Stephanie Alice Baker
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 307946 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Stephanie Alice Baker |
| NOMBRES | Stephanie Alice |
| APELLIDO | Baker |
| FIRMA | BAKER S A |
| AFILIACIONES | City, University of London |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4921-2456 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 21 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 90 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 21 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2011 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 5 |
Health Creator
“Health creator” is now a common term across academic work (e.g., Avella, 2024) and public parlance (e.g., Moore, 2020), also featuring in the title of one of the traditional panels at AoIR2024. However, as a label, it directs our attention away from matters of ill health (e.g., suffering, diagnosis, loss), overlooking the work of those who share their lived experience of illness and missing the multiple implications this work has for creators, a…
Conspiracy Theory as Metaphor
Illness has long been framed through metaphor. Whereas the media was once a primary vehicle to represent disease metaphors, new media technologies and short video platforms are increasingly used to represent health and illness through metaphor. This study ( n = 200) employs an ethnographic approach to understand how metaphors are used to spread health misinformation online. It examines how cancer related health misinformation is circulated on the…
Crowdfunding platforms as conduits for ideological struggle and extremism
Crowdfunding platforms remain understudied as conduits for ideological struggle. While other social media platforms may enable the expression of hateful and harmful ideas, crowdfunding can actively facilitate their enaction through financial support. In addressing such risks, crowdfunding platforms attempt to mitigate complicity but retain legitimacy . That is, ensuring their fundraising tools are not exploited for intolerant, violent or hate‐bas…
Memes Save Lives
Disinformation research is increasingly concerned with the hierarchies and conditions that enable the strategic production of false and misleading content online. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was revealed that 12 influencers were responsible for a significant volume of antivaccine disinformation. This article examines how influencers use antivaccination memes for commercial and political gain. Drawing on a 12-month digital ethnography of thre…
‘A mother’s intuition
In this article we examine the proliferation of anti-vaccine content on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employ a case study approach to analyse the techniques used by 13 anti-vaccine influencers to promote vaccine refusal on Instagram for 19 months from January 2020 to July 2021. Our findings reveal that the maternal is strategically invoked in anti-vaccine content by appealing to three interrelated ideal types: the protective mothe…
Simple solutions to wicked problems
The pandemic has produced an abundance of medical misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Many of these narratives appear impervious to scientific evidence and indifferent to the authority of the state. This has resulted in ‘true believers’ being cast as paranoid and irrational. In this article, we take a different approach by exploring the cultural appeal of anti-vaccine conspiracy theori…
From Covid-19 Treatment to Miracle Cure
Introduction Medical misinformation and conspiracies have thrived during the current infodemic as a result of the volume of information people have been exposed to during the disease outbreak. Given that SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) is a novel coronavirus discovered in 2019, much remains unknown about the disease. Moreover, a considerable amount of what was originally thought to be known has turned out to be inaccurate, incomplete, or based on an obsole…
Conspiracy
Conspiracies have been a cultural mainstay for decades (Melley). While often framed as an American problem (Melley), social media has contributed to their global reach (Gerts et al.). Bruns, Harrington, and Hurcombe have traced the contemporary movement of conspiracy theories into the cultural mainstream from fringe conspiracist groups on social media platforms such as Facebook through their greater uptake in more diverse communities and to subst…
Avoiding conflict and minimising exposure
In a context where Twitter has come under criticism for enabling and encouraging hostile communication, this article explores how users adopt a ‘Twitter face’ when navigating interactions on the platform. Extending Goffman’s observation that face-work is applicable to both immediate and mediated interaction, this article provides a novel application of face-work on Twitter. Reporting on data from an online questionnaire completed by general Twitt…
Alt. Health Influencers
