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Social comparison on Instagram among millennial mothers: The relationships between envy and parental stress New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-09 Jung Ah Lee, Yeonsoo Cho, Youngju Jung, Jaeyee Kim, Yongjun Sung
Mothers are heavily engaged in social media, and mommy influencers have become key sources of information and targets for social comparison. This study investigates the psychological mechanisms by which mothers’ parental stress is affected by social comparison with mommy influencers. An online survey was conducted among South Korean millennial mothers ( N = 237). The results revealed that mothers who
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Playing on hard: Algorithmic border objects and inequality among esports student-athletes New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-06 Ben Scholl
Collegiate esports are a key contributor to the North American esports field’s fledgling talent pipeline, where varsity student-athletes identify the streaming platform Twitch as a major component. Exemplified by Twitch, this article theorizes the role of platform algorithms as border objects—an analytical concept which frames the shared use of classification systems when a powerful party’s practices
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Write, record, optimize? How musicians reflect on music optimization strategies in the creative production process New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-06 Nick Polak, Julian Schaap
Musicians are believed to increasingly “optimize” their music to positively influence discoverability and engagement on music and social media platforms. Common examples of such optimization strategies are skipping intros, quickly moving to the chorus, or inserting danceable “hooks.” But to what extent are optimization strategies actively considered in the creative production process? And, if so, in
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Tactile transformation in flying airplanes: From hands-on to fingers-on aviation New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-02 Brian McDonough
Portable laptops, cell phones, touchscreen equipment and other mobile devices are changing the way commercial airplane pilots are handling information used for flying aircraft. Pilot expertise and skill are being transformed by a new approach in which fingertips are replacing traditional hands-on methods of controlling airplanes. Drawing on participatory and interview methods at a UK airbase, this
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Historical figures on Instagram: A typology of themes and modes of representation New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-30 Maria Schreiber, Christian Schwarzenegger, Christine Lohmeier
Following the notion that a greater variety of actors can engage in practices of memory work, the aim of our study is to understand how the polyphony of memory evolves in social media networks. We thus conducted an explorative study of accounts for historical figures on Instagram. The accounts were analysed regarding their thematic accentuations, the kind of material employed and presented, the level
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Distinction and alternative tech: Exploring the techno-critical disposition New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Michael Stevenson, Carolina Valente Pinto
How should we understand alternative social media and open-source technologies that seek to challenge the dominance of Big Tech? Are these ethical substitutes for monopolistic platforms and technological infrastructures, or “alternative” in the sense we might talk of alternative forms of culture? Here we offer new perspective on these questions by conceptualizing alternative tech through Bourdieu’s
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Unpacking the network dynamics of online political discussions: Stochastic actor-oriented modeling with political/sociopsychological/linguistic factors New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-28 Sujin Choi
The underlying mechanisms of online political discussions which may involve power dynamics have seldom been explored through a dynamic network approach, even though discussions themselves are inherently relational and dynamic processes. It remains unclear how discussions are shaped over time between egos/alters with different political/sociopsychological/linguistic attributes as well as by the existing
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The growing partisan politicization of non-political online spaces: A mixed-method analysis of news app reviews on Google Play between 2009 and 2022 New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-26 Rui Wang, Sagarika Suresh Thimmanayakanapalya, Yotam Ophir
Drawing on theories of identity politics and partisan polarization, we explored the politicization of Google Play’s news app reviews—an explicitly non-political domain. Using a mixed-methods approach, Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMNs), combining topic modeling, network analysis, community detection, and theory-driven qualitative reading, we analyzed 759,143 reviews from 2009 to 2022 across
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The backrooms and liminal spaces: Explorations of a digital urban legend New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Bradley Earl Wiggins
Urban legends form an important part of socio-cultural narratives of shared fears and anxieties, and their presence online has developed similarly. This contribution explores the online urban legend the backrooms and examines its narrative construction offering possible reasons for the popularity and participatory aspect of the backrooms. Appearing on 4chan in May 2019, the backrooms represent an endless
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Taking back and giving back on TikTok: Algorithmic mutual aid in the platform economy New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-25 Elena Maris, Robyn Caplan, Hibby Thach
This article explores three genres of TikTok content in which creators and users collaborate to re(direct) the value they create on-platform toward specific needs, people, and causes. Drawing from literatures on platform economies, user and creator labor, algorithmic imaginaries and resistance, and mutual aid, we used algorithmic ethnography to identify and define major genres of content, eventually
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“I stand up for us”: Muslims’ feelings of stigmatization in response to terrorism on social media New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-23 Ruta Kaskeleviciute, Helena Knupfer, Jörg Matthes
