C Abidin
Biographic Data
| ID | 56798 |
|---|---|
| NAME | C Abidin |
| GIVEN NAMES | C |
| FAMILY NAME | Abidin |
| SIGNATURE | ABIDIN C |
| AFFILIATIONS | Curtin University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5346-6977 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 84 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 565 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 83 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 10 |
“What’s our escape plan, and where are we going to meet up?”: Theorising platform evacuation in platform society
This paper develops the analytical framework of “platform evacuation” to explore the dynamics of collective departure and migration of users from a social media platform due to a crisis in or of platform governance. Drawing on internet research addressing platform governance, platform cultures, creator practices, and digital memory work, we theorise “platform evacuation” as grounded in changes to governance by platforms or governance on platforms…
Platform Governance at the Margins: Rules, Relations and Resistance
Social media platforms have great potential to educate young people and adults alike about sexuality, to create nurturing spaces of connection for marginalised communities across the globe, and to express oneself safely. However, this potential is always constrained by platform governance, or the processes of content moderation enacted by platforms and (state) regulation of platform companies (Gorwa, 2019), who are moved by economic and political…
Memefication of Motherhood on Tiktok: Typesofmoms Deconstruction of Parenting Idealisation
Social media has reshaped digital portrayals of motherhood, often reinforcing idealised and aspirational maternal archetypes. While early platforms promoted curated self-representations, TikTok’s memefication culture disrupts these conventions through participatory humour and satire. This study examines how #TypesOfMoms deconstructs parenting idealisation by employing meme formats that enable users to reframe motherhood beyond perfectionist narra…
Encountering the Deceased through Data: Memory, Mourning, and Control in The Last Day of Molly from On Children
Introduction Dystopian science fiction is known for exploring themes around technology and immortality, particularly the idea of transcending death through digital life, as seen in works such as Black Mirror, Westworld, and Electric Dreams. This genre also engages with related issues—such as digital privacy, informed consent, and access to the personal archives of the deceased—which reflect broader cultural imaginaries and anxieties surrounding d…
Influence from the margins: American Ethnologist interviews Crystal Abidin and Vanessa Díaz on Bad Bunny, K‐pop, J‐pop, and the shifting landscape of celebrity
Shortly after Super Bowl LX, in which Bad Bunny headlined the most‐watched halftime show in Super Bowl history, the editors of American Ethnologist sat down to interview anthropologists Crystal Abidin (author of books including TikTok and Youth Cultures and Child Influencers: How Children Become Entangled with Social Media Fame ) and Vanessa Díaz (author of the books Manufacturing Celebrity and P FKN R: How Bad Bunny Became the Global Voice of Pu…
Mainstreaming wanghong in the international press discourse
Tiktok ‘Dogshows’ and the Amplification of Online Incivility Among Gen Z Influencers in the Philippines
Studies on digital platforms and online incivility have established that uses of humor can lean towards cyberbullying and hate speech. Focusing on TikTok’s affordances and cultures of online incivility, this paper studies how TikTok influencers and their audiences maneuver legal-but-harmful humour (Matamoros-Fernández et al., 2023). Specifically, we study how online incivility has become an accepted and negotiated practice in the Filipino context…
The Place of a Child on Platforms: Responsibilities, Obligations, and Expectations
This panel delves into the complex entanglement of children within our 'platform society,' spotlighting their roles amidst the dynamics of platformisation, datafication, and monetisation. It scrutinises the emergence of child influencers, mapping their integration and active participation within the influencer economy. This exploration underscores the critical intersection between childhood and platformization, highlighting the commodification an…
Virtual Celebrity Industries in East Asia
The concept of virtual celebrity realises the ambition of manufactured pop idols that inspired Japan’s idol industry in the 1970s, and spread across East Asia soon thereafter. Today, the term encompasses a variety of genres with local histories and applications, including Vocaloids, virtual idols, vTubers, virtual anchors, and virtual influencers. Although virtual celebrity was once considered a niche interest reserved for $2 and dedicated fans o…
Patchwork Governance on KidTok: Balancing Regulation and Community Norms
TikTok's rapid growth among young users has introduced unique challenges to existing frameworks for understanding child internet fame. We identify “KidTok” as a unique networked public for “internet famous” young people on TikTok shaped by the platform's sociotechnical environment and explore the novel risks that governance should address. While concerns about privacy, safety, and exploitation persist across platforms, TikTok's algorithm‐driven e…
