Paper short abstract:

Based on fieldwork among young adults in Norway, this paper examines how social media may provoke movements that challenge boundaries between public/private spheres and contributes change in sociality. I contrast the material with Gullestad’s pre-social media work on the themes from the 1980s.

Paper long abstract:

Following Gullestad’s work from Norway in the late 1970s and 1980s, neighborhoods symbolize public affairs and flowing relations, while homes with their curtains and doorsteps symbolize the private. Such symbolic thresholds still play their roles as markers between public and private spheres today. However, this paper explores to what extent current uses of social media are challenging these thresholds, as well as the kitchen table society described by Gullestad.

During two years of fieldwork among young adults in Norway, I observed how conversations and presence around their “kitchen tables” are altered by endless information beeping in on their phones. In the paper’s ethnographic case, we are partying with four young women and learn about how their conversations are driven by Snapchat’s Snapmap function – where friends can share their location - and how they themselves become the conversation objects of others. Snapchat is a mobile messaging application that also offers an interactive map (Snapmap). At the night of the party, the young women are pinned on Snapmap, and suddenly receive two knocks on their door. The first knock triggered the next, and as the last knocker enters the scene he bursts out “What are THEY doing here?” This vignette illuminates how Snapmap challenges the privacy of the home, and how social media in general changes the conversations around the table. Snapmap has its own curtains and thresholds, similar to Gullestad’s kitchen table, though different than the physical house with its markers of privacy standing publicly as part of the neighborhood.

Paper short abstract:

This paper explores contemporary forms of digital activism in relation to a field marked by larger discursive practices and enactments of difference, diversity and belonging. I concur with the call for a careful rethinking of the ethnographic and conceptual understanding of digital activism.

Paper long abstract:

During my ethnographic fieldwork I observed several artistic campaigns or trends on the social media created by people working in the art and cultural sector."If Mustafa isn't Norwegian, what the hell am I?" was an attitude campaign which spread at full speed through social media. However, the general social media practices of the participants of this research consisted mainly on posting and sharing dissent content related to topics such as trauma, racism, shame, childhood neglect, sexual abuse, migration, domination, inequality, representation, diversity, unbelonging and the condition of being culturally betwixt and between, among others. These media practices seems not to qualify as digital activism, usually associated with organised social movements or networks and the unfold of different strategies online/offline.The posting and sharing I observed were on the contrary spontaneous and part of a broaden creative process, and the moral concern of individuals. It nevertheless might challenge the establishment, by generating alternatives to the dominant. Therefore, I concur with the call for a careful rethinking of the ethnographic and conceptual understanding of digital activism. Based on an ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the dissenting social media practices of Norwegians with minority background and adoptees in the art and cultural sector in Norway. I wonder how to conceptualise a practice that appears as activism but without activists.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses the role of social media ‘bragging posts’ (skryteposter) in the negotiation of status and position in rural Norway, a place often considered the locus of the Nordic cultural value of ‘equality as sameness’.

Paper long abstract:

This paper discusses the place of social media ‘bragging posts’ (skryteposter) in the everyday production of status and hierarchy in rural Norway. Nordic rural communities are often assumed to be the locus of the cultural idea of ‘equality as sameness’. This is an idea where ‘being equal’ is signified by ‘being similar’; difference is under-communicated in order to balance and possibly resolve tensions between individual/society, independence/community and equality/hierarchy. Equality as sameness is a dominant social form in the everyday life of Valdres, Norway, where I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in 2020-21. However, bragging posts, particularly those portraying the person as an active, knowledgeable user of the outdoors, is a context where my interlocutors frequently negotiated status and position in social hierarchies. This, I suggest, must be seen in relation to cultural values as well as the social forms enabled by digital technology: the combination of being physically fit and mastering the outdoors is cultural capital in Valdres. Yet, everyday social forms allow only for subtle expressions of possession of this capital. However, social media appears as a ritual space with different social rules and limits for what is considered ‘showing off’. In my discussion of bragging posts in Valdres, I draw on more recent commentaries on Gullestad’s work, particularly Hojer Bruun, Jakobsen and Krøijer’s work from Denmark showing how egalitarianism is only one of several valued forms of sociality in the Nordics - and that hierarchies can emerge also from people’s concerns with other forms of sociality.

Paper short abstract:

Digitalisation threatens to multiply the exclusions experienced by homeless people. Access to digital media is a constant process for homeless people, in which practicing connectivity is always accompanied by practicing disconnectivity, complicating narratives of digital inclusion.

Paper long abstract:

The Covid-19 pandemic radically transformed social and material life, shifting much of it into the domestic sphere and into digital spaces. This transformation particularly affects homeless people, who do not have a permanent dwelling and who disproportionately struggle to gain and maintain quality access to digital communication technologies. As smartphone ownership has become tacitly accepted as a precondition for participating in many aspects of societal life, digitalisation therefore threatens to multiply the exclusions experienced by homeless people.

In this context, I conducted two years of ethnographic research with a charity in Berlin (Germany) which organised a large-scale distribution of smartphones to homeless people. Planning and carrying out smartphone distributions proved a very unique ethnographic starting point to understand the digital desires, fears, challenges, and practices of homeless people, which I will elaborate and reflect on.

It quickly became apparent that connectivity for homeless people is not a binary question of having or not having a smartphone. Rather, it is a set of constant practices which require significant time and resource investments. Simultaneously, homeless people often experience – and practice – disconnectivity. Disconnectivity may result from phone loss, breakage, lack of phone credit, or access to power; however, it is also constituted through practices like turning off one’s phone for a prolonged period of time, not picking up calls or answering messages, and many other ways of refusing to do (digital) connectivity. In this presentation, I will use the concept of “dis:connectivity” to show how these different practices are entangled.

Paper short abstract:

Boundaries for journalism are in flux. Also, the social boundaries in between news workers. This study shows how hierarchy had to be reestablished in the shared software where everyone could see each other’s work in ‘real time’ and control was moved into the journalists’ space for writing.

Paper long abstract:

News work has traditionally been highly hierarchical, even in a rather egalitarian work style of harmony and trust in a Norwegian context. Based on one-year fieldwork in a small Norwegian newsroom, I display how the changing social interaction in a digitalized newsroom contributed to (re)establishing collectiveness and hierarchy in between news workers. The openness, transparency, and accessibility of the physical open office landscape extended into the newsroom’s digital ‘landscape’ of their shared production platform. There were no walls in the office landscape and the tools were not “walled off” either, but the journalists protected both the physical and digital spaces by cultivating invisible fences around their craft in both spaces. Since digital ways of performing journalism hold potential for fostering greater individualism as well as different forms of control, a protective ‘we’ for establishing internal trust, and an invasive ‘we’ in form of surveillance and control, affected each other in re-establishing hierarchy. It is important to highlight is that it is not necessarily the digital ways of working in itself, but the way they create new forms of sociality and new ways of performing harmony and control, that contribute to reestablishment of boundaries. My findings show that shifting collectives of ‘we’ did not necessarily mean less individual autonomy. Rather, professional autonomy was guaranteed through the collective community as well as the core values and mission embedded in the journalistic craft.