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Social Media as Wearables? (Ashley Wong)

Crawford’s article examines wearable self-tracking devices and questions the usage of personal data. Wearables have recently gained an influx of supporters, and this popularity is in no small part due to their ability to supersede the human ability to process information about themselves – since they provide only ‘facts’ in terms of self-knowledge, wearables are seen as a more authoritative source of information about humans than humans themselves. This comes in tandem with the modern fetish for numerical accuracy and truth, as wearables embrace and support this fetish when providing their service of self-knowledge. As such, wearables have facilitated the ongoing commodification of the human body, where each person is condensed into their personal data. Crawford introduces a comparison between the weight scale and wearables today in order to analyse how big data has changed across human history. In particular, the main difference between the two is that wearables have allowed personal data to be accessed by external parties, therefore removing control from their user in terms of how and where their data spreads. The new age of technology and wearables has therefore assigned a new capital to data, although this capital is usually not controlled, sold, or bought by their owners themselves (us). This thus raises questions of human agency, as well as control over our own data and privacy.

Beyond these common questions, Crawford also discusses the use of wearables and their data in legal proceedings and data analytics. The same questions on human agency and fallibility are raised, but there is now a threat of data accuracy. Although data used in court may be solidly factual and therefore hard proof, the data’s origins now come into question as third-party companies who process the data before it reaches the court have their own human fallibilities and algorithmic issues, therefore compromising the data quality. To take the data for face value as hard proof would therefore raise questions of human injustice within the court itself, the foundation for promising to deliver justice.

In Singapore, many wearables have appeared over time, the most noteworthy being the TraceTogether token that appeared during the COVID-19 pandemic. However, one ‘wearable’ that appeared even before that may be our mobile devices. Although not commonly perceived as a “wearable” by the common definition, it appears that mobile devices do raise the same questions of agency and data protection as wearables. This is particularly due to the proliferation of social media that now allows users to film and post on a safe and anonymous platform. With this ability, many social issues have been brought to light on social media platforms. However, much of these have infringed on data privacy rights as films taken without consent or posts containing information on others are often the catalyst for bringing about social change. One particular example may be taxi drivers who now have cameras on their vehicles. This has allowed taxi drivers who suffer abuse at the hands of rude passengers to pursue justice, as this article (source: https://www.straitstimes.com/singapore/video-of-passenger-scolding-taxi-driver-goes-viral) has shown. On the other hand, taxi drivers who are themselves rude have also been exposed, as videos of them can easily be taken and sent into the social media stratosphere (source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrTkuKD5lHs). The common thread between the two is how data privacy can be infringed, as both cases made use of videos taken without consent to serve justice. These videos appear to state facts but could also have easily been doctored by freely available video editing apps. This inaccuracy is often not thought about when consuming these videos on social media, followed by petition signing or email writing to petition for social change. As such, data accuracy may be an important question for us to consider as part of our healthy epistemological practices for the data driven world of today.

#nm3205 #TW1 #blog post 10 #wearables #surveillance

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Bordieu in a Singaporean Context (Ashley Wong Qi Hui)

Bordieu’s conception of the habitus is the main focus of Webb, Schirato, and Danaher’s paper. They define the habitus as “the partly unconscious ‘taking in’ of rules, values and dispositions”, an abstract habit where we internalize regulations and reproduce practices under their influence. They also discuss Bordieu’s conception of cultural capital, in which competition is split into reproduction and transformation. The former is seen when agents adjust their behaviour based on societal limitations placed on them. This results in the perpetuation and reproduction of oppressive systems where agents with lesser capital believe that they should be content with their lot, due to their habitus of believing themselves to be naturally limited. The latter is observed when agents devote resources and capital towards a certain goal in an attempt to transform their capital and positioning. However, this largely fails as society is naturally rigged against those at the bottom rungs. Bordieu also brings up four modes of operation which cultural capital follows: misrecognition, symbolic violence, illusion, and universalization.

Misrecognition is a process where agents fail to recognize their current situation as a product of societal norms as they are used to the status quo. This enables symbolic violence, which is this current predicament that agents are forced to suffer as a result of their misrecognition. A similar example would be racial privilege in Singapore. Singaporean Chinese are used to their way of life without racial discrimination and are thus unable to truly understand it when it happens to other races. Their higher position in the social hierarchy enables symbolic violence in the form of racial discrimination happening to other races, whether it is committed by the agent or others that the agent fails to recognize and call out. Illusio is enabled by the habitus, since it requires agents to believe in and participate for the illusion to function. This illusion in question is the institutional fact set down by the status quo. Universalization can allow agents to set up industries that follow their beliefs, by universalizing them as the industry’s main tenets which can then be marketed. This often translates to higher cultural capital for positive beliefs within the societal context. For racial discrimination in Singapore, illusio may be seen in how flat owners who rent to others often state that they want a “Chinese-speaking individual”. Although it seems to show no racially discriminatory overtones, it is known under the surface that the usual situation would be that the flat owner is racist and does not want to rent to non-Chinese individuals for no reason other than their different race.

