#Aoir2016 Internet Rules!

Visibility Rules
Schreiber, Maria (1); Gómez-Cruz, Edgar (2); Abidin, Crystal (3); Boll, Tobias (4)
1: University of Vienna, Austria; 2: RMIT University, Melbourne, Australia; 3: National University of Singapore; 4: Johannes Gutenberg-University, Mainz, Germany

Addressing the overall topic of this year’s conference, this panel will investigate and discuss rules of (online) visibility. We understand visibility as practice or strategy of selection. Investigating visibility rules means asking what is made visible and what remains invisible (Bal, 2003; Schade/Wenk, 2011), and aiming to understand the coincidence and convergence of spectacle and surveillance (Mitchell, 1994) in specific constellations of online visibilities.
We focus on practices of showing and sharing visual content online, while taking into account the distributed or hybrid agency in these practices - therefore, a variety of entangled rules becomes relevant:
We are interested in how sharing practices might be socially structured by strategic aims, (self-)presentation politics (Goffman, 1959) and attention economies, but also by symbolic boundaries and implicit, habitual patterns of relationship management (Bourdieu, 1972). In our papers, we reconstruct and reveal such social visibility rules for instance in regard to male nudity and webcamming practices, and in strategic “publicity grieving“ practices of Instagram influencers.
Platforms provide specific algorithmic structures and affordances for all kinds of interactions (vanDijck, 2013) and we investigate how this might be empowering and/or disciplinary (Kitchin & Dodge, 2011), and how users exploit (or do not exploit) functions and possibilities that platforms and apps might offer to regulate visibilities. How software like WhatsApp, Instagram or camming websites co-construct any kind of online interaction is therefore integral to understanding visibility rules.
The papers share an interest in visual cultures or rather cultures of visibility, which are of course entangled with the rules mentioned above, but can also be understood through concepts of visual conventions, spectatorship and scopic regimes. They comes into play regarding how specific styles of pictures are prevalent on specific platforms, or regarding visual tropes of grieving that are part of publicity performances. We understand images as integral elements of online interactions and value the potential of visuality as medium for condensed, embodied performances and aesthetic expression (Belting 2005).
Visual data (photos, memes, videos) is our empirical starting point for the analyses of three specific configurations of visibility rules - as we share the approach that empirical grounding is essential for theoretical innovation.