Amidst the torrent of hate and harassment online lie some messages which, on their own, appear innocuous. Between being called an “attention whore” and receiving threats of physical violence, a feminist and pop culture... [ view full abstract ]
Amidst the torrent of hate and harassment online lie some messages which, on their own, appear innocuous. Between being called an “attention whore” and receiving threats of physical violence, a feminist and pop culture commentator was also sent tweets such as “Where are the six other videos you described in your original Kickstarter?”. In order to understand that this may be more than a simple question, the reader requires knowledge of not only the context on twitter, but also an in-depth understanding of the communities in which the tweeter and the tweeted are operating. However, understanding this wide-reaching and nearly untraceable context is difficult as Twitter is a site of context collapse.
Marwick and boyd (Marwick & boyd, 2011) demonstrate how context collapse allows users to write for their own ideal audience despite the fact that tweets can (and likely will) be read more widely. Due to this context collapse, it can become difficult to identify the ideal audience of a tweet as well as the intended purpose or interpretation of the tweet (Georgakopoulou, 2017). Context collapse provides the basis for which harassment and abuse can be analysed online. This theory accounts for the instances of harassment that, out of context, appear innocuous and thus fall through the cracks when defining and identifying this widespread issue. Based on tweets sent to one woman and her media company during one week of extreme hate online, this presentation will demonstrate how seemingly innocuous tweets need to be understood and analysed in terms of context collapse in order to deepen our understanding of online abuse.
References
Georgakopoulou, A. (2017). “Whose context collapse?”: Ethical clashes in the study of language and social media in context. Applied Linguistics Review, 8(2/3), 169–189.
Marwick, A. E., & boyd, danah. (2011). I tweet honestly, I tweet passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience. New Media & Society, 13(1), 114–133.
