Publications

2022
Sharing and social media: The decline of a keyword?
John, N. (2022). Sharing and social media: The decline of a keyword?. New Media & Society. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This article revisits claims made a decade ago about the importance of the word “sharing” in the context of social network sites (SNSs). Based on an analysis of the home pages of 61 SNSs between the years 2011 and 2020, the findings incontrovertibly show that “sharing” has lost its central place in the terminology employed by social media platforms in their self-presentation. Where in the mid-2000s SNSs relied heavily on a rhetoric of sharing to promote their services, by 2020, this rhetoric had been almost entirely dropped. The research reported here implies that social media platforms no longer feel a need or desire to be associated with these cultural beliefs. Given this, questions are raised as to whether “sharing” remains a keyword for social media.

2021
Online tie and content management and changing religious identity among Muslim Arab women in Israel
Agbarya, A., & John, N. (2021). Online tie and content management and changing religious identity among Muslim Arab women in Israel. Information, Communication & Society. Publisher's VersionAbstract

 

This study investigates the central dilemmas and changes in social media use among people whose religious identity is in flux, with an emphasis on backstage processes of decision making. Drawing on 15 in-depth interviews with Muslim women in Israel, we found five main themes reflecting the main online changes users experience and effect. We suggest two different logics that the themes show in online decision-making regarding identity and self-presentation. The first is relatively predictable, whereby users reconstruct their social environment to fit their new religious identity. The second logic concerns the management of ties and content in accordance with religious obligations in ways that may not fit the user’s personal welfare, and which are related to complex inner conflicts of the user. While previous literature stresses personal welfare as a main factor behind online tie and content management, in this article we show how users are willing to sacrifice their online welfare for the sake of their new identity.

 

2020
The concept of ‘sharing’ in Chinese social media: Origins, transformations and implications
Zhao, L., & John, N. A. (2020). The concept of ‘sharing’ in Chinese social media: Origins, transformations and implications. Information, Communication & Society. Publisher's VersionAbstract

 

In this article we present an analysis of the concepts of fenxiang and gongxiang—the Mandarin words for ‘sharing’—in the context of Chinese social media. We do so through an interrogation of the words fenxiang and gongxiang as used by Chinese social media companies. Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we created screenshots of 32 Chinese social network sites between 2000-2018 and tracked changes in the usage of fenxiang and gongxiang over time. The Mandarin translations in some ways operate like the English word, ‘sharing’. Fenxiang has the meaning of participating in social media, and gongxiang refers to technological aspects of sharing, while also conveying a sense of harmony. However, the interpersonal relations implied by fenxiang, and the political order implied by gongxiang, are quite different from those conveyed by ‘sharing’. Together, fenxiang and gongxiang construct a convergence of micro-level interpersonal harmony and macro-level social harmony. Thus, the language of sharing becomes the lens through which to observe the subtlety, complexity and idiosyncrasies of the Chinese internet. This article thus offers a new heuristic for understanding Chinese social media, while also pointing to an important facet of the discursive construction of Chinese social media. This implies a continuing need to de-westernize research into the internet and to identify cultural-specific meanings of social media.

 

sharing_on_chinese_social_media_accepted_version_zhao_and_john_ics.pdf
Punching up or turning away? Palestinians unfriending Jewish Israelis on Facebook
John, N. A., & Agbarya, A. (2020). Punching up or turning away? Palestinians unfriending Jewish Israelis on Facebook. New Media & Society. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This article explores the Facebook unfriending of users from a majority group by members of a minority group, focusing on Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel. Indeed, this is the first study to focus on power differentials among Facebook users in the context of unfriending. The article thus adds depth to our understanding of unfriending, while also shedding light on the experience of social media use from the perspective of an oppressed minority. Based on semi-structured in-depth interviews with 20 ’48 Palestinians (Palestinian citizens of Israel), we present various triggers for unfriending (mainly, encounters with racism and surveillance), and show that Palestinians’ stories of unfriending Jewish Israelis are sometimes about punching up, and sometimes about stepping away. However, while unfriending is broadly considered an apt response to abuse, it also distances Palestinians from centers of power in Israel. This suggests an important way in which social media reproduce inequality.

