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- Convenors:
-
Elena Liber
(University College London)
Yathukulan Yogarajah (University College London)
Toby Austin Locke (University College London)
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Short Abstract:
How are contemporary economic, political, and psychosocial crises negotiated through TikTok and social media? What social and digital practices emerge in times of crisis? Which networks and actors become relevant through such negotiations? And what might this mean for anthropology?
Long Abstract:
The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic precipitated global lockdown measures. As physical doors to the world closed, digital ones opened. The pandemic introduced many to new digital platforms for socialising and facilitated the emergence of new languages for doing so. One such app, which experienced a pandemic fuelled surge, is the micro-vlogging app TikTok. By the end of 2020 TikTok was the most internationally downloaded app. TikTok, and other social media platforms offered new forms of digital sociality. Initially framed as a dancing app that provided light-hearted distraction from everyday life, TikTok and the smartphone's political, economic, and psychosocial significance became increasingly evident as popularity of the platform grew.
Between 2020 and the present, TikTok has been used to connect people across the globe, plan, enact and document protests, disrupt Trump rallies, speculate about cryptocurrencies, find likeminded communities, teach and learn about myriad topics, and spread disinformation.
At a time of crisis, the smartphone, TikTok and social media, became mediums by which people attempted to scale their selves up, and scale the world down. How can anthropologists make sense of these new practices that seem to characterise the contemporary world? Who are the actors and networks that mediate this world?
We invite proposals for papers that theoretically, ethnographically and/or methodologically explore the themes of 'Crisis, TikTok and Social Media.' Of particular interest are papers which draw on or present ethnographic data in their analysis.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 14 April, 2023, -Jasmine Mohtashami (SOAS)
Paper short abstract:
Platform moderators are particularly exposed to the dissemination of fake news and conspiracy theories due to the amount of content they filter through. Using auto/ethnographic research, what lessons can be learned of mental health impacts in times of crises?
Paper long abstract:
TikTok has risen as a primary source of news and individual expression for many throughout the recent pandemic. The quest for views and integrity to truth often clashes, resulting in the moderating team making a decision. Using auto/ethnographic research of former TikTok moderators, tensions between conscience and tagging guidelines as well as struggling with tight productivity targets are explored.
Furthermore, how does extended exposure to problematic videos such as covid conspiracy content affect the moderator, and therefore in turn the consumer? A notable example is that due to prolonged exposure to covid conspiracy theories, this former moderator with no former anti-covid rhetoric was skeptical to receive a booster due to the unconscious bias the repeated watching of these videos elicited.
As short-form video content is here to stay, what lessons can be gathered when the app we watch watches us in return?
Please note that this paper will not address any TikTok-specific guidelines and represents the personal experiences of the researcher only.
Marie Heřmanová (Czech Academy of Sciences)
Paper short abstract:
The paper focuses on the strategies of young content creators who use Instagram and TikTok to communicate political news to their audiences. It proposes the concept of hybrid visibility to analyse how theye navigate their identities within the algorithmic affordances of the platforms.
Paper long abstract:
Online influencers play an increasingly important role in political communication – they serve as both intermediaries and producers of political messages. Until recently, influencers were mostly characterised by their ability to recommend and sell products and, thus, perceived predominantly as marketing tools (Abidin, 2016; Duffy, 2016; van Driel, Dumitrica, 2021). Recent research documents the rise of the category of “political influencers”, who use their authority and fame online to engage in meaningful and political content (Riedl, Schwemmer, Ziewiecki, Ross, 2021; Fischer, 2022 ).
The proposed paper uses the notion of “political influencers” to examine how young Czech social media influencers use their online presence to communicate with their publics about global events, specifically the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Based on long-term ethnography among young Czech influencers who use Instagram and TikTok to communicate about “shit you should care about” in the words of one of my respondents, 22 year old Johana, it focuses on how the young people navigate a) the algorithmic affordances of the platforms that shape when and to whom their content is visible and b) their own identity as activists and content creators. It employs the notion of “hybrid visibility” to analyse their strategies of managing the above mentioned entaglements.
Elena Liber (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore narratives from the war in Ukraine as they unfold on TikTok. It will consider the ethical and methodological challenges of working in a time of emergency, and reflect on what these challenges might mean for the crafting of a responsive and urgent anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
In the early hours of 24th February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. In this moment of emergency, many took to TikTok to share in real-time what was taking place on the ground. The most downloaded app of 2020-21, and the fastest growing social media platform, TikTok provided Ukrainians with a means to communicate the lived reality of war, to live stream air raid sirens, and document life in metro stations and air raid shelters. War correspondents and journalists launched TikTok accounts to share their reports from cities under fire. And many used the platform to access urgent information about what was going on. The war in Ukraine has been described as “The First TikTok War”.
Drawing on a combination of ethnographic research carried out between 2016-18 in L’viv, Ukraine, and recent research carried out as part of the TikTok Ethnography Collective, this paper will explore narratives of the war in Ukraine as they unfold on TikTok. It will consider the ethical and methodological challenges of working in a time of emergency, and reflect on what these challenges might mean for the crafting of a responsive and urgent anthropology.
Branwen Spector (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
This paper furthers my work using Tinder, a geolocation based dating app, to overcome physical boundaries to accessing research interlocutors in my fieldsite in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank, as a tool for conducting socially distanced research in Ukraine under invasion.
