Riana Patel
MSc student in Digital Anthropology at UCL
Location London
Activity
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Riana Patel replied to Riana Patel
I have! Maybe it's a response to exactly that behavior, so you can see who else might be interested without the investment of even clicking attending...
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Riana Patel made a comment
The course was great and I also really appreciated the stimulating discussion!
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Riana Patel made a comment
I agree with the theory of attainment, insofar as there is nothing new about humanity, but there are new technologies that do alter our experience of the world itself.
I would be interested to know how the debate about social media and humanity might change in light of advances in artificial intelligence that are testing what it means to fundamentally be...
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Riana Patel replied to Julie Freeman
The rhetoric of social media as the great equalizer, where everyone can connect with anyone is not necessarily true - the online resembles more of the offline than we might want to believe, certainly of our "niches"
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Riana Patel replied to Jamie Coates
Definitely agree
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Riana Patel made a comment
This video really digs into the complexities of homogeneity and heterogeneity - while two pictures may look identical and appear in two very different places, the meanings ascribed to them vary massively. Social media is "making" use the same as much as any technology or tool allows for the construction of a varied palette of experiences and...
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Riana Patel made a comment
To the first point, a common practice is clicking attending to events on Facebook but not actually attending to them in person - it allows you to signal to others that you are interested in x/y/z but doesn't require the time investment of going.
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Riana Patel made a comment
I see patterns in the type of postings, but the interesting thing about this course has been how the research gets at the underlying motivations and drivers about why we post - and these reasons certainly vary context to context.
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Great point - when no offline analog is present, how do we tackle the norms of online communities comparatively?
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Riana Patel made a comment
In the recent Paris attacks and the very recent Lahore attack, Facebook brought out the feature that allowed people to mark themselves as safe so family and friends on their networks would know - a much speedier way than say 10 years ago. This news also travels much quicker not just through postings of news stories, but by actual people who were there in times...
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Riana Patel made a comment
The roots behind the differences in the Brazilian and Chilean sites are fascinating - the desire to either leave the "backwards" village or to create a strong sense of community since the alternative in Santiago doesn't hold up to the values of the local place.
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Riana Patel made a comment
Higher status groups may include more than those who are wealthier than poorer groups. High status may be those who adopt technologies earlier than the majority of others - early adopters - who then have the benefit of experience and the status of being in the know when the technology becomes mainstream.
It may not be about the particular trends, but rather...
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Riana Patel made a comment
I thought the avoidance of the village background that is seen as backwards and poor actually creates a presence of aspiration through its lack, in the Brazilian field site.
I found that solidarity on social media follows during intense events, such as the Paris attacks, where many changed their profile pictures to show support by using the French flag. It...
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What to make of the use of social media by anti-capitalist groups? Subversion?
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Riana Patel made a comment
I use social media to communicate with people in my network, which is itself part of a particular socioeconomic context. I don't often directly communicate with others outside of this network, but it is interesting to see the availability of content produced by any number of different people who are of different genders, races, socioeconmic statuses, and...
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Riana Patel replied to Victoria W
Definitely agree! One of my favorite parts of the course.
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Riana Patel replied to James Moore
I do think anthropologists always bring their assumptions and preconceptions to the field, but I also think that the exercise of reflexivity helps to see where these assumptions and the actuality matches or doesn't match up. As far as narrativizing, I think there is absolutely a narrative constructed, but it is built up for 15 months of fieldwork by the team...
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Riana Patel made a comment
Lots of interesting insights into not only how social media is perceived but also the general feel of the site!
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The discussions on the course, to me, are equally as meaningful as the course content - I think this is because there are so many people sharing different opinions and thoughts that allows for a way of understanding the information posed through the lens of human experience.
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Is the form of surveillance necessarily top-down by the categories you listed? I sometimes may not post something because I don't want someone who may have access to reading it to read it - a form of self censorship and surveillance by tacit means.
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Riana Patel made a comment
Social media networks are definitely useful for businesses and can be helpful for consumers, though many distrust advertising since it is equated as being unscrupulous. I think this idea is founded when we consider the amount of data collected oftentimes without the explicit knowledge of an individual. It comes with the territory, but it is getting harder and...
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Sucharita, is the relationship between sponsored posts and inauthenticity coming from the readers of these posts? In other words, are the consumers skeptical of sponsored posts anyways, or will they read them with the caveat in mind?
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Riana Patel made a comment
Yes the distinction between social and business is very blurred -- in the same way that work and leisure in socializing has been blurred (from earlier week in the MOOC). However, I still think there are differences in the Chinese conceptions of how commerce may be conducted in practice than in other sites in the West. As discussed in last week's MOOC, giving...
