Nelanthi Hewa
Biographic Data
| ID | 6715276 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Nelanthi Hewa |
| GIVEN NAMES | Nelanthi |
| FAMILY NAME | Hewa |
| SIGNATURE | HEWA N |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0641-2239 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 10 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 4 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 10 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
The Life, Death, and Afterlife of Gamespy
In the late 90s and early 2000s, GameSpy Network, was an inescapable presence of the early interactive web—either in the GameSpy Network—a collection of websites dedicated to covering popular game franchises (e.g Planet Quake, Planet Half-Life) or by working with game developers and publishers to provide multiplayer capabilities for hundreds of PC and console games. Even in instances when GameSpy did not provide the online infrastructure for a ga…
The Work of Sexual Violence Reporting
Controlled connection
Substack, a self-described “subscription network for independent writers and creators,” launched in 2017. Substack claims to be part of a better future for news workers, yet it has been embroiled in controversy and questions, particularly in recent years. In this article, we draw on interviews we conducted with journalists and writers of color who produce newsletters to better understand the opportunities and limitations of contemporary newslette…
Misogyny, Survivorship, and Believability on Digital Platforms
On 18th May 2022, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg declared “the death of #MeToo” (Goldberg, 2022). The papers in this panel examine this claim and wrestle with its potential implications. Drawing on case studies and data from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, we evaluate the current state of play in the online push-and-pull between feminist speech about gender-based violence and…
Verified play, precarious work
This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced…
Authentification at the Edge
While platforms may be hard to know, they are increasingly invested in knowing—and policing— users. From “verified accounts” to “two-factor authentication,” platform affordances have proffered metrics of “authenticity” as an antidote to the uncertainties of attention economies, which are ostensibly saturated by fake news, misinformation, and algorithmic radicalization (Haimson & Hoffman, 2016; Caplan, 2020). Yet the platformization of realness cl…
When the machine hails you, do you turn? Media orientations and the constitution of digital space
Machines have gone by many names, both in and outside of media theories. They have been called tools, prosthetics, auxiliary organs, and more. This paper explores what happens when we think of media as orientating devices. Sara Ahmed (2006) attends to the way orientations — sexual orientations, but also orientations as ways of being in the world more generally — come to be, and come to be felt on the body. Though Ahmed does not speak of media spe…
Information Activism
The mouth of the internet, the eyes of the public
Sexual violence reporting is a site where issues of visibility, publicity, privacy, algorithms, and intelligibility all converge, and where the language of digital “space” is married to metaphors of “going public.” Using Google search results of Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller’s stories of sexual violence as a springboard, this theoretical paper explores how all of these metaphors—public spaces, going public, being seen—are both prevalent and en…
For the Record
James Carey famously repositioned the spotlight on the techniques of journalism itself as a practice devoted to the task of defining “what is to be considered real: what can be written about and how it can be understood.” This article looks at shorthand, the tape recorder, and the cameraphone as material objects that shape journalism as a practice even as they, in turn, are discursively constructed by and situated in journalists’ quest to establi…
The mouth of the internet, the eyes of the public
Sexual violence reporting is a site where issues of visibility, publicity, privacy, algorithms, and intelligibility all converge, and where the language of digital “space” is married to metaphors of “going public.” Using Google search results of Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller’s stories of sexual violence as a springboard, this theoretical paper explores how all of these metaphors—public spaces, going public, being seen—are both prevalent and en…
Verified play, precarious work
This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced…
For the Record
James Carey famously repositioned the spotlight on the techniques of journalism itself as a practice devoted to the task of defining “what is to be considered real: what can be written about and how it can be understood.” This article looks at shorthand, the tape recorder, and the cameraphone as material objects that shape journalism as a practice even as they, in turn, are discursively constructed by and situated in journalists’ quest to establi…
Authentification at the Edge
While platforms may be hard to know, they are increasingly invested in knowing—and policing— users. From “verified accounts” to “two-factor authentication,” platform affordances have proffered metrics of “authenticity” as an antidote to the uncertainties of attention economies, which are ostensibly saturated by fake news, misinformation, and algorithmic radicalization (Haimson & Hoffman, 2016; Caplan, 2020). Yet the platformization of realness cl…
When the machine hails you, do you turn? Media orientations and the constitution of digital space
Machines have gone by many names, both in and outside of media theories. They have been called tools, prosthetics, auxiliary organs, and more. This paper explores what happens when we think of media as orientating devices. Sara Ahmed (2006) attends to the way orientations — sexual orientations, but also orientations as ways of being in the world more generally — come to be, and come to be felt on the body. Though Ahmed does not speak of media spe…
Information Activism
The mouth of the internet, the eyes of the public
Sexual violence reporting is a site where issues of visibility, publicity, privacy, algorithms, and intelligibility all converge, and where the language of digital “space” is married to metaphors of “going public.” Using Google search results of Emma Sulkowicz and Chanel Miller’s stories of sexual violence as a springboard, this theoretical paper explores how all of these metaphors—public spaces, going public, being seen—are both prevalent and en…
For the Record
James Carey famously repositioned the spotlight on the techniques of journalism itself as a practice devoted to the task of defining “what is to be considered real: what can be written about and how it can be understood.” This article looks at shorthand, the tape recorder, and the cameraphone as material objects that shape journalism as a practice even as they, in turn, are discursively constructed by and situated in journalists’ quest to establi…
Misogyny, Survivorship, and Believability on Digital Platforms
On 18th May 2022, in an opinion piece for The New York Times, columnist Michelle Goldberg declared “the death of #MeToo” (Goldberg, 2022). The papers in this panel examine this claim and wrestle with its potential implications. Drawing on case studies and data from the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, and Ireland, we evaluate the current state of play in the online push-and-pull between feminist speech about gender-based violence and…
Verified play, precarious work
This article argues that GamerGate, a critical hashtag event in the history of digital harassment, is key to understanding contemporary identity verification systems and digital labour. We build our argument from a comparative analysis of two case studies: (1) digital journalistic responses to GamerGate and (2) Twitter’s account verification ‘checkmark’ system from 2021 to 2022. These phenomena showcase the linkages between the gendered and raced…
Controlled connection
Substack, a self-described “subscription network for independent writers and creators,” launched in 2017. Substack claims to be part of a better future for news workers, yet it has been embroiled in controversy and questions, particularly in recent years. In this article, we draw on interviews we conducted with journalists and writers of color who produce newsletters to better understand the opportunities and limitations of contemporary newslette…
The Work of Sexual Violence Reporting
The Life, Death, and Afterlife of Gamespy
In the late 90s and early 2000s, GameSpy Network, was an inescapable presence of the early interactive web—either in the GameSpy Network—a collection of websites dedicated to covering popular game franchises (e.g Planet Quake, Planet Half-Life) or by working with game developers and publishers to provide multiplayer capabilities for hundreds of PC and console games. Even in instances when GameSpy did not provide the online infrastructure for a ga…
Sociology (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Law (6 works) · Political science (6 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (5 works) · Media studies (5 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Digital Games and Media (3 works) · Digital media (3 works) · Gender Studies (3 works)