Influencer regulations, governance and sociocultural issues in Asia
Influencer and micro-celebrity research has become a popular interdisciplinary research area across digital media studies and celebrity studies in the past few years, including a growing interest in Asia broadly (e.g., Abidin, 2018; Abidin & Brown, 2018; Hopkins, 2019; Hurley, 2019; Lukács, 2020) and their growth on platforms outside of Silicon Valley (e.g., Guan, 2020; Lin & de Kloet, 2019; Song, 2018). However, existing research in the field ha…
The Platformed Discourse of ‘Fans’ in the Chinese Creator Market
“Fans” in Chinese Digital Markets The rich, extensive, and diverse Chinese digital market presents a plethora of platforms, content formats, and monetisation strategies that are quickly proliferating and evolving, in part due to the size and hyper-competitiveness of the industry. In particular, the cultural production of wanghong—the domestic catch-all for Internet celebrities, influencers, creators and the like—is often perceived to be a distinc…
Platform-Driven Vlogging: How Vlogs Were Mainstreamed in the Chinese Creator Market
Introduction On Silicon Valley platforms, a vlog—short for “video log”—is a format of content where creators record and share everyday activities, personal experiences, and their opinions through first-person narratives (Choe; Kennedy). Although YouTube, which is commonly known as a long-form video platform, has played a crucial role in popularising vlogging in the West (Wood), vlogs can take different forms such as a “live vlog” (Abidin and Lee)…
Introduction to the Special Issue on ‘The Future of Wanghong’
In this Special Issue of Global Media and China on ‘The Future of Wanghong’ , we offer six articles from authors whose foci cover the cultures and economies of wanghong. Drawing on ongoing research on wanghong by the Influencer Ethnography Research Lab (IERLab) at Curtin University, this Special Issue invited interlocutors to share their cutting edge expertise on emergent wanghong phenomena to reflect on the status quo as a springboard for us to …
Cloud Parenting: Douyin Affordances, Emotional Authenticity, and Commodification of Wanghong Children
This article examines the phenomenon of cloud parenting in China, considering the affective mechanisms in sharenting and commodification of wanghong children facilitated by the platform affordances. We select five child wanghong accounts that are active on Douyin for case studies, along with corresponding audience interviews. We find that Douyin’s creation affordances enable child wanghong to create a family affection aesthetic. At the same time,…
TikTok & Children: TikTok Cultures Research Network & TikTok Fireside Chat
At the TikTok & Children Symposium, the TikTok Cultures Research Network initiated a dialogue with TikTok Trust & Safety personnel to learn about their provisions and priorities for young people. The industry fireside chat was attended by scholars of TikTok cultures and intended to facilitate research agenda with real-world applications for researchers to respond to market issues as they unfold. Such cross-sector conversations provide the rare op…
TikTok and children: An Introduction
TikTok's global popularity among children has sparked intense debate worldwide. Some argue that the platform's algorithmic design leads children down a rabbit hole of compulsive content consumption and encourages the imitation of socially harmful behaviours. Others highlight its positive role as a space for children to express their voices on social issues and engage in socialization. This Special Issue on TikTok and Children arises within this c…
Introduction to 2K Special Issue on 'Child Influencers in the Asia Pacific Region
In this introduction to the Social Media + Society 2K Special Issue on 'Child Influencers in the Asia Pacific Region,' we review some of the scholarship on various iterations of child Influencers across creator types, genres, and platforms, and survey some of the key issues raised in the scholarship. The Special Issue offers 11 articles that consider how child Influencers are connected to discourses around hegemony, are involved in social-cultura…
The Regulation of Child Influencers in Australia and the Asia Pacific Region
This article offers the tripartite of 'law,' 'community governance,' and 'industry leadership' for framing how the regulation of child Influencers can be studied. It provides a brief overview of key issues pertaining to the regulation of children and online fame, especially regarding tensions around definitions and scope, which can limit the jurisdiction of the law. It also offers a stocktake of child Influencer regulation in the Asia Pacific reg…
The Nesting Strategies of E-Commerce Wanghong: Promotional Temporalities in Online Shopping Festivals on Chinese Platforms
The wanghong economy in China adopts unique platform monetization strategies, including social tipping, virtual gifting, advertising, and more prominently, e-commerce. E-commerce wanghong are one type of influencer focusing on pushing sales through e-commerce services and play a pivotal role in integrating e-commerce and social media. Online shopping festivals have recently catalyzed the intersection of wanghong cultures and e-commerce. A typical…
