#AoIR2024 Industry

Session Chair: Jonathan Corpus Ong
 
Presentation 1
 
Endemic identities: Social media self-representation in “the long pandemic”
Chelsea Paige Butkowski
American University, United States of America
 
Although the World Health Organization put an end to the enduring state of pandemic public health emergency in May 2023, the COVID-19 virus remains an everyday reality and risk around the world. Cases continue to surge in many countries, but experts suggest that the virus is transitioning from a pandemic into an endemic phase, meaning that it will be indefinitely present in human populations. Through this project, I argue that COVID-19 has had important social implications that will remain just as endemic as the virus itself. More specifically, I study the relationship between pandemic cultures and ideals of identity performance on social media in 2024, five years into this ongoing crisis. This research is based in cross-platform scroll back interviews with U.S. American social media users. The interviews involve inviting research participants to scroll backward on their social media profiles, co-analyzing and reinterpreting their profile histories in the present. Preliminary findings suggest that while many participants have retired strategic self-representational practices that they developed to manage emergent social expectations during early COVID, perceived shifts in their values surrounding digital identity have proven more enduring. I draw on these findings to theorize about the significance of unending crisis events for identity performance.
 
 
Presentation 2
 
Pandemic Pals: Online Communities of Mutual Aid in India
Dyuti Jha, Jeremy David Foote
Purdue University, United States of America
 
A large mutual aid culture in India emerged during COVID-19 pandemic. As COVID-19 presented a massive shock and a huge organizational challenge to the formal healthcare system, several informal, online information and communication organizations emerged. Some of these online communities were large in membership and target areas whereas some emerged as smaller communities targeting local calls for help in smaller cities with limited access to resources. Under the lockdown, the formation and functions of these communities occurred almost exclusively through online communication across multiple platforms, both within the group and with outside stakeholders including patients, vendors, and healthcare authorities. To understand how and why the sort of organizations observed in India during COVID-19 would emerge or how they navigate organizational challenges posed by severe resource constraints, this paper studies the phenomenon of the emergence and function of online mutual aid communities in India through interviews with people who actively participated in these communities. Understanding how these mutual aid groups not only minimize the organizational challenges in the healthcare system during the pandemic by bridging the information gap between online and offline communities but also through a variety of organizational practices and principles managed to serve other purposes such as providing social support to fellow group members and caring for a marginalized community adds significantly to the understanding of how resilience is fostered in online communities during crises in the global South.
 
 
Presentation 3
 
“They will destroy Telegram” – Narratives of platform censorship in the German-speaking COVID-19 conspiracy community on Telegram
Ricarda Drüeke, Corinna Peil, Charlotte Spencer-Smith
University of Salzburg, Department of Communication Studies, Austria
 
The Covid-19 pandemic has significantly amplified the dissemination of conspiracy theories. In response, social media platforms have intensified their efforts in content moderation, prompting conspiracy theorists to seek refuge on platforms like Telegram. Our study examines conspiracy theorists' perceptions of and misconceptions about content moderation practices on different social media platforms, as discussed in Telegram channels of the “Querdenken” community. Different narratives emerge in relation to the platforms discussed (Telegram, Facebook, and YouTube). Our findings provide insight into how conspiracy theorists construe disruptions in their communication channels, intertwining notions of platform power with their conspiratorial worldview.
 
 
Presentation 4
 
The offline strikes back: complicating the role of digital technologies in Covid-19 mutual aid activism
Elisabetta Ferrari
University of Glasgow, United Kingdom
 
As the Covid-19 pandemic spread globally, activist-led mutual aid efforts quickly emerged all over the world to help people access food and other basic necessities. Mutual aid activists relied on multi-layered digital practices to coordinate their efforts, largely by employing corporate digital technologies. In conversation with the literature on digital activism and drawing on 39 interviews with activists in the US, Italy and the UK, in this paper I examine how Covid-19 mutual aid complicates our understanding of the intersection of activism and digital technologies and of the online/offline divide. I show that contradictory experiences of the digital marked this wave of solidarity activism. First, while mutual aid was fully digital, especially given the necessity to organize while physically distancing, it was also embodied, because activists physically had to come together to prepare and distribute food and PPE. At the same time, there was also a new appreciation for digital-only activism as an equally valid form of engagement. Second, some mutual aid groups adopted very sophisticated tech-enabled systems, which required significant labor to manage and had a steep learning curve. Other groups, however, relied on less sophisticated tech practices (e.g. Whatsapp chats and phone calls). Even in a moment of heightened centrality of digital communication, such as the pandemic, the offline was still crucial. I argue that we can make sense of these somewhat contradictory aspects through activists’ commitment to care as overarching principle, which oriented them towards developing more inclusive movements, built on overlapping modalities of activism.