered self-expression are rife in the social media world through blogs, vlogs, Instagram, and more. Though these activities are superficially framed as amusement and sociality, this chapter contends that many young women do not produce and promote content just for the fun of it. Rather, they approach social media creation with strategy, purpose, and aspirations of career success. Hence, this chapter explores some of the most salient conditions and features of aspirational labor: narratives of creative expression, relationship-building in online and offline contexts, and modes of individualized self-expression that both reveal and conceal normative feminine consumer behavior.

This chapter examines Gaiman's intensive use of social media to create a shadow self that gives fans the access they crave to his inner processes and daily life. This means making selections, much like a curator faced with a massive archive must select pieces that form a cohesive exhibit, a process that is much more nuanced than the commercial call to create a "brand," an idea that is commonly touted within the world of business. Instead, it is a conscious construction of a shadow self, an embodiment that both is and is not the real Neil Gaiman.

This chapter explores the still-evolving business and revenue models and geolocation data capture efforts of two commercial businesses now central to the contemporary settlement of locative media: Foursquare and Facebook. In Foursquare’s case, it underwent a quite dramatic series of transformations, evolving from a check-in based mobile social networking service, to a search and recommendation service, and now also serving as a firm offering location intelligence related enterprise services. In Facebook’s case, it set about further strengthening its grip on social media data markets by adding geolocation functionalities and geodata capture capabilities to its social networking operations. These two case studies provide a rich composite picture of the business ecologies of locational information. The aim in selecting these cases is to develop a clearer understanding of how both firms accrue location data and how they extract location value—that is, how this information is shared, harvested, valued, reused, and commodified.

The rat-a-tat of automatic gunfire burst through the morning air in Anantnag. For the locals of this troubled district in the south of Kashmir, it came as a shock but no longer a surprise. Separatist militants had once again clashed with army forces. Several civilians were caught in the crossfire. One died; three others were wounded. It was Saturday, July 1, 2017. Hours earlier, at midnight, India had adopted a new national sales tax, designed to stitch the country’s twentynine states together into one economic union. The new system—known as the Goods and Services Tax, or GST—was heralded as an economic reform that would spur growth, enlarge the tax base, and make it easier to do business. Kashmir was the only state still debating whether to join. It was a symbolic outlier. Some distance from the gunfire, sixteen-year-old Zeyan Shafiq was just waking up. He hadn’t heard the shooting; his home was well insulated. When he opened his eyes, he told me, the first thing he did was to reach for his iPhone. He looked at the screen and sighed. The wireless internet at home was down. So was mobile data. Shafiq got out of bed, put on his slippers, and shuffled toward the front door, where he knew he would have a stronger mobile signal. No luck. He couldn’t catch the internet. Shafiq looked up at the skies, opened his lungs, and let out a bellow of frustration. For Shafiq, it was easy to guess what had happened. There must have been what locals called an encounter—a skirmish between Kashmiri separatists and the state. These days, encounters were inevitably followed by the government shutting down the internet. The digital blackouts weren’t aimed at stopping separatists or terrorists from communicating. They were usually already dead. The shutdowns were to prevent people from sharing videos and photos of the violence on social media. In effect, 13 million Kashmiris were collateral damage, unable to do something as simple as check email. There was a time when curfews were merely physical, imposed with barbed wire, barriers, and troops on the streets.

This chapter is concerned with the analysis of contemporary, community-based practices surrounding the user-generated deity Safety Kitty on the image-sharing platform Instagram. Users engage with Safety Kitty both as an image and through the associated hashtag #safetykitty to protect themselves from the existential threat of supernatural chain images shared on the platform. This chapter first demonstrates that the use of “magic” as a rhetorical tool by programmers and advertisers to describe the various mysteriously obfuscating and wondrously enabling qualities of information technologies has fallen out of popular use in recent years. Attention is then shifted to magical thinking as manifest within lay users’ participation on the social web. Drawing from early sociological approaches to magic in conjunction with new media theory, this chapter proposes that the Instagram-based rituals associated with protection from supernatural threats is indicative of a collective understanding of the unknowability of the processes behind our personal devices.