Where are all the Black girls on TikTok: Exploring in-group community and (in)visibility through #BlackGirlTikTok
Since the global virality of the ‘Renegade’ dance on TikTok and beyond in 2020, concerns regarding the erasure of Black girls have been noted. This paper extends the conversation by considering how Black girls and teenagers may continue to wrestle with visibility and suppression even within a more intimate in-group community of Black TikTokers. In this paper, we assemble an original corpus of TikTok posts purposively sampled from #BlackGirlTikTok…
TikTok ‘dogshows’ and the amplification of online incivility among Gen Z influencers in the Philippines
Studies on digital platforms and online incivility have established that uses of humour can lean towards cyberbullying and hate speech. Focusing on TikTok's affordances and cultures of online incivility, this paper studies how TikTok influencers and their audiences manoeuvre legal-but-harmful humour. Specifically, we study how online incivility has become an accepted and negotiated practice in the Filipino context through the phenomenon of ‘dogsh…
Fantasised and fantastical Nordic imaginaries: Contextualising Nordic life vlogs by East Asian YouTube vloggers
Nordic life vlogs are a popular genre among avid watchers of YouTube influencers across East Asia. The vlogs showcase “a slice of life” content, documenting the simple living, daily routines, beautiful landscapes, cultural festivals, and everyday norms of what it is like to live in the Nordic region. While there are many Nordic life vloggers, in this article, we focus on a subset: young immigrant women from Japan and South Korea living in the Nor…
Child idols in South Korea and beyond: Manufacturing young stars at the intersection of the K-pop and influencer industries
This article explores how the influencer and traditional entertainment industries are converging in the “child idol” phenomenon—a celebrity genre and system that had existed prior to the emergence of the influencer industry but has now been remixed with the influencer industry’s convention and refashioned as the stepping stone to lubricate children’s journeys toward professional idol careers in the wake of K-pop culture. We examine the “child ido…
The Matrix of Authenticity in Influencer Cultures
This brief retrospect on the matrix of authenticity in Influencer cultures considers the ‘What’, the ‘How’, and the ‘So What’ of being authentic online. Firstly, it traces the changing parameters of what constitutes Influencer authenticity over almost two decades, looking at ‘the real’, ‘the template’, and ‘the juxtaposition’. Secondly, it queries the qualities used to benchmark and assess authenticity performance as ‘ordinariness and intimacy’, …
Familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor
Following in the celebrity trajectory of mommy bloggers, global micro-microcelebrities, and reality TV families, family Influencers on social media are one genre of microcelebrity for whom the 'anchor' content in which they demonstrate their creative talents, such as producing musical covers or comedy sketches, is a highly profitable endeavor. Yet, this commerce is sustained by an undercurrent of 'filler' content wherein everyday routines of dome…
Visibility labour: Engaging with Influencers' fashion brands and #Ootd advertorial campaigns on Instagram
Influencer commerce has experienced an exponential growth, resulting in new forms of digital practices among young women. Influencers are one form of microcelebrity who accumulate a following on blogs and social media through textual and visual narrations of their personal, everyday lives, upon which advertorials for products and services are premised. In Singapore, Influencers are predominantly young women whose commercial practices are most not…
Aren't These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity
Taking seriously the global trend of selfies becoming marketable and entangled in ecologies of commerce, this article looks at Influencers who have emerged as (semi-)professional selfie-producers and for whom taking selfies is a purposively commercial, thoughtful, and subversive endeavor. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and grounded theory analysis, I examine Influencers' engagements with selfies on Instagram and their appropriations of …
From 'Networked Publics' to 'Refracted Publics: A Companion Framework for Researching 'Below the Radar' Studies
Reflecting on a decade (2009-2020) of research on influencer cultures in Singapore, the Asia Pacific, and beyond, this article considers the potential of 'below the radar' studies for understanding the fast evolving and growing potentials of subversive, risky, and hidden practices on social media. The article updates technology and social media scholar danah boyd's foundational work on 'networked publics' to offer the framework of 'refracted publ…
Buymylife.com: Cyber-femininities and commercial intimacy in blogshops
Private messages from the field: Confessions on digital ethnography and its discomforts
