Commentators and scholars view both social media and cities as sites of fragmentation. Since both... more Commentators and scholars view both social media and cities as sites of fragmentation. Since both urban dwellers and social media users tend to form assortative social ties, so the reasoning goes, identity-based divisions are fortified and polarization is exacerbated in digital and urban spaces. Drawing on a dataset of 34.4 million interactions among Amsterdam Instagram users over half a year, this article seeks to gauge the level of fragmentation that occurs at the interface of digital and urban spaces. We find some evidence for fragmentation: users form clusters based on shared tastes and leisure activities, and these clusters are embedded in four distinct lifestyle zones at the interface of social media and the city. However, we also find connections that span divisions. Similarly, places that are tagged by Instagram users generally include a heterogeneity of clusters. While there is evidence that Instagram users sort into groups, there is no evidence that these groups are isolated from one another. In fact, our findings suggest that Instagram enables ties across different groups and mitigates against particularity and idiosyncrasy. These findings have important implications for how we should understand and study social media in the context of everyday life. Scholars should not only look for evidence of division through standard network analytic techniques like community detection, but also allow for countervailing tendencies.
Making sense of interaction in digital spaces is one of the key challenges for contemporary socio... more Making sense of interaction in digital spaces is one of the key challenges for contemporary sociology. Our paper makes a contribution to the sociological theorization of social media. It suggests that the dominant framing of social media in terms derived from communications scholarship, particularly the concept of the public sphere, proves unhelpful when trying to make sense of what people overwhelmingly use social media for in their everyday lives. The networked public sphere prism suggests that unbridled opinion exchange and political debate are what characterize social media and thus define our age. This has been part of the utopian investment in networked forms of communications, and has proven an important aspect in the context of recent protest mobilizations and movements for accountability in which social media played a highly publicized role. However, outside of such normative ideals and exceptional contexts , social media are rarely vehicles for opinion exchange or disruptive movements. Rather, from the perspective of everyday life, social media are more often aligned with order than with disruption, and with the display of status rather than reasoned debate. We propose drawing on the work of Norbert Elias to develop an alternate theorization of social media. Elias' early work on the court society, his analysis of the civilizing process, as well as the larger "figurational" approach to the study of human society he founded, are helpful not just in making sense of the status-seeking behavior of social media users, but also the new needs, desires, sensibilities and practices that emerge at the interface of social media and the spaces of everyday life. From Elias' work, we derive structural pressures as well as new sensibilities that emerge in social spaces ordered by an overarching system of rank. While the court-like sociality of social media tends to reinforce rather than challenge social order, this does not rule out that social media can become aligned with movements for social change. In these cases, however, activists have to actively work against pressures toward conformity, so their successes should be seen as exceptions, not as paradigmatic.
How do people represent the city on social media? And how do these representations feed back into... more How do people represent the city on social media? And how do these representations feed back into people's uses of the city? To answer these questions, we develop a relational approach that relies on a combination of qualitative methods and network analysis. Based on in-depth interviews and a dataset of over 400 000 geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam, we analyse how the city is reassembled on and through the platform. By selectively drawing on the city, users of the platform elevate exclusive and avant-garde establishments and events, which come to stand out as hot spots, while rendering mundane and low-status places invisible. We find that Instagram provides a space for the segmentation of users into subcultural groups that mobilise the city in varied ways. Social media practices, our findings suggest, feed on as well as perpetuate socio-spatial inequalities.
Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2014
This article offers a broad analysis of a POOC (“Participatory Open Online Course”) offered throu... more This article offers a broad analysis of a POOC (“Participatory Open Online Course”) offered through the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2013. The large collaborative team of instructors, librarians, educational technologists, videographers, students, and project leaders reflects on the goals, aims, successes, and challenges of the experimental learning project. The graduate course, which sought to explore issues of participatory research, inequality and engaged uses of digital technology with and through the New York City neighborhood of East Harlem, set forth a unique model of connected learning that stands in contrast to the popular MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) model.
