Work in progress
How t
o do things with "values": A cross-linguistic analysis of the meanings and functions of a core concept on Twitter
The term values is prominent in political discourse. Yet its ubiquity is matched by its vagueness, especially when considering usage among different cultures. In this project, we study the use of the term values on Twitter across different language communities. Through examining a corpus of around 15 million tweets containing the term values from 2019-2021 in English, German, Italian, Japanese and Korean, we find fundamental differences in how different cultures perceive and frame values: while the term in English, Italian, and German appears mainly in a partisan political context, Japanese and Korean usage is far more interpersonal and apolitical. In the English, Italian, and German corpuses, the term is often invoked in politically motivated rhetorical attacks, often alleging hypocrisy. In the Japanese and Korean corpuses, tweeters use the term to promote a societal norm of respecting others’ values and to discuss generational gaps.
This research was presented at the conference of the Association of Internet Researchers in Dublin.
No judgment: Value optimization and the reinvention of reviewing on YouTube
Given their popularity and commercial appeal, YouTube review videos offer a productive site to investigate the normative effects of platformization on cultural production. Through a combination of content and thematic analysis of 200 videos, I identify what and who creators communicate as worthwhile. Good objects are aesthetic, functional, distinctive, and either pleasurable or resonant, while good reviewers are relatable above all else. Only half the videos include formal evaluations, while a vast majority include prompts for social media engagement, suggesting the primacy of the reviewer’s persona. I develop the concept of value optimization, the communicative strategies designed to align with the perceived values on a platform, and show how commercial-friendly values and tendency to qualify or avoid strong judgments transform the historical function of reviewing.
This research will be presented at the upcoming conference of the International Communication Association in Toronto.
"It's like the fridge magnet of the Internet": Platform aesthetics, generational taste, and the cross-cultural valuation of good morning memes
This paper investigates the values expressed by good morning memes—an under-studied subgenre of social media inspiration featuring a “good day” wish—and the criteria that users from different countries and generational groups adopt to evaluate them. Explicit values were detected through a content analysis of 414 memes in English and Italian, while insights about evaluation were derived from 20 semi-structured interviews with American and Italian social media users. The content, form, and stance of the memes in the two languages present small but meaningful cross-cultural divergences, the most prominent of which is a differential stance towards the value of self-efficacy, foregrounded by the meme in English and met with humorous skepticism by the memes in Italian. Interview data revealed a cross-generational cleavage in the interpretation of the genre, with younger users negatively evaluating the memes as inauthentic because uncreative and older users appreciating them as genuine expressions of positivity and courtesy. The article concludes that distinctions between groups of social media users can take place at the level of explicit values as well as at the level of communicative values. These distinctions are at the core of widely shared assumptions regarding specific users dwelling on specific platforms and appreciating specific types of content; assumptions that may coalesce into aesthetic imaginaries that I dub platform aesthetics.
The value affordances of social media features
Like, Comment, and Share are ubiquitous features that are central elements of engagement on social media platforms. Yet the values promoted by such features remain an open question. We propose the concept of value affordances, defined as the perceived underlying principles promoted or hindered by technology. We develop a novel method for studying value affordances through focus groups to explore the engagement features of Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. Across platforms, our participants agreed that engagement features promote expression, care, and community, aligning with how companies promote their platforms, and hinder privacy, mindfulness, peace, and safety, echoing public concerns about the harmful consequences of social media. Their accounts typically downplayed the role of technology, instead emphasizing user agency and responsibility. We discuss three tensions that structure how users perceive the relationship between themselves and technology: internal enablements vs. external constraints, stable vs. contextual affordances, and expert vs. casual users.
This research will be presented at the upcoming conference of the International Communication Association in Toronto.
#Values for money? The construction of a keyword across Instagram language communities
This paper investigates the visual and textual repertoires that Instagram users from across the globe associate with the concept of “values” via hashtagging. While the term may potentially be visualized and described in infinite ways, its actual representation emerges from the interplay between the platform and its users. By examining posts in English, German, Italian, Korean, and Japanese, we show that #values is used consistently across cultures, with a vague semantic meaning but clear functional meaning as a self-branding strategy adopted by professionals (especially personal coaches). We conclude that Instagram’s commercial character, individualistic ethos, and focus on authenticity lead to a convergence in how users in different locales define and use the term “values” on the platform.
This research will be presented at the upcoming conference of the International Communication Association in Toronto.
A cross-national analysis of values in YouTube morning routines
This article examines the values displayed by mom vloggers from five countries in their YouTube morning routine videos. What are the prominent values presented? Are there cross-cultural commonalities and differences? We analyze how mothers demonstrate their routine activity of care and explore how various practices of self-presentations serve the public construction of motherhood.
Published
“I love this photo, I can feel their hearts!” How users across the world evaluate social media portraiture
Personal portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when judging them? An analysis of 100 interviews with users from Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States reveals that people consistently recognize genre-specific values in portraits and evaluate them through a narrow set of communication-related criteria. Such evaluations vary somewhat cross-culturally in ways that only occasionally match established comparative literature on values. We reflect on the relational character of the criteria adopted for the evaluation of portraits worldwide, highlighting its association with new modes of sociability in digital spheres.
