N Carah
Biographic Data
| ID | 50123 |
|---|---|
| NAME | N Carah |
| GIVEN NAMES | N |
| FAMILY NAME | Carah |
| SIGNATURE | CARAH N |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Queensland |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0378-1303 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 53 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 113 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 53 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2011 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Slop
According to DeepSeek, the latest Chinese AI slop generator, the meaning of the term “slop” in the English language changed during the eighteenth century. From having simply signified something mud
Intimate platform biographies on, off and underneath Instagram
For 15 years Instagram has industrialised and platformised the everyday practices of creating and sharing images. Across that time, users’ profiles became archives that offer a biography of their lives, their visual practices and the platform itself. In this article we use a novel combination of data donation, computational and scroll back interview methods to develop an intimate form of platform biography centred on users’ archives. We draw on 2…
Algorithmic Gossip in Young People’s Accounts of ‘Unhealthy’ Advertising on Social Media
The algorithmic and individualised nature of advertising on social media - and the intentionally opaque and unobservable design of advertising algorithms - makes them difficult to study. We turn to participatory methods, working with 204 young Australians as 'citizen scientists' to collect 5169 screenshots of 'unhealthy' advertising on social media. Through SMS chat over a one week period, we engaged our participants in 'algorithmic gossip' to th…
Screenshot Methodologies to Collect and Analyse Social Media Platform Advertising
This paper presents three projects where we have developed participatory digital research methods designed to extend observability of digital advertising on social media platforms and engage with users’ individual experiences with digital advertising. In each approach, participants collected instances of digital advertising from social media apps by taking screenshots or using a screen-capture mobile app. Participants also assumed active roles in…
Scroll, Print, Algorithmically Cluster
Over the past fifteen years Instagram has industrialised and platformised the everyday practices of creating and sharing digital images. Our posts and stories are both an archive of our lives and visual practices, but also part of the historical process of assembling image data sets for training machine vision systems. This paper presents the final part of a multi-year project where we use a combination of cultural and computational methods to ex…
Reporting on the “Next Generation of Nicotine Addicts”
In May 2023, the Australian Federal Government announced further restrictions on the sale of vaping devices, partly due to concern over widespread use by young people. We conducted a mixed methods study to examine how youth vaping has been reported in the Australian news media and compare these articles to media guidelines on responsible reporting of drug use. Drawing a sample from the Factiva database, we conducted quantitative content analysis …
Observing “tuned” advertising on digital platforms
The hyper-targeted advertising that emerged on digital platforms over the past two decades is now more productively understood as tuned advertising, a dynamic and unfolding process where ads are continuously algorithmically "optimised" to users in real time. Following Rieder and Hofmann (2020), we aim to develop a framework for the "conditions for the practice of observing" algorithmically-tuned digital advertising. We draw on our research across…
Normative value of ‘best buys’ and the case of bans on alcohol marketing
Finding the future in digitally mediated ruin
The #nostalgiacores are a series of interrelated hashtags on Instagram and TikTok where users recirculate content from the digital and consumer cultures of the 1990s and 2000s – childhood play centres, dead malls, long-gone toys, and superseded game consoles and phones. In this article, we explore these digital cultures using a critical platform studies approach that involves a combination of network analysis and close textual analysis augmented …
Computational Methods for Improving the Observability of Platform-Based Advertising
The advertising ecosystem has been progressively reshaped by computational advertising models facilitated and controlled by digital media platforms. Meta and Alphabet, two of the dominant players in this ecosystem, have contributed significantly to industry disintermediation via the design and market dominance of their advertising systems, which in turn are symbiotic with their own business models, and feed on large amounts of consumer data gener…
‘It’s pretty sad if I’m just betting by myself … ’
Smartphone technologies and prominent marketing campaigns continue to contribute to the growth of sports betting in contemporary Australia, shifting the practice from pubs and clubs into the domestic and intimate lives of young bettors. This article seeks to build on prior studies of sports betting in the lives of young Australian men by focusing on how gambling shame and stigma is navigated by bettors and their romantic partners. Data collected …