Paper long abstract:
In 2016 I began working with Tinder, a geolocation based dating app, to overcome physical boundaries to accessing research interlocutors in my fieldsite in the Occupied Palestinian West Bank. Using dating apps as a research method rather than a field of study became far more pertinent during the lockdowns of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Drawing on this methodological approach, this paper again addresses the ethical and practical implications of using platforms designed for romance and intimacy in anthropological research while also highlighting the benefits of their affordances for anthropologists working in settings of war and occupation. By applying the same method to pilot research on mobility and infrastructure in Ukraine, in this paper I reflect on the practical and ethical implications of this approach, including its limitations. Reflecting on my work in Palestine, I show how dating apps allow anthropologists to socially map locations that are both difficult to access and in flux as well as facilitating contact with populations across boundaries.
In doing so, I also invoke a central paradox in anthropological conceptions of fieldwork that centre the formation of intimate relationships with our interlocutors, but a taboo around discussing the sexual subjectivities of anthropologists and their relationships with research participants. Using a platform designed for romance and intimacy as a research tool, I contribute to anthropologists rethinking conceptions of the responsibilities and subjectivities of anthropologists in the field and the colonial and patriarchal values underpinning them.
Yathukulan Yogarajah (University College London)
Paper short abstract:
What kind of speculative communities does TikTok and a new generation of social media form?
Paper long abstract:
The Tick Tock of Speculative Communities: Folk economies of online worlds
In an increasingly digitised and financialised world, people are turning to smartphones and computer screens to understand this complex and uncertain space. They ‘speculate’ and form a ‘folk’ knowledge of the economy, markets, and historical processes they are entangled in. Against a background of much (abstract) theorising on the relevance of social media in the contemporary world, this talk reflects on a two-year collective ethnography project on TikTok and Social Media to highlight the speculative practices people are involved in to get to mediate the world around them. How might we – as anthropologists and social scientists – engage with these practices in a grounded manner? Who are the actors involved in the building of online worlds? How do these online worlds come to affect the economies and politics of the ‘offline’ world? This talk reflects on these diverse range of questions.
Antonio Montañés Jiménez (University of Oxford)
Paper short abstract:
Drawing on a virtual ethnography among Pentecostal Gitanos, including the collection of WhatsApp and Facebook messages and videos produced by my Gitano interlocutors, in this paper, I interrogate how Pentecostal Gitanos made use of social media and internet technologies during the pandemic.
Paper long abstract:
Drawing on a virtual ethnography among Pentecostal Gitanos, including the collection of WhatsApp and Facebook messages and videos and other sorts of content produced by my Gitano interlocutors, in this paper, I interrogate how Pentecostal Gitanos made use of social media and internet technologies during the pandemic. Here, I explore an understudied dimension of Gitano human experience: the intersection of ethnicity and religion and the virtual world while adding to a growing scholarship concerned with the relevance of social media to understand the construction of individual personae and the communitarian dynamics of religious communities Also, this paper engages with broader anthropological and conversations regarding the role of religion and technology in the communicative and public spheres of European societies.
I will first examine the historical entanglement of protestant religion and technology, emphasising how technological advancements have boosted the propagation of protestant ideas. Then, I will explore how social media have played a significant role in defining believers´ views about the pandemic. Finally, I will provide some insights to understand how social media facilitated the creation and reproduction of a strong sense of religious togetherness. This sense of togetherness, I argue, was vital for believers to cope with the negative emotional consequences of the pandemic and its tragedies.
Eve Nentwig (UCL)
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the relationship between speed, knowledge and power for content creators of the contemporary digital age. Ordinary users have subverted traditional, institutionalised forms of expertise and I argue that this is partially achieved by reacting to digital events time-centrically.
Paper long abstract:
This paper explores how the information-rich digital age brought about cultural-temporal shifts, wherein the fastest contributors to our information repository of digital events enjoy greater visibility and resultant influence. Of particular relevance is the popular phrase “Web 2.0” (O’Reilly 2005), which denotes our changing expectations regarding the relationship between ordinary users and their relatively more potent digital presences. Using a selection of digital ethnographic examples, this paper will document the radically reshaped relations of expertise of the contemporary digital age, in which ordinary users have come to seen as and experience their roles as ‘experts’ (Eysenbach 2008). Accordingly, this paper asserts the significance of ordinary experts’ attuned sense for the unfolding rhythms of digital temporalities and their resultant ability to outperform and subvert traditionally powerful and more established institutionalised expertise. Quick-witted takes on current developments by the likes of Boris Johnson Parody Twitter accounts or TikTok accounts incorporating the audio of Will Smith’s viral encounter with Chris Rock arguably also humanise and blur conventionally more rigid distinctions between 'the official’ and unofficial. Relatedly, Hine’s (2020) notion of pop-up ethnography highlights the need to capitalise on the cultural currents of temporary and opportunistic digital developments, thereby positing what a more temporally-attuned form of participant observation might entail. In sum, an eye for temporal digital rhythms could help us to call into question traditional notions of socio-economic power, consider the psychosocial effects of having to endlessly monitor digital happenings, or even revamp anthropology’s slow and richly-detailed methodological heart.