This special issue collects the confessions of five digital ethnographers laying bare their methodological failures, disciplinary posturing, and ethical dilemmas. The articles are meant to serve as a counseling stations for fellow researchers who are approaching digital media ethnographically. On the one hand, this issue’s contributors acknowledge the rich variety of methodological articulations reflected in the lexicon of “buzzword ethnography”.…
Feeling Asian Together: Coping With #Covidracism on Subtle Asian Traits
Since the onset of COVID-19, incidents of racism and xenophobia have been occurring globally, especially toward people of East Asian appearance and descent. In response, this article investigates how an online Asian community has utilized social media to engage in cathartic expressions, mutual care, and discursive activism amid the rise of anti-Asian racism and xenophobia during COVID-19. Specifically, we focus on the 1.7-million-strong Facebook …
TeachTok: Teachers of TikTok, micro-celebrification, and fun learning communities
Yes Homo: Gay influencers, homonormativity, and queerbaiting on YouTube
This paper provides a small snapshot of some of the issues regarding LGBTIQ+ experiences and identities. Of particular importance are the political and personal agencies of personhood and expression – how do individuals perform and experience gender and sexuality outside both heteronormativity and homonormativity? This paper analyses fluidity across geographies and mobilities, with a specific emphasis on age, categorisation and identity expressio…
Agentic cute (^.^): Pastiching East Asian cute in Influencer commerce
There has yet to be a definitive study of cute culture that is organically Singaporean. Drawing on existing work on East Asian cute culture and the regional popularity of commercial social media microcelebrities or ‘Influencers’ in Singapore, this article annotates three modes of agentic cute used to obscure the soft power that Influencers hold. Through the qualitative textual and visual analysis of content from three popular Singaporean Influenc…
K-pop TikTok: TikTok's expansion into South Korea, TikTok Stage, and platformed glocalization
We examine how TikTok expanded into the South Korean landscape by utilizing K-pop as a vehicle, thus demonstrating the theory of 'platformed glocalization'. After several failed attempts to enter the Korean market - having been stigmatized as a 'vulgar Chinese app' - TikTok Korea eventually launched a successful event series known as 'TikTok Stage' to leverage on the gaps in the K-pop market arising from the COVID-19 pandemic. While 'platformizat…
Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame
This anthology uses in-depth interdisciplinary case studies from across the globe to examine the practice and concept of microcelebrity. Taking account of highly contextualized cultural settings and social histories, the chapters present scholarly interpretations of microcelebrity as it has proliferated and diverged in global social media networks
Introduction to the Special Issue of 'TikTok and Social Movements
This Special Issue of 'TikTok and Social Movements' emerges from an attempt to map out the landscape of social movements happening on TikTok, drawing from the online symposium 'TikTok and Social Movements' hosted in September 2021 by the TikTok Cultures Research Network, a research portal for interdisciplinary scholarship on TikTok cultures. The recent growing popularity of TikTok has transformed the cultures and practices of social movements wor…
Oegugin Influencers and pop nationalism through government campaigns: Regulating foreign‐nationals in the South Korean YouTube ecology
In South Korea, it has become a growing trend for foreign Influencers to promote Korean cultures, especially through genres like mukbang (livestreamed binge‐eating), beauty vlogs (e.g. “A day in the life of”), reaction (e.g., K‐pop and K‐drama “reacts”). This is observed in popular cross‐platform hashtag streams like “ oegugin ” [#외국인; “foreign‐nationals”], and “ oegugin‐baneung ” [#외국인반응; “foreigner reactions”]. While institutions frequently dep…
Entrepreneurial Selves, Feminine Corporeality and Lifestyle Blogging in Singapore
The making of the entrepreneurial self is a dominant trope of contemporary media culture, and a multitude of media formats across divergent national contexts showcase the contemporary obsession with media visibility and the attainment of celebrity status as the most aspirational form of social mobility. In Singapore, commercial lifestyle blogs are prime examples of entrepreneurial identity-making as websites almost exclusively created by young wo…
Influencers and Covid-19: Reviewing key issues in press coverage across Australia, China, Japan, and South Korea
As COVID-19 broke out across the Asia Pacific from December 2019, media coverage on its impacts proliferated online. Among these discourses, coverage on influencers was prominent, likely as many of the issues arising from COVID-19 contingencies – such as digitalization, public messaging, and misinformation – are cornerstones of this digital economy. In response, this cross-cultural study draws on a corpus of Australian, Chinese, Japanese, and Kor…
