Rebecca Roach

I was originally a postdoctoral researcher on the Ego-Media project, and now I’m a lecturer at the University of Birmingham.

In my twenties I was hyperaware that my appearance was a major factor in the way that other people – mostly older men – responded to me. That made me uncomfortable for various reasons, not least I want my ideas and my research to come across, not what I look like. But also a slight discomfort of have I done well because of the way I look? Has that worked in my advantage and I’ve not realized it, and it’s gonna go away, and then I’m going to realize it, but be slightly horrified?

It’s that notion of appearance, and what it’s doing to the interaction.

And so, for me, social media is a demand to see my appearance, or a demand to have a sort of statement that can then somehow be used to judge me.

I’m more unwilling to be visible, and a little resistant, as you will see from the fact that that this is not a video.

I increasingly think that a blacked-out photo is the way to go.

I had quite a large role in thinking through the methodological questions. I was also responsible for the ethics application for much of the research, which meant a lot of thinking about different methodological and ethical questions.

Because my PhD was on interviews and literature, I was often thinking about how to use interviews as a method. So, I’d been thinking about these questions already: What kind of methods literary studies uses versus social sciences: do literary studies have methods? Maybe we just don’t articulate them very well? And also, how all these questions are changing with the advent of digital media.

What I’m really interested in, and have been increasingly as I do this research on this project, is partly a response to the narrative around social media as narcissistic, but also a freedom of choice, self-expression thing.

What has always interested me in this is the constraints, and the ways in which automation and platforms and regulatory frameworks shape and affect those narratives. I’ve never thought that self-expression on social media is this free thing, this liberatory space to narrate yourself. So, I’ve been really interested in just thinking through sort of prompts, and shapings and influences in the same way that, you know, with interviews. I think J. M. Coetzee says something in one of his notes, the question always determines the answer.

And that, in part, was something that interested me about interviews. As scholars we often write down “oh, they said this in an interview.” And you’re like, “yeah, but what was the question they were being asked? What were the circumstances?” Journalists think about those issues quite a lot. But, to me, it’s the interactivity.

I guess, perhaps, part of the reason it interests me so much is that I’m so conscious of performing. It’s not to say that there’s a truth behind the public performance at all. It’s more that the context affects the utterance, and so I’m really interested in thinking about that relationship between context and utterance. And so I’m really interested in thinking about social media in terms of structures, materiality, and interactivity.

One of the things that has been difficult but productive has been trying to think through what a publication and what an argument can be when you can’t assume that your reader is always taking the same route through a piece of material.

So, whether that’s in a kind of interactive fiction, and sort of hypertextual approach, or whether it’s just you can’t make certain assumptions about what the reader knows or doesn’t know, so what terms you have to explain or don’t. It's so challenging but it is also really useful in thinking about not so much why does a research article need to be between eight and ten thousand words. But more, in that model, you know the length of the argument you can make, and you know how to make an argument. And it’s been terrifying, yet also really interesting when you suddenly explode that, and go “no no no. You can make an argument through juxtaposition.” I’ve found that tricky, and I don’t think I have many answers at the moment. But, also really interesting.