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Riana Patel made a comment
Scalable sociality in social media may be changing the way that parents, students, and teachers interact. Where things were once private, they may now be able to become public through messaging and other interfaces that allow access to students and teachers after school hours. In my own experience, I used software such as Blackboard that was the hub for...
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Riana Patel made a comment
Social media is seen to be a disruptive force in schools, for the most part and one that, a few years ago, was seen as separate. You went to school and had your Facebook, but your school did not get involved in your profile. I think this has changed since the ubiquity of these networks has stood the test of (relative) time. More and more education startups are...
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I'm interested in how communities form online -- do you feel that these technologies are both facilitated by and engender a globalizing force or one that depends on the specific interests?
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I agree that immediacy is one of the biggest "new" features of social media that is likely the source of why we consider it a modern technology.
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Could you expand on what you mean if the balance changes towards the other way?
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Riana Patel made a comment
I think the immediacy and speed of social media seems particularly modern to me - especially since the elements of scalable sociality that have been articulated have to do more with private/public dichotomies rather than fast/slow.
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Riana Patel made a comment
When moving house, my social media use changed slightly in that I had to set up a new chat group for all my flatmates which was used to discuss house issues. It was a kind of unifying force over the process of moving in (and now, out) that allowed for centralized organization. We used it to express things formally, which is interesting since we would see each...
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Riana Patel made a comment
The tension between tradition and newness is a fascinating one, since we tend to equate broader social categories such as religion with being traditional and with social media platforms as being new. As we have seen throughout the course, new platforms are certainly new in some ways, but the patterns of behaviors as seen through content are not necessarily...
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Riana Patel replied to M F
I think it is an interesting question to pose, though the answer is obviously "yes" since it has led me to think about how similar problems become locally specific. The idea of the "Chinese" field site has grown from the researcher's specific experiences in the field site and of course we can't make a universalizing claim about the Chinese (particularly...
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Riana Patel made a comment
I think this example has been seen before - in the case study of Zehra last week, where she was managing different platforms and had to grapple with "family surveillance"
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Do you think these reputations influence the content actually produced on sites, such as reddit and tumblr for example? People who may not be "social justice warriors" quickly become inculcated in the dominant discourse of the platform and then might reproduce it--how true do you think this cycle might be?
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Riana Patel made a comment
Polymedia is a useful concept though of course is not a necessarily new idea -- it has a long history. One personal example came from when I contacted someone through email rather than texting/FB message. This was commented upon since email is much more for work or formal purposes and perhaps isn't checked as often. I only had access to email at the time, so...
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Riana Patel replied to [Learner left FutureLearn]
What do you think about the effects of the FutureLearn platform itself on learning, as compared to others you mentioned, like Coursera?
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Riana Patel replied to Graham kerr
I think we are already seeing the "retro platform" movement with things like digital detoxing/unplugging or more generally leaving Facebook. The reasons people often employ for doing these activities is to get "back" to their life, face-to-face communication.
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Riana Patel replied to Daniel Tiriba
It's interesting how social media can enter the lexicon to signify meanings besides communication.
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I agree with Miguel's point about interconnected products - and also Facebook to an extent, since WhatsApp and the newly released Oculus Rift are owned by FB.
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Riana Patel replied to Andrew Kahr
I'm interested about your separation of news/SM - since actually, for many users of FB, their newsfeed contains quite a lot of typically 'news' stories. Links from journalism/media sites like BBC/Guardian are posted by a lot of my friends and is often the first port of call for breaking news.
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To the point about the shake feature, I found this article fascinating about how WeChat's QR scanning altered how people greeted each other physically: https://medium.com/@xuhulk/are-you-scanning-me-or-am-i-scanning-you-558e1826c983#---436-852.6y8juyhmp
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I like that you allow for the ambiguity of effects - it is true that broadband simultaneously decreases and increases inequality depending on the context of "for whom"
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Riana Patel made a comment
Looking at the stas, broadband access has increased certain types of inequality: younger, urban, and male people seem to account for more users than older, rural, and female segments of the population -- this is likely because there are proportionally more men than women in China.
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Riana Patel replied to Shan-Estelle Brown
I think the research practices would be largely the same as this project, just that the focus might be on the practices of the platform. For example, the language that emerges from the functions of Twitter might have been of interest in Danny's field site, beyond the content and implications. The phenomenon of subtweeting or "supertweeting...
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Riana Patel made a comment
In US/Europe, we could look at platforms such as Tinder and Grindr that are a hybrid of social media but perhaps tend towards the private end of scalable sociality. Nevertheless, they do act as a carriers and are carriers in and of themselves of specific cultural and social meanings and effects. For example, the link between rising issues of public sexual...