#nm3205 #TW1 #consumption

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The Sharing Economy in Singapore (Ashley Wong Qi Hui)

In “What is the Sharing Economy?”, Ravenelle discusses the sharing economy based on three theories: 1. the difference between Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft; 2. labour casualization and its influence on risks; 3. its overall result on social inequalities.

  The first point discusses trust and community, where Gemeinschaft is a shared community with a collective consciousness built on face-to-face interactions while Gesellschaft is symbolic of the ‘city’ with tenuous social bonds that forces members to use contracts rather than trust to forge connections. The sharing economy is often marketed as a return to Gemeinschaft from Gesellschaft, attempting to build a community based on sharing leftover resources within a contractual society, that can also create trust. However, deeper analysis of the sharing economy shows that the main tenets of Gesellschaft remains within the system. The connections forged within the sharing economy are purely functional rather than interactive; the sharing economy becomes a place where discrimination is carried forward rather than removed as intended.

  The second point is on how the sharing economy has influenced employer-employee relations and the new risks that result from the new working dynamic. Workers are now forced to handle the effects of casualized labour, which includes financial risks, overtly competitive employment, and lowered wage rates. This brings into question gig employment, which contains those same risks. However, what has changed is that the risks are now also prevalent in sharing economy employment as it becomes more casualized, leading to a demoralized and unmotivated labour market in general as mental health is negatively impacted. However, the risks are also felt differently across social classes. “Insecurity becomes flexibility” (p.38) for the upper-class who has desirable skills, as they are better able to treat employment in the sharing economy as gig employment, while those of the lower-class require the stability due to relatively worse financial situations. A distinction is drawn between subsistence and transformational entrepreneurism, where the latter is the prevalent case for most workers in the sharing economy.

  The last point explains how the sharing economy exacerbates social inequalities, despite its marketing of success stories that depict workers breaking out of inequalities they face. This is also tied to the different risks faced by upper-class and lower-class workers, as the former uses their employment in the sharing economy as supplementary income rather than for subsistence. This is worsened by upper-class workers having more financial ability to invest in the sharing economy, which allows them to earn more than a lower-class worker who has less to invest and offer to clients. The opportunities that the upper-class has in technological empowerment and skills cause the lower-class to lose out and thus creates underemployment.

In Singapore, the classic sharing economy job is to be a driver for Grab. Although this job is often framed as a rosy career path that anyone, even low-skilled workers, can take up (“Aiya, if anything happens I can still drive for Grab!”), there are many hidden thorns that have influenced other aspects of the labour market. One is the impact on non-gig employment, such as taxi companies like Comfort DelGro whose business has suffered with the emergence of this gig employment. Another is the impact on gig workers themselves, whose employment in the sharing economy has caused them undue stress and anxiety over their temporal career and ever-increasing cost of living. The rising precarity of the labour market due to the influence of the sharing economy is thus one of the reasons why labour in Singapore is increasingly viewed in a negative light. As such, it may be necessary to analyse how we can better adapt to the changing patterns of employment in order to take part in the labour market in the future.

#nm3205 #blog post 6 #TW1 #precarity

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Is Brooklyn Nine Nine Copaganda? (Ashley Wong Qi Hui)

In Social Media as Participatory Culture, Fuchs discusses the concept of participatory culture, introduced by Henry Jenkins as “designating the involvement of users, audiences, consumers, and fans in the creation of culture and content”. He claims that Jenkins’ discussion of participatory culture is essentially reductionistic, as it only focuses on the positive sides to participating and looks only at the democratic aspects of social media. Instead, Fuchs contrasts this with the concept of participatory democracy, which he claims would be better able to tackle the political and economical aspects of participation, rather than merely the cultural aspect that participatory culture embraces. One way that participatory democracy differs from participatory culture is that the former is universal while the latter is relative. Where participatory culture is exclusive as it assumes only some can fully participate, participatory democracy is inclusive as it implies a universal right for everyone to take part in decision-making and control structures that influence them, which includes media as a structural feature of capitalism. This conjoins the economic influence that media and its relative infrastructure carries, for example: the factors of production that go into building and developing media infrastructure, the free labor that media exploits from users, and privacy concerns. Fuchs also critiques Jenkins’ treatment of fan culture as a micro platform for politics and questions the justification for studying popular culture if it does not help to establish a just society through political engagement. For this, he is concerned with the negative aspects of fan culture which potentially contain fascist and extremist overtones. Another aspect that Fuchs finds lacking is Jenkins’ claim that participatory culture advances cultural diversity, as he believes that this is linked with economic factors such as privileged visibility and capitalist-influenced ownership. Overall, Fuchs believes that Jenkins’ assumption of constant consumer resistance is unfounded and needs to bring in consumer exploitation.