Where are all the Black girls on TikTok: Exploring in-group community and (in)visibility through #BlackGirlTikTok
Since the global virality of the ‘Renegade’ dance on TikTok and beyond in 2020, concerns regarding the erasure of Black girls have been noted. This paper extends the conversation by considering how Black girls and teenagers may continue to wrestle with visibility and suppression even within a more intimate in-group community of Black TikTokers. In this paper, we assemble an original corpus of TikTok posts purposively sampled from #BlackGirlTikTok…
Backdoor advertising scandals, Yingyeo culture, and cancel culture among YouTube Influencers in South Korea
In tandem with the increasing role of Influencers in culture and commerce, Influencers’ advertorial disclosures have become controversial in many countries, including South Korea. In August 2020, under the accusations by tabloids and other YouTubers, several famous Influencers were embroiled in the “backdoor advertising scandal,” wherein Influencers deftly advertise products in exchange for a significant amount of money from sponsoring companies,…
Minahs and minority celebrity: Parody youtube influencers and minority politics in Singapore
Many YouTube Influencers have intentionally shaped their content and channels into ‘sites of resistance’ that produce critical commentary about social issues, politics, and the state. When performed through the vehicle of parody and satire videos, such contents double up as entertainment and displays of insubordination against the hegemony. This paper takes seriously one instance of such YouTube Influencers: Singaporean duo MunahHirziOfficial (MH…
The “Fox Eye” Challenge Trend: Anti-Racism Work, Platform Affordances, and the Vernacular of Gesticular Activism on TikTok
This article takes the “Fox Eye” challenge that trended on social media in 2020 as a case study in anti-racism activism by (East) Asian users on TikTok. The “Fox Eye” challenge was a trend in which both celebrities and ordinary users—often predominantly White women—posted photos and short videos on how to wear specific styles of make-up to achieve almond-shaped eyes or “fox eyes.” This was often accompanied with a “migraine pose” where a user pus…
Grief hypejacking: Influencers, #ThoughtsAndPrayers, and the commodification of grief on Instagram
At the intersection of the attention economy of human vision on social media, the tyranny of machine vision on platform algorithms, and the emergence of hashtag publics as an immediate reaction to various global events, this article takes interest in the phenomenon of “grief hypejacking,” where users bandwagon on high-visibility hashtags and public tributes on Instagram to generate mourning content with the specific intention to misappropriate su…
Somewhere between here and there: Negotiating Researcher Visibility in a Digital Ethnography of the Influencer Industry
Despite our preparation for fieldwork, a majority of what ethnographers actually do in the field is based on ‘gut-feeling’, ‘sensing’, and ‘whim’. This paper is a piece of reflexive ethnography detailing a series of minor but important methodological decisions pertaining to researcher visibility throughout fieldwork in a digital community of social media Influencers. It details one anthropologist’s private negotiations during the foray into the I…
Introduction to the Social Media + Society Special Issue on Selfies: Me-diated Inter-faces
This introduction to the special issue entitled Me-diated Inter-faces begins by bringing into question the concept of positioning: what is it that we are doing when we take a position within the study of social media? Reviewing the work of the inaugural manifestos of the journal Social Media + Society on one hand, and the introduction to the special issue on selfies for the International Journal of Communications on the other, this introduction p…
Child idols in South Korea and beyond: Manufacturing young stars at the intersection of the K-pop and influencer industries
This article explores how the influencer and traditional entertainment industries are converging in the “child idol” phenomenon—a celebrity genre and system that had existed prior to the emergence of the influencer industry but has now been remixed with the influencer industry’s convention and refashioned as the stepping stone to lubricate children’s journeys toward professional idol careers in the wake of K-pop culture. We examine the “child ido…
Playing YouTube: How the Nancy YouTuber doll and app position children as aspiring YouTube influencers
This article analyzes Nancy YouTuber, a popular doll and companion app that is part of a growing trend of children's toys modeled on YouTube influencers. Nancy YouTuber's app is one of the first to provide a fictitious YouTube channel, introducing children to YouTube's affordances. We investigate how the doll and app socialize YouTuber practices, and to what extent the combination of both deepens the commodification of childhood. We use the walkt…
Buymylife.com: Cyber-femininities and commercial intimacy in blogshops
Beyond the Singapore Girl: Discourses of Gender and Nation in Singapore, written by Chris Hudson
Ethnography and virtual worlds: A handbook of method, by Tom Boellstorff, Bonnie Nardi, Celia Pearce and T.L. Taylor