Alcohol marketing on social media
Aim Alcohol promotions in conventional channels are associated with subsequent alcohol consumption in young people, but little is known about young people's exposure to digital alcohol marketing. This exploratory study investigated young people's exposure to, and engagement with, alcohol marketing on social media platforms, variations across sociodemographic groups and associations with alcohol-related behaviors
I've lost my children to vaping”
These findings are discussed in the context of moral panic theory and how framings are constructed by the media in collaboration with policy actors to support particular policy measures
On the sensations of direct-to-consumer DNA testing
The field of genealogy has rapidly evolved with the rise of direct-to-consumer DNA testing, a digital technology with the potential to disrupt previously held understandings of family history. Recent theorisation in the sociology of personal life provides a useful lens to attune to potent sensations and affinities sparked by direct-to-consumer DNA testing. Our analysis focuses on the accounts of three donor-conceived people – Thomas, Simone and A…
Why Am I Seeing This Ad? The affordances and limits of automated user-level explanation in Meta’s advertising system
Against the backdrop of calls for greater platform transparency, this exploratory article investigates Meta’s ‘Why Am I Seeing This Ad’ (WAIST) feature, which is positioned as a consumer-level explanation of Meta’s advertising model. Drawing on our own walkthroughs of Facebook and Instagram and data from the Australian Ad Observatory, we find the feature falls short in two ways. First, the explanations do not always align with how the system and …
No Targets, Just Vibes
Digital advertising's cultural surround is algorithmically tuned. The popular narrative about digital advertising is that it is hyper-targeted and customized. In this article, we argue that digital platforms' targeted advertising is more productively understood as tuned advertising, where algorithmic models optimize the resonance between ads and consumers in a continuous rhythmic flow of images, videos, and text. We develop the concept of tuned a…
Cottagecore, #Futurecore, #Sadcore
This paper uses a novel combination of computational and qualitative methods called ‘critical simulation’ to explore the interplay between everyday image-making practices and the algorithmic architecture of Instagram. The paper aims to understand the capacity of machine vision systems to recognise and reproduce the diverse vernacular aesthetics and affects associated with particular scenes on Instagram - in this case, drawing on a case study of I…
The Algorithmic Flow of Harmful Industries Advertising on Social Media Platforms
Advertising shapes our larger public culture but the typical experience of advertising is now confined to our private and algorithmically-customised social media feeds. In this project, with our partner VicHealth, we used a participatory digital method to work with 204 young Australians aged 18 to 25 to collect 5169 examples of alcohol, gambling and fast food advertising from their social media feeds. We analyse the collections of advertisements …
Exploring Facebook’s “Why Am I Seeing This Ad” Feature
For more than a decade, digital advertising has been the primary means of funding online content and services. The evolution of digital advertising towards algorithmically targeted advertising, believed to be highly personalized and tailored to the individual, has presented new challenges for public oversight. Whereas previously, public concern centred on the content of ads and their exposure to audiences, the rise of platform-based advertising m…
Addressing the accountability gap
This commentary reports on gambling advertisements served to Australians on Facebook in 2021-2022 that we discovered through a research project that uses novel data donation infrastructure to improve the observability of platform-based advertising. Preliminary findings show that advertisements for online casinos appear on social media and are served to people tagged as located in Australia despite laws that prohibit both the operation and adverti…
Turning users into ‘unofficial brand ambassadors’
INTRODUCTION: TikTok has over one billion monthly users and is particularly popular among children. We examined the (1) use of owned media by major unhealthy food and non-alcoholic beverage brands on TikTok and (2) nature of branded hashtag challenges instigated by such brands and the user-generated content created in response. METHODS: We assessed the (1) content of all videos posted on the accounts of 16 top food and non-alcoholic beverage bran…
Connected and consuming
Determining the prevalence of alcohol-related content on social media is important to guide education initiatives and interventions in this space. We aimed to assess the performance of the pre-developed alcoholic beverage identification deep learning algorithm (ABDILA) to automatically quantify alcoholic beverage prevalence in user-generated Instagram images. 6,121 images were gathered from Instagram using ‘Splendour in the Grass’ related hashtag…
