Academic literature on the topic 'The Fappening'

Using an interactionist framework, we analyze publicly available data from Twitter to track real-time reactions to the widely publicized celebrity nude photo hacking of 2014 (“The Fappening”). We ask: “Related to The Fappening, what manhood acts are employed in virtual social space?” Using search terms for “fappening” or “#thefappening,” we collected 100 tweets per hour from August 31 to October 1, 2014 (Average: 1,700/day). Coding and qualitative analyses of a subsample of tweets ( N = 9,750) reveal four virtual manhood acts commonly employed to claim elevated status in the heterosexist hierarchy and reproduce gendered inequality. These acts include (1) creation of homosocial, heterosexist space; (2) sexualization of women; (3) signaling possession of a heterosexual, male body; and (4) humor as a tool of oppression. This article introduces the concept of “virtual manhood acts” and contributes to growing understandings of the reproduction of manhood and the oppression of women in online social spaces.

This article engages with media responses to the 2015 Ashley Madison hack (which largely exposed the sexual details of adult heterosexual men) and the 2014 ‘Fappening’ hack (which exposed private sexual images of adult female celebrities). It draws on Petchesky’s concept of positive sexual rights and Warner’s framework of sexual ethics to reflect on the ways current educational and policy responses to ‘teen sexting’ (or sharing nude/semi-nude pictures) might change if young people’s sexual rights were recognized as being similar (if not the same) to those of the adult victims of the 2014 and 2015 hacks.

At the fringes of the platform economy exists another web that evokes an earlier era of Internet culture. Its anarchic subculture celebrates a form of play based based on dissimulation. This subculture sets itself against the authenticity injunction of the current mode of capitalist accumulation (Zuboff). We can imagine this as a mask culture that celebrates disguise in distinction to the face culture as embodied by Facebook’s “real name” policy (de Zeeuw and Tuters). Often thriving in the anonymous milieus of web forums, this carnivalesque subculture can be highly reactionary. Indeed, this dissimulative identity play has been increasingly weaponized in the service of alt-right metapolitics (Hawley).Within the deep vernacular web of forums and imageboards like 4chan, users play by a set of rules and laws that they see as inherent to online interaction as such. Poe’s Law, for example, states that “without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views”. When these “rule sets” are enacted by a massive angry white teenage male demographic, the “weapons of the geek” (Coleman) are transformed into “toxic technoculture” (Massanari).In light of an array of recent predicaments in digital culture that trace back to this part of the web or have been anticipated by it, this special issue looks to host a conversation on the material practices, (sub)cultural logics and web-historical roots of this deep vernacular web and the significance of dissimulation therein. How do such forms of deceptive “epistemological” play figure in digital media environments where deception is the norm — where, as the saying goes, everyone knows that “the internet is serious business” (which is to say that it is not). And how in turn is this supposed culture of play challenged by those who’ve only known the web through social media?Julia DeCook’s article in this issue addresses the imbrication of subcultural “lulz” and dissimulative trolling practices with the emergent alt-right movement, arguing that this new online confluence has produced its own kind of ironic political aesthetic. She does by situating the latter in the more encompassing historical dynamic of an aestheticization of politics associated with fascism by Walter Benjamin and others.Having a similar focus but deploying more empirical digital methods, Sal Hagen’s contribution sets out to explore dissimulative and extremist online groups as found on spaces like 4chan/pol/, advocating for an “anti-structuralist” and “demystifying” approach to researching online subcultures and vernaculars. As a case study and proof of concept of this methodology, the article looks at the dissemination and changing contexts of the use of the word “trump” on 4chan/pol/ between 2015 and 2018.Moving from the unsavory depths of anonymous forums like 4chan and 8chan, the article by Lucie Chateau looks at the dissimulative and ironic practices of meme culture in general, and the subgenre of depression memes on Instagram and other platforms, in particular. In different and often ambiguous ways, the article demonstrates, depression memes and their ironic self-subversion undermine the “happiness effect” and injunction to perform your authentic self online that is paradigmatic for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. In this sense, depression meme subculture still moves in the orbit of the early Web’s playful and ironic mask cultures.Finally, the contribution by Joanna Zienkiewicz looks at the lesser known platform Pixelcanvas as a battleground and playfield for antagonistic political identities, defying the wisdom, mostly proffered by the alt-right, that “the left can’t meme”. Rather than fragmented, hypersensitive, or humourless, as online leftist identity politics has lately been criticized for by Angela Nagle and others, leftist engagement on Pixelcanvas deploys similar transgressive and dissimulative tactics as the alt-right, but without the reactionary and fetishized vision that characterises the latter.In conclusion, we offer this collection as a kind of meditation on the role of dissimulative identity play in the fractured post-centrist landscape of contemporary politics, as well as a invitation to think about the troll as a contemporary term by which "our understanding of the cybernetic Enemy Other becomes the basis on which we understand ourselves" (Gallison).ReferencesColeman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. New York: Verso, 2014.De Zeeuw, Daniël, and Marc Tuters. "Teh Internet Is Serious Business: On the Deep Vernacular Web and Its Discontents." Cultural Politics 16.2 (2020): 214–232.Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy.” Critical Inquiry 21.1 (2014): 228–66.Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.Massanari, Adrienne. “#Gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society 19.3 (2016): 329–46.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

