Crowdsourcing Girl Identities

Crowdsourcing Girl Identities
Digital Gender - March 14th 2014
Camilla Hällgren - Umeå University

• Art - As Research and Activism
• Research – As Discovery and Activism
• Concluding Remarks
camilla.hallgren@edusci.umu.se
Crowdsourcing Girl Identities

Power
Identity
Gender
Contemporary
Online Media
Learning
Visuality
RESEARCH
& ART

Art – As Research and Activism
Exploring the human condition not only through numbers and words - but also
through art
Themes: Power, learning, identity, gender
Using art to comment, question, provoke, challenge and intervene

Strength: Images stimulates
emotional reactions
Weakness: Norms about
emotional values
Methodology:
Multifunction of text and art
to attract interest and at the
same time challenge
the viewer
Combination of macro
technique, 12 mms model
train figures in everyday
scenarios, and gender theories
Little Sweden Art: Big issues on a small scale

Dissemination Online
Social Media
Blog, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram
The art blog: www.littleswedenart.com
First published December 2009
80 000 visitors from all over the world.
Sweden, US, Germany and Russia
Facebook Group: Little Sweden Art (140 members)
Instagram: @littleswedenart
First published in August 2012
54 images
2025 followers
3398 comments, 21 744 likes.
Instagram Awards
- Amselcom Family who shows ”the most unique artist on Instagram”
- The Josh Johnson forum, a community of 220 000 members. Little Sweden Art
was awarded and recognised as ”…definitely thinking out of the typical macro
box” and as ”something out of the ordinary.”
- By the Friends of the World Group who ”Awards worldwide beautiful shots”
- Winner of the What Eye Cee Group
- Rebel Macro Finalist
- Kwaii of the day

Dissemination – other channels
- Recent exhibition at Skellefteå Art Hall
- The National Public Art Council in Sweden 2010
- Museums
- Municipal arts centres
- County councils
- Idaho State University
- Local news
- TV
- Book covers
- University web
- Printed Edition: Gallery Andersson Sandström

Research – As Discovery and Activism
The overall aim in the project is to conduct empirical, theoretical
and artistic explorations of girls’ online identity-making to further
our understanding of the relation between online culture, gender and
young peoples’ identity-making
The interaction between online cultures and youths’ identity making
“- Do You think I’m Pretty?” Crowdsourcing Girl Identities

Crowdsourcing Identities?
- To conceptualize possible identity making strategies in social media
- A metaphor for understanding young girls’ online explorations
and learnings about gender
- As an extension to pre-digital theories about identity construction
- The online practice of obtaining feedback on your identity, from a
large group of people
(Camilla Hällgren 2014)
________________________________________________________
”Crowdsourcing is the practice of obtaining needed services, ideas, or content
by soliciting contributions from a large group of people, and especially from an
online community, rather than from traditional employees or suppliers”
Wikipedia 2014-03-06

Crowdsourcing Identities – Why Important?
- As an example of contemporary identity making strategies
- As an example of using the media rather than being used by the media
- As something empowering
- Identity making may be a matter of making life chances.
- Who you may/can be, what choices you can make and how your identity
is read - it is a matter of power

Crowdsourcing Identities – Why now?
- The global changeover towards the Network Society (van Dijk, Castells and others)
- New media - networking technologies – other capabilties to interaction
- Web 1.0, 2.0, 3,0, UGC and SNS
- ”…nobody knows you are a dog”
(Steiner 1993)
- Selfhood as inner conversation transformed to external interactive perfomance
(Loveless and Williamson 2013)
- The ”Demotic turn” A shift in the relation between media and people
(Graeme Turner 2010)

Crowdsourcing Identities – How to Research?
Research Object
Online expressions of identity making
Instances of explorations of the self
(…not presentations of the self or expressions of particular identities)
Method
Netnography (Kozinets)
Non participant observations
Critical visual method (Rose 2013)
Purposeful sampling relating to study purpose (Patton)
Analytical objects
User Generated Contents (UGC)
Online, first person video visuals and written comments

Crowdsourcing Identities – Ethics?
- Non-participatory observations
- Publicly available online material
- Masking
- Terms of Use
- Following fundamental rights of human dignity, autonomy, minimization of
harm and respect to persons
- Contextual integrity, context-relative norms (Nissenbaum 2011)
- Acknowledgement of privacy in public
(AoIR 2012, Vetenskapsrådet, Kozinet 2011, ESOMAR 2013, Nissenbaum 2011,
Iakomedis Svedmark 2012, Dunkels 2013)

Crowdsourcing Identities – Images as Units of Analysis?
- Suggests that images are more than shapes and colours
- Carries information/embodies: values, norms, social processes
(Sverrison, 2011, Pauvell, 2012) Social documents.
- Representations of how the producers and the audience saw
things at that particular time. Non-material dimensions of culture.
- Online folk documents. Part of the circuit of culture. (du Gay 1997, Wagner 2012)
- “Search for the society in the picture and the pictures’ role in the society”
(Sverrison, 2013:166)

Crowdsourcing Identities – Theoretical Framework
Identity
George Herbert Mead (1934) Thoughts about the self. Developed by
Erving Goffman (1959) Transferred into a mediated context
by Joshua Meyrowitz (1985) ("The localness of experience is a constant.") (Thumin, 2011)
”…sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others" (W.E.B Du Bois 1903)
Gender
(de Beauvoir 1949, Rubin 1976, Young 1980, Hirdman 1987, Butler, Connel,
Yates, Walkerdine)
Participatory culture framework
(Jenkins, Burges and Green, 2009, Chau, 2010)
Youth online
(Dunkels, Boyd, Buckingham, Livingstone)
Feminist concern and Critical Normative approach

Crowdsourcing Identities – Theory – Identity
- Understanding of who we are (Taylor 2002)
- Identity paradox – (Latin IDEM - the same)
- Something unique and something we share (Buckingham 2008)
- Also how we are positioned – power dimensions
- Bauman – fluid identity, almost limitless, negotiable
- Identity – a performance shaped by context (Goffman 1959)
- As a function of interaction with others (Wagner 2011)
- Intersectionality of identity dimensions (Crenshaw 1989)

Camilla Hällgren - hallgren.camilla@gmail.com
Crowdsourcing Identities – The Girl

Power
Linguistically
Psychologically
Existential condition
Socially and culturally
Life stage
Individual experience
Intersectionally
Generation
Gender
Social class
Ethnicity
Nationality
Sexual orientation
Able bodiness
Mental abilities
Biologically
Politically
Symbolically
Relational
Situational
Camilla Hällgren - hallgren.camilla@gmail.com
Crowdsourcing Identities – The Girl

- What can we learn about our existence at the intersection between art and research?
Concluding Remarks

- How important are online inputs to identity
making compared to other sources/mirrors?
- To what extent is a persons online
Information to bee seen as an extension of
the self? And vice-versa?
- What is digital about digital identity/gender?
- What may be the main ethical issues of
researching online identity making?
- What can we learn about the society and
human conditions through the study of its
visual artefacts?
- Where does the unit of analysis start and
where does it end?
- How to balance great potentials for self
expressinos, education activism and great
potentials for commercial interests and
surveillance?
- What can we learn about our existence at the intersection of art and research?
Concluding Remarks - Longer Version

Camilla Hällgren
Department of Applied Educational Science
Interactive Media and Learning
Umeå University
Camilla.Hallgren@edusci.umu.se
www.littleswedenart.com

Crowdsourcing Girl Identities

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