Social Transformations
The Online Women Community: A Supportive Environment for Exposure and Intimacy
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dana Weimann Saks, Vered Elishar-Malka, Yaron Ariel
This study examines the activity and expression patterns of women within closed, multi-participant women's Facebook groups. At the research center, the three largest groups of their kind in Israel, which have been created, and are now being managed by, and dedicated exclusively to, women. This study aims to learn about the unique women's online community by examining the type of dynamic and discourse that take place within these groups: their usages patterns, their perception of intimacy, sharing, support, and self-disclosure. A quantitative content analysis was conducted to randomly examine posts that were written during December 2017-January 2018 by members and administrators of the groups. A total of 1,500 posts were analyzed, including their threads properties. In addition, the Facebook profile of all the group members who had published these posts were analyzed for further information. The most popular topics of the posts were health (14.7%), motherhood (12.7%), relationships with partners (12%) and sexuality (9.3%). The majority (92%) of them included a positive message expressed by their author. Most of the posts (89%) included dialogical elements. Furthermore, in most (94%) of the posts, the authors' name, picture, and Facebook's full profile were overt. A positive correlation was found between the level of personal exposure and the depth of discourse that followed. We also found a negative correlation between the level of personal exposure in the group, and the number of friends on the user's page, a possible indication of the central role that these groups play in their users' lives.
Marking and Making Time: Temporality in Video Blogging of Gender Transition
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Victoria Pitts Taylor
Video blogs are a highly popular way for people to narrate and share their experiences of gender confirmation surgery, hormone therapy and other modes of physical transition. Video bloggers use a variety of methods to mark the time it takes to transition, and to communicate the hardships caused by medical and legal barriers that slow down the process. This paper examines the ways that time and temporality are measured and crafted in video blogs of gender transition, and considers the relationship between physical, embodied and online temporalities as they converge in these forms of social media.
Informational Sharing and Cultural Diversity in the Digital Age
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shu Chuan Chu
With digital technologies facilitating the information sharing and knowledge exchange, online communities have become a global space that could facilitate consumers’ information search. This proposal examines how technologies have changed Internet users' information sharing behaviors and discusses the influence of cultural diversity in electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) communication. Specifically, this proposal argues an important role of culture in information sharing in online communities by examining how new technologies have shaped and impacted the knowledge exchange process.
Being in the Digital World: Flusser and the Future of Thinking
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter Nemes
It has been over three decades that Vilém Flusser expanded his philosophy of photography into a prophetic vision of humanities' leap into a universe of technical images. Revisiting the notion of the future of writing (and, as a consequence, the end of history) as well as the notion of a return of image-based thinking allows for directly questioning how digital technologies change the possible answers to the age-old quest of what it means to be human. This philosophically driven exploration of the digitalized world that we now inhabit is the goal of my paper. Using Flusser's unique phenomenological approach I will investigate the ways in which knowledge is formulated and how understanding is shaped by our altered being in the (digital) world. Flusser foresaw and anticipated but never actually experienced the fully connected existence of Homo Digitalis and engaging his ideas now is more important than ever. A separate but connected line of inquiry is the question of absence and presence, a dynamic that is at once at the core of how humans communicate and inhabit the world and a central concern of the effects of technology on us. The goal is to go beyond the cataloging of potential or already visible problems of digital technologies' impact on human psychology and think about the state of being that we are in now in a concrete and phenomenological way.