Fuchs makes certain good points on Jenkins’ claims, but one part that I find trouble agreeing with is his questioning of fan culture as politics. Although I do agree that we should not automatically assume that fans’ engagement with media content is political in nature, I believe that politics definitely play a role in what fans engage with and therefore the political aspects of engaging in fan culture cannot be entirely swept aside. Fuchs says that participating in fan culture is not significantly political in nature, but rather acts as an excuse for people to ignore riskier political activities as popular culture becomes a political movement in itself. However, each individual’s political inclinations and beliefs do play a part in the media content they participate in. For example, Brooklyn Nine Nine (B99) is a comedy television series that explores the lives of a diverse group of detectives and police officers in America. Many people love and support the show for its open engagement with political issues such as racial profiling, police brutality, and the LGBTQ+ community. As such, fans’ political inclinations are thus revealed in their choosing to engage with this content and its fan culture. This, however, does not dismiss fans’ ability to critique and take part in political movements. The Black Lives Matter movement in America peaked in 2020 with the unnecessary killing of George Floyd, sparking a wave of international outrage and protests in over 60 countries across the world. During this time, the B99 fan community was active in questioning the show’s role in portraying the American police in a positive light when the reality has showed that it is actually rife with corruption and white heterosexual bias (linked). There was a concern that the show promoted copaganda, cop-positive propaganda, that supported the actions of the police force during the BLM protests. At the same time, this line of questioning influenced the show’s creators as well, as they scrapped their work (all scripts and four filmed episodes) for Season 8 in favor of rethinking the show’s direction and portrayal of the police (linked). This shows how political matters do play a role in fan culture, as fans bring their own implicit political stances and beliefs to the table when picking and staying with content and thus influence the fan community in a macro political aspect.

#nm3205 #TW1 #blog post 5 #user generated content

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Urbanizing Our Media, or Mediatizing Our Urbanity? (Ashley Wong Qi Hui)

The reading this week discussed how media interfaces with our urban infrastructure. This relationship extends two ways: 1. how urban spaces influence the mobile media that we carry around; 2. how media, both mobile and public, shapes our urban spaces. This two-way relationship affects our experience in the urban space, as we adjust our mobile kits to better adapt our presence to the needs of our surroundings.

  Three genres of managing our presence in urban space are thus discussed: cocooning, encampments, and footprints. The first, cocooning, is the habit of using our mobile media to create a private bubble of space that shelters an individual from interaction with their surroundings and the people around them. In Singapore, this is most often observed in public transport, where commuters are constantly on their media devices in order to avoid interaction with others. The lecture also brought up how this habit of segregation has become so naturalized that we automatically find anyone who does not engage in cocooning to be suspicious or even offensive.

  The next genre, encampments, is seen when our mobile media is used to set up temporary roots in the urban space, thus constructing a personal space that is temporal but still more permanent than cocooning. Individuals often use this space to engage in activities such as work, study, or hobbies. The main difference from cocooning is the intention to set down roots in this space because of a certain affinity with the location or a desire to create personal relationships with others in that location. As such, their mobile kit may even differ from the kit they use for cocooning. This is often seen in libraries or cafes across Singapore, which tend to have a large influx of students setting up an ambient “home away from home” in which to study. This higher-order function is in stark contrast to cocooning, where the main intention is not to stay in that location, but rather isolate themselves from the rest of the undesirable location.

  The two-way relationship mentioned earlier is most clearly observed in footprinting. Individuals now carry keys and cards in their mobile kit to establish and maintain their relationships with urban infrastructure, thereby leaving a footprint on the urban world. They have adapted their mobile kit to fit the changing urban space around them, while urban infrastructure has also made use of changing media types to boost its functionality and aesthetic. There is a wide range of reactions to footprints, where some appreciate the ease and convenience that footprinting tools afford them in maintaining relationships, while others make sure to take advantage of the streamlined relationship to increase their potential rewards. Yet others also dislike the need to carry around these footprinting tools in their mobile kit, and even criticize the reward schemes available as a ploy for customer loyalty. Some even fear the data tracking that footprinting establishments are allowed access to. The most interesting point is that footprints are often enforced by the location that uses the footprinting tool, rather than by the individual who carries the tool. This thus creates a depersonalizing effect on the individual’s relationship with urban infrastructure. In Singapore, the same reactions may be found across the population as well. However, the footprinting effect is exacerbated in our urban city where all our interactions are more or less mediated by our media devices. This emphasizes the extreme reactions on each end: the classic kiasu Singaporean fervently collects their NTUC receipts to gather points and maximise rewards in the form of cutlery; or the technophobic Singaporean who fears the government’s collection of their data during the recent SPF and TraceTogether data collection scandal.

