Although we normally place the academic, institutional gallery or museum exhibition space in a separate domain from the virtual space social sites like Facebook, Tumblr, and Pinterest provide, I argue that the motivations that determine our uses of both spaces are the same. Using the writings of theorists such as Foucault and Baudrillard, and the history of Cabinets of Curiosities, I look critically at the creation of online profiles (primarily related to Facebook, but also found in other popular social sites) and traditional exhibitions spaces (for instance, the galleries of the Museum of Modern Art). I examine the logic of categorization and the intended impact this will have on viewers, comparing the nature of collecting and the curatorial impulse to display, showing that ideas surrounding collection function in both spaces. Through this I illustrate that a curatorial impulse is present in each, revolving around some sense of identity, although there are clear differences in ability to create context and exhibition time frames among other things. This will demonstrate that such spaces provide similar outlets for engrained human behaviors that mediate our interaction with and understanding of not only culture, but social interactions and even personal identity. In effect, I show that these spaces are much more closely related than they have previously been given credit for, and that certain social networking sites might even be the next logical stage in the continual development and progression of our understanding of collecting and exhibiting.

With the swift integration of cellphone technology into our daily lives, people are becoming uncertain regarding the norms restricting cellphone use in certain places. This research asks: Are there generational differences in perceptions of informal norms surrounding how individuals should use mobile phones in social spaces? I hypothesized that today’s Millennial generation, who were born into the era of the Digital Age, will have a significantly different understanding of informal norms surrounding cellphone usage when compared to those who came of age with minimal exposure to mobile phones, particularly the Baby Boomer generation. I predicted that the Millennial generation would have more lax cell phone norms in comparison to their older cohort. For example, the younger cohort may perceive that mobile phones can be used in movie theaters while a movie is playing, whereas the Baby Boomer generation may regard this behavior as impolite. I interviewed approximately twenty subjects in Seattle; ten University of Washington undergraduate students from the Millennial generation and ten people from the Baby Boomer generation. The implications of my results provided some insight into how the two generations perceive the acceptance of cellphone use in social spaces and whether the difference in perceptions may be generational.

The world is filled with gendered images that shape and echo society’s ideas on what is feminine, reinforce the ideologies about how a woman should look and act, and are hidden under the guise of humor. This humor shames women who step out of their place, and encourages them to step back into the gender “box” defined by the culture industry. In the modern, mediated world, this plays out in advertising as well as “humorous” pictures, called Internet memes, which are shared by individuals on social media websites. The term meme first appeared in “The Selfish Gene” by Richard Dawkins in 1976. He defines a meme as “small cultural unites analogous to genes, which spread from person to person by imitation” (as cited in Shifman, 2009, p. 1). An Internet meme, therefore, is an idea that spreads (or “goes viral”) through imitation in cyberspace. To understand how women are invited into certain feminine subjectivities, this paper performs a semiotic analysis of memes related to gender “codes” that define what is feminine through the use of humor. Building off the work of Erving Goffman(1969, 1979), Sut Jhally (2009) defines the traits (passive, childlike, and submissive) that are commonly associated with being feminine, and argues that these traits are considered subordinate to masculine traits. The Internet memes examined in this paper are selected from popular social media websites and deal with body image, behavior, dress, and a woman’s “place.” The role of advertising in society has been discussed extensively; however, there is less discussion of the role of Internet memes related to gender. This presentation fills that gap and brings to the conversation a view on a form of ideological reinforcement that is unique and increasingly widespread.

Understanding how people communicate during disasters is important for creating systems to support this communication. Twitter is commonly used to broadcast information from the ground and to organize support during times of need. During the 2010 Gulf Oil Spill, Twitter was utilized for spreading information, sharing firsthand observations, and to voice concern about the situation. Through building a series of classifiers to detect emotion and sentiment, the distribution of emotion during the Gulf Oil Spill can be analyzed and its propagation compared against released information and corresponding events. I contribute a series of emotion classifiers trained from 4,000 tweets with preliminary results of accuracy between 51% and 70%. These classifiers are used to analyze the emotional impact of events, such as Obama’s Oval Office Address. A broader implication of this project includes analysis of other disaster datasets through utilizing our open-source visualization and classifiers.