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Published VersionCC BY-NC-ND V4.0, Open Access
Journal article
Between, Behind, and Out of Sight: Conversation in Dark Social Spaces
M/C Journal, Vol.24(2)
2021
Abstract
I am on the phone with a journalist discussing my research into anti-vaccination. As the conversation winds up, they ask a question I have come to expect: "how big do you think this is?" My answer is usually some version of the following: that we have no way of knowing. I and my fellow researchers can only see the information that is public or in the sunlight. How anti-vaccination information spreads through private networks is dark to us. It is private and necessarily so. This means that we cannot track how these conversations spread in the private or parochial spaces of Facebook, nor can we consider how they might extend into other modes of mediated communication.
Modern communication is a complex and multiplatform accomplishment. Consider this: I am texting with my friend, I send her a selfie, in the same moment I hear a notification, she has DMed me a relevant Instagram post via that app. I move to Instagram and share another post in response; we continue our text message conversation there. Later in the day, I message her on Facebook Messenger while participating in a mutual WhatsApp group chat. The next day we Skype, and while we talk, we send links back and forth, which in hindsight are as clear as hieroglyphics before the Rosetta stone. I comment on her Twitter post, and we publicly converse back and forth briefly while other people like our posts. None of these instances are discrete conversational events, even though they occur on different platforms.
Details
- Title
- Between, Behind, and Out of Sight: Conversation in Dark Social Spaces
- Authors
- Naomi Smith (Author) - Federation University
- Publication details
- M/C Journal, Vol.24(2)
- Publisher
- Queensland University of Technology, Creative Industries Faculty
- Date published
- 2021
- DOI
- 10.5204/mcj.2764
- ISSN
- 1441-2616
- Copyright note
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
- Organisation Unit
- School of Law and Society
- Language
- English
- Record Identifier
- 99702397802621
- Output Type
- Journal article
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