Governing principles: Articulating values in social media platform policies
Policy documents function as boundary objects that navigate diverse audiences, purposes, and interests. This paper compares the discourse of values in the Privacy Policies, Terms of Service, and Community Guidelines of five major platforms (Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Twitter, and TikTok). Through a mixed-method analysis, we identified frequently mentioned value terms and five overarching principles consistent across platforms: expression, community, safety, choice, and improvement. However, platforms limit their burden to execute these values by selectively assigning responsibility for their enactment, often unloading such responsibility onto users. Moreover, while each of the core values may potentially serve the public good, they can also promote narrow corporate goals. This dual framing allows platforms to strategically reinterpret values to suit their own interests.
Hashtag activism found in translation: Unpacking the reformulation of #MeToo in Japan
In 2017, the MeToo hashtag spread across the globe. However, it showed limited success in the Japanese Twittersphere and instead inspired local initiatives such as #WeToo and #Furawādemo (“flower demo”). To understand this reformulation, we analyzed 15 interviews with Japanese social media users and 119 Japanese newspaper articles. The results corroborate the framework we label VTM (values, topics, media), suggesting that an intersection between perceived Japanese values, the topic’s gendered and sexual nature, and media affordances explain the movement’s local development. While perceived Japanese values clash against those associated with #MeToo, new formulations “soften” the protest by blending in values such as reserve and harmony. Overall, we show how perceptions of popular values rather than values as essential orientations shape activism. Finally, we discuss the study’s implications for understanding cultural variance in cyberactivism, highlighting how divergent notions of “safe space” shape such movements.
A typology of social media rituals
Although the universe of user-generated content may seem chaotic, the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals help categorize popular genres of content and trace the values they convey. Integrating theoretical literature on rituals with empirical studies of social media genres, we develop a typology of 16 rituals that express diverse values, ranging from respect and responsibility to materialism and pleasure. Furthermore, we show that rituals embed different notions of good communication and discuss how our framework can facilitate comparative investigations of user-generated content and platform values.
Beyond neutrality: Conceptualizing platform values
We present a conceptual framework for studying the communication of values on and through social media composed of two dimensions: scale (from individual users to global infrastructures) and explicitness (from the most explicit to the invisible). Utilizing the model, we compare the communication of two values—engagement and authenticity—in user-generated content and policy documents on Twitter and Instagram. We find a split between how users and platforms frame these concepts and discuss the strategic role of ambiguity in value discourse, where idealistic meanings invoked by users positively charge the instrumental applications stressed by platforms. We also show how implicit and explicit articulations of the same value can contradict each other. Finally, we reflect upon tensions within the model, as well as the power relations between the personal, cultural, and infrastructural levels of platform values.
Memetic commemorations: Remixing far-right values in digital spheres
This paper examines memetic content as a window into the values expressed by far-right constituents. Our main premise was that far-right memes are a site of interaction between two types of values: those of the far-right as a social movement and those characterizing memetic communication on social media. We studied this notion through a case from Italy: the photo-based meme genre of ‘alternative calendar commemorations’ that memorialize events or figures important to the far-right imaginary. A multi-modal qualitative analysis based on Schwartz’s theory of personal and political values yielded mixed results. As expected, we found strong appeals to collectivistic values such as patriotism and tradition. Yet some of the individualistic values associated with memes, such as self-direction and authenticity, were also evident in the corpus. We conclude by discussing how this blend of values challenges both well-established value theories and perceptions about the political work of far-right memes.
What does #freedom look like? Instagram and the visual imagination of values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value hashtags, sampling the top 100 posts for each (N = 2,000). A combined qualitative–quantitative content analysis revealed that 19 of the 20 hashtags possess distinct visual footprints, typically reflecting an orientation toward the self and an emphasis on consumption. We conclude by discussing three implications of our findings: the role of images in the social construction of the meaning of values, the distinction between internalized and externalized value depictions, and aestheticized consumption as an organizing principle of Instagram’s mainstream.
The value(s) of social media rituals: A cross-cultural analysis of New Year’s resolutions
New Year’s resolutions are acts of valuation where people express ideas about what is important in life. Although resolutions have a long history, the twenty-first century has transformed the practice into a social media ritual with greater visibility, interactivity, and reach. Using this unique event to explore the globalization of values, we analyze tweets about resolutions in English, German, Italian, Japanese, and Korean. Through semantic network analysis and content analysis, we find commonalities and language-specific dynamics that do not map neatly onto established divisions between the ‘East’ and ‘West.’ Instead, we identify three underlying tensions organizing the articulation of values: self-acceptance vs. self-improvement, public vs. private, and conformity vs. oppositionality, which we discuss in relation to an overarching tension between local contexts and global platform cultures.
Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres
This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey in five countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions about the types of content people like and dislike. We inductively identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres, or narrower categories that share elements of form and content. We compared the results according to country, gender, age, and education level, identifying patterns. While we found significant differences in the prominence and preferentiality of content, these distinctions were less pronounced for disliked topics around which social media users tended to converge. Finally, we discuss genre imaginaries as normative maps that reflect ideas about morality in general and the purpose of social media in particular.