This article examines the proliferation of alt. health influencers during the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyse the self-presentation strategies used by four alt. health influencers to achieve visibility and status on Instagram over a 12-month period from 11 March 2020, when the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation. My analysis reveals the ways in which these influencers appeal to the utopian discourses of early web culture and the u…
Clean eating and Instagram
Food cultures are shaped by the ubiquity of digital photography. Embedded in social media sites, such as Instagram, images of food are used in photographic exchanges to perform identity and interact with community. In a context of proliferating food media, an ethics of “clean eating” – a dietary practice adhering to consuming “healthy” foods deemed to be “pure” – is presented as a form of moral food consumption that embraces particular foods whil…
The challenges of responding to misinformation during a pandemic
Social media have been central in informing people about the COVID-19 pandemic. They influence the ways in which information is perceived, communicated and shared online, especially with physical distancing measures in place. While these technologies have given people the opportunity to contribute to public discussions about COVID-19, the narratives disseminated on social media have also been characterised by uncertainty, disagreement, false and …
The Belle Gibson scandal
The Belle Gibson scandal that broke in 2015 is a testament to the growing phenomenon of lifestyle gurus in the 21st century. In this article, our aim is not to explain the psychology behind Gibson's lies. Rather, we focus on the social, cultural and technological conditions that enabled Gibson's persona to flourish and their impact on contemporary understandings of the self. Lifestyle gurus embody the para-social, trading off the appeal of intima…
Good Morning Fitfam’
Social networking sites are important platforms for visual self-presentation online. This article investigates how content producers present their gender identities on the social networking site, Instagram. We draw upon and develop Goffman’s analytic framework to understand the self-presentation techniques and styles users employ online. Conducting a visual content analysis of clean eating–related top posts, we examine how users deploy clean eati…
The selfie and the transformation of the public–private distinction
The selfie is a contemporary form of self-portraiture, representing a photographic image of the human face. The selfie is created for the purpose of reproduction and to communicate images visually with others from a distance. The proliferation of web 2.0 technologies and mobile smart phones enables users to generate and disseminate images at an unprecedented scale. Coupled with the increasing popularity of social media platforms, these technologi…
Mediation as Moral Education
On March 5, 2012, the US charity, invisible children, released a 30-minute video on YouTube: KONY 2012. The film was an advocacy campaign designed to raise awareness about war crimes committed by the African warlord, Joseph Kony, Commander-in-Chief of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, alleged to have abducted up to 30,000 children and turned them into child soldiers and sex slaves over the past 26 years. The film’s “only purpose,” accord…
Social Tragedy
A social tragedy is a collective representation of injustice. Baker demonstrates how social tragedies facilitate moral action and discusses a series of contemporary case studies – the death of Princes
Mediating mega events and manufacturing multiculturalism
Contemporary global politics is characterized by intense debate about the status of multiculturalism. Framed within discourses of crime, counter-terrorism and moral decline, multiculturalism has been declared redundant just as the Australian government has rehabilitated the term in local citizenship legislation and policy making. Tensions between the local and the global are complex and multifaceted, taking place beyond the formal political arena…
The power of popular publicity
Sociologists have tended to take insufficient account of the importance of emotions to the social power of the institution of media, particularly as altered by the emergence of social media in the current media ecology. This paper compensates for this neglect by means of a brief illustrative case study of the effect of social media on the public reception of the 2011 Sepp Blatter racism scandal and of other ‘race-related’ scandals in the UK. In p…
The “Fall” of What? Fifa’s Public Viewing Areas and Their Contribution to the Quality of Public Life
Much conventional scholarship considers “the public” to be in decline in the modern Western world, following a range of cultural developments believed to encourage withdrawal into the private domain. Public Viewing Areas devoted to communicating live events may be interpreted as countering such a trend by attracting audiences to the public sphere. This article examines how the world governing body of association football, FIFA, recently aimed to …
The Mediated Crowd
