NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media

Paasonen, Susanna,Jarrett, Kylie,Light, Ben

ISBN 10: 026204305X / ISBN 13: 9780262043052

Published by The MIT Press, 2019

About this Item

Very Good Condition - May show some limited signs of wear and may have a remainder mark. Pages and dust cover are intact and not marred by notes or highlighting.

Seller Inventory # mon0000034260

Bibliographic Details

• Title: NSFW: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media
• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Publication Date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 026204305X
• ISBN 13: 9780262043052
• Binding: hardcover
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

An exploration of how and why social media content is tagged as “not safe for work” and an argument against conflating sexual content with risk.

The hashtag #NSFW (not safe for work) acts as both a warning and an invitation. NSFW tells users, “We dare you to click on this link! And by the way, don't do it until after work!” Unlike the specificity of movie and television advisories (“suggestive dialogue,” “sexual content”), NSFW signals, nonspecifically, sexually explicit content that ranges from nude selfies to pornography. NSFW looks at how and why social media content is tagged “not safe” and shows how this serves to conflate sexual content and risk. The authors argue that the notion of “unsafety” extends beyond the risk of losing one's job or being embarrassed at work to an unspecified sense of risk attached to sexually explicit media content and sexual communication in general.

The authors examine NSFW practices of tagging and flagging on a range of social media platforms; online pornography and its dependence on technology; user-generated NSFW content—in particular, the dick pic and associated issues of consent, desire, agency, and social power; the deployment of risqué humor in the workplace; and sexist and misogynist online harassment that functions as an enforcer of inequalities. They argue against the categorical effacement of sexual content by means of an all-purpose hashtag and urge us to shift considerations of safety from pictorial properties to issues of context and consent.

About the Author

Susanna Paasonen is Professor of Media Studies at the University of Turku in Finland. She is the coauthor of NSF: Sex, Humor, and Risk in Social Media (MIT Press).

Kylie Jarrett is Head of the Department of Media Studies at Maynooth University, Ireland, and author of Feminism, Labour and Digital Media: The Digital Housewife.

Ben Light is Professor of Digital Society at the University of Salford, UK, and the author of Disconnecting with Social Networking Sites.