Dr Akane Kanai is a Assistant Professor, Sociology at the University of Warwick. Her work explores the politics of mediated knowledges, with a focus on transformations in understandings of gendered and racialised identities in social media and popular culture. In collaboration with the Centre, Dr Kanai is investigating how parenting is transformed through online culture. In particular, the project explores how social media translates different expertise into proliferating parenting ‘standards’ and how this is navigated by new parents.

First digital memory

My earliest digital memory (and this is a hazy one) is of Ask Jeeves, an early search engine depicted as an obliging butler that could answer any question. I recall my friends and I would type in questions for school projects. I would hazard that we actually didn’t learn much from this, but that this primed us to be receptive to the dominance of Google culture emerging in the later 2000s.