We introduce Instagram as a data source for use by scholars in urban studies and neighboring disc... more We introduce Instagram as a data source for use by scholars in urban studies and neighboring disciplines and propose ways to operationalize key concepts in the study of cities. These data can help shed light on segregation, the formation of subcultures, strategies of distinction, and status hierarchies in the city. Drawing on two datasets of geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam and Copenhagen collected over a twelve-week period, we present a proof of concept for how to explore and visualize sociospatial patterns and divisions in these two cities. We take advantage of both the social and the geographic aspects of the data, using network analysis to identify distinct groups of users and metrics of unevenness and diversity to identify socio-spatial divisions. We also discuss some of the limitations of these data and methods and suggest ways in which they can complement established quantitative and qualitative approaches in urban scholarship.
How do city dwellers use social media to represent, perceive and navigate the urban landscape? Ho... more How do city dwellers use social media to represent, perceive and navigate the urban landscape? How do they use these media to find out what is happening in their city and to communicate their sense of belonging? How does the city feed into digital networks, and how these networks feed on the city? This paper develops a relational approach to these questions that relies on an innovative combination of qualitative methods and network analysis. It demonstrates the utility of this approach by analyzing a dataset of over 400,000 geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam posted by more than 30,000 users over twelve weeks in 2015. The analysis illuminates three important aspects of the interface between social media and the city. First, Instagram functions as a filtering device. It is a membrane over the surface of the city as it selects out certain parts of the urban landscape – the glamorous, the hip, the refined – and passes them through to users. By producing and circulating appealing pictures of exclusive, exciting and avantgarde establishments and events, Instagram users serve as voluntary promoters of high-end consumption and accelerators of gentrification. Second, Instagram functions as a stratification device. The networks that form on the platform are highly uneven. Some users command the lion’s share of the attention, while the overwhelming majority are relegated to the margins. Similarly, a relatively small set of places reaps most of the benefits from being pictured on the platform. The users and places that gain a high degree of visibility on Instagram already have considerable symbolic resources at their disposal in other domains. Third, Instagram is also a segmentation device. Users often cluster within subcultural groups that relate to the city in different ways. While Instagram users arguably enact neoliberal subjectivity, they are not mere cogs in the urban development machine. Their appreciation is reserved for distinctly local establishments, not for large chains. They also value cosmopolitan places where people from different backgrounds come together. The paper thus reflects on the refraction and restructuring of the city through social media. Its approach and findings inform both urban studies and media studies and speak to lacunae in both fields.
The axial age debate has put big questions of social and cultural change back on the agenda o... more The axial age debate has put big questions of social and cultural change back on the agenda of sociology. This paper takes this development as an occasion to reflect on how social thought works with (and against) nineteenth-century intellectual traditions in its efforts to understand history on a macro scale. Karl Jaspers, who initially formulated the axial age thesis in The Origin and Goal of History, revised the Hegelian account of world history by broadening the scope of the narrative to encompass all civilizations participating in the events of the first millennium BCE that saw the rise of major philosophical and religious traditions. However, his account, like the earlier philosophical accounts he seeks to improve upon, privileges cognitive developments over material practices and social interactions, and as such offers little to those seeking to make sense of how cultural patterns interact with others and spread. Here another social theorist engaging with Hegel, W. E. B. Du Bois, provides a helpful contrast. His account of the development of double-consciousness in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, helps us to understand experiences of encounter and the perduring historical effects they may have. Du Bois’ relational theory reminds us of the importance of unpacking abstractions and understanding processes in terms of social interactions.
The concept of the axial age, initially proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to ... more The concept of the axial age, initially proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to a period in the first millennium BCE that saw the rise of major religious and philosophical figures and ideas throughout Eurasia, has gained an established position in a number of fields, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of religion. We explore whether the notion of an “axial age” has historical and intellectual cogency, or whether the authors who use the label of a more free-floating “axiality” to connote varied “breakthroughs” in human experience may have a more compelling case. Throughout, we draw attention to ways in which uses of the axial age concept in contemporary social science vary in these and other respects. In the conclusion, we reflect on the value of the concept and its current uses and their utility in making sense of human experience.