Tuning machines
The work of training machine vision systems is diffused into the participatory cultures of social media. As we use social media platforms to express ourselves we assemble databases and train algorithms; and these algorithms in turn shape our everyday cultural practices. In this article, we describe a machine vision system that we built to undertake an unsupervised classification of 13,000 images posted to Instagram from Splendour in the Grass, a …
Limbic platform capitalism
The purposive design, production and marketing of legal but health-demoting products that stimulate habitual consumption and pleasure for maximum profit has been called ‘limbic capitalism’. In this article, drawing on alcohol and tobacco as key examples, we extend this framework into the digital realm. We argue that ‘limbic platform capitalism’ is a serious threat to the health and wellbeing of individuals, communities and populations. Accessed r…
Optimizing Looking and Buying on Instagram
Over its first decade Instagram became central to Facebook’s dominance of audience and advertising markets. In this article, we critically examine how marketing and advertising trade press documented the development of advertising and retail on the platform. Instagram’s platformization involved formalizing relationships among users, influencers, creators, advertisers, retailers, and analytics services. The development of advertising and retail on…
Brands and Instagram
Brands are a critical part of the ongoing experimentation that underpins the development of mobile social media platforms like Instagram. Instagram had no dedicated advertising or analytics tools until 2014 so, in the absence of such devices, brands have developed uses of the platform that engage with the productive ability of cultural intermediaries and consumers to create and circulate images of their bodies, everyday lives, and cultural practi…
Curators of Databases
This article examines the relationships between cultural spaces, the image-making practices of smartphone users and social media platforms. I argue that social media platforms depend on the curatorial capacities of smartphone users who observe everyday life and register it online. Social media platforms use databases and analytics to continuously assemble identities, cultural practices and social spaces in relation to one another. In addition to …
Algorithmic brand culture
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have transformed how brands operate as cultural processes. Over the past decade, these platforms have engineered an algorithmic brand culture that combines the participatory affordances and data-processing power of digital media. In the brand culture of social media, the creative narration of cultural experience doubles as data that trains platform algorithms. We develop an account of the algorit…
Algorithmic brands
This article examines how brands have iteratively experimented with mobile and social media. The activities of brands – including Coca-Cola, Virgin and Smirnoff – at music festivals in Australia since 2005 are used as an instructive case. The article demonstrates how these brands imagined social media, attempted to instruct consumers to use mobile devices, and used cultural events to stimulate image production tuned to the decision-making of soci…
Brand value
One way brands create value is by engaging the capacity of cultural labourers to animate affective connections with consumers. Brands assemble social spaces that harness the communicative capacities of cultural actors. A mode of branding that works by managing an open-ended social process depends on affective labour. Affective labour involves not only the capacity of individuals to produce specific meanings and feelings, but also the open-endedly…
Snapchat’s augmented reality brand culture
On the social media platform Snapchat users share images and videos that disappear after a set amount of time. Snapchat has developed an augmented reality brand culture that embeds brands within this live sharing of images and video on the platform. This advertising model is culturally significant because rather than ship finished ads, Snapchat optimizes the distribution of ad-making tasks. The advertising model is organized around sponsored filt…
Algorithmic Hotness
This article examines how the circulation of images on mobile and algorithmic social media platforms is gendered. We draw on data from a research project that examines the interplay between promotion, drinking culture, and social media. In this project, informants documented flows of images between their social media accounts and a nightlife precinct. We show how the human capacity to use bodies to affect other bodies, and to make critical judgme…
Original live music venues in hyper-commercialised nightlife precincts
Nightlife precincts are constituted by intersecting cultural, market and regulatory forces. They are a vibrant part of the experience economy of the city and important sites for the performance of live music and arts. This article examines original live music venues in Fortitude Valley, an inner-city neighbourhood in Brisbane, Australia. The Valley is both a culturally significant site for original live music venues and a dense hyper-commercialis…