palestinians_unfriending_jewish_israelis_on_facebook_accepted_version.docx
What is meant by ‘sharing’ in the sharing economy?
John, N. A. (2020). What is meant by ‘sharing’ in the sharing economy?. Built Environment , 46 (1), 11-21. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This article looks closely at the notion of sharing as it is used in the context of the sharing economy. It is based on the qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews conducted in four countries with thirty-four participants who see themselves as operating within the sharing economy. Interviewees' definitions and understandings of sharing are presented, with particular focus on the question of whether the presence of money is a counterindication for sharing. While some interviewees unequivocally reject as sharing any transaction that involves money, and while some view the use of 'sharing' to describe such interactions as manipulative and deceptive, others see the two as potentially co-existing. One mechanism that enables this is seeing paying and sharing as referring to different aspects of the same transaction. Interestingly, it is not only representatives of for-profit companies who argue that even where there is money, there can also be sharing, but also social justice activists lobbying for their vision of a sharing economy. Adopting a pragmatic approach to language, but not forgoing critique, the article argues for a close analysis of how people actually talk about sharing rather than dismissing certain practices as 'not really sharing'.

2019
Imagining an ideal podcast listener
Sharon, T., & John, N. A. (2019). Imagining an ideal podcast listener. Popular Communication. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Based on a close reading of the adult coloring book and listening party kit published to accompany NPR’s podcast Invisibilia, this article examines the ideal listener of, and the ideal mode of listening to, audio storytelling podcasts. We argue that these texts prompt the notion of childlike listening, a mode of listening that harnesses the innocence and curiosity of the child for the sake of deep discussion and interpersonal connection. This ideal listening mode is achieved through performative unplugging, whereby listening party attendees show their ability to delay gratification by turning off their phones. By unpacking the ideals constructed by the coloring book and listening party kit, we argue that the cultural values they seek to convey align with wider views about the power of podcasts to bring us together.

Based on a close reading of the adult coloring book and listening party kit published to accompany NPR’s podcast Invisibilia, this article examines the ideal listener of, and the ideal mode of listening to, audio storytelling podcasts. We argue that these texts prompt the notion of childlike listening, a mode of listening that harnesses the innocence and curiosity of the child for the sake of deep discussion and interpersonal connection. This ideal listening mode is achieved through performative unplugging, whereby listening party attendees show their ability to delay gratification by turning off their phones. By unpacking the ideals constructed by the coloring book and listening party kit, we argue that the cultural values they seek to convey align with wider views about the power of podcasts to bring us together.

 

Social media bullshit: What we don’t know about facebook.com/peace and why we should care
John, N. A. (2019). Social media bullshit: What we don’t know about facebook.com/peace and why we should care. Social Media + Society. Publisher's VersionAbstract

 

If we live in media, then our knowledge of our social lives must, at least partly, come from those media. It is in this context that I analyze www.facebook.com/peace, a page that claims to show “how many new friendships formed just yesterday” between Facebook users from the opposing sides of three different protracted conflicts. However, the numbers seem unfeasible, leading to a series of attempts to try and evaluate them independently, as well as to ask Facebook if they could explain them. This article presents these failed efforts to verify the numbers published by Facebook, and the subsequent conclusion that they are, technically speaking, bullshit, and more specifically, social media bullshit. It is in reaching this conclusion that the article contributes to theoretical discussions around data, social media, and knowledge.

 

If we live in media, then our knowledge of our social lives must, at least partly, come from those media. It is in this context that I analyze www.facebook.com/peace, a page that claims to show “how many new friendships formed just yesterday” between Facebook users from the opposing sides of three different protracted conflicts. However, the numbers seem unfeasible, leading to a series of attempts to try and evaluate them independently, as well as to ask Facebook if they could explain them. This paper presents these failed efforts to verify the numbers published by Facebook, and the subsequent conclusion that they are, technically speaking, bullshit, and more specifically, social media bullshit. It is in reaching this conclusion that the article contributes to theoretical discussions around data, social media, and knowledge.

 

Deaf and hard of hearing smartphone users: Intersectionality and the penetration of ableist communication norms
Bitman, N., & John, N. A. (2019). Deaf and hard of hearing smartphone users: Intersectionality and the penetration of ableist communication norms. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This article examines smartphone usage among deaf and hard of hearing people, and shows how it is deeply shaped by the core function of the voice call. Indeed, while the smartphone appears accessible, it actually reproduces communicative norms of the hearing hegemony. In-depth interviews highlight the social norms of voice calls both as a communicative practice and as forcing communicative values on textual smartphone interactions. People who cannot perform voice calls must obey these norms of immediacy and priority while interacting accessibly via WhatsApp and video calls. Moreover, users’ auditory diversity is reflected in their responses and practices vis-à-vis voice calls, highlighting this as a representation of the hegemonic hearing society. Critical examination of these phenomena shows how deaf and hard of hearing smartphone users’ communicative practices result from intersections of their audiological capacities and other stigmatized positions, which has profound implications for our understanding of media accessibility.

