Browsing by Author "Jorge, Ana"
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- Book review of Van der Graaf, S. (2018). ComMODify: user creativity at the intersection of commerce and community. London: Palgrave Macmillan.Publication . Jorge, AnaThis book by Shenja Van der Graaf offers a detailed study to investigate user participation in a platform of the software industry, crucially a “firm-hosted platform that thrives on user participation and creativity” (p. 16). The author, currently a Senior Researcher at imec-SMIT of Vrije Universiteit in Brussels, seeks to address the gap in existing scholarship on user-participation which “has tended to be based frequently on intuitive claims about user participation” (p. 9). The research focuses on modding, an abbreviation for the practice of modifying a game by a developer. In looking at Second Life as the main case, this work “tells a story of content creation, connectivity and commodification between the developer firm and user communities indicative of tensions such as those about exploitation and privacy we are currently facing online associated with the transition from user-based to market-based platforms like Facebook” (p. 3).
- Digital disconnection and Portuguese youth: motivations, strategies, and well-being outcomesPublication . Dias, Patrícia; Martinho, Leonor; Jorge, AnaAs most individuals become digital media users, many struggle to find balance in such use. This study adds to emergent research on how digital disconnection experiences reflect on wellbeing (Nguyen et al., 2021; Radtke et al., 2022; Vanden Abeele, 2021) by focusing on motivations and strategies to disconnect from digital media, as well as on outcomes for well-being. We set out to understand teenagers who have voluntarily chosen to disconnect in the post-lockdown period in 2021. Our qualitative study included 20 participants from Portugal between 15 and 18 years old. Among those who consciously chose to disconnect from digital media, motivations arose from realizing that digital media was not bringing enough benefits for the amount of time that they took from users. Specific forms of digital media stood out as particularly problematic for young people, especially social media, but also videogames and pornography. This realization seems to be strongly influenced by the media and is evident in the vocabulary and associations used by our respondents. Social pressure is felt both as causing anxiety when they are connected and when they are disconnected through fear of missing out. However, the group provides support when they engage in a progressive disconnection together. Radical disconnection is rare, especially during the pandemic, and can appear as a solution to a dramatic problem in young people’s lives, but it can also be reverted. More often, participants attempted to self-regulate their use of digital when they acknowledged the advantages of those services as well as their drawbacks. This is not a linear process but rather filled with attempts and reversals as unexpected feelings such as boredom arise. When young people grow different leisure and social habits, they experience positive outcomes of disconnecting from the digital.
- EditorialPublication . García-Jimenez, Antonio; Jorge, Ana
- Ferramentas jornalísticas na educação: uma rádio online para jovensPublication . Brites, Maria José; Santos, Sílvio Correia; Jorge, Ana; Catalão, DanielThe relationship between journalism and education remains in a yet weakly explored camp, although journalism can embody a pedagogical tool, oriented to the practice of journalistic concepts and techniques. In this article, we explore a case-study of an online radio developed with youth communities, using participant observation, interviews and focus groups conducted in the scope of the project RadioActive Europe (2013-14). We argue that these young participants take similar roles in daily life and particularly in school to those used in contexts of radio participation. Learning through action, however, implies long lasting intervention processes so that the transposal of roles taken up in the project may be more perennial, dynamic and fluid in the personal life processes.
- Growing out of overconnection: the process of dis/connecting among Norwegian and Portuguese teenagersPublication . Jorge, Ana; Agai, Mehri; Dias, Patrícia; Martinho, Leonor Cunha VazYoung people struggle with permanent online connection that is associated with their generation. This article looks at teenagers’ affective relationship to connectivity and disconnectivity, and how it is socioculturally influenced by the media, family, and peers. It reports on an interview study with 36 teenagers between 15 and 19 years of age from Norway and Portugal. Our findings evidenced how disconnection may arise out of a latent feeling of “disaffect” generated in the experience of the ambience of connected and platform culture as well as the media; or of the unavailability created by how teenagers spend their leisure time, which is influenced by families’ moral economies. Teenagers have to perform affective labor in managing the different, sometimes contradictory, forces that converge in the experience of connectivity. Managing digital disconnection appears as an individual—but socially produced—moral obligation to self-govern, to which teenagers have unequal conditions.
