Produsing Theory in a Digital World 3.0

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Cover image: Windsor by ChiTownMuggle (2019).
Reprinted with kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

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About the author

Rebecca Ann Lind (Ph.D., University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has published on race, gender, class and media; journalism; new media; media ethics; and media audiences.

About the book

Continuing the explorations begun in the first two Produsing Theory volumes, this book investigates some of the tensions generated in the spaces enabled by the confl uence of the formerly disparate activities of producing and consuming media. Multiple and varied theories— some still emerging—are invoked in attempts to illuminate the spaces between what previously had been neatly-separated components of media systems. This book is useful in a number of courses such as media culture and theory, introduction to new media, the Internet and the audience, new media theory and research, mass communication theory, emerging media, critical analysis and new media, concepts of new media, new media participants, new media in a democratic society, critical studies in new media, new media and social media, digital media studies, participatory media, media audiences in a digital world, digital cultures and social media, Web culture and new media studies, introduction to new media, new media and society, and more.

“A collection of sparkling ideas from many of the fi eld’s best thinkers, this book is sure to generate productive discussion.”

—Nancy Baym, Senior Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research

“Through a series of thought-provoking essays bound to appeal to those both in and new to the fi elds of media and communication studies, this volume minds the gaps between production, audience, and Internet studies, bringing theories of the technological, computational, discursive and critical along for the journey.”

—Lynn Schofi eld Clark, University of Denver

This eBook can be cited

This edition of the eBook can be cited. To enable this we have marked the start and end of a page. In cases where a word straddles a page break, the marker is placed inside the word at exactly the same position as in the physical book. This means that occasionally a word might be bifurcated by this marker.

Acknowledgments

1. Produsing Theory in a Digital World: Minding the Gap

Rebecca Ann Lind

2. “With and between you all”: Celebrity Status, User-Audience Networks, and Representative Claims in Emma Watson’s Feminist Politics

Ellen Watts and Andrew Chadwick

3. L8r H8r: Commoditized Privacy, Influencer Wars, and Productive Disorder in the Influencer Industry

Crystal Abidin

4. Production and Performance of White Anti-Racism in Online Media

Michael Potts

5. Networked Gatekeeping and Networked Framing of #BlackLivesMatter Publics during the 2016 US Presidential Election

Sharon Meraz

6. The Potential of Social Media Groups to Afford Users a Voice

James Ngetha Gachau

7. “Glamorous factories of unpredictable freedom”: Care, Coalition, and Hacking Hacking

Christina Dunbar-Hester

8. Religious Influencers: Faith in the World of Marketing

Mara Einstein

9. Audiences, Affects, Attachments: Theorizing Textual Approaches to Digital Culture

Akane Kanai

10. Discourse-Analytical Studies on Social Media Platforms: A Data-Driven Mixed-Methods Approach

Ehsan Dehghan, Axel Bruns, Peta Mitchell and Brenda Moon

11. The Hyperperception Model: How Observing Others on Social Media Can Affect People in Close Relationships

Erin L. Spottswood and Christopher J. Carpenter

12. Proposing a Model of Social Media Use and Well-Being

Marina Krcmar, Drew P. Cingel, Yifan Zhao, and Lauren Taylor

13. Audiences Assemble: Becoming an Audience and Produser in Mixed Media Environments

Annette Hill

14. Coordination, Continuity, Configuration: Toward a Mattering Framework for Human-Machine Produsing

Jaime Banks

15. Afterword: The Legitimacy of Produsage

Robert W. Gehl

Contributors

Index

Acknowledgments

With the publication of this book, Produsing Theory has become a trilogy. Just as in the first two volumes, my greatest thanks must be given to the contributors. I have enjoyed working with and learning from the contributors in this and the first two volumes. Besides generously sharing their intriguing ideas in the following pages, the authors have been responsive, understanding, and still willing to look at my emails even after some fairly intense conversations during the writing process. I hope they are pleased with the outcome.

In addition, and as always, many thanks are due to my colleagues (especially Steve Jones and Zizi Papacharissi) in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (and its Dean, Astrida Orle Tantillo), for their support.

The folks at Peter Lang have also been a pleasure to work with, and I owe special thanks to the three editors who have been involved in the Produsing Theory books: Erika Hendrix, Kathryn Harrison, and Mary Savigar. Thank you for helping bring these ideas to fruition!

Grateful acknowledgment is made to the following for permission to use copyrighted material:

Cover image: Windsor by ChiTownMuggle (2019). Reprinted with kind permission of the artist. All rights reserved.

1. Produsing Theory in a Digital World: Minding the Gap

Rebecca Ann Lind

Minding the gap. This book, like the other two Produsing Theory volumes, is all about the gaps. But unlike the physical and perilous gaps of public transportation systems such as the London Underground, the gaps with which we are concerned are conceptual and productive—they’re the spaces between what previously had been neatly separated and discrete components of media systems. In some settings, division by audience, content, and production settings remains useful (e.g., Lind, 2017), but this volume, like the previous two (Lind, 2012, 2015), focuses on the interstitial spaces and the intersections between and around these settings: the gaps.

We may still refer to texts, audiences, and producers, but in a media environment increasingly driven by what Coates (2005) called social software, we must expand our focus if we are to understand the relationship among these components. Coates defined social software loosely as “software which supports, extends, or derives added value from, human social behaviour—message-boards, musical taste-sharing, photo-sharing, instant messaging, mailing lists, social networking.”

In this book, we’ll continue our exploration of the gaps such as the spaces and intersections between self and other (including nonhuman others), between audiences and texts (including how audiences assemble), between exploration and inhibition (including reinforcing or challenging hegemonic racial or gendered identities), and—of course—between the production and use of media. Each of these gaps is a site that can be illuminated by the various theories and methods, some still emerging, presented herein. The chapters present multiple perspectives to consider and study these spaces made possible by ongoing developments in communications technologies and social software. Each has some type of connection to what Axel Bruns (2008) called ←1 | 2→produsage, briefly defined as “the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement” (p. 21). Produsers enact a hybrid role in the system—they both produce and use media content. They thrive in the gaps.