Samenleven staat in de eenentwintigste eeuw vooral te boek als bron van zorg. Sinds de eeuwwisseling zijn Nederlanders tevredener met zichzelf, maar ontevredener over de nabijheid en de omgang met anderen. Zoals het Sociaal en Cultureel Planbureau (SCP) het in 2004 verwoordde: ‘Met mij gaat het goed, met ons gaat het slecht.’ In het Continu Onderzoek Burgerperspectieven van het SCP tonen Nederlanders zich sindsdien telkens bezorgd over de ‘manier waarop we samenleven’. Mensen ‘ervaren dat het individualisme toeneemt, normen en waarden vervagen en hebben het idee dat tegenstellingen toenemen, onder andere op en door sociale media’ (SCP, 2021). Ze benoemen problemen als tweedeling, verharding, vereenzaming en ‘ieder voor zich’.
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Studying images on social media introduces several challenges that relate to the size of datasets and the different meaning-making grammars of social visuality; or as aptly pointed out by others in the field, it means ‘studying the qualitative on a quantitative scale’. Although cultural analytics provides an automated process through which patterns can be detected in large numbers of images, this methodology doesn’t account for other modalities of the image than the image itself. However, images circulating social media can (and should) be analyzed on the level of their audience as the latter is co-creating the meaning of images. Bridging the study of platform affordances and affect theory, this paper presents a novel methodology that repurposes Facebook Reactions to infer collective attitudes and performative emotional expressions vis á vis images shared on the large Syrian Revolution Network public page (+2M). We found visual patterns that co-occur with certain collective combinations of buttons, displaying how socio-technical features shape the discursive frameworks of online publics.
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To understand under what conditions intercultural group work (IGW) leads to more intercultural interactions, a survey was conducted among local students (n = 80) and international students (n = 153) in Dutch universities. In this study, students were more inclined to engage in intercultural interactions when they perceived that working with culturally diverse others prepared them to work and live in a diverse setting. The positive association was strengthened when students perceived that diversity, in terms of nationality within their work group, was also beneficial for accomplishing their group task. The findings demonstrate the significance of students’ perceptions of IGW, including the perceived general value for personal development and intellectual benefits related to specific tasks. This implies that institutions and teachers could be made responsible for engaging with innovative educational methods to address and incorporate student diversity into curriculum.
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