Digital Realities
Listing Labor: Cataloging Collectibles in the Digital Vintage Economy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Michael Palm, Tamara Kneese
In this paper, we analyze the buying and selling of vinyl records and vintage collectibles via online storefronts. While the digital vintage economy is framed by nostalgia for older modes of production and consumption, it is intrinsically connected to broader processes of platformization. On Etsy, stores and individual sellers can display and sell their one-of-a-kind threads alongside handcrafted items. Meanwhile, on Discogs, record stores and individual merchants list and sell new as well as collectible vinyl. Discogs and Etsy are often omitted from conversations about the platform economy, but the labor practices that sustain these platforms resemble the warehouse labor observed at Amazon, where low-wage workers quickly locate, pack, and ship items ordered by consumers. Much like larger-scale and more infamous companies like Airbnb and Uber, the niche markets comprising the digital vintage economy thrive on a gendered artisanal and entrepreneurial imaginary that underpins what is in fact very mundane labor. We draw on interviews with individual sellers as well as record and vintage store owners and employees in the Bay Area, Portland, and Brooklyn to describe how merchants use Discogs, Etsy, eBay, and Instagram as digital storefronts to augment their brick-and-mortar sales. We situate the online traffic in collectibles within broader platform economies, and by comparing records and vintage clothes as sectors of the digital vintage economy, dominated by men and women respectively, we are able to critique digital divisions of labor, which continue to be organized by race, age, and class as well as gender and geography.
An Assessment of the National Telecommunications and Information Administration, 1978-2018
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Stuart N. Brotman
The National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) is celebrating its fortieth anniversary. It was created to serve as the President's principal adviser on telecommunications and information policy issues, working closely with the White House, other Executive Branch agencies, Congress, and the Federal Communications Commission. This paper reviews historic milestones from 1978 to 2018 related to NTIA's long-term impact on legislative and regulatory reform. It also assesses future directions where NTIA can provide meaningful leadership in helping to shape our nation's twenty-first-century digital policy agenda.
All the World’s a [Mirror] Stage: Lacan, Social Media and Emergent Subjectivities
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Scott Wilson
If we recognise Jacques Lacan’s three registers of the Imaginary, Symbolic and Real as structures which govern textual production, then Social Media texts and platforms do more than simply represent these registers; they circulate them and enforce their articulation by demonstrating how to operate as textual producers and consumers within them. With this in mind, how might have Social Media affected the relationship of the subject to the world accessed through these media forms? How, especially, does the subject negotiate the complicated terrain of power and knowledge represented, first, by an acquiescence to, and then an overcoming of, the Subject-Supposed-to-Know? How might this revision of a crucial moment (for Lacan) in the development of the subject play out and be visible in such contemporary crises as Post-Truth, QAnon and Brexit? This paper seeks to explore the structuring effect of Lacan’s Three Registers on subjective formation and examine the manner with which Social Media offer a digital revision of these structures, making available new ways of becoming subjects that differ from previous (analogue) subjects in their relationship to categories of knowledge and the manner with which this knowledge might be used to generate an encounter with the world.
Technographic Profiles and Online Self-Presentation Among Young Adult Filipinos in Mobile Dating Apps
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Christian Jaycee Samonte, Jonalou Labor
Available technologies, such as mobile phone dating applications, serve to enrich dating experiences. In the Philippines, particularly in Metro Manila, mobile dating app use has become pervasive, familiar, and even habitual among the youth. The trend to use such dating applications has paved the way for the discussions of the ever-evolving notion of presented self in online platforms. On one hand, a technographic profile pertains to how mobile dating apps access, use, and own technology (Forest, 1985). It also covers their attitude and values towards technology. On the other hand, self-presentation is the process of highlighting what is perceived as one’s sense of appropriateness in a communicative encounter (Goffman, 1956; Walther, 1996). The researcher employed a qualitative communication research design. As an inductive approach, the study used focus interviews. The study looked into the experiences of 40 Tinder users in the National Capital Region of the Philippines. Technographic profiles revealed that Tinder users are content authors, content managers, spectators and lurkers, collectors of potential matches, and critics. In terms of self-presentation, the researcher found out that that the performance of the self is constructed truthfully and ideally by showing sincerity to the performed role, using a personal front, dramatically executing the role, idealizing the online face, maintaining control of the shared information, misrepresenting the selves, and mystifying the presentation. The study concludes that the informants have already appropriated the use of the app because of the extensive use of Tinder and their capacity to pay access to the app.
