Rapporteur Notes 4/14/17

• Difficult to think outside of the way we see social media (outside of the US), wechat
• “Generation of chinese copycats” [?????? orientalism]
• Wechat — “super-app” does everything; virality as a concept-->anything can go viral, company and products etc can be tagged and connections between people are drawn
• Tech is evolving quickly — street vendors even have QR codes, and people usually only pay through that
• Circumventing banks, banking ecosystem that is a lot more accessible
• circumventing ID reqs, note wrinkling, limited hours
• WeChat wallet is a super big thing, paying for everything (not cash or bank cards) —video chatting feature has better connection than skype
• Wechat always has the best internet connection, perhaps because services mediated by tech companies AND state?
• Public and private blurring, state-owned companies trying to innovate, state contract enmeshment
• Different ecosystem, online-offline relationships, ad focused on things you would do in your daily life, new tech playing a role in class formations or a new taste in aspirations?
• Bubble formation? Certain companies are boosted? To what degree do we trust ‘pay-to-play’
• Controversy (baidu paid to prioritize certain searches) re: cancer patient and finding treatment at military hospital, died
• ——-gold farmer clip:
• “The same as transmitting Chinese labor to America virtually”
• “He lives in the virtual world, he has no time”
• Vignette on vigilante killing farmers, perhaps reality of xenophobia is also transmitted through these radicalized caricatures of goldfarmers
• ——- paper tips:
• Themes of virtual economies, but now sociality
• Relationships that develop, issues of authenticity, elements we should attend to?
• Community == who? moderators, designations of what? Disciplining?
• Newbie student? How do they learn the norms, banned, isolated?
• Thinking about diffuse kinds of communities? Subreddits? Facebook groups?
• Identity construction, anonymity?
• ——- discussion re: folks' projects
• Student doctor network, collaborative, pdf, hierarchy, acronyms, celebrities
• How do people assess sketchiness vs reliability? Comments said it was good ==?
• Professor at yale med messed w/ ppl
• If you don’t need/want help then you probably wont be on the site, altruistic check
• Microsituations are good support for claims you want to make, use them as evidence
• Custom-crafted platforms with specific topics that things are oriented around
• signature widgets construct identity, how old, how far along, how long you have been married —> level of authority
• Catch people in a perpetual state of participation, “graduation”, moving up with cohort?
• determining trustworthiness?
• Flip it around and find the scam, what behaviors led to that discovery?
• Ebay, lingo, algorithm
• How to control what you’re working on —> focus on a small element, otherwise the scope might be too
• Facebook difficulties: posts moderated,
• Different levels of knowing people, structuring the dynamics of the relationships
• Ephemerality, versus deeper commitment, just leave and enter more quickly, transforming how that works
• Moderation is curation, presentation and performance?
• Subjectivities on and offline:
• More or less authentic online?
• We choose and select what we want to show of ourselves
• Terms of authenticity online are morally loaded, different social norms perhaps
• Relationships mirroring and mapping onto social media patterns
• Formats for things, mirroring the relationship with the norm of performance
• ex: Where he physically is, posting different things when he is at conference vs home, twitter at home vs twitter in Dhakar (talking directly to people, “research mode”)
• All our identities change where we are geographically + temporally
• ex: Audience based on different social media platforms changes the performance [facebook, the most people, the most filtered] instagram brought up as college student, pinterest exclusively for teaching ideas
• Curation and audience? But what about community? Because audience go and view — branding, seller and buyer, community member,
• Audience is directionality perhaps? Power discourse
• Integration of selves possible over social media?
• Inauthentic == ?? we are always products of our context
• No maybe, there is actually a “true” representation of something, versus people posting their positive experiences and not talking/reserve the -ve vs hiding the truth in a tv thing
• Moral judgment being placed
• But you cannot be a public figure, make claims, and be a hypocrite —> it is all about curation and authenticity
• Sharing data through social media is transparency, which is what we’re getting at, the fidelity between what’s happening in the backstage and in front of the stage
• Oversharer, too authentic and transparent?? Dramatic and fine line of authenticity?
• Self quantification? Tracking and mapping that online
• Next week
• Constructing projects and strategies for the ethnography, critique Song's book!!! She welcomes it