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Browsing by Author "Elkins, Evan, advisor"

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    Beautiful transgressions: subversion and visibility in YouTube's beauty community
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2023) Marshall-McKelvey, Kira, author; Elkins, Evan, advisor; Hughes, Kit, committee member; Anderson, Karrin, committee member; Arthur, Tori, committee member
    YouTube influencers must navigate the platform's capricious algorithm in order to achieve and maintain visibility online. The attention economy necessitates visibility labor for YouTubers to succeed in digital content creation. In particular, YouTubers must consider advertiser guidelines so that their content gets monetized (and subsequently rendered more visible). Content on YouTube that achieves high visibility tends to reinforce hegemonic logics of self-branding and gender. The beauty community, which produces feminized cultural outputs, is a highly commercial space on YouTube that rewards capitalist-affirming logics of gender and women's empowerment. Working in conversation with scholarship that explores the resistive possibilities of "LeftTube" (leftist YouTube), I highlight subversive tactics that women beauty gurus use without sacrificing their visibility online. Threading in discourse of play and fun, I argue that women beauty gurus can subvert postfeminist, neoliberal norms that discipline and confine gender performance. I first identify the normative genre conventions of the contemporary YouTube beauty community. Then I argue that RawBeautyKristi challenges norms of new momism and the "always on" digital entrepreneur by performing negative affect as a symptom of alienation, decentering western and masculine temporal structures, and complicating aesthetic labor in relation to neoliberal motherhood. Next, I argue that Nappyheadedjojoba performs platform-specific-intimacy to activate an ostensibly apolitical audience. Specifically, on YouTube, her incongruous references to makeup relieve tension, she utilizes beauty-specific terminology to familiarize her politics, she engages respectability politics, and she incorporates self-promotion as relational labor. On Patreon, she positions audience support as promoting creative liberty, she employs self-disclosure in relation to her politics, and she engages ratchetry as resistance. These strategies cultivate a sort of political authenticity. Lastly, Jenna Marbles's playful performance of failure to be part of YouTube's beauty community lluminates the inaccessibility of a seemingly open, democratizing space. By positioning herself as a YouTube viewer who unsuccessfully attempts tutorials, framing excess in contrast to the quest for natural beauty, exaggerating her status as an aging 32-33 year old lady, and flouting YouTube's self-branding conventions, Mourey reveals an attention economy in the beauty community that privileges postfeminist norms of age, beauty, and femininity. Ultimately, my dissertation aims to provide those in precarious positions with tactics to challenge dominant structures in ways that are invisible to those in power.
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    Choosing love: performances of romance in mobile dating simulation games
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2022) Martinez, El, author; Elkins, Evan, advisor; Diffrient, Scott, committee member; Martey, Rosa, committee member
    With the launch of the Android app store in 2008, mobile gaming has occupied a surging niche in the video game market. While considerable scholarly attention has been paid to video games, with mobile games enjoying a portion of that attention, the study of dating simulation games is still emerging. Further, almost all existing scholarship on dating simulation games focuses on console- or computer-based games. This thesis aims to fill that gap by analyzing how dating simulation conventions translate onto mobile devices. What changes when a new platform, with its own conventions and affordances, is introduced? Through textual analysis of gameplay mechanics, visual style, and narrative, I examine how popular mobile dating simulation games offered through the Android app store construct and restrict player access to romance on the axes of time and money. Ultimately, I argue that the ways time and money flow on the mobile device afford unique performances of romance while foreclosing others, apart from their progenitors on consoles and PCs.
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    Online spaces: technological, institutional, and social practices that foster connections through Instagram and Twitch
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Weigel, Taylor, author; Elkins, Evan, advisor; Dickinson, Greg, committee member; Martey, Rosa, committee member
    We are living in an increasingly digital world. In the past, critical scholars have focused on the inequality of access and unequal relationships between the elite, who controlled the media, and the masses, whose limited agency only allowed for alternate meanings of dominant discourse and media. With the rise of social networking services (SNSs) and user-generated content (UGC), critical work has shifted from relationships between the elite and the masses to questions of infrastructure, online governance, technological affordances, and cultural values and practices instilled in computer mediated communication (CMC). This thesis focuses specifically on technological and institutional practices of Instagram and Twitch and the social practices of users in these online spaces, using two case studies to explore the production of connection-oriented spaces through Instagram Stories and Twitch streams, which I argue are phenomenologically live media texts. In the following chapters, I answer two research questions. First, I explore the question, "Are Instagram Stories and Twitch streams fostering connections between users through institutional and technological practices of phenomenologically live texts?" and second, "If they are, how do users support and advance connections across individuals in dispersed geographies on Twitch streams and Instagram Stories?" As my analysis shows, Twitch streams and Instagram Stories are texts that present themselves as phenomenologically live—meaning that even if they are not live, they are meant to feel live to the viewers—due to the complex institutional and technological practices that often remain hidden to the user, as well as social practices of users. By looking specifically at the rhetoric of liveness, the public screen, the third place, embodiment, and platform affordances and governance, this thesis will uncover the modes of production and possibilities for connection in online, ephemeral spaces. Through a visual and textual analysis of phenomenologically live texts on Instagram and Twitch and a critical analysis of the temporal, social, technological, and institutional practices that engender the materialization and maintenance of these communities, this thesis seeks to understand how visual platforms structure particular experiences in online interactions, acting as informal public spaces that have the ability to foster connections between users.
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    The Tumblr porn ban: the platform triad and the shaping of online spaces
    (Colorado State University. Libraries, 2020) Pettis, Ben, author; Elkins, Evan, advisor; Dunn, Thomas, committee member; Wolfgang, David, committee member
    This thesis considers social media platforms and the fluid nature of online spaces. Specifically, I examine the social network site (SNS) Tumblr and the controversy that surrounded its recently amended community guidelines and adult content policy. Tumblr had previously had somewhat of an "alternative" identity as compared to mainstream SNSs such as Facebook or Twitter. This identity had largely resulted from its previously lax policy toward pornography and other adult content. Such content had previously been allowed on the website, which enabled a wide degree of personal freedom and expression. This policy, along with the platform's specific affordances, had contributed to Tumblr's characteristic as an online queer space. Many LGBTQ+ individuals and groups had once used the platform to share pornography and adult content, but also just to form a sense of community and express their identities in ways that were not always possible on other SNSs or within the physical world. But in December 2018, Tumblr Staff announced significant changes to the website's community guidelines, and that after December 17, 2018 any such content would no longer be allowed on the platform. This policy announcement, which became colloquially known as the Tumblr porn ban, represented a divergence in how the platform's users and its corporate owners envisioned the online space. For Tumblr users, the platform had been an online queer space characterized by a significant degree of individual autonomy and expression. But for Tumblr Inc., the platform could only be an online queer space until it was no longer profitable, and thus adjusted the content policy in response to various political economic pressures. In this thesis, I use digital discourse and political economic analyses of Tumblr Staff's announcement as well as Tumblr users' responses. I argue that the controversy that emerged surrounding the Tumblr Porn Ban represents the fluid and co-construction of platforms and online spaces. The negative response to the Tumblr Porn Ban was not necessarily directly in response to the loss of pornography and adult content, but rather a loss of what such contented had once represented—individual freedom and autonomy for users. Removing the adult content was significant because it changed what the online space had once been. By studying the Tumblr Porn Ban, this thesis demonstrates that online platforms are not static or monolithic entities. Instead, they are fluid online spaces that are constructed, shaped, and continually redefined by a platform triad of users, corporations, and state power.