Commentators and scholars view both social media and cities as sites of fragmentation. Since both... more Commentators and scholars view both social media and cities as sites of fragmentation. Since both urban dwellers and social media users tend to form assortative social ties, so the reasoning goes, identity-based divisions are fortified and polarization is exacerbated in digital and urban spaces. Drawing on a dataset of 34.4 million interactions among Amsterdam Instagram users over half a year, this article seeks to gauge the level of fragmentation that occurs at the interface of digital and urban spaces. We find some evidence for fragmentation: users form clusters based on shared tastes and leisure activities, and these clusters are embedded in four distinct lifestyle zones at the interface of social media and the city. However, we also find connections that span divisions. Similarly, places that are tagged by Instagram users generally include a heterogeneity of clusters. While there is evidence that Instagram users sort into groups, there is no evidence that these groups are isolated from one another. In fact, our findings suggest that Instagram enables ties across different groups and mitigates against particularity and idiosyncrasy. These findings have important implications for how we should understand and study social media in the context of everyday life. Scholars should not only look for evidence of division through standard network analytic techniques like community detection, but also allow for countervailing tendencies.
Making sense of interaction in digital spaces is one of the key challenges for contemporary socio... more Making sense of interaction in digital spaces is one of the key challenges for contemporary sociology. Our paper makes a contribution to the sociological theorization of social media. It suggests that the dominant framing of social media in terms derived from communications scholarship, particularly the concept of the public sphere, proves unhelpful when trying to make sense of what people overwhelmingly use social media for in their everyday lives. The networked public sphere prism suggests that unbridled opinion exchange and political debate are what characterize social media and thus define our age. This has been part of the utopian investment in networked forms of communications, and has proven an important aspect in the context of recent protest mobilizations and movements for accountability in which social media played a highly publicized role. However, outside of such normative ideals and exceptional contexts , social media are rarely vehicles for opinion exchange or disruptive movements. Rather, from the perspective of everyday life, social media are more often aligned with order than with disruption, and with the display of status rather than reasoned debate. We propose drawing on the work of Norbert Elias to develop an alternate theorization of social media. Elias' early work on the court society, his analysis of the civilizing process, as well as the larger "figurational" approach to the study of human society he founded, are helpful not just in making sense of the status-seeking behavior of social media users, but also the new needs, desires, sensibilities and practices that emerge at the interface of social media and the spaces of everyday life. From Elias' work, we derive structural pressures as well as new sensibilities that emerge in social spaces ordered by an overarching system of rank. While the court-like sociality of social media tends to reinforce rather than challenge social order, this does not rule out that social media can become aligned with movements for social change. In these cases, however, activists have to actively work against pressures toward conformity, so their successes should be seen as exceptions, not as paradigmatic.
How do people represent the city on social media? And how do these representations feed back into... more How do people represent the city on social media? And how do these representations feed back into people's uses of the city? To answer these questions, we develop a relational approach that relies on a combination of qualitative methods and network analysis. Based on in-depth interviews and a dataset of over 400 000 geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam, we analyse how the city is reassembled on and through the platform. By selectively drawing on the city, users of the platform elevate exclusive and avant-garde establishments and events, which come to stand out as hot spots, while rendering mundane and low-status places invisible. We find that Instagram provides a space for the segmentation of users into subcultural groups that mobilise the city in varied ways. Social media practices, our findings suggest, feed on as well as perpetuate socio-spatial inequalities.
Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, 2014
This article offers a broad analysis of a POOC (“Participatory Open Online Course”) offered throu... more This article offers a broad analysis of a POOC (“Participatory Open Online Course”) offered through the Graduate Center, CUNY in 2013. The large collaborative team of instructors, librarians, educational technologists, videographers, students, and project leaders reflects on the goals, aims, successes, and challenges of the experimental learning project. The graduate course, which sought to explore issues of participatory research, inequality and engaged uses of digital technology with and through the New York City neighborhood of East Harlem, set forth a unique model of connected learning that stands in contrast to the popular MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) model.