2018
An agnotological analysis of APIs: Or, disconnectivity and the ideological limits of our knowledge of social media
John, N. A., & Nissenbaum, A. (2018). An agnotological analysis of APIs: Or, disconnectivity and the ideological limits of our knowledge of social media. The Information Society. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Adopting an agnotological perspective, this article extends the critical literature on APIs (application programming interfaces) by systematically showing that social media APIs are largely blind to acts of disconnectivity such as unfriending and unliking. We do this through analysis of the traces of social media usage that are not accessible through APIs as gleaned from the technical documentation published for developers by 12 major SNSs. Our findings make two main contributions. First, we show for the first time that APIs offer virtually no access to data about disconnectivity. Second, we show that APIs offer a very limited historical perspective, particularly regarding disconnectivity. However, for types of users that might spend money on advertising, far more historical and disconnectivity-oriented information is accessible through the API. This has practical consequences for research, and contributes to an agnotology of social media that sheds critical light on the advertiser-friendly atmosphere of connectivity that social media try to create.

 

an_agnotological_analysis_of_apis_john_nissenbaum_accepted_version.pdf
“He’s Got His Own Sea”: Political Facebook Unfriending in the Personal Public Sphere
John, N. A., & Gal, N. (2018). “He’s Got His Own Sea”: Political Facebook Unfriending in the Personal Public Sphere. International Journal of Communication , 12, 2971–2988. Publisher's VersionAbstract

 

This article explores the meaning of political unfriending and proposes the concept of the personal public sphere. Interviews with Jewish Israeli Facebook users who unfriended during the Israel–Gaza conflict of 2014 show unfriending to be a form of boundary management for the self in conditions of networked sociality. They shed light on deeply rooted perceptions of the “networkedness” of society as a fundamental organizing principle for the self and collective. Thus, we conceptualize unfriending as exercising sovereignty over one’s personal public sphere while also acknowledging that everyone else has their own personal public sphere too. The concept of the personal public sphere accounts for a crucial feature of politically motivated unfriending: the dissonance between the justifications for unfriending and the act itself.

Unpacking (the) Secret: Anonymous social media and the impossibility of networked anonymity
Sharon, T., & John, N. A. (2018). Unpacking (the) Secret: Anonymous social media and the impossibility of networked anonymity. New Media & Society , 20 (11), 4177–4194. Publisher's VersionAbstract

 

This study focuses on the perceptions and practices of anonymous communication with friends enabled by tie-based anonymous apps. Based on qualitative analysis of in-depth interviews with users of the application Secret, the strategies deployed by interviewees in order to de-anonymize other users are emphasized and placed within the broader context of the real-name web. The article shows that Secret was not only based on pre-existing social networks but also drew on the network as a structure of thought. The concept of networked anonymity is introduced to account for the ways that anonymous actors imagine one another as “someone,” rather than as an unknown “anyone.” As such, the survivability of this communicative model is inherently limited by competing forces—the drive to connectivity, on the one hand, and to anonymity, on the other.

 

unpacking_the_secret_final_submission.pdf
2017
The emergence of the ISP industry in Israel
McLelland, M. (2017). The emergence of the ISP industry in Israel. In G. Goggin (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Global Internet Histories (pp. 90-104) . Routledge. Publisher's Version
Why privacy keeps dying: The trouble with talk about the end of privacy
John, N. A., & Peters, B. (2017). Why privacy keeps dying: The trouble with talk about the end of privacy. Information, Communication & Society , 20 (2), 284-298. Publisher's VersionAbstract

It is a curious fact how much talk about privacy is about the end of privacy. We term this “privacy endism,” locating the phenomenon within a broader category of endist thought. We then analyze 101 newspaper articles between 1990 and 2012 that declare the end of privacy. Three findings follow. First, claims about the end of privacy point to an unusually broad range of technological and institutional causes. Privacy has been pronounced defunct for decades, but there has never been a near consensus about its causes. Second, unlike other endist talk (the end of art or history, etc.), privacy endism appears ongoing and not period-specific. Finally, our explanation of the persistence and idiosyncrasy of claims to the end of privacy focuses on Warren and Brandeis’ 1890 negative conception of privacy as “the right to be let alone”: namely, modern privacy talk has always been endist because the right to privacy was born out of the conditions for its violation, not its realization. The conclusion comments on implications of that basic proposition.  