Commentary on the recent riots largely reflects ideological differences with political discourse reviving traditional debates of social inequality and moral decline. While the 2011 riots resemble former incidents of rioting in twentieth-century Britain, it is argued that the recent unrest was significantly enhanced by the development of new social media, requiring new understandings of mediated crowd membership in the twenty-first century. I intr…
Alt. Health Influencers
This article examines the proliferation of alt. health influencers during the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyse the self-presentation strategies used by four alt. health influencers to achieve visibility and status on Instagram over a 12-month period from 11 March 2020, when the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation. My analysis reveals the ways in which these influencers appeal to the utopian discourses of early web culture and the u…
Good Morning Fitfam’
Social networking sites are important platforms for visual self-presentation online. This article investigates how content producers present their gender identities on the social networking site, Instagram. We draw upon and develop Goffman’s analytic framework to understand the self-presentation techniques and styles users employ online. Conducting a visual content analysis of clean eating–related top posts, we examine how users deploy clean eati…
The Belle Gibson scandal
The Belle Gibson scandal that broke in 2015 is a testament to the growing phenomenon of lifestyle gurus in the 21st century. In this article, our aim is not to explain the psychology behind Gibson's lies. Rather, we focus on the social, cultural and technological conditions that enabled Gibson's persona to flourish and their impact on contemporary understandings of the self. Lifestyle gurus embody the para-social, trading off the appeal of intima…
Clean eating and Instagram
Food cultures are shaped by the ubiquity of digital photography. Embedded in social media sites, such as Instagram, images of food are used in photographic exchanges to perform identity and interact with community. In a context of proliferating food media, an ethics of “clean eating” – a dietary practice adhering to consuming “healthy” foods deemed to be “pure” – is presented as a form of moral food consumption that embraces particular foods whil…
The Mediated Crowd
Commentary on the recent riots largely reflects ideological differences with political discourse reviving traditional debates of social inequality and moral decline. While the 2011 riots resemble former incidents of rioting in twentieth-century Britain, it is argued that the recent unrest was significantly enhanced by the development of new social media, requiring new understandings of mediated crowd membership in the twenty-first century. I intr…
The challenges of responding to misinformation during a pandemic
Social media have been central in informing people about the COVID-19 pandemic. They influence the ways in which information is perceived, communicated and shared online, especially with physical distancing measures in place. While these technologies have given people the opportunity to contribute to public discussions about COVID-19, the narratives disseminated on social media have also been characterised by uncertainty, disagreement, false and …
Mediating mega events and manufacturing multiculturalism
Contemporary global politics is characterized by intense debate about the status of multiculturalism. Framed within discourses of crime, counter-terrorism and moral decline, multiculturalism has been declared redundant just as the Australian government has rehabilitated the term in local citizenship legislation and policy making. Tensions between the local and the global are complex and multifaceted, taking place beyond the formal political arena…
The “Fall” of What? Fifa’s Public Viewing Areas and Their Contribution to the Quality of Public Life
Much conventional scholarship considers “the public” to be in decline in the modern Western world, following a range of cultural developments believed to encourage withdrawal into the private domain. Public Viewing Areas devoted to communicating live events may be interpreted as countering such a trend by attracting audiences to the public sphere. This article examines how the world governing body of association football, FIFA, recently aimed to …
The power of popular publicity
Sociologists have tended to take insufficient account of the importance of emotions to the social power of the institution of media, particularly as altered by the emergence of social media in the current media ecology. This paper compensates for this neglect by means of a brief illustrative case study of the effect of social media on the public reception of the 2011 Sepp Blatter racism scandal and of other ‘race-related’ scandals in the UK. In p…
Memes Save Lives
Disinformation research is increasingly concerned with the hierarchies and conditions that enable the strategic production of false and misleading content online. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was revealed that 12 influencers were responsible for a significant volume of antivaccine disinformation. This article examines how influencers use antivaccination memes for commercial and political gain. Drawing on a 12-month digital ethnography of thre…