We introduce Instagram as a data source for use by scholars in urban studies and neighboring disc... more We introduce Instagram as a data source for use by scholars in urban studies and neighboring disciplines and propose ways to operationalize key concepts in the study of cities. These data can help shed light on segregation, the formation of subcultures, strategies of distinction, and status hierarchies in the city. Drawing on two datasets of geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam and Copenhagen collected over a twelve-week period, we present a proof of concept for how to explore and visualize sociospatial patterns and divisions in these two cities. We take advantage of both the social and the geographic aspects of the data, using network analysis to identify distinct groups of users and metrics of unevenness and diversity to identify socio-spatial divisions. We also discuss some of the limitations of these data and methods and suggest ways in which they can complement established quantitative and qualitative approaches in urban scholarship.
How do city dwellers use social media to represent, perceive and navigate the urban landscape? Ho... more How do city dwellers use social media to represent, perceive and navigate the urban landscape? How do they use these media to find out what is happening in their city and to communicate their sense of belonging? How does the city feed into digital networks, and how these networks feed on the city? This paper develops a relational approach to these questions that relies on an innovative combination of qualitative methods and network analysis. It demonstrates the utility of this approach by analyzing a dataset of over 400,000 geotagged Instagram posts from Amsterdam posted by more than 30,000 users over twelve weeks in 2015. The analysis illuminates three important aspects of the interface between social media and the city. First, Instagram functions as a filtering device. It is a membrane over the surface of the city as it selects out certain parts of the urban landscape – the glamorous, the hip, the refined – and passes them through to users. By producing and circulating appealing pictures of exclusive, exciting and avantgarde establishments and events, Instagram users serve as voluntary promoters of high-end consumption and accelerators of gentrification. Second, Instagram functions as a stratification device. The networks that form on the platform are highly uneven. Some users command the lion’s share of the attention, while the overwhelming majority are relegated to the margins. Similarly, a relatively small set of places reaps most of the benefits from being pictured on the platform. The users and places that gain a high degree of visibility on Instagram already have considerable symbolic resources at their disposal in other domains. Third, Instagram is also a segmentation device. Users often cluster within subcultural groups that relate to the city in different ways. While Instagram users arguably enact neoliberal subjectivity, they are not mere cogs in the urban development machine. Their appreciation is reserved for distinctly local establishments, not for large chains. They also value cosmopolitan places where people from different backgrounds come together. The paper thus reflects on the refraction and restructuring of the city through social media. Its approach and findings inform both urban studies and media studies and speak to lacunae in both fields.
The axial age debate has put big questions of social and cultural change back on the agenda o... more The axial age debate has put big questions of social and cultural change back on the agenda of sociology. This paper takes this development as an occasion to reflect on how social thought works with (and against) nineteenth-century intellectual traditions in its efforts to understand history on a macro scale. Karl Jaspers, who initially formulated the axial age thesis in The Origin and Goal of History, revised the Hegelian account of world history by broadening the scope of the narrative to encompass all civilizations participating in the events of the first millennium BCE that saw the rise of major philosophical and religious traditions. However, his account, like the earlier philosophical accounts he seeks to improve upon, privileges cognitive developments over material practices and social interactions, and as such offers little to those seeking to make sense of how cultural patterns interact with others and spread. Here another social theorist engaging with Hegel, W. E. B. Du Bois, provides a helpful contrast. His account of the development of double-consciousness in “Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” the opening chapter of The Souls of Black Folk, helps us to understand experiences of encounter and the perduring historical effects they may have. Du Bois’ relational theory reminds us of the importance of unpacking abstractions and understanding processes in terms of social interactions.
The concept of the axial age, initially proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to ... more The concept of the axial age, initially proposed by the philosopher Karl Jaspers to refer to a period in the first millennium BCE that saw the rise of major religious and philosophical figures and ideas throughout Eurasia, has gained an established position in a number of fields, including historical sociology, cultural sociology, and the sociology of religion. We explore whether the notion of an “axial age” has historical and intellectual cogency, or whether the authors who use the label of a more free-floating “axiality” to connote varied “breakthroughs” in human experience may have a more compelling case. Throughout, we draw attention to ways in which uses of the axial age concept in contemporary social science vary in these and other respects. In the conclusion, we reflect on the value of the concept and its current uses and their utility in making sense of human experience.
Uploads