With their combined ethnographic expertise in disciplines spanning across anthropology, sociology, informatics, digital media, and game studies, Boellstorff, Bardi, Pearce and Taylor draw on more t
Agentic cute (^.^): Pastiching East Asian cute in Influencer commerce
There has yet to be a definitive study of cute culture that is organically Singaporean. Drawing on existing work on East Asian cute culture and the regional popularity of commercial social media microcelebrities or ‘Influencers’ in Singapore, this article annotates three modes of agentic cute used to obscure the soft power that Influencers hold. Through the qualitative textual and visual analysis of content from three popular Singaporean Influenc…
Visibility labour: Engaging with Influencers' fashion brands and #Ootd advertorial campaigns on Instagram
Influencer commerce has experienced an exponential growth, resulting in new forms of digital practices among young women. Influencers are one form of microcelebrity who accumulate a following on blogs and social media through textual and visual narrations of their personal, everyday lives, upon which advertorials for products and services are premised. In Singapore, Influencers are predominantly young women whose commercial practices are most not…
Introduction to the Social Media + Society Special Issue on Selfies: Me-diated Inter-faces
This introduction to the special issue entitled Me-diated Inter-faces begins by bringing into question the concept of positioning: what is it that we are doing when we take a position within the study of social media? Reviewing the work of the inaugural manifestos of the journal Social Media + Society on one hand, and the introduction to the special issue on selfies for the International Journal of Communications on the other, this introduction p…
Aren't These Just Young, Rich Women Doing Vain Things Online: Influencer Selfies as Subversive Frivolity
Taking seriously the global trend of selfies becoming marketable and entangled in ecologies of commerce, this article looks at Influencers who have emerged as (semi-)professional selfie-producers and for whom taking selfies is a purposively commercial, thoughtful, and subversive endeavor. Based on in-depth ethnographic fieldwork and grounded theory analysis, I examine Influencers' engagements with selfies on Instagram and their appropriations of …
Entrepreneurial Selves, Feminine Corporeality and Lifestyle Blogging in Singapore
The making of the entrepreneurial self is a dominant trope of contemporary media culture, and a multitude of media formats across divergent national contexts showcase the contemporary obsession with media visibility and the attainment of celebrity status as the most aspirational form of social mobility. In Singapore, commercial lifestyle blogs are prime examples of entrepreneurial identity-making as websites almost exclusively created by young wo…
Not Just Another Gangnam Style
Familygoals: Family Influencers, Calibrated Amateurism, and Justifying Young Digital Labor
Following in the celebrity trajectory of mommy bloggers, global micro-microcelebrities, and reality TV families, family Influencers on social media are one genre of microcelebrity for whom the 'anchor' content in which they demonstrate their creative talents, such as producing musical covers or comedy sketches, is a highly profitable endeavor. Yet, this commerce is sustained by an undercurrent of 'filler' content wherein everyday routines of dome…
My life is a mess: Self-deprecating relatability and collective identities in the memification of student issues
In this paper, we investigate memes about student issues. We consider the memes as expressions of a new networked student public that contain discourses that may fall outside the mainstream discourse on higher education. The paper is based on content analysis of 179 posts in the public Facebook Group ‘Student Problem Memes’, combined with a nine-month media watch and a discussion workshop with 15 students. Through self-deprecating humour, student…
Net Idols and Beauty Bloggers’ Negotiations of Race, Commerce, and Cultural Customs: Emergent Microcelebrity Genres in Thailand
Around the mid-2000s, the first wave of young Thai women who attained fame organically on the internet emerged when their photos and profiles were widely shared by friends and fans in web communities and discussion forums. Comprising mainly of students, these women were known as “net idols” and celebrated primarily for their looks, as online conversations focused on their beauty, cosmetic and dressing skills, and overall pleasant appearance. Sinc…
From Internet Celebrities to Influencers
Internet Celebrity: Understanding Fame Online
This book presents a framework for understanding different forms of internet celebrity that have emerged in the last decade. Through cross-cultural case studies, the book offers brief histories behind internet celebrity, analysis on recent developments in the industry, and commentary on emergent trends
Between art and application: Special issue on emoji epistemology
