Alexander Cho – författare

This book takes an extensive look at the many different types of users and cultures that comprise the popular social media platform Tumblr. Though it does not receive nearly as much attention as other social media such as Twitter or Facebook, Tumblr and its users have been hugely influential in creating and shifting popular culture, especially progressive youth culture, with the New York Times referring to 2014 as the dawning of the “age of Tumblr activism.”Perfect for those unfamiliar with the platform as well as those who grew up on it, this volume contains essays and artwork that span many different topics: fandom; platform structure and design; race, gender and sexuality, including queer and trans identities; aesthetics; disability and mental health; and social media privacy and ethics. An entire generation of young people that is now beginning to influence mass culture and politics came of age on Tumblr, and this volume is an indispensable guide to the many ways this platform works.

This book takes an extensive look at the many different types of users and cultures that comprise the popular social media platform Tumblr. Though it does not receive nearly as much attention as other social media such as Twitter or Facebook, Tumblr and its users have been hugely influential in creating and shifting popular culture, especially progressive youth culture, with the New York Times referring to 2014 as the dawning of the “age of Tumblr activism.”Perfect for those unfamiliar with the platform as well as those who grew up on it, this volume contains essays and artwork that span many different topics: fandom; platform structure and design; race, gender and sexuality, including queer and trans identities; aesthetics; disability and mental health; and social media privacy and ethics. An entire generation of young people that is now beginning to influence mass culture and politics came of age on Tumblr, and this volume is an indispensable guide to the many ways this platform works.

Affect’s Engine is an immersive ethnography of queer people of color on the social media platform Tumblr during its “peak,” from 2010 to 2015. Chronicling a formative time in social media history, Alexander Cho traces the affective patterns and practices of these users, showing how they forged deeply felt, often wordless connections while also cultivating a vibrant politics of resistance to white supremacy and heteronormativity. From “intersensuality” to “attunement” to “haptic wayfinding,” Cho offers a vocabulary to describe these cultures of use that travels across media studies, affect studies, human-computer interaction, and queer of color critique. By paying critical attention to Tumblr’s unique user experience, he argues that the same features that drew queer people of color to Tumblr to feel intensely also explain why the platform struggled to succeed financially: its design did not cohere around the good liberal subject—linear, singular, discrete, orderly, public, and market legible. Cho paints a vivid picture of a vital and bygone internet era, and asks readers to take seriously how affect is shaped by user-facing design on social media.

Affect’s Engine is an immersive ethnography of queer people of color on the social media platform Tumblr during its “peak,” from 2010 to 2015. Chronicling a formative time in social media history, Alexander Cho traces the affective patterns and practices of these users, showing how they forged deeply felt, often wordless connections while also cultivating a vibrant politics of resistance to white supremacy and heteronormativity. From “intersensuality” to “attunement” to “haptic wayfinding,” Cho offers a vocabulary to describe these cultures of use that travels across media studies, affect studies, human-computer interaction, and queer of color critique. By paying critical attention to Tumblr’s unique user experience, he argues that the same features that drew queer people of color to Tumblr to feel intensely also explain why the platform struggled to succeed financially: its design did not cohere around the good liberal subject—linear, singular, discrete, orderly, public, and market legible. Cho paints a vivid picture of a vital and bygone internet era, and asks readers to take seriously how affect is shaped by user-facing design on social media.

How black and Latino youth learn, create, and collaborate onlineThe Digital Edge examines how the digital and social-media lives of low-income youth, especially youth of color, have evolved amidst rapid social and technological change. While notions of the digital divide between the "technology rich" and the "technology poor" have largely focused on access to new media technologies, the contours of the digital divide have grown increasingly complex. Analyzing data from a year‐long ethnographic study at Freeway High School, the authors investigate how the digital media ecologies and practices of black and Latino youth have adapted as a result of the wider diffusion of the internet all around us--in homes, at school, and in the palm of our hands. Their eager adoption of different technologies forge new possibilities for learning and creating that recognize the collective power of youth: peer networks, inventive uses of technology, and impassioned interests that are remaking the digital world.Relying on nearly three hundred in-depth interviews with students, teachers, and parents, and hundreds of hours of observation in technology classes and after school programs, The Digital Edge carefully documents some of the emergent challenges for creating a more equitable digital and educational future. Focusing on the complex interactions between race, class, gender, geography and social inequality, the book explores the educational perils and possibilities of the expansion of digital media into the lives and learning environments of low-income youth. Ultimately, the book addresses how schools can support the ability of students to develop the social, technological, and educational skills required to navigate twenty-first century life.