This chapter traces the history and significance of Nike shoes within the auteurist mediascape that Spike Lee has cultivated for over three decades. Lee has steadily created his own dynamic, paracinematic universe that both parallels the logic of Hollywood’s dominant mode of production and resists some of its core tenets by retaining at its centre the distinct idea of the auteur—precisely what transmedial storytelling and postmodern textuality are often viewed to have obliterated. The chapter focuses on the beginning of Lee’s professional career in the 1980s and its current moment, noting the strong affinities between these moments both in American culture and in Lee’s work, which are intimately bound up with one another. Examining Lee’s career in this way provides insight into Lee’s engagement with the problem of police brutality and the enduring injustices faced by the black community in the US.

In this chapter Mapes elaborates on the rhetorical strategies of historicity, simplicity, lowbrow appreciation, pioneer spirit, and locality/sustainability. She turns to a data set of 90 corresponding Instagram (@nytfood) posts, documenting the multimodal tactics by which food media writers and users perform a kind of acceptable or “palatable” eliteness. One such tactic is the framing of “rough” and “refined,” and the juxtaposition of various forms of supposedly low and highbrow cultural artifacts or practices. These tactics, in turn, help establish two interdependent strategies or rhetorics for manufacturing status in capitalist society: fetishism and condescension. She argues that these two processes support the production and maintenance of elite authenticity and class privilege.

This chapter, which focuses on 83 “throwback Thursday” (#tbt) posts from the @nytfood account, departs slightly from the discourse of elite authenticity. Instead, Mapes identifies three orders of elitist stancetaking which collectively paint the decades-old food trends pictured in the #tbt posts as derisible and inferior—in direct contrast with “progress”-oriented notions of sustainability or simplicity in contemporary food discourse. While much of this work is institutionally produced, @nytfood Instagram followers are also complicit in elitist stance acts. In their various comments, participants demonstrate how putatively inclusive, democratic digital platforms can be spaces of/for social hierarchy, and how the elitist performances of #tbt produce privileged standards of good taste and fashionable eating.

This chapter analyzes the varied ways that Renegades build digital communities using Dubsmash and Instagram. It argues that online communities hold the potential to democratize access and reject coastal biases typically seen in popular US culture. The traditional entertainment centers of Los Angeles and New York City, while still important, are relegated to second-tier status behind cities such as Dallas, Houston, and Atlanta, in addition to less populated areas across the American South. By taking up digital space on an inclusive platform, Renegades re-center traditional scripts of community building, effectively demonstrating the necessity for culturally responsive communities. These Dubsmashers search for what is familiar and lay the groundwork for equity and inclusion from there, promoting a shared sense of values that enables a plurality of voices to rise to the top. The chapter uses the official Dubsmash Instagram account as a case study, unpacking the nuanced ways that Dubsmash promotes the work of its most well-known influencers alongside a growing set of Renegades who show brand loyalty by regularly engaging with the app and who promote this subset of hip hop culture through their micro-performances on Dubsmash. Specifically, this chapter explores the different ways that Dubsmash has used dance challenge and games to bring people together and further a sense of connection during the COVID-19 pandemic of 2020.

This chapter explores how Dubsmash and other music-based apps can become fundamental digital spaces for hip hop artists not only to shape a distinct identity but also to establish their careers, even as the apps also threaten to render these artists invisible in moments of virality that divorce content from creator. By closely reading the digital presence of Renegades TisaKorean, Brooklyn Queen, and Kayla Nicole Jones, this chapter explore how musicians position themselves as both music and dance content creators on Dubsmash to gain a following. The case of TisaKorean—the rapper who introduced the world to the now-iconic dance move the Mop—speaks to the power of going viral in the digital age. Likewise, hip hop artist Brooklyn Queen and comedian and rapper Kayla Nicole Jones have been able to leverage their popularity on Dubsmash, TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube to cement their music careers.

Chapter 3 is devoted to social media. The survey reveals the role of age over socioeconomic status and gender as the prime determinant of platform access and use. The interviews show that people attribute different meanings to different platforms and act accordingly. Participants view WhatsApp as akin to a coffee place, a communication space affording a distinct public intimacy; Facebook as a mall characterized by its massive and generalist environment—a convenient yet unappealing venue; Twitter as a newsstand, an information-centered context marked by an informal and humorous tone; Instagram as a promenade, or a venue for an idealized and aestheticized visual presentation of the self; and Snapchat as a carnival, an equally visual but more ludic alternative. The analysis shows a high level of attachment to platforms. The chapter concludes by continuing the discussion of a reconstitution of sociality in the experience of information abundance.