This special issue, curated by Joel Gn and Crystal Abidin, provides an investigation of the uses and impacts of emoji within the domains of culture, race, language, and art and commerce. Considering the broader socio-cultural implications of emoji and the various ways that emoji negotiate and mediate the tenuous boundary between art and application, the eight papers draw from disciplines including media studies and communications, sociology and d…
Microcelebrity Around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame
This anthology uses in-depth interdisciplinary case studies from across the globe to examine the practice and concept of microcelebrity. Taking account of highly contextualized cultural settings and social histories, the chapters present scholarly interpretations of microcelebrity as it has proliferated and diverged in global social media networks
Hanging Out at Home as a Lifestyle
The locus of the home is one of the earliest and most common settings and backdrops in YouTube vlogs. In the decade since YouTube creators and Influencers have flourished in the industry, new strategies, mechanisms, and vocabularies of self-presentation have emerged across various social media, resulting in the emblem of the home emerging as a topic, genre, and setting in YouTube vlogs. Several studies have studied the proliferation of various ge…
“Si Geena” (Brat): Un-Social Digital Juveniles’ Episodic Resistance in Singapore
This paper explores episodes of provocative online articulations and the accompanying angry public reactions as part of the cultural politics of juvenile online resistance in contemporary Singapore. Rather than viewing such delinquency as ‘youth deficits’, this paper seeks a literary-culturalist standpoint in exploring the uninhibited audacity of these public online displays. We perceive such performances as reflecting the critical and socially u…
Tacit Labours of Digital Social Research as an Early Career Researcher
Consider this essay as two brief confessions on the pressures of conducting ‘digital social research’ as an Early Career Researcher. Specifically, the confessions call out two emergent norms in academia: that early career digital social researchers ought to be visible and trackable online, and that we ought to focus on novel and innovative phenomena pioneered by ‘the youngs’. These two expectations have insidiously been integrated into early care…
Yes Homo: Gay influencers, homonormativity, and queerbaiting on YouTube
This paper provides a small snapshot of some of the issues regarding LGBTIQ+ experiences and identities. Of particular importance are the political and personal agencies of personhood and expression – how do individuals perform and experience gender and sexuality outside both heteronormativity and homonormativity? This paper analyses fluidity across geographies and mobilities, with a specific emphasis on age, categorisation and identity expressio…
Navigating Interdisciplinarity as a Precarious Early Career Researcher
From Youtube to Tv, and Back Again: Viral Video Child Stars and Media Flows in the Era of Social Media
While talk shows and reality TV are often considered launching pads for ordinary people seeking to become celebrities, we argue that when children are concerned, especially when those children have had viral success on YouTube or other platforms, their subsequent appearance(s) on television highlight far more complex media flows. At the very least, these flows are increasingly symbiotic, where television networks harness preexisting viral interes…
‘Please Read the Comments’: Commenting Cultures Across Platforms
An old adage about the internet goes “Don’t Read The Comments”. It is a cynical word of caution from supposedly more experienced and savvy internet users, against a slew of negative, abusive, and unhelpful comments that are usually rampant online, stemming from trolling behaviour (Phillips 2015). “Don’t Read The Comments” has become an internet meme. Alongside parody websites (i.e. @AvoidComments n.d.), trawling through the comments section in se…
Racing the Platform/Platforming Race
Race and racism are enduring structural forces that have a hand in virtually every aspect of society; the internet and its vast array of platforms, applications, devices, and cultures are well within their grasp (Nakamura and Chow-White, 2013; Brock, 2020). The papers on this panel trouble, question, and reorient notions of how race comes to matter in our contemporary digital landscape. We build on scholarship that explores how content creators m…
Influencers, Brands, and Pivots in the Time of Covid-19: A Look at Australian, Japanese, and Korean Issues
In light of the COVID-19 pandemic, where income has become precarious and Internet use has soared, the influencer industry has to strategise over new ways to sustain viewer attention, maintain income flows, and innovate around formats and messaging, to avoid being excluded from continued commercial possibilities. In this article, we review the press coverage of the influencer markets in Australia, Japan, and Korea, and consider how the industry h…
Sociology (60 works) · Media studies (44 works) · Political science (42 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (38 works) · Business (33 works) · Law (31 works) · Influencer marketing (28 works) · Art (26 works) · Asian Culture and Media Studies (25 works) · Psychology (25 works)