2. Today’s Plan
• Israel-Gaza conflict
• Rooke
– gendered spaces
– coding gender
• Marwick and boyd
– motivations for using social media
– imagined audience and context collapse
• BREAK
• Fuchs
– group exercise about political blogging
• ties in Marwick and boyd, Castells and Fuchs
• wrap up and what is coming next

3. TUESDAY NOVEMBER 20th
18:00 - City Hall, Festival Control Board Room
Welcome & Speeches
18:45 - Walk to Human Rights Monument
19:00 - Human Rights Monument - Vigil
Following the vigil there will be a walk to Pink Triangle
Services (PTS) at 331 Cooper St. for warming up,
discussion and refreshments.

18. Gendered Space

19. “Users must be creative within the bounds of the code of
social media.” (from Reading Assignment)
How do we code binary gender
into the design of online spaces?
How could we AVOID coding binary
gender into the design of online
spaces?

20. from Reading Assignment
• “Projects on Facebook are difficult since the site is in
constant change, and if you were to make a community
that was private, organizers of that Facebook page
would have to continue to keep up with the privacy
settings to ensure safety and a sense of comfort for its
users.”
• “Twitter, with its hash tags would be difficult to use. If a
person used a word and hash tagged it not realizing
what it might do (i.e. invite unwanted harassment) the
space is compromised.”
• “Safety for so many trans* individuals and youth
especially is crucial (Rooke 2010, 662) and I just don’t
think that it can be provided on sites like Twitter and
Facebook.”

21. What motivates people to use social media?
• Peer pressure; compare with others
• Inclusion in online communities; finding new acquaintances with
shared interests
• Staying in touch with distant relatives
• Boredom/habit
• Nosy
• Egocentric; promote a business for capitalism
• Agenda – for remembering things
• Rant; state opinions
• Procrastination
• Gossip; nostalgia; stalking, creeping, twatching
• Chat
• Finding new information; relevant, up-to-date info; pick me up
(motivational quotes)
• influence mainstream dmedia; creating/organizing events

22. Imagined Audience
• “technology complicates our metaphors of
space and place” (115)
• imagined audience vs. actual readers
– two different groups?

23. Context Collapse
• “Twitter flattens
multiple
audiences into
one” (122)
• ‘nightmare
reader’
– “lowest common
denominator
philosophy of
sharing” (126)

24. FUCHS
• identify antagonisms: contradictory tendencies
• consider dialectics: actuality/potentiality
• no linear causes and effects  more complex
– neither only opportunities nor only risks inherent in social
phenomena but contradictory tendencies
• cooperative and participatory society
– information and knowledge:
• free and accessible to all
• produced for the benefit of all
– true network society: association of free and equal
producers

25. • Step 1: with ONE partner, come up with a political issue that
you both could (however slightly!) imagine pursuing as a
theme for a co-authored blog [3 minutes MAX]
• Step 2: figure out who your imagined audience is and how you
could use mass self-communication and horizontal networks to
work towards raising awareness and/or achieving social change
[10 minutes MAX]
• Step 3: apply Fuchs! [10 minutes MAX]
a) First discuss the potentiality of your overarching goal.
b) Then discuss the likely actuality.
c) Consider why this gap exists.

26. Week Eleven: Privacy and Surveillance
• boyd, danah and Eszter Hargittai. 2010.
“Facebook Privacy Settings: Who Cares?” First
Monday 8(2).
• Fuchs, Christian. 2011. “An Alternative View of
Privacy on Facebook.” Information 2:140‐165.
• Cohen, Nicole S. and Leslie Regan Shade.
2008. “Gendering Facebook: Privacy and
Commodification.” Feminist Media Studies
8(2):210-214.