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Riana Patel replied to Shan-Estelle Brown
Hi Nell, I think the affordances of the platform should be considered especially since the platform is not an invisible entity that allows for content to be seamlessly produced and consumed. There is a politics to platforms which may stem from the context of designers and developers or from how the platform gains meaning locally. In other words, a platform is...
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Thanks Sairam
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Yes, I would say the same about my personal experience. It would be interesting to analyze how engagement online with these issues maybe tends to reinforce distinctions in political causes along a gendered line.
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Riana Patel replied to Tim Peters
It also brings up the question that this course seeks to answer - why we post? Is it to do with creating a political identity or for seeking discussion or for silencing others?
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Riana Patel made a comment
In my own social media, I notice that more often women will post things relating to popular culture (eg film, TV shows) than men. Exceptions to this rule are for stereotypically "masculine" pop culture - the recent Star Wars film for instance, where it was mostly males posting about the film than women. Perhaps because of the nature of the public Facebook...
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What about the limits of permanence though? I am thinking of many websites that have since gone dark since their infrastructures are no longer supported (think flash) or their owners have abandoned the maintenance of them? What happens when someone leaves Facebook so their comments are removed, therefore removing context from a discussion?
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I thought the case study of Zehra this week illustrated nicely the idea that social media is not inherently moral (good vs bad), but can have both positive and negative consequences. I also think the aim of the project is not to promote or critique social media use, but perhaps to examine how it occurs in each field site and comparatively assess how these...
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Riana Patel made a comment
Scalable sociality provides an interesting lens for which to assess the effects of social media, particularly in the issues of politics and gender which often intersect.
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Riana Patel made a comment
I think it is important to not overemphasize the separation of a platform's intended use from its actual or unintended uses - the intent of a platform was perhaps conceived by a set of developers and designers in a specific context, but there was always the business goal of scaling up which can only be done by pivoting from the initial use and entering new...
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I agree, affordances are really important since they dictate the language of action, or, in other words, the different ways meanings can be expressed through online actions.
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In regards to Danny's comment, social media often works paradoxically, simultaneously reinforcing and subverting the same issue. This may be because of the multifaceted nature of the interplay of instant communication and context and also since the dynamics of online environments are often as complex as offline ones.
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Perhaps there is pressure to present a solidified, unified identity?
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I agree, it's fascinating to consider the idea of the very radically different lifeways of those people who send friend requests and don't know you.
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Riana Patel made a comment
Zehra's story is interesting, as it seems she circumvented impositions of tradition and maintained a social life through social media. The shift away from arranged marriage, however, may not be completed solely through social media, since we know online/offline use is always contextual and dependent on one another. That said, it is nice to hear that while many...
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Does the online always follow what occurs offline? Or are there ways for social media to be used (online) to encourage changes offline too?
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Riana Patel replied to Ella Taylor-Smith
I wondered what were the causes of this divergence in gender-specific uses, if any?
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Riana Patel replied to Vasco de Sousa
Yes, it is always interesting to observe reactionary forms when incidents dealing with issues such as gender and race crop up--the extremes of action on social media are leveraged to express deeper political opinions or to perform being offended.
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Riana Patel replied to John Hunt
And social media allows for a platform of subversion for these traditional norms.
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Riana Patel replied to Sherry Santo Formolo
The issue of gender performativity is interesting - how is gender performed in online spaces such as Facebook?
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Riana Patel replied to Shan-Estelle Brown
Victoria, these are great articles to share and very important issues. One of my own critiques of this project is the decision to not look at platforms and instead look at content. I think both are quite important and the fact that Facebook is not necessarily widespread does not discount the effects in design and development in the places it is used (which is...
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This is highly interesting. Is it then the case that social media tends to amplify existing outlines of what is acceptable to talk about? Or is it the case that social media dictates what is allowable, in a sense, since the proliferation of selfies and outward-facing postings might be a topic of conversation in and of itself?
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Is that the effect of social media being ineffectual in changing minds, or perhaps the mindset people enter in that space?
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Curious about the last point you made, how did social media deepen your political views?
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While people may avoid discusisng these topics, in my personal experience, people may engage with these issues in other ways, such as "liking" a political or religious page. Since this is not directly posted outwards, it still may appear in the newsfeed. I wonder if this might influence how people think of others, even if they don't think their activity is...
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I think your point about humor as a distancing device is interesting - but what is the reality of politics? Could it be that joking is a means of engaging with issues without being "too serious" on social media, which is often what people fear when posting?
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Interesting image, Barbara. I wondered what you meant about the online/offline personality? What does that mean and how is it constructed? I wonder how people might construct multiple selves offline and online and whether political postings are part of that process?
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Political postings are very much dictated by issues of gender/class/ethnicities, however, one thing I am curious about is the practice of not posting about politics. Why do people abstain from this, even with their peers are very vocal? For my own part, it is because I don't prefer to write things in that will be read in the public sphere generally, and...
