What do you understand by settler colonialism’? Explain with reference to an example of a settler colonial nation. 2. ??Define digital allyship and provide a

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SI: Marginality and Social Media

Social media technologies complexly intersect with and affect Indigenous subjectivities. Facebook and Twitter, on one hand, have become home to more or less organized hate groups, facilitating what Matamoros-Fernández (2017) has called “platformed racism” (p. 930). Research has found Indigenous people disproportionately bear the brunt of practices of troll- ing, cyberbullying, and other forms of digital violence (Campbell et al., 2010). The effects of these forces are far from immaterial, but can lead to both real trauma at the level of the individual, and the ongoing marginalization at the level of whole social groups (Carlson et al., 2017). In these ways, social media offers another platform through which the settler colonial “logic of elimination” (Wolfe, 2006) can be enacted.

But social media have also offered opportunities to power- fully resist, refute, and reject this logic and work toward imag- ining and realizing different futures for Indigenous peoples. From the online Zapatista movement in Mexico against gov- ernment subjugation (Wolfson, 2012), to the Canadian #IdleNoMore activism for Indigenous sovereignty (Grundberg & Lindgren, 2015), to the #SOSBlakAustralia protests against the forced closures of remote Aboriginal communities (Carlson & Frazer, 2016), Indigenous peoples globally have leveraged social media technologies to their own ends—challenging

dominant discourses, organizing feet-on-the-streets activism, and producing anti-colonial collectives.

Researchers have also been interested in how social media is implicated in Indigenous peoples’ more “everyday” political expressions, performances, or representations of the self (Lumby, 2010; Petray, 2011). Moving beyond earlier debates around the “authenticity” of online expression, more recent work has sought to understand the political work of social media performances. Petray (2011) argues, for instance, that “self-writing,” where Indigenous Australians overtly perform their identities online, constitutes an everyday form of “micro- activism” through which pejorative stereotypes may be chal- lenged. This work has demonstrated social media—as “an arena for political struggle” (Harris & Carlson, 2016, p. 460)— provides Indigenous peoples promising though uncertain polit- ical possibilities in refuting the forces of settler colonialism.

925261 SMSXXX10.1177/2056305120925261Social Media <span class="symbol" cstyle="Mathematical">+</span> SocietyCarlson and Frazer research-article20202020

Macquarie University, Australia

Corresponding Author: Ryan Frazer, Macquarie University, Sydney, NSW 2109, Australia. Email: [email protected]

“They Got Filters”: Indigenous Social Media, the Settler Gaze, and a Politics of Hope

Bronwyn Carlson and Ryan Frazer

Abstract Social media technologies have had ambivalent political implications for Indigenous peoples and communities. On one hand, they constitute new horizons toward which settler colonial forces of marginalization, disenfranchisement, and elimination can extend and strengthen their power. On the other hand, social media have also offered opportunities to resist and reject the violence of colonization and its ideological counterparts of domination and racial superiority, and work toward imagining and realizing alternative futures. In this article, we draw on insights from settler colonial studies and affect theory to chart the politics of “affect” through the stories of Indigenous Australian social media users. We first argue that the online practices of Indigenous social media users are often mediated by an awareness of the ‘settler gaze’—that is, a latent audience of non-Indigenous others observing in bad faith. We then outline two responses to this presence described by participants: policing the online behaviors of friends and family, and circulating hopeful, inspiring, and positive content. If “policing” is about delimiting the things of which online bodies are capable, then an affective politics of hope is about expanding a body’s capacity to act and imagining other possible futures for Indigenous people.

Keywords Indigenous studies, affect theory, settler colonial studies, social media

2 Social Media + Society

Over the last decade, social scientists turned to ideas of “affect” to better understand the processes through which political subjectivities and collectives are produced and maintained. Most often understood through Baruch Spinoza’s dictum of “the capacity to affect and be affected,” this work has looked at what affects do in the formation of subjectivi- ties, rather than what they are (Ahmed, 2013). A focus on affect has helped scholars parse the complex forces that pro- visionally cohere to produce particular political arrange- ments—that is, how forces “beyond” both the material and discursive move, stabilize, and transform subjects.

Increasingly, media and communications studies scholars have put to work these ideas to analyze the messy, complex, and often unstable forms of political sociality now facilitated through social media. Most commonly, this work has sought to understand how affect is implicated in the production of digital “publics” (Hipfl, 2018; Papacharissi, 2016). Analyses have included how the affective force of “anger” can rally a people around issues of social justice (Blevins et al., 2019); how anti- fascist activism can be reframed and intensified through notions of “love” (Persson, 2017); and how “eudaimonic” (i.e., mean- ingful, joyful, and inspiring) memes can be used to “circulate joy” among Facebook publics (Rieger & Klimmt, 2019).