New media technologies are changing the ways that we not only go about our day-to-day lives, but also the ways that we sell and exchange our labor within the capitalist economy. These technologies are shaping how we represent and perceive ourselves and others, as well as the ways in which, as we move about the world, our images are taken and circulated with neither our explicit permission, nor sometimes our knowledge (Dovey, 2000; Toffoletti, 2007). Despite the fact that we can no longer viably opt out of visual or technological culture, there remains a strong rhetoric of personal responsibility when such images are used in ways that are unexpected and sometimes extremely damaging (C. Hall, 2015). The growth in incidences of what Clare McGlynn (2017) calls “image-based sexual violence” cannot be divorced from the economic and cultural shifts that are both challenging and reifying dominant power relations in the early 21st century. This doctoral thesis examines the economic and social discourses underpinning news reporting on sexual privacy violations in relation to new media technologies and shifting forms of female celebrity. Using empirical methods to collect and sort U.S. and Canadian news articles at a macro level as well as discourse analysis of news reporting at the micro level, I focus on two particular sites wherein new media celebrity, sexual violence/violation, and political economies converge: the celebrity sex tape scandal and the stolen celebrity nude photo. I examine sexuality and privacy violation in an exemplary economic context, looking at how the “leaked” sex tape or image functions in the gendered sexual economy to undermine claims to meritocratic capitalist success. I focus on two moments of crisis: firstly, the pop culture crisis of 2007-2008, coinciding with the global economic recession as well as the growth in new media technology and social media usage, wherein several high-profile female celebrities undergo dramatic and very public “breakdowns” in proper femininity, ranging from the fairly banal “scandal” surrounding a then-15-year-old Miley Cyrus posing semi-nude for Vanity Fair to the more severe and illegal acts of Lindsay Lohan and Paris Hilton (both of whom were arrested for driving under the influence across this time period). Secondly, I examine the moment of crisis signaled by the 2014 iCloud hacking incident wherein hundreds of female celebrities’ personal private nude photos were stolen and circulated online. I analyze the sex “scandals” that are both discursively constructed by, and circulating through, the news at these moments. The findings point to several notable trends in the contemporary political climate. Firstly, they illuminate the tensions and contradictions in the media’s attempt to reconcile post-feminist sexual “empowerment” narratives with the broader imperatives of neoliberalism, surveillance, and self-commodification. Secondly, this thesis provides a timely analysis of the gendered pathways to success and the gatekeeping that is conducted both within and by the (news) media, which are themselves invested in narratives of meritocracy. Finally, the cynical, meta-commentary circulating in the news reporting on celebrity content – reporting that is increasingly beholden to corporate interests – contributes to the broader erosion of trust in mainstream media. In today’s media environment in particular, studies of heirs-turned-reality stars such as Paris Hilton (whose trajectory is eerily similar to that of U.S. President Donald Trump), are particularly urgent, as are studies that connect the seemingly disparate yet increasingly converging fields of celebrity, journalism, feminism (and sexual violence), and neoliberalism.