Week 2: Stefanie Duguay

1. Watch The Video Lecture
In this lecture, Stefanie Duguay looks at the relationship between selfies and self-imaging videos and the platforms on which these images are distributed.  Importantly, she is interested in exploring how the collision of selfies and technological platforms enable or disable the visibility of lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and queer (LGBTQ) people. Duguay uses a theoretical framework called Actor Network Theory to look at the case study of celebrity and LGBTQ advocate Ruby Rose and her self imaging practices on two social media platforms: Instagram and Vine. What Duguay reveals is that platform elements, or mediators, can influence the conversational capacity of selfies.  This lecture makes us rethink the 'passivity' of technology in shaping our actions and visual depictions of your identities.

2. Required Readings

  1. Vivienne, S. & Burgess, J. (2012). The digital storyteller’s stage: Queer everyday activists negotiating privacy and publicness. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 56(3), 362-377.
  2. Berlant, L. & Warner, M. (1998). Sex in public. Critical Inquiry, 24(2), 547-566.
  3. Chapter 2 “Disassembling platforms, reassembling sociality” (pp. 24-44) in van Dijck, J. (2013). The culture of connectivity: A critical history of social media. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
  4. Duguay, S. (2016). LGBTQ visibility through selfies: Comparing platform mediators across Ruby Rose’s Instagram and Vine presence. Social Media + Society, 2(2), 1-12.

3. Assignments and reflections...

1. Pick a topic related to identity or social justice that users might post about on Instagram and Vine. Find the popular hashtags about this topic on each platform (they may not be identical), and compare users’ images across platforms.
Example topics:
  • #blacklivesmatter
  • Transgender identity (see #transproblems on Vine and #transgender on Instagram)
  • #Vapelife
  1. What differences do you see between the way this topic is represented on each platform?
  2. What do the most recurrent representations say about aspects of identity (e.g. what view on ethnicity, sexuality, gender, ability, age, marital status, etc., do they perpetuate?)
  3. What platform affordances/features are users taking advantage of to make a point or depict their identity?
Bonus: Look up the same topic on another platform, such as Tumblr, and re-answer the questions comparing across all three platforms.


2. Find one of your selfies on a social media platform and assess its conversational capacity.
  1. What range of discourses is your selfie communicating? Does it say anything about your identity?
  2. How far is your selfie’s reach? Have you shared it on other platforms? Have others liked, commented and re-shared it?
  3. How salient are your selfie’s discourses? How clearly does the selfie say something about you? Are its statements obscured by a focus on appearance?
Given your assessment, could this selfie or any of your other selfies constitute a form of everyday activism (sharing your personal story/identity to challenge social norms)?