2016
Sharing
John, N. A. (2016). Sharing. In B. Peters (Ed.), Digital Keywords: A Vocabulary of Information Society and Culture (pp. 269-277) . Princeton, Princeton University Press. Publisher's Version
The Age of Sharing
John, N. A. (2016). The Age of Sharing . Cambridge, Polity. Publisher's Version
The rise of "sharing" in communication and media studies
John, N. A., & Sützl, W. (2016). The rise of "sharing" in communication and media studies. Information, Communication & Society , 19 (4), 437-441. Publisher's Version the_rise_of_sharing_in_communication_and_media_studies.pdf
2015
'I don't Like you any more': Facebook unfriending by Israelis during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014
John, N. A., & Dvir-Gvirsman, S. (2015). 'I don't Like you any more': Facebook unfriending by Israelis during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. Journal of Communication , 65 (6), 953–974. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This paper explores Facebook unfriending during the Israel-Gaza conflict of 2014. We suggest that politically-motivated unfriending is a new kind of political gesture. We present an analysis of a survey of 1,013 Jewish Israeli Facebook users. 16% of users unfriended or unfollowed a Facebook friend during the fighting. Unfriending was more prevalent among more ideologically extreme and more politically active Facebook users. Weak ties were those most likely to be broken, and respondents mostly unfriended people because they took offense at what they had posted or disagreed with it. While social network sites may expose people to diverse opinions, precisely by virtue of the many weak ties users have on them, our findings show these ties to be susceptible to dissolution.

facebook_unfriending_paper_final_with_authors.pdf
2014
File sharing and the history of computing: Or, why file sharing is called “file sharing”
John, N. A. (2014). File sharing and the history of computing: Or, why file sharing is called “file sharing”. Critical Studies in Media Communication , 31 (3), 198-211. Publisher's VersionAbstract

Attempts by the state and the entertainment industry to impose the term “piracy” on practices of digital file sharing have been challenged by academics and activists alike. The notion of “file sharing,” however, seems to have escaped our attention. By placing that term in the context of the history of computing, where sharing of different kinds has always been a central feature, and by drawing on a nuanced understanding of the many meanings of “sharing,” this article shows that “file sharing,” unlike “piracy,” is a bottom-up term that has emerged from the field itself. The article shows that those who oppose the term “file sharing” certainly have good strategic reason to do so: sharing is by definition a positive social value and bestows a warm glow upon that which it touches. It is argued, though, that we should not allow the “war on piracy” metaphor to gain the ascendancy—not only because “piracy” is a such a negative term, and not only for strategic reasons, but also, and mainly, because when we call file sharing “file sharing” we are issuing a critical challenge to the current copyright regime.

2013
The Construction of the Multilingual Internet: Unicode, Hebrew and Globalization
John, N. A. (2013). The Construction of the Multilingual Internet: Unicode, Hebrew and Globalization. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication , 18 (3), 321-338. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This paper examines the technologies that enable the representation of Hebrew on websites. Hebrew is written from right to left and in non-Latin characters, issues shared by a number of languages which seem to be converging on a shared solution—Unicode. Regarding the case of Hebrew, I show how competing solutions have given way to one dominant technology. I link processes in the Israeli context with broader questions about the ‘multilingual Internet,’ asking whether the commonly accepted solution for representing non-Latin texts on computer screens is an instance of cultural imperialism and convergence around a western artifact. It is argued that while minority languages are given an online voice by Unicode, the context is still one of western power.

The Social Logics of Sharing
John, N. A. (2013). The Social Logics of Sharing. The Communication Review , 16 (3), 113-131. Publisher's VersionAbstract

This article explores the concept of sharing in three distinct spheres: Web 2.0, whose constitutive activity is sharing (links, photos, status updates, and so on); “sharing economies” of production and consumption; and intimate interpersonal relationships, in which the therapeutic ethos includes a cultural requirement that we share our emotions. It is argued that a range of distributive and communicative practices—not all of which are entirely new—are converging under the metaphor of sharing. Thus, practices in one sphere are conceptualized in terms of practices from other spheres. What all three spheres of sharing have in common are values such as equality, mutuality, honesty, openness, empathy, and an ethic of care. Moreover, they all challenge prevalent perceptions of the proper boundary between the public and the private.

Pages