Rob Gallagher

My name’s Rob Gallagher, and I’m a postdoctoral researcher with the Ego-Media project here at King’s. My academic background is in literature but I’ve always – with my PhD work and with my other postdoc post – been attracted to multidisciplinary research settings. So Ego Media was attractive for that reason; there was a team of researchers from different fields, but there was also that pedigree in literature and life writing, that made me think this was a project for me. My personal Ego Media research, I've been breaking it down into five categories. There’s my work on ASMR videos on YouTube, there’s some work on grime music and gaming, there’s the book project which is about videogames and identity, there’s a project called Moving Past Present that was a collaboration with Janina Lange and looked at reanimating the Gaiety Girls as digital avatars, and there was a project with Ana Parejo Vadillo, which resulted in a digital edition of a poem from 1893, that we thought about as part of the prehistory of digital identity work and avatar play. These collaborative projects were all very different, my role was different in each of them. In some cases I was much more doing background research and facilitating other people’s creativity. Janina really led with the Gaiety project and with the help of Meghan Treadway – a performer – and Moses Attah – a 3D animator – she created a pop-up motion capture studio more or less out of nothing. Other projects, I had more of a kind of creative role; I worked with two ASM artists who make videos on YouTube, and produced a series of texts that they read for a podcast and then we talked about the ideas in the texts.

For me, it was really valuable seeing people work with technologies with which I’m not particularly au fait. I think you can obviously get people to talk about their process, or about these platforms and technologies in the abstract, but if you’re working together to produce a particular product, it gives it a kind of frame of reference and a kind of concrete goal. And that’s really kind of illuminated types of practice and types of technology that I didn't know too much about.

Theory and practice both have a role to play in studies of digital culture, and I think there’s sometimes a tendency, maybe, to place too much emphasis on practice at the cost of kind of theorizing and thinking. By having the relationship between theory and practice, you have at least one example of what you’re trying to talk about, because you’ve produced one. By trying to address the ideas both of the level of abstract arguments in articles and at the level of artworks or performances that try to convey them in another form, that was quite useful duality.

There’s also a kind of ethical dimension with kind of studies of digital culture, where rather than appropriating something someone else has made, and not necessarily knowing the context from which it emerged, or whether they would be happy with what you’re doing with it, or saying about it, you’re inflicting that on your own creations.

I’m quite aware that as a researcher there’s this sometimes dubious stance of standing on the sidelines, claiming to understand things that you’re not necessarily personally involved or invested in. There’s an issue with studies of online culture of how invested you ought to be, or have to be, in the phenomena you’re studying. To kind of seem to pass judgment on all selfie takers as someone who’s never taken a selfie, strikes me as potentially dubious. But to be so bound up in a culture that you’re unable to see it from the outside, also seems like it’s not going to necessarily generate useful knowledge.