3(2) 2017: Mobile Digital Practices

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Audiences, Aesthetics and Affordances: Analysing Practices of Visual Communication on Social Media
Schreiber, Maria (2017) , S. 143-163
This research investigates how the practices of sharing pictures with specific audiences on social media may be related to aesthetics and affordances. Based on fieldwork (interviews, picture analysis and digital ethnography) with a group of female teenagers in Vienna, Austria, how they visually curate their accounts is mapped and reconstructed. Regarding content and aesthetics, different kinds of pictures are shared using different apps. Snapchat, for example, (for this specific group at the time of the investigation) is the preferred medium for live communication with very close friends using fast, pixelated, “ugly” pictures, while Instagram serves to share polished, conventional, “beautiful” pictures with broader audiences. Based on this case study, three conceptual arguments can be made. First, visual communication is practised in relation to specific social settings or audiences. Social media is part of these practices, and users navigate differences between platforms to manage identities and relationships. Second, the analysis of practices embedded in specific software, therefore, has to be contextualised and related to the structures of these environments. Software co-constructs processes of editing, distribution, sharing and affirmation, and its affordances have to be related to the ways in which users exploit them. Third, as visual communication becomes an intrinsic part of online communication, the exploration of how distinctions between audiences and affordances play out stylistically appears to be of particular interest, which entails calibrated aesthetics; however, this visual layer is seldom investigated closely.
Mobile Mediated Visualities: An Empirical Study of Visual Practices on Instagram
Serafinelli, Elisa; Villi, Mikko (2017) , S. 165-182
The escalation of photo sharing through social networking sites is one of the most substantial changes in mobile communication practice in recent years. The launch of smart mobile technologies represents a decisive moment in the production and observation of visualities with an elevated characteristic of digital shareability and reproducibility. Considering recent technological advancements and new social media services, this paper aims to study how social platforms and smart mobile devices are affecting individuals’ visual, social and digital practices. In particular, this paper examines the social exchange of photographs online in order to advance an in-depth reading of contemporary mobile media. The mobility afforded by smart mobile devices represents a fundamental condition that shapes the human-technology relationship. The paper studies this condition by concentrating on the dynamic mobility of individuals, devices and visual information. Methodologically, the paper employs a case study approach to analyse how Instagram affects individuals’ perception of their mediated lives. Qualitative interviews formed the fieldwork and a sample of 44 Instagram users took part in the study. Visual content analysis of participants’ photo sharing further contributed to the investigation. Findings from the study show that the use of smart mobile devices constitutes the development of new forms of mobile mediated visualities. The mobility and mediation afforded by smart mobile devices seem to establish new practices for producing and sharing images that push individuals to think visually of events, people and surroundings. These practices lead to the visual dataification of social practices and intensify the quantity and variety of visual data shared online. Within this context, the visual hyper-representation of social practices is exemplified by the current trend of giving to everything a visual justification (e. g. foodporn). In its conclusions, the paper offers a conceptual apparatus that can help to understand contemporary social, digital and visual interactions.
‘Re-appropriating’ Facebook?: Web API mashups as Collective Cultural Practice
Werning, Stefan (2017) , S. 183-204
In contemporary debates about socio-technical implications of software, the platform metaphor, the corresponding notions of architectures and ecosystems as well as the formatting of data to afford ‘platformization’ play a central role. This approach has certainly proven fruitful to assess the role of companies like Facebook in contemporary society. However, it characteristically overlooks the messiness of actual usage practices and those studies that do acknowledge the internal power struggles that subcutaneously shape platforms often take a top-down perspective, disregarding bottom-up processes of (re-)appropriation. To address this gap, the article outlines a method to study how users and semi-professional developers collectively frame the cultural imaginary of a platform by conducting a thoroughly comparative content analysis of mashups created using the Facebook Web API. The affordances of many individual mashups might be considered marginal; yet, the tool-assistant comparison allows for inferring common patterns of interpretation that characterize mashup creation as a mobile digital practice, which plays a key role in social media platform development.
Screen Tourism
Schulze, Marion (2017) , S. 123-141
In the article, I discuss new forms of mobility allowed by digital practices, i. e. digital mobilities consisting in visiting geographical places from and through a screen. This discussion is based on my online ethnographic research on international fans of South Korean television series, K-Dramas. The international fandom of K-Dramas, and in a larger sense, South Korean pop cultural products – exemplified by the success of South Korean rapper Psy’s “Gangnam Style” in 2012 –, is a continually growing global phenomenon that has been observed from the end of the 2000s on; a fandom that is mainly constituted through the Internet. However, instead of discussing already thoroughly researched “classic” participatory digital activities of television series fans, as blogging or writing fan fiction, I will focus on still overseen forms of mobility practices engendered by the watching of K-Dramas. My research shows that international fans of K-Dramas are highly mobile – but as much digitally as actually. They do not only travel physically to Korea to visit film locations. They also engage in digital mobilities to Korea through the mediation of desktop web mapping services like Google Maps and their South Korean equivalents, Daum and Naver. This screen screen tourism – as I call it –, then, differs in many ways from screen tourism how it is discussed in previous research on media. In describing and discussing these forms of digital mobility, special attention will be given to two dimensions: (1) the techniques fans use to find film locations, and (2) fans’ “ethno-mapping,” i. e. the methods they have created to map out film locations online.

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