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"This comprehensive text explores the relationship between identity, subjectivity and digital communication, providing a strong starting point for understanding how fast-changing communication technologies, platforms, applications and practices have an impact on how we perceive ourselves, others, relationships and bodies. Drawing on critical studies of identity, behaviour and representation, Identity and Digital Communication demonstrates how identity is shaped and understood in the context of significant and ongoing shifts in online communication. Chapters cover a range of topics including advances in social networking, the development of deepfake videos, intimacies of everyday communication, the emergence of cultures based on algorithms, the authenticities of TikTok, and online communication's setting as a site for hostility and hate speech. Throughout the text, author Rob Cover shows how the formation and curation of self-identity is increasingly performed and engaged with through digital cultural practices, affirming that these practices must be understood if we are to make sense of identity in the 2020s and beyond. Featuring critical accounts, everyday examples, and analysis of key platforms such as TikTok, this textbook is an essential primer for scholars and students in media studies, psychology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, computer science, as well as health practitioners, mental health advocates and community members"--

"This comprehensive text explores the relationship between identity, subjectivity and digital communication, providing a strong starting point for understanding how fast-changing communication technologies, platforms, applications and practices have an impact on how we perceive ourselves, others, relationships and bodies. Drawing on critical studies of identity, behaviour and representation, Identity and Digital Communication demonstrates how identity is shaped and understood in the context of significant and ongoing shifts in online communication. Chapters cover a range of topics including advances in social networking, the development of deepfake videos, intimacies of everyday communication, the emergence of cultures based on algorithms, the authenticities of TikTok, and online communication's setting as a site for hostility and hate speech. Throughout the text, author Rob Cover shows how the formation and curation of self-identity is increasingly performed and engaged with through digital cultural practices, affirming that these practices must be understood if we are to make sense of identity in the 2020s and beyond. Featuring critical accounts, everyday examples, and analysis of key platforms such as TikTok, this textbook is an essential primer for scholars and students in media studies, psychology, cultural studies, sociology, anthropology, computer science, as well as health practitioners, mental health advocates and community members"--

"Examining the emergence of new sexual and gender identities in the context of an ever-changing digital landscape, Emergent Identities considers how traditional, binary understandings of sexuality and gender are being challenged and overridden by a taxonomy of non-binary, fluid classifications and descriptors. In this comprehensive account of the ongoing shift in our understandings of gender and sexuality, Cover explores how and why traditional masculine/feminine and hetero/homo dichotomies are quickly being replaced with identity labels such as heteroflexible, bigender, non-binary, asexual, sapiosexual, demisexual, ciswoman, and transcurious. Drawing on real world data, Cover considers how new ways of perceiving relationships, attraction and desire are contesting authorised, institutional knowledge on gender and sexuality. The book explores the role that digital communication practices have played in these developments, and considers the implications of these new approaches for identity, individuality, creativity, media, healthcare and social belonging. A timely response to recent developments in the field of gender identity, this will be a fascinating read for students of Psychology, Gender Studies, Media and Cultural Studies, and related areas as well as professionals in this field"--

Introduction: Population as a social, media and cultural concept -- Fertility promotion, power and contemporary eugenics -- Crowded concepts and the politics of the big nation -- Population and identity -- Overpopulation in visual representation -- Underpopulation and apocalyptic narratives -- Genetics, population purity and the 'race of devils' -- The 'forgotten' people -- Bodies, racialised populations and practices of othering -- Attitudes of welcome : ethics of cohabitation and sustainability.

1. Queer suicide representations in popular media -- 2. Histories and genealogies of suicide research and sexuality -- 3. It gets better? Online representations of hope, vulnerability and resilience -- 4. Reconstitutions : identity, subjectivity and the dominant discourses of sexuality -- 5. Tensions : suicide, sexual identity and shame -- 6. Community : homonormativity, exclusion and relative misery.

Online Identities: Creating and Communicating the Online Selfpresents a critical investigation of the ways in which representations of identities have shifted since the advent of digital communications technologies. Critical studies over the past century have pointed to the multifaceted nature of identity, with a number of different theories and approaches used to explain how everyday people have a sense of themselves, their behaviors, desires, and representations. In the era of interactive, digital, and networked media and communication, identity can be understood as even more complex, with digital users arguably playing a more extensive role in fashioning their own self-representations online, as well as making use of the capacity to co-create common and group narratives of identity through interactivity and the proliferation of audio-visual user-generated content online.Makes accessible complex theories of identity from the perspective of today's contemporary, digital media environmentExamines how digital media has added to the complexity of identityTakes readers through examples of online identity such as in interactive sites and social networkingExplores implications of inter-cultural access that emerges from globalization and world-wide networking Rob Cover is Head of the Media and Communication Discipline and Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at The University of Western Australia. He researches and publishes on issues of media and identity, including digital media theory, queer theory, youth sexuality and representation, cultural concepts of population and migration, as well as sports, masculinities and media scandal. He has published over fifty journal articles and book chapters since 2000, and his most recent books are Queer Youth Suicide, Culture and Identity: Unliveable Lives? (Ashgate, 2012) and Vulnerability and Exposure: Footballer Scandals, Masculine Identity and Ethics (UWAP Scholarly, 2015).

This article presents a critical account of heterosexual men's online sex webcam performances in terms of the capacity for challenging or disrupting heteronormativity and opening the field for the representation of a greater range of heterosexualities. Using a narrative analysis of selected examples of heterosexual performances on visual sex sites, it is argued that a deeply felt attachment to heterosexual identity coexists in complex, critical, and potentially disruptive ways with a contemporary, online approach to diverse, individualized sexual practices. Investigating examples of male performers who articulate an avowed heterosexual identity but perform acts for a gay male spectatorship and engage in practices such as self-penetration that are discursively marked by nonheterosexuality, this article explores the potential for the productive disruption of normative views of masculine heterosexuality without the need to resort to a free-floating argument for sexual fluidity. It is argued that, while heteronormativity is disrupted in such sites, masculinity has the capacity to reincorporate nonheterosexual behaviors and acts.

This article examines the ways in which recent theorizations of interactivity work to reconceive the author-text-audience relationship. Suggesting that all media forms - historical and contemporary - can be reconceptualized in light of recent understandings of interactivity, it is argued that control over the text and its narrative as mythically 'finished' products is struggled over between an authorial desire for finality and an audience desire for control over the arrangement, (re)configuration and (re)distribution of the text. This struggle takes place across the sites of technological developments of textual control versus full interactivity, and in the realms of both media theory and media law.

This artical argues that lesbian/gay print journalism publications are strategically utilised by younger readers to forge a sense of community belonging. It is shown that such publications mediate an important dynamic between self-identity and group or community identity through motifs of belonging, engagement and access. Utilising interviews with younger readers of lesbian/gay journalism, it is argued that such publications are understood by readers as a public 'social space', but that a strong desire to engage in lesbian/gay in local, geographic and physical sense is identified by the readers, suggesting that such publications perform an important but incomplete role in the construction of sexual identity and community belonging.