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HI Sairam, could you elaborate?
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That's an interesting point, about the intersection of political postings and gender. I wonder whether the issues discussed vary as well?
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Do you think the information about privacy policies with respect to social networks is a stratified issue? Since I am interested and have a greater degree of digital literacy than others, I am aware of my rights and the effects of posting, whereas others may not/can't afford to NOT participate in these networks (for business, or other reasons)?
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I agree with this point, but wondered to what degree the public sphere was still a useful concept?
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Riana Patel made a comment
I would choose
"The micro politics of power in everyday life such as in the family or workplace."Since, as many critical thinkers such as Foucualt, suggest, power is not distributed through top down processes but disseminated through actors and reinstatiating in everyday practices.
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Great point, but perhaps the immediacy has two different pathways of effects - in other words, it may benefit multiple stakeholders in both good and bad and everything in between?
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Do you think this leads to an echo chamber of similar opinions, where others are shut out?
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To the first point about everyone being a publisher/broadcaster, this is true, but only to the effect that that individual's network is leveraged. For instance, I may post something but it will have no real world effect, whereas if President Obama or another political figure posted something, it would have immediate ramifications. I think the power of social...
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On the other hand, that's to discount that newspapers and media outlets aren't without their inherent biases. Certainly, it's a different issue insofar as truth is involved, but, as the Arab Spring perhaps illustrates, news from official sources may not be as trustworthy as local news and knowledge spread through social networks.
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I really like this point
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Riana Patel replied to Luca Morini
It's also interesting how the results are presented comparatively, rather than each per single field site. I think that's quite interesting for a group project of this size to be so collaborative.
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That's true, though, as mentioned in the comments for the previous page, there is a balance between video work that is truly representative and video work that communicates other forms of knowledge, such as the sensory and experiential qualities of the field site.
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Riana Patel replied to Davide Veniali
How do you mean?
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Riana Patel replied to James Moore
I agree, I think the different types of media on the course are enriching.
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Riana Patel replied to Shan-Estelle Brown
It's interesting how we separate the pursuit of getting likes for a less economic, or more authentic use of social media. Is this a fair distinction?
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Riana Patel replied to Júlia Garcia
I agree. Privacy is such a sticky topic since there are so many unknowns and potentialities about how user-generated information is being used. With regards to children, I thought the week in English village fieldsite, The Glades, showed interesting insights about how younger schoolchildren were appropriating social media into existing patterns of behavior...
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Riana Patel replied to Marina Svensson
The issue of ethics and consent is definitely a tricky one on sites like Facebook, since posts that appear as "public" may not actually be wanted to be used for research purposes, so public access can't be taken as positive consent. I think this is an issue that is not necessarily picked up by university ethics boards, since even the anonymization of all data...
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Riana Patel replied to Sofie Sandell
That is an interesting, but perhaps not unheard of phenomenon on social media. Do you think that it is endemic to social media and how did you deal with that situation?
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Riana Patel replied to Alex A. G. Taub
Yes - I think it's embroiled in the digital dualism debate: whether the online is less authentic and real than the offline? I think as we are seeing in this course, the domains aren't separate at all, but often amplifying and transforming cultural norms that are preexisting.
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Riana Patel replied to Paul Michael Atienza
Thanks, that is fascinating!
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Riana Patel made a comment
Social media photography has definitely increased the sheer amount of images I might see on any given day - I think in some ways this visual overload might have implications for my own posting habits (e.g. I won't post images unless I deem them to be noteworthy or of an aesthetic standard that's high).
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Riana Patel replied to Ruth Siddall
I think that's interesting, since I too tend to disregard memes as an important or thoughtful medium. But wondered how this view came about (I do think it's fairly common especially in Western contexts)?
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Riana Patel made a comment
In my society (UK/US), people post about politics, current affairs, and entertainment/media. I think this probably reflects the general discourse about what is important and noteworthy to discuss with others.
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Riana Patel made a comment
For some, social media may be an extension of their daily social lives in which presentation of multiple selves (cf Goffman) is mediated through specific cultural practices.
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Riana Patel made a comment
I think Shanz presents an interesting look at how we divide the act of posting to the content of posting and, similarly, the appearance of someone with their experience, mentally and emotionally.
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Riana Patel replied to Paul Michael Atienza
Sounds like interesting research, Paul. Wondered if you identified the cause(s) of translocal variations?
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Riana Patel made a comment
I make an effort not to have too many photos of myself online, in part because once they're on the web, they can take on a life of their own and their use is no longer solely my own. Particularly with social media such as Facebook, uploading photos is a question of property and ownership issues, since they become complicated in the online sphere.
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Riana Patel replied to Alex A. G. Taub
I'm the same, but wondering why that is?