The Mediated Crowd
Commentary on the recent riots largely reflects ideological differences with political discourse reviving traditional debates of social inequality and moral decline. While the 2011 riots resemble former incidents of rioting in twentieth-century Britain, it is argued that the recent unrest was significantly enhanced by the development of new social media, requiring new understandings of mediated crowd membership in the twenty-first century. I intr…
The “Fall” of What? Fifa’s Public Viewing Areas and Their Contribution to the Quality of Public Life
Much conventional scholarship considers “the public” to be in decline in the modern Western world, following a range of cultural developments believed to encourage withdrawal into the private domain. Public Viewing Areas devoted to communicating live events may be interpreted as countering such a trend by attracting audiences to the public sphere. This article examines how the world governing body of association football, FIFA, recently aimed to …
The power of popular publicity
Sociologists have tended to take insufficient account of the importance of emotions to the social power of the institution of media, particularly as altered by the emergence of social media in the current media ecology. This paper compensates for this neglect by means of a brief illustrative case study of the effect of social media on the public reception of the 2011 Sepp Blatter racism scandal and of other ‘race-related’ scandals in the UK. In p…
Mediation as Moral Education
On March 5, 2012, the US charity, invisible children, released a 30-minute video on YouTube: KONY 2012. The film was an advocacy campaign designed to raise awareness about war crimes committed by the African warlord, Joseph Kony, Commander-in-Chief of the Lords Resistance Army (LRA) in Uganda, alleged to have abducted up to 30,000 children and turned them into child soldiers and sex slaves over the past 26 years. The film’s “only purpose,” accord…
Social Tragedy
A social tragedy is a collective representation of injustice. Baker demonstrates how social tragedies facilitate moral action and discusses a series of contemporary case studies – the death of Princes
Mediating mega events and manufacturing multiculturalism
Contemporary global politics is characterized by intense debate about the status of multiculturalism. Framed within discourses of crime, counter-terrorism and moral decline, multiculturalism has been declared redundant just as the Australian government has rehabilitated the term in local citizenship legislation and policy making. Tensions between the local and the global are complex and multifaceted, taking place beyond the formal political arena…
The selfie and the transformation of the public–private distinction
The selfie is a contemporary form of self-portraiture, representing a photographic image of the human face. The selfie is created for the purpose of reproduction and to communicate images visually with others from a distance. The proliferation of web 2.0 technologies and mobile smart phones enables users to generate and disseminate images at an unprecedented scale. Coupled with the increasing popularity of social media platforms, these technologi…
Good Morning Fitfam’
Social networking sites are important platforms for visual self-presentation online. This article investigates how content producers present their gender identities on the social networking site, Instagram. We draw upon and develop Goffman’s analytic framework to understand the self-presentation techniques and styles users employ online. Conducting a visual content analysis of clean eating–related top posts, we examine how users deploy clean eati…
Clean eating and Instagram
Food cultures are shaped by the ubiquity of digital photography. Embedded in social media sites, such as Instagram, images of food are used in photographic exchanges to perform identity and interact with community. In a context of proliferating food media, an ethics of “clean eating” – a dietary practice adhering to consuming “healthy” foods deemed to be “pure” – is presented as a form of moral food consumption that embraces particular foods whil…
The challenges of responding to misinformation during a pandemic
Social media have been central in informing people about the COVID-19 pandemic. They influence the ways in which information is perceived, communicated and shared online, especially with physical distancing measures in place. While these technologies have given people the opportunity to contribute to public discussions about COVID-19, the narratives disseminated on social media have also been characterised by uncertainty, disagreement, false and …
The Belle Gibson scandal
The Belle Gibson scandal that broke in 2015 is a testament to the growing phenomenon of lifestyle gurus in the 21st century. In this article, our aim is not to explain the psychology behind Gibson's lies. Rather, we focus on the social, cultural and technological conditions that enabled Gibson's persona to flourish and their impact on contemporary understandings of the self. Lifestyle gurus embody the para-social, trading off the appeal of intima…
