Connect With Your Audience! The Relational Labor of Connection
The Communication Review |
The theme of Console-ing Passions this year is cultivating community, a topic about which I have had much to say in the context of fan practices. In my work on fans and soap operas (e.g. Baym, 2000) and independent Scandinavian music (e.g. Baymn, 2007), I showed how audiences appropriate the affordances of the internet in order to build communities based on shared practices and meanings. In this paper, I want to look at building ties from another vantage point by considering the kind of work that relating to these often, but not always, mediated communities and individuals entails. I mean this short talk to be provocative rather than exhaustive, a peek into a potential trajectory into media work for feminist media studies.
Platform Biography: A framework for analyzing the structures and dynamics of social media
Social media platforms have become influential in every sphere of communication, from the intimate and mundane to the public, professional, and political. It’s tempting to view a platform as a single “technology”—a static object that can be cast as a causal agent of societal change. But a closer look reveals that platform companies, their technologies, and the cultures that form through and around them constantly push against and reshape one another. If platforms are always changing, then how do we theorize, study, and compare them? In this webinar, based on the book Twitter: A Biography, Microsoft Senior Principal Researcher Nancy Baym and Queensland University of Technology Professor Jean Burgess introduce an original approach to this problem: the Platform Biography, a systematic framework for analyzing social…