Watching Nightlife
This article examines the affective labor of nightlife photographers within the surveillance economy of social media. I examine nightlife photographers as “below the line” cultural laborers who employ their identities and communicative capacities to create and circulate images of nightlife online. These images stimulate interaction that can be watched, tracked, and responded to by the databases of social media. The study draws on interviews with …
Optimizing Looking and Buying on Instagram
Over its first decade Instagram became central to Facebook’s dominance of audience and advertising markets. In this article, we critically examine how marketing and advertising trade press documented the development of advertising and retail on the platform. Instagram’s platformization involved formalizing relationships among users, influencers, creators, advertisers, retailers, and analytics services. The development of advertising and retail on…
What do participants on digital media platforms produce? Tracking the development of Hello Sunday Morning from a blog, to a social network, to a self-tracking app
This article analyses the development of the participatory online social movement and health intervention Hello Sunday Morning (HSM) from 2009 to 2016. HSM has developed a media platform comprised of blogs, social networking and self-tracking apps with the aim of changing individual and cultural drinking practices. The case of HSM enables us to reflect on the participatory culture of digital media platforms. I argue that participants don’t just c…
Media and evidence-informed policy development
This article draws together theory from political science, media, and science and technology studies to examine the past, present and possible future roles of ‘media’ in influencing evidence-informed policy-making in mental health in Australia. The authors develop a nuanced understanding of the role that media framing, focussing events and participation have played in the evolution of mental health policy. Media are shown to influence evidence ut…
Alcohol brands on Facebook
In September 2012, the Australian Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) made ‘landmark decisions’ relating to the use of Facebook by vodka brand Smirnoff and beer brand Victoria Bitter. The ASB determined that (i) a brand's Facebook page is a marketing communication tool, and (ii) all contents on the page fall under the industry's self‐regulatory code of ethics, including consumer‐created content such as user‐generated comments and photos. The decis…
Breaking into The Bubble
Brands1 1. In this article, the term ‘brand’ is used as a synonym for a particular company represented by and incorporating the particular identity or image it regards as an asset. increasingly engage aspiring writers, artists, designers, musicians, and other cultural producers in brand-building programmes. Brands present these programmes as responsible forms of investment in cultural production. This narrative obscures the labour that aspiring c…
Online self-expression and experimentation as 'reflectivism
Hello Sunday Morning is an online health promotion organisation that began in 2009. Hello Sunday Morning asks participants to stop consuming alcohol for a period of time, set a goal and document their progress on a personal blog. Hello Sunday Morning is a unique health intervention for three interrelated reasons: (1) it was generated outside a clinical setting, (2) it uses new media technologies to create structured forms of participation in an i…
Inundated by the Audience
Following the Brisbane flood in 2011, Seven's breakfast television program Sunrise launched a partnership with the Queensland government called 'Operation Bounce Back'. The initiative called on skilled tradespeople to volunteer for the rebuilding effort, and extended Sunrise's representations of audience participation. In this article, we examine Operation Bounce Back in relation to different accounts of audience participation. We look at the int…
Drinkwise, Enjoy Responsibly
This article examines the communicative activities and press coverage of the alcohol industry-funded social-change organisation DrinkWise. Established in 2005, DrinkWise funds health research in universities, runs public health campaigns and engages in public relations activities. We use a framing analysis to examine the way DrinkWise frames problems, judgements and solutions related to alcohol consumption and policy. The aim of this analysis is …
Breaking into The Bubble
Brands1 1. In this article, the term ‘brand’ is used as a synonym for a particular company represented by and incorporating the particular identity or image it regards as an asset. increasingly engage aspiring writers, artists, designers, musicians, and other cultural producers in brand-building programmes. Brands present these programmes as responsible forms of investment in cultural production. This narrative obscures the labour that aspiring c…
Drinkwise, Enjoy Responsibly