In this article, we chart the everyday politics of affect through the stories of Indigenous Australian social media users.1 We conducted in-depth semi-structured interviews with 41 participants across five Australian communities, in which we discussed what kinds of content they posted online, what they thought constituted “proper” and “appropriate” online behavior, and what factors figured into their views on what comprised “good” online behavior. Rather than ques- tioning the “authenticity” of these performances of the self, we instead asked the following: What work do they do? Which online actions and expressions do they make possible, and which others do they foreclose? And which broader rela- tions of power might be working to guide, shape and pre- clude these online expressions?

Through our analysis, we argue that the online practices of Indigenous social media users are often mediated by an aware- ness of the “settler gaze”—that is, the knowledge of a potential audience of anti-Indigenous others observing in bad faith. The people we spoke to described two main responses to this latent presence. On one hand, some articulated a responsibility to moderate and “police” the online expressions of their family, friends, and kin, particularly when they were concerned these expressions might be used against them in some way. On the other hand, a smaller group of participants described actively sharing content that produced an altogether different image of Indigenous futures—one that exceeded the dominant settler colonial narrative of Indigenous “decline”—in what we broadly describe as an affective politics of hope. In both cases, however, we suggest the affective expressions of these Indigenous social media users can be understood as already enabled and delimited through existing Indigenous–settler power relations and regimes of surveillance.

Social Media and Affective Politics

Political scholars across disciplines have found difficulty articulating the political relations, connections, and arrange- ments that now emerge on social media (Castells, 2015). In an age of “fake news” (Albright, 2017), dispersed and seem- ingly “unorganised” White supremacist networks (Nagle, 2017), and the frantic workings of “cancel culture,” more traditional forms of political analyses appear increasingly inadequate to describe the more decentralized and “rhizom- atic” forms of political action that social media makes possible.

Perhaps most influentially, political scholars Bennett and Segerberg (2012) describe these online political arrange- ments as “connective action.” They define connective action as a more “personalised,” less centrally organized, and more provisional political formation. The personalisation of the political, Bennett (2012) argues elsewhere, “is perhaps the defining change in the political culture of our era” (p. 37). Rather than being elicited, organized, and held together through hierarchical models of political “membership,” online political movements “are developing relationships to publics as affiliates [. . . ] offering them personal options in ways to engage and express themselves” (Bennett & Segerberg, 2012, p. 760, emphasis added).

Increasingly, there has been a turn to ideas of affect to understand these more dynamic and “affiliative” publics of digitally mediated action (Hipfl, 2018). While theories of “affect” have diverse provenance (Pile, 2010), much of the recent work in media studies has drawn on broadly Spinozan conceptualizations of affect as the ability to affect and be affected. That is, focusing less on the clearly felt or easily articulable dimensions of everyday experience, this work pays attention to what bodies can and cannot do, say, and sense. Affect does not set analysis only on questions of iden- tity, representation, or complete, unified, and static forms. Instead, it emphasizes connections, in-betweenness, provi- sional unity, circulation, and emergence. It asks how bodies are connected to other bodies and what capacities these con- nections might produce or preclude. It is an approach that, as scholars are increasingly recognizing, appears particularly well-suited for the messy, contingent, and diffuse political formations that often transpire on social media.

Papacharissi (2016), for instance, elaborates the idea of “affective publics” to understand online movements that exceed more traditional political solidarities. Affect is, they explain, “the drive or sense of movement experienced before we have cognitively identified a reaction and labeled it as a particular emotion” (Papacharissi, 2016, p. 316, emphasis added). For Papacharissi, because it is pre-cognitive or non-representable, affect leaves open possibilities for alternative political arrange- ments. “Its in-the-making, not-yet-fully-formed nature is what invites many to associate affect with potentiality,” they write (Papacharissi, 2016, p. 316). Papacharissi (2016) argues that it is through the affective registers of Twitter hashtags, for

Carlson and Frazer 3

instance, that undifferentiated “crowds” are rendered into more clearly defined “publics,” which “come together and/or disband around bonds of sentiment” (p. 308). This leads to a much more open, complex understanding of the political affordances of online connections. Rather than focusing on the readily identifi- able structures and meanings of political

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