The Ethnographic Use of Facebook in Everyday Life

New social media have become indispensable to people all over the world as platforms for communication, with Facebook being the most popular. Hence, platforms such as Facebook are also becoming crucial tools for ethnographers because much social life now exists ‘online’. What types of field relations stem from such social media-driven ethnography? And what kinds of data do these relations present to the ethnographer? These questions must be considered in order to understand the challenges Facebook and other social media pose to ethnographic methodology. This article focuses on how Facebook may play an important role even in ethnographic work concerned with questions other than how Facebook works as a social medium. Most importantly it allows the ethnographer to keep up-to-date with the field. I argue that ethnography is already in possession of the methodological tools critically to assess the validity and value of data gathered or produced via Facebook including issues such as authenticity which are also pertinent to digital ethnography

Constructing the digitalized sporting body: black and white masculinity in NBA/NHL internet memes

In this article, I examine the ways sport fans construct and circulate discourses of race and masculinity in cyberspace. I do this through an examination of a set of Internet memes that juxtapose the bodies of National Hockey League players with National Basketball Association players in one single image. I argue these memes celebrate White masculinity, while at the same time constructing African American athletes as individualistic, selfish, and unwilling to sacrifice their bodies for the greater good of the team. More so, I argue that these memes construct a form of racial ideology that is representative of White backlash politics

The Molecular Genetic Architecture of Self-Employment

Economic variables such as income, education, and occupation are known to affect mortality and morbidity, such as cardiovascular disease, and have also been shown to be partly heritable. However, very little is known about which genes influence economic variables, although these genes may have both a direct and an indirect effect on health. We report results from the first large-scale collaboration that studies the molecular genetic architecture of an economic variable-entrepreneurship-that was operationalized using self-employment, a widely-available proxy. Our results suggest that common SNPs when considered jointly explain about half of the narrow-sense heritability of self-employment estimated in twin data (σg2/σP2= 25%, h2= 55%). However, a meta-analysis of genome-wide association studies across sixteen studies comprising 50,627 participants did not identify genome-wide significant SNPs. 58 SNPs with p<10-5were tested in a replication sample (n = 3,271), but none replicated. Furthermore, a gene-based test shows that none of the genes that were previously suggested in the literature to influence entrepreneurship reveal significant associations. Finally, SNP-based genetic scores that use results from the meta-analysis capture less than 0.2% of the variance in self-employment in an independent sample (p≥0.039). Our results are consistent with a highly polygenic molecular genetic architecture of self-employment, with many genetic variants of small effect. Although self-employment is a multi-faceted, heavily environmentally influenced, and biologically distal trait, our results are similar to those for other genetically complex and biologically more proximate outcomes, such as height, intelligence, personality, and several diseases

Anxiety and Depression in Adults with Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis

Adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) are thought to be at disproportionate risk of developing mental health comorbidities, with anxiety and depression being considered most prominent amongst these. Yet, no systematic review has been carried out to date to examine rates of both anxiety and depression focusing specifically on adults with ASD. This systematic review and meta-analysis examined the rates of anxiety and depression in adults with ASD and the impact of factors such as assessment methods and presence of comorbid intellectual disability (ID) diagnosis on estimated prevalence rates. Electronic database searches for studies published between January 2000 and September 2017 identified a total of 35 studies, including 30 studies measuring anxiety (n = 26 070; mean age = 30.9, s.d. = 6.2 years) and 29 studies measuring depression (n = 26 117; mean age = 31.1, s.d. = 6.8 years). The pooled estimation of current and lifetime prevalence for adults with ASD were 27% and 42% for any anxiety disorder, and 23% and 37% for depressive disorder. Further analyses revealed that the use of questionnaire measures and the presence of ID may significantly influence estimates of prevalence. The current literature suffers from a high degree of heterogeneity in study method and an overreliance on clinical samples. These results highlight the importance of community-based studies and the identification and inclusion of well-characterized samples to reduce heterogeneity and bias in estimates of prevalence for comorbidity in adults with ASD and other populations with complex psychiatric presentations

She’s so vain? A Q Study of Selfies and the curation of an online self.

Selfie posting is now a well-established practice, particularly for young women. However, it is nevertheless much maligned in popular discourses. As a counterpoint to digital narcissism, selfie posting is also constituted as relational. This Q methodological study explored how young women make sense of selfie practices. Twenty-seven young women aged 18-23 sorted a set of statements about selfies into a quasi-normal grid. These sorts were factor analysed to identify shared patterns. Four factors were identified which were subsequently analysed qualitatively, producing a narrative for each. These included, (1) ‘Presenting…Me!’ (2) ‘I am what I am’, (3) ‘Sharing is caring’ and (4) ‘The In-crowd – beautiful and popular’. The complexity of identity curation evidenced in this study highlights the importance of moving beyond both polarised characterisations and the pathologisation of young women selfie takers in order to explicate the interplay between normative femininities and the digital self

Instagrammatics and digital methods: Studying visual social media, from selfies and GIFs to memes and emoji

Visual content is a critical component of everyday social media, on platforms explicitly framed around the visual (Instagram and Vine), on those offering a mix of text and images in myriad forms (Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr), and in apps and profiles where visual presentation and provision of information are important considerations. However, despite being so prominent in forms such as selfies, looping media, infographics, memes, online videos, and more, sociocultural research into the visual as a central component of online communication has lagged behind the analysis of popular, predominantly text-driven social media. This paper underlines the increasing importance of visual elements to digital, social, and mobile media within everyday life, addressing the significant research gap in methods for tracking, analysing, and understanding visual social media as both image-based and intertextual content.In this paper, we build on our previous methodological considerations of Instagram in isolation to examine further questions, challenges, and benefits of studying visual social media more broadly, including methodological and ethical considerations. Our discussion is intended as a rallying cry and provocation for further research into visual (and textual and mixed) social media content, practices, and cultures, mindful of both the specificities of each form, but also, and importantly, the ongoing dialogues and interrelations between them as communication forms

Selective Induction of Cell Death in Melanoma Cell Lines through Targeting of Mcl-1 and A1

Melanoma is an often fatal form of skin cancer which is remarkably resistant against radio- and chemotherapy. Even new strategies that target RAS/RAF signaling and display unprecedented efficacy are characterized by resistance mechanisms. The targeting of survival pathways would be an attractive alternative strategy, if tumor-specific cell death can be achieved. Bcl-2 proteins play a central role in regulating survival of tumor cells. In this study, we systematically investigated the relevance of antiapoptotic Bcl-2 proteins, i.e., Bcl-2, Bcl-xL, Bcl-w, Mcl-1, and A1, in melanoma cell lines and non-malignant cells using RNAi. We found that melanoma cells required the presence of specific antiapoptotic Bcl-2 proteins: Inhibition of Mcl-1 and A1 strongly induced cell death in some melanoma cell lines, whereas non-malignant cells, i.e., primary human fibroblasts or keratinocytes were not affected. This specific sensitivity of melanoma cells was further enhanced by the combined inhibition of Mcl-1 and A1 and resulted in 60% to 80% cell death in all melanoma cell lines tested. This treatment was successfully combined with chemotherapy, which killed a substantial proportion of cells that survived Mcl-1 and A1 inhibition. Together, these results identify antiapoptotic proteins on which specifically melanoma cells rely on and, thus, provide a basis for the development of new Bcl-2 protein-targeting therapies