This article examines the communicative activities and press coverage of the alcohol industry-funded social-change organisation DrinkWise. Established in 2005, DrinkWise funds health research in universities, runs public health campaigns and engages in public relations activities. We use a framing analysis to examine the way DrinkWise frames problems, judgements and solutions related to alcohol consumption and policy. The aim of this analysis is …
Inundated by the Audience
Following the Brisbane flood in 2011, Seven's breakfast television program Sunrise launched a partnership with the Queensland government called 'Operation Bounce Back'. The initiative called on skilled tradespeople to volunteer for the rebuilding effort, and extended Sunrise's representations of audience participation. In this article, we examine Operation Bounce Back in relation to different accounts of audience participation. We look at the int…
Watching Nightlife
This article examines the affective labor of nightlife photographers within the surveillance economy of social media. I examine nightlife photographers as “below the line” cultural laborers who employ their identities and communicative capacities to create and circulate images of nightlife online. These images stimulate interaction that can be watched, tracked, and responded to by the databases of social media. The study draws on interviews with …
Alcohol brands on Facebook
In September 2012, the Australian Advertising Standards Bureau (ASB) made ‘landmark decisions’ relating to the use of Facebook by vodka brand Smirnoff and beer brand Victoria Bitter. The ASB determined that (i) a brand's Facebook page is a marketing communication tool, and (ii) all contents on the page fall under the industry's self‐regulatory code of ethics, including consumer‐created content such as user‐generated comments and photos. The decis…
Curators of Databases
This article examines the relationships between cultural spaces, the image-making practices of smartphone users and social media platforms. I argue that social media platforms depend on the curatorial capacities of smartphone users who observe everyday life and register it online. Social media platforms use databases and analytics to continuously assemble identities, cultural practices and social spaces in relation to one another. In addition to …
Brand value
One way brands create value is by engaging the capacity of cultural labourers to animate affective connections with consumers. Brands assemble social spaces that harness the communicative capacities of cultural actors. A mode of branding that works by managing an open-ended social process depends on affective labour. Affective labour involves not only the capacity of individuals to produce specific meanings and feelings, but also the open-endedly…
Profiling Hello Sunday Morning
Media and evidence-informed policy development
This article draws together theory from political science, media, and science and technology studies to examine the past, present and possible future roles of ‘media’ in influencing evidence-informed policy-making in mental health in Australia. The authors develop a nuanced understanding of the role that media framing, focussing events and participation have played in the evolution of mental health policy. Media are shown to influence evidence ut…
Brands and Instagram
Brands are a critical part of the ongoing experimentation that underpins the development of mobile social media platforms like Instagram. Instagram had no dedicated advertising or analytics tools until 2014 so, in the absence of such devices, brands have developed uses of the platform that engage with the productive ability of cultural intermediaries and consumers to create and circulate images of their bodies, everyday lives, and cultural practi…
Algorithmic brands
This article examines how brands have iteratively experimented with mobile and social media. The activities of brands – including Coca-Cola, Virgin and Smirnoff – at music festivals in Australia since 2005 are used as an instructive case. The article demonstrates how these brands imagined social media, attempted to instruct consumers to use mobile devices, and used cultural events to stimulate image production tuned to the decision-making of soci…
Brand Machines, Sensory Media and Calculative Culture
This study argues that the defining feature of contemporary advertising is the interconnectedness between consumer participation and calculative media platforms. It critically investigates how audience participation unfolds in an algorithmic media infrastructure in which brands develop media devices to codify, process and modulate human capacities and actions. With the shift from a broadcast to an interactive media system, advertisers have reinve…
Algorithmic Hotness
This article examines how the circulation of images on mobile and algorithmic social media platforms is gendered. We draw on data from a research project that examines the interplay between promotion, drinking culture, and social media. In this project, informants documented flows of images between their social media accounts and a nightlife precinct. We show how the human capacity to use bodies to affect other bodies, and to make critical judgme…