- 'I am not being sponsored to say this': a teen youtuber and her audience negotiate branded contentPublication . Jorge, Ana; Marôpo, Lidia; Nunes, ThaysThe field of microcelebrity is increasingly monetised, professionalised, and institutionalised, with the growing recognition of content creators as social media influencers. This article looks at the integration of branded content within youth digital culture, where participatory possibilities for self-expression are more and more entwined with consumer culture. It seeks to discuss how digital producers understand brand culture and how audiences negotiate the meanings of the commercialism inserted in their content. We look at the case of SofiaBBeauty, a successful young Portuguese youtuber, who has been vlogging since she was 12. The article analyses her association with brands in 12 videos in 2017 (vlog, haul, giveaway, Q&A, first impression, etc.), and the comments by the users showing acceptance and appraisal of, negotiation, or criticism towards, the brand and/or the youtuber. We explore the way Sofia connects her self-presentation with products/brands to appear close to her young audiences, and brands her persona as she is growing up to adulthood; how she presents her commercial recommendations as genuine and pregnant with affect, and whether the audience accepts it or not; as well as how she positions herself in the global YouTube community of practice, where connection with brands aggrandizes her persona in the eyes of the audience. Sofia's videos create a post-feminist subject where consumption is articulated with independence, capability, and empowerment (Banet-Weiser, 2011), while engaging her audiences in a commodification process (Berryman & Kavka, 2017).
- Media education competitions: an efficient strategy for digital literacies?Publication . Pereira, Luis; Jorge, Ana; Brites, Maria JoséIn this paper we present results from research in Portugal about competitions in schools that involve digital education (2010-2015). The aim of this study is to discuss its effectiveness as a strategy for developing Media Education. The 16 activities we have collected are mostly targeted at the school population and show an emphasis on media production, a dimension that is often not considered part of formal learning, which is more focused on reading than on writing. The results lead us to raise questions about the importance of non-formal education. Interestingly, most of these initiatives have been designed to take place in the school context and are, in various ways, supported by the Ministry of Education, a situation which blurs the boundaries between formal and non-formal learning. The analysis of the data leads us to this specific recommendation: these initiatives should be formally evaluated in order to understand their real impact on the acquisition of news media education skills.
- Mummy influencers and professional sharentingPublication . Jorge, Ana; Marôpo, Lidia; Coelho, Ana Margarida; Novello, LiaSharenting (sharing parenting on social media) has become a widespread activity, and some of those parents become family influencers. Female influencers have been on the rise, partly as an alternative to the precariousness of the job market. This article presents a qualitative study on 11 Portuguese mummy and family influencers, analysing social media content observed throughout 2.5 years, as well as media discourses on them. It focuses on how these female content creators portray parenting and family, work–life balance as an influencer and their boundaries for privacy and intimacy. It demonstrates how prominent mummy influencers reproduce a neoliberal ethos which favours an individual management of reconciling motherhood and a career in the context of post-austerity and precarity, through an emotional discourse that promotes relatability with the audience, converted into an essentially consumerist agenda.
- Parenting on celebrities’ and influencers’ social media: revamping traditional gender portrayalsPublication . Jorge, Ana; Garcez, Bibiana; Carvalho, Bárbara Janiques de; Coelho, Ana MargaridaThis study consisted of a content analysis of parenting portrayals in the 40 most popular Portuguese male and female content producers on YouTube and Instagram, on a sample of content published in 2019. Female creators give disproportionately greater attention to parenting and are the ones depicting everyday labor related to it, whereas male creators show themselves as fathers in happy and fun moments. By way of their popularity and visibility on social media platforms, and as supported by the social media platforms and advertising realms, celebrities and influencers are amplifying the traditional division of parenting labor through the mechanisms of a postfeminist, hyper-individualistic discourse emphasized by female influencers and celebrities, and of humoristic content that confirms gender stereotypes without social punishment, deployed by entertainment personalities, both male and female.
- Social media, interrupted: users recounting temporary disconnection on InstagramPublication . Jorge, AnaThis article looks at the discourses of Instagram users about interrupting the use of social or digital media, through hashtags such as “socialmediadetox,” “offline,” or “disconnecttoreconnect.” We identified three predominant themes: posts announcing or recounting voluntary interruption, mostly as a positive experience associated to regaining control over time, social relationships, and their own well-being; others actively campaigning for this type of disconnection, attempting to convert others; and disconnection as a lifestyle choice, or marketing products by association with disconnection imaginary. These discourses reproduce other public discourses in asserting the self-regulation of the use of social media as a social norm, where social media users are responsible for their well-being and where interruption is conveyed as a valid way to achieve that end. They also reveal how digital disconnection and interruption is increasingly reintegrated on social media as lifestyle, in cynical and ironic ways, and commodified and co-opted by businesses, benefiting from—and ultimately contributing to—the continued economic success of the platform. As Hesselberth, Karppi, or Fish have argued in relation to other forms of disconnection, discourses about Instagram interruptions are thus not transformative but restorative of the informational capitalism social media are part of.