Shoefies and Huis: crafting community participation from the ground up

ABSTRACT This paper uses a case study drawn from the Twitter activity around a New Zealand Hui-style conference to explore the role that sharing playful shoefies (selfies of shoes) has in building trust and weak tie bonds between disparate conference participants. By considering the shoefie as a place where participants can perform salience and belonging, this paper argues that photographs of shoes fulfil a range of communicative and network functions that are underserved by the other communicative spaces available at the Hui. Furthermore, this paper argues that the structure of the Hui itself, as opposed to more formalised academic conference structures, further leverages the informality and playfulness of the shoefie in order to fulfil its specific goals of community engagement and equality among participants.

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