Queensland Alcohol-related violence and Night Time Economy Monitoring project (Quantem)
The information gathered through this project aims to evaluate the effectiveness of the Policy and to draw on these findings to inform future prevention and enforcement approaches by policy makers, police, and venue staff
Emerging social media ‘platform’ approaches to alcohol marketing
Social media platforms are important actors in the development of alcohol marketing techniques. While public health research has documented the activities of brands and consumers related to alcohol promotion and consumption on social media, there remains the need to develop an account of the native, participatory and data-driven advertising model of these platforms. This article examines the relationship between alcohol brands, media platforms an…
Online self-expression and experimentation as 'reflectivism
Hello Sunday Morning is an online health promotion organisation that began in 2009. Hello Sunday Morning asks participants to stop consuming alcohol for a period of time, set a goal and document their progress on a personal blog. Hello Sunday Morning is a unique health intervention for three interrelated reasons: (1) it was generated outside a clinical setting, (2) it uses new media technologies to create structured forms of participation in an i…
Algorithmic brand culture
Social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram have transformed how brands operate as cultural processes. Over the past decade, these platforms have engineered an algorithmic brand culture that combines the participatory affordances and data-processing power of digital media. In the brand culture of social media, the creative narration of cultural experience doubles as data that trains platform algorithms. We develop an account of the algorit…
Landscape and branding
In her final interlude in Landscape and Branding, Nicole Porter describes a moment walking along a track in the Blue Mountains when a “large droplet of water silently descended from a clifftop
Critical perspectives on brand culture in the era of participatory and algorithmic media
Brands have become a ubiquitous feature of life in market‐based consumer societies. While marketers aim to establish brands as efficient devices for guiding purchase decisions, critical scholarship investigates how branding functions as a mode of exercising power by shaping consumers' identities and consumer culture more broadly. Beginning in the 1950s as a predominantly semiotic critique of advertising, critical research into branding has over t…
What do participants on digital media platforms produce? Tracking the development of Hello Sunday Morning from a blog, to a social network, to a self-tracking app
This article analyses the development of the participatory online social movement and health intervention Hello Sunday Morning (HSM) from 2009 to 2016. HSM has developed a media platform comprised of blogs, social networking and self-tracking apps with the aim of changing individual and cultural drinking practices. The case of HSM enables us to reflect on the participatory culture of digital media platforms. I argue that participants don’t just c…
Snapchat’s augmented reality brand culture
On the social media platform Snapchat users share images and videos that disappear after a set amount of time. Snapchat has developed an augmented reality brand culture that embeds brands within this live sharing of images and video on the platform. This advertising model is culturally significant because rather than ship finished ads, Snapchat optimizes the distribution of ad-making tasks. The advertising model is organized around sponsored filt…
Original live music venues in hyper-commercialised nightlife precincts
Nightlife precincts are constituted by intersecting cultural, market and regulatory forces. They are a vibrant part of the experience economy of the city and important sites for the performance of live music and arts. This article examines original live music venues in Fortitude Valley, an inner-city neighbourhood in Brisbane, Australia. The Valley is both a culturally significant site for original live music venues and a dense hyper-commercialis…
The impact of Queensland's Tackling Alcohol‐Fuelled Violence Policy on nightlife and business trade
The impact of the Queensland Government's Tackling Alcohol‐Fuelled Violence Policy on live music performances in Fortitude Valley, Brisbane, Australia
Queensland Alcohol‐related violence and Night‐time Economy Monitoring (Quantem)
This commentary introduces the special section on the outcomes of the Queensland Alcohol‐related violence and Night‐time Economy Monitoring project and outlines the political and policy context of the interventions put in place under the Queensland government's Tackling Alcohol‐Fuelled Violence strategy. The development of the strategy was informed by alcohol policy initiatives trialled in other major Australian cities over the past two decades. …
Business (36 works) · Advertising (35 works) · Sociology (30 works) · Computer Science (28 works) · Social media (25 works) · Political science (23 works) · World Wide Web (21 works) · Psychology (18 works) · Digital Marketing and Social Media (15 works) · Marketing (12 works)