#nm3205 #TW1 #mobile media #blog post 3

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TV in the Gender-Divided Sphere (Ashley Wong Qi Hui)

Spigel discusses the ways that TV has shaped our media spaces, by considering racial disparities, gender roles at home, and changing family dynamics across time. These have altered the way we use TV in both the public and private spheres. Moreover, TV affects our media spaces in both its material form as well as the institutionalized content it displays, thus molding our communication through its mediatization as Couldry and Hepp mentioned in last week’s reading. The main areas that Spigel raised were: 1) the role of TV in encompassing and displaying in the militarist context; 2) gender roles being embodied in the way TV is used in the domestic space; 3) TV as a centric ‘hearth’ of the home; 4) bringing the TV from the private to the public space through telecommunications; 5) the role of telepresence and liveness in TV; 6) how TV contributes to spatial de-realization.

One of the most intriguing points was how TV not only shaped the domestic space (in exacerbating gender roles), but also shaped the public suburban space (in continuing the racial divides in society, for example the ‘white flight’ of the 1950s). For the former, I look to my own household where my father takes responsibility for the TV and the space around it.

The media space around the TV is curated by him, and he maintains the TV console and speakers. This is designated as “his area”, where only he can place items here without question. When we are watching TV together as a family over dinner, he has first dibs on choosing the channel or movie. This only changed when my brother was born, as my father now lets him choose what to watch. If my sister and I want to watch a particular show, we must persuade my brother that he wants to watch it as well so that he can ask our father on ‘our’ behalf. As the subservient females of the family, it probably has never crossed either my father or brother’s minds to ask us first. The situation is a little better now that each of us have our own mobile devices and streaming platforms to curate our own content, but the same trend can be seen. My sister and I share many interests and are in the habit of compromising, so we often choose to watch our media content together on one device while taking turns to choose what to watch. However, my brother and father are not in the same habit of asking and compromising, each preferring to watch on their own devices even if it is the exact same content.

#nm3205 #TW1 #domestic media #TV #blog post 2

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Mediatization: Good or Bad? (Ashley Wong Qi Hui)

As a social construct, the “social world” is built by us as members of the society through everyday action, which includes the sphere of communication. Since the introduction of media in our everyday lives, communication has been altered such that media is now interweaved with face-to-face interaction. This results in a new conception where both media and face-to-face interaction shape the “social world”, rather than just the latter. Media allows us to traverse the intersubjectivity of the “social world” because of how it links people across both time and space. Media is involved in communication by involving two simultaneous processes: materialization and institutionalization. Couldry and Hepp propose the development of the term “mediatization”, where communication is increasingly shaped by media.

Arguably, mediatization has created overreliance on media – almost a relationship where man is ruled by technology. It was brought up in class by many that media now forms such a big part of our lives that we have become overtly dependent on our technological devices. This is a necessarily true statement: for example, cellphones are so interweaved with our daily lifestyles that it becomes almost necessary to our way of life. We use them for everyday actions such as scrolling for news, Googling for information, or communicating with loved ones. Any time that we require information (even if it is just to check the time), we choose to whip out our phones rather than search for a public clock. This is part of the process of naturalization.

It is commonly thought that this process is a bad thing: what would happen if we lost access to our technology? Forgetting to charge my phone or losing signal would mean losing access to both the phone and the media it provides me with, effectively cutting me off from the “social world”. This is undoubtedly a valid fear, particularly for those of us who lived in a time without mobile devices. We cannot imagine ourselves ever being without our handy cellphone again. However, mediatization creates more than just the institutional facts that form the basis of our use of media. The naturalization process is in itself also an institutional fact that forms part of the fabric of the “social world: to be part of this “social world”, we naturally find ourselves engaging with our phones. To decide that we should not engage with media because we may become too accustomed to having technology around implies that there will be some future time where technology no longer exists, and we somehow revert back to being cavemen hitting each other with sticks. Yet mediatization already proves that the real world itself is shaped by media and our usage of it. Rather than worrying about an overt reliance on technology, perhaps we should be focused on naturalizing media to the level that we would not ever need to worry about losing access to it.

#nm3205 #mediatization #TW1 #blog post 1