From Covid-19 Treatment to Miracle Cure
Introduction Medical misinformation and conspiracies have thrived during the current infodemic as a result of the volume of information people have been exposed to during the disease outbreak. Given that SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) is a novel coronavirus discovered in 2019, much remains unknown about the disease. Moreover, a considerable amount of what was originally thought to be known has turned out to be inaccurate, incomplete, or based on an obsole…
Conspiracy
Conspiracies have been a cultural mainstay for decades (Melley). While often framed as an American problem (Melley), social media has contributed to their global reach (Gerts et al.). Bruns, Harrington, and Hurcombe have traced the contemporary movement of conspiracy theories into the cultural mainstream from fringe conspiracist groups on social media platforms such as Facebook through their greater uptake in more diverse communities and to subst…
Avoiding conflict and minimising exposure
In a context where Twitter has come under criticism for enabling and encouraging hostile communication, this article explores how users adopt a ‘Twitter face’ when navigating interactions on the platform. Extending Goffman’s observation that face-work is applicable to both immediate and mediated interaction, this article provides a novel application of face-work on Twitter. Reporting on data from an online questionnaire completed by general Twitt…
Alt. Health Influencers
This article examines the proliferation of alt. health influencers during the COVID-19 pandemic. I analyse the self-presentation strategies used by four alt. health influencers to achieve visibility and status on Instagram over a 12-month period from 11 March 2020, when the pandemic was declared by the World Health Organisation. My analysis reveals the ways in which these influencers appeal to the utopian discourses of early web culture and the u…
‘A mother’s intuition
In this article we examine the proliferation of anti-vaccine content on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. We employ a case study approach to analyse the techniques used by 13 anti-vaccine influencers to promote vaccine refusal on Instagram for 19 months from January 2020 to July 2021. Our findings reveal that the maternal is strategically invoked in anti-vaccine content by appealing to three interrelated ideal types: the protective mothe…
Simple solutions to wicked problems
The pandemic has produced an abundance of medical misinformation, disinformation and conspiracy theories about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. Many of these narratives appear impervious to scientific evidence and indifferent to the authority of the state. This has resulted in ‘true believers’ being cast as paranoid and irrational. In this article, we take a different approach by exploring the cultural appeal of anti-vaccine conspiracy theori…
Crowdfunding platforms as conduits for ideological struggle and extremism
Crowdfunding platforms remain understudied as conduits for ideological struggle. While other social media platforms may enable the expression of hateful and harmful ideas, crowdfunding can actively facilitate their enaction through financial support. In addressing such risks, crowdfunding platforms attempt to mitigate complicity but retain legitimacy . That is, ensuring their fundraising tools are not exploited for intolerant, violent or hate‐bas…
Memes Save Lives
Disinformation research is increasingly concerned with the hierarchies and conditions that enable the strategic production of false and misleading content online. During the COVID-19 pandemic, it was revealed that 12 influencers were responsible for a significant volume of antivaccine disinformation. This article examines how influencers use antivaccination memes for commercial and political gain. Drawing on a 12-month digital ethnography of thre…
Conspiracy Theory as Metaphor
Illness has long been framed through metaphor. Whereas the media was once a primary vehicle to represent disease metaphors, new media technologies and short video platforms are increasingly used to represent health and illness through metaphor. This study ( n = 200) employs an ethnographic approach to understand how metaphors are used to spread health misinformation online. It examines how cancer related health misinformation is circulated on the…
Health Creator
“Health creator” is now a common term across academic work (e.g., Avella, 2024) and public parlance (e.g., Moore, 2020), also featuring in the title of one of the traditional panels at AoIR2024. However, as a label, it directs our attention away from matters of ill health (e.g., suffering, diagnosis, loss), overlooking the work of those who share their lived experience of illness and missing the multiple implications this work has for creators, a…
Sociology (16 obras) · Political science (14 obras) · Psychology (11 obras) · Social media (11 obras) · Law (10 obras) · Media studies (10 obras) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (8 obras) · Computer Science (7 obras) · Misinformation and Its Impacts (7 obras) · Epistemology (6 obras)