Imagined Affordances of Instagram and the Fantastical Authenticity of Female Gulf-Arab Social Media Influencers

Hurley, Zoë

doi:10.1177/2056305118819241

Cited by 76 publications

(90 citation statements)

References 45 publications

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“…Digital photographs and what individuals and groups do with them happen at the nexus of social, emotional, economic and technological practices and meanings (Lacković, 2019;Hurley 2019). Relations between organisms and environment are central to the existence in the world (Deely 2007) as complex and dynamic sign systems (Marais and Kull 2016;Maran 2006).…”

Section: Psc Analysis Applications: Methodological Designs and A Relamentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking with Digital Images in the Post-Truth Era: A Method in Critical Media Literacy

Lacković

2020

Postdigit Sci Educ

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This article introduces a new method to support critical media literacy, learning and research in higher education. It acts as a response to an unprecedented profusion of visual information across digital media that contributes to the contemporary post-truth era, marked by fake news and uncritical consumption of the media. Whereas much has been written about the reasons behind and the character of the post-truth, less space has been dedicated to how educators could counteract the uncritical consumption of images from the perspective of semiotics. This article adopts a unique semiotic approach to address the stated gap. It discusses in depth the meaning making of pictures, digital photographs and material objects that photographs can embody. It does so by focusing on three aspects of a pictorial sign: (1) the materiality of its representation and representational elements, (2) its object (what the sign refers to) and (3) its descriptive interpretations. These three aspects inform the signification analysis within the proposed productionsignification-consumption (PSC) method, exemplified with digital photographs. Understanding and analysing images via the PSC method draw attention to how humans create, interpret, (re)use, consume and respond to online and offline communication signs. The method can contribute to the development of critical media literacy as an engagement with postdigital semiotics, much needed in an age of global ecological and social crises, uncertainty and fast consumption of digital content.

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Section: Psc Analysis Applications: Methodological Designs and A Relamentioning

confidence: 99%

Thinking with Digital Images in the Post-Truth Era: A Method in Critical Media Literacy

Lacković

2020

Postdigit Sci Educ

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“…Unknotting Instagram's tertiary dynamics could reveal how social media's so-called "affordances" are taken up in gendered terms (Hurley, 2019a(Hurley, , 2020b. It is an attempt to unravel platform capitalism's entangled nexus of discourses, technologies, social, and individual agencies.…”

Section: Postdigital Artifactsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…But such foci give visibility to certain forms of empowerment while backgrounding Arab women's practices and issues more pertinent locally (Le Renard, 2019). Simultaneously, conflation of Arab women's online agency with offline empowerment has tended to be conceived in neoliberal or marketized terms (Hurley, 2019a(Hurley, , 2019b. But gender empowerment is not conceivable in exclusively postfeminist or neoliberal terms and neither is it merely a question of visibility for the socioeconomic elite (Bannet-Weiser, 2018;McRobbie, 2009).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

#reimagining Arab Women’s Social Media Empowerment and the Postdigital Condition

Hurley

2021

Social Media + Society

Self Cite

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Social media intersects across physical spaces, digital infrastructures, and social subjectivities in terms of what is being called the “postdigital,” in an increasingly merging offline/online world. But what precisely does it mean to be “postdigital” if you are an Arab woman or social actor in the Global South? How does access to social networking sites, while increasing visibilities, also provide potential for increased agency? This study is concerned with the extent to which Arab women’s self-presentation practices on Instagram could be considered as empowering, or otherwise, within the postdigital condition. First, the study takes Instagram as a case to develop a theoretical framework for considering social media as a tertiary artifact, involving material, routine-symbolic, and conceptual affordances. Second, it applies the artifact framework to explore a corpus of self-presentations by five Arab women influencers. Feminist postdigital theorizing offers unique contributions to problematizing normative, ethnocentric, and neoliberal conceptions of Arab women’s empowerment. The application of the novel framework leads to an interpretative discussion of Arab women’s influencing practices across merging offline/online and transnational boundaries. Overall, the critical perspective begins to reimagine Arab women’s empowerment, not simply as individualized or material processes, but as agencies that are interwoven within the commercialized and conceptual dynamics of visual social media.

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“…Differences, inequalities and anxieties are also exacerbated semiotically in the postdigital realm via images since interpretation occurs at the nexus of social, emotional, economic and technological practices and meanings (Lacković 2020;Hurley 2019b). These issues raise questions about postdigital assemblages, which involve entanglements of human agency within matter, materialism, technologies and hypervisualities (Barad 2007;Haraway 1987).…”

Section: Postdigital Feminism and Cultural Visual Regimesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Postdigital Feminism and Cultural Visual Regimes: Covid-19 at Women’s Only University in the Gulf

Hurley

2020

Postdigit Sci Educ

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Covid-19 At Women's Only University in the Gulf Transitioning to teaching online at a women's only university in the Gulf during the Covid-19 makes me, like millions of other university teachers globally, increasingly reflective. With the world in crisis, there is renewed focus on theoretical tensions within the postdigital condition, and my interest is in unique female insights and their positioning in postdigital theory and practice (Deepwell 2020). How does women's learning intersect across physical spaces, digital infrastructures and learning ecologies? Or is it perhaps somewhere else, across all of these, as well as in-between (Pyyhtinen and Suoranta 2020)? How do these online practices affect women from different cultures? What precisely does it mean to be postdigital if you are female (Jandrić et al. 2019)? How can a postdigital critical pedagogy be informed by feelings of love, kindness and compassion for learning, learners and one another, while hopefully keeping women employed (Petrilli 2017)? These questions were pertinent prior to Covid-19, they are particularly poignant now, and they are imperative for future development of postdigital feminist theory and practice.

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Imagined Affordances of Instagram and the Fantastical Authenticity of Female Gulf-Arab Social Media Influencers

Cited by 76 publications

References 45 publications

Thinking with Digital Images in the Post-Truth Era: A Method in Critical Media Literacy

Thinking with Digital Images in the Post-Truth Era: A Method in Critical Media Literacy

#reimagining Arab Women’s Social Media Empowerment and the Postdigital Condition

Postdigital Feminism and Cultural Visual Regimes: Covid-19 at Women’s Only University in the Gulf

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