Terrorism has the potential to divide societies. It is particularly relevant to investigate how Islamist terrorism on social media is associated with Muslim minorities’ attitudes and behaviors. This study examined how seeing terrorism on social media relates to Muslim minority individuals’ perceived stigmatization. We further investigated how perceived stigmatization translates to social media behaviors
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Impact of misinformation from generative AI on user information processing: How people understand misinformation from generative AI New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-20 Donghee Shin, Amy Koerber, Joon Soo Lim
This study examines the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the ways in which users process and respond to misinformation in generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) contexts. Drawing on the heuristic–systematic model and the concept of diagnosticity, our approach examines a cognitive model for processing misinformation in GenAI. The study’s findings revealed that users with a high-heuristic
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Who relates to whom and according to which rationale? Visibility and advocacy in the Ugandan LGBT+ Twittersphere New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-19 Jakob Svensson, Anders Olof Larsson, Cecilia Strand
An increase in international funding for LGBT+ rights advocacy in Uganda has resulted in not only a mushrooming of organizations but also intra-community competition for visibility, attention, and limited resources. Against this backdrop, we set out to study how organizations relate to each other in the Ugandan LGBT+ Twittersphere. Following an analytical framework around rationalities of mediated
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(Re)sharing feminisms: Re-sharing Instagram Stories as everyday feminist practices New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-18 Sofia P. Caldeira
Contemporary experiences of everyday feminisms often include the use of social media platforms like Instagram. The introduction of Instagram Stories created a space for emerging feminist engagements, allowing for practices of re-sharing content that serve as small acts of political engagement, accommodating the participation of otherwise reluctant users. This article explores the feminist potential
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From the auction block to the Tinder swipe: Black women’s experiences with fetishization on dating apps New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-16 Jasmine Banks, Mel Monier, Miranda Reynaga, Apryl Williams
The digital has been celebrated for its objectivity and lack of bias, yet digital media scholars have addressed the ways that inequity is embedded in technology. What is often missing from this discourse is the voices of Black women. Drawing on interviews with 20 self-identified Black and African American women, aged 18–30, who have used dating apps in the preceding 6 months, we invited participants
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The game of Ride-Pass in platform work: Implementation of Burawoy’s concept of workplace games to app-mediated ride-hailing industry in Poland New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Bartosz Mika, Dominika Polkowska
The article provides an argument that the platform is the site of Burawoy’s workplace games. The game observed on the platform used a pattern quite similar to one diagnosed by Burawoy, successfully employing coercion and consent to control the workforce. Control on the platform has a general nature which combines technological, organisational and normative aspects. Work on the app is coordinated by
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‘Conspiracy theories should be called spoiler alerts’: Conspiracy, coronavirus and affective community on Russell Brand’s YouTube comment section New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Robert Topinka
This article examines how conspiracy theories anchor affective communities through an analysis of the YouTube comment section for the actor and comedian turned political influencer, Russell Brand. Comparing videos before and after Brand’s shift to covid scepticism, I explore like counts, reply networks and other commenting patterns in a dataset of 217,157 comments and conduct an in-depth analysis of
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Making events: How anticipatory infrastructures produce shared temporalities New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Megan Finn, Mike Ananny
Anticipatory infrastructures assemble sensors that are ready to detect, networks primed to share data, scientists prepared to confirm events, and news organizations poised to tell stories. This article explains how public time is articulated through sensor-mediated communications by examining two anticipatory infrastructures. Each infrastructure uses similar earthquake data to detect, report on, and
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The Infopolitics of feeling: How race and disability are configured in Emotion Recognition Technology New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Kerry McInerney, Os Keyes
In this article, we argue that facial emotion recognition technology (facial ERT) reproduces historical forms of pseudoscience based on the concept of quantifiable and unequally distributed emotional capacity. Drawing on Kyla Schuller’s Biopolitics of Feeling and Colin Koopman’s theory of infopower, we put forward the term ‘the infopolitics of feeling’ to describe how facial ERT encodes culturally
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My news, your news, and our news: Self-presentational motivations and three levels of issue relevance in news sharing on social media New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Jennifer Ihm, Eun-mee Kim
Research on news sharing has focused on the societal relevance of news as the core value of traditional journalism or the informational characteristics of viral news on social media. In contrast, this study reinterprets news-sharing behaviors as interpersonal communication of news sharers presenting themselves to their personal networks beyond the distribution of societally important information. Through
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Fear of missing out and social media use: A three-wave longitudinal study on the interplay with psychological need satisfaction and psychological well-being New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Ellen Groenestein, Lotte Willemsen, Guido M van Koningsbruggen, Peter Kerkhof
