Event overview
Join us for a lecture by Professor Ashley Mears titled 'The Right Amount of Sex: Catching Attention in the Grey Zone of a Platform'
Attention is a scarce resource in the "digital attention economy". For content creators on social media, they face a paradox: the most attention-grabbing content, like sexual content, is often prohibited and attracts platform discipline. In this talk, Mears will discuss her research with content creators which documents the development of parasexuality on social media, arriving at a theory of platforms as grey zones and governance systems which allow for strategic rule breaking.
Speaker:
Dr. Ashley Mears is a Professor and Chair of Cultural Sociology and New Media at the University of Amsterdam. Working primarily at the intersections of cultural sociology, media and gender studies, Mears researches value and exchange in the context of labor, beauty, elites, consumption, and social media. Her work has been funded by the National Science Foundation and the Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation, and featured in The New York Times, The New Yorker, Le Monde, The Economist, NPR, the BBC, and Chinese Cosmo.
Chair:
Dr Marissa Willcox, Goldsmiths MCCS
Dates & times
| Date | Time | Add to calendar |
|---|---|---|
| 10 Dec 2025 | 5:00pm - 7:00pm |
Accessibility
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