This three-wave longitudinal study ( n = 1341) examined between- and within-person effects linking fear of missing out (FoMO) and social media use to psychological need satisfaction and well-being over time. As such, this study tests the premise that FoMO can be understood as a self-regulatory limbo, arising from deficits in psychological need satisfaction and/or lower well-being. This limbo is suggested
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Exploring responses to mainstream news among heavy and non-news users: From high-effort pragmatic scepticism to low effort cynical disengagement New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Sora Park, Caroline Fisher, Richard Fletcher, Edson Tandoc, Uwe Dulleck, Janet Fulton, Agata Stepnik, Shengnan Pinker Yao
Research shows the growth of online information has led to a decline in audience trust in mainstream news. However, how this lowered trust in the news affects different audiences’ attitudes and news consumption behaviour is less understood. Our thematic analysis of 40 semi-structured interviews with Australian heavy and non-news users of mainstream news shows that responses vary with respect to the
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Blaming the smurf: Using a novel social deception behavior in online games to test attribution theories New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Charles K Monge, Nicholas L Matthews
Despite their popularity, online video games possess pervasive toxicity. However, players do not categorically judge toxic behaviors as wrong. Attribution theories are well suited to disambiguate such judgment variance, but debate exists on the usefulness of motivated versus socially regulated blame perspectives. By exploring a new, potentially toxic behavior called “smurfing,” we innovate on methodological
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Picture me in person: Personalization and emotionalization as political campaign strategies on social media in the German federal election period 2021 New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-12 Stephanie Geise, Katharina Maubach, Alena Boettcher Eli
Due to the possibilities of direct communication with voters, politicians successfully use social media for personalization and emotionalization in election campaigns. However, since much of the research is based on text-centered analyses of individual platforms, we examine multimodal strategies of personalization and emotionalization of political candidates across platforms. Through a qualitative
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‘Taking the router shopping’: How low-income families experience, negotiate, and enact digital dis/connections New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Kate Mannell, Estelle Boyle, Jenny Kennedy, Indigo Holcombe-James
Within digital media scholarship, there are significant bodies of literature investigating forced disconnection (‘digital exclusion’) and voluntary disconnection (‘digital disconnection’) but there is little research addressing entanglements between them. This article explores how bringing together these bodies of literature through an empirical study offers new pathways and considerations for both
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Children’s, parents’ and educators’ understandings and experiences of digital resilience: A systematic review and meta-ethnography New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-11 Simon P Hammond, Gainfranco Polizzi, Claire Duddy, Y’etsha Bennett-Grant, Kimberley J Bartholomew
Supporting children to be digitally resilient when facing online adversity is an increasingly important developmental task. However, conceptual knowledge underpinning digital resilience and how this operates among children and across their home, community and societal contexts is embryonic. A systematic review and meta-ethnography of research focusing on the understandings and experiences of digital
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How do we speak about algorithms and algorithmic media futures? Using vignettes and scenarios in a citizen council on data-driven media personalisation New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 Ranjana Das, Yen Nee Wong, Rhianne Jones, Philip JB Jackson
‘New’ media and algorithmic rules underlying many emerging technologies present particular challenges in fieldwork, because the opacity of their design, and, sometimes, their real or perceived status as ‘not quite here yet’ – makes speaking about these challenging in the field. In this article, we use insights from a three-stage citizens council investigating citizens’ views on developments in data-driven
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The silicon future New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-08 John Cheney-Lippold
This article proposes the concept of the silicon future—a privileged temporal position that functionally precedes the present—to argue for an increased focus on temporality and the role it plays in technodeterminist discourse. By interpreting how Silicon Valley firms employ this silicon future as an inevitability that they themselves have already reached, the article describes a temporal paternalism—a
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Rethinking #thedress: On the social aesthetics of viral ambiguity illusions New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Jordan Schonig
The social media phenomenon known as #thedress, a photograph of a dress that appeared to be either blue and black or white and gold, has been called one of the most viral debates of the twenty-first century. While many scientific explanations have been offered to explain the image’s mysterious color ambiguity, this article analyzes #thedress as an example of a broader genre that I call viral ambiguity
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Curating hope in chronocracy: TikTok creation and the offline lives of young men from Pakistan in Greece New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-07 Rachael Lindsay
This article investigates the disparity between the everyday lives of young men from Pakistan living in Greece and the impressions created through their TikTok profiles. It asks how creating and curating TikTok content counters the multifarious temporal exclusions, or chronocracy, they experience as they work undocumented and attempt to stay under the radar of the authorities. By shedding light on
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Social media and the mediation of everyday violence: A study of Colombian young adults’ experiences New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Esteban Morales
Social media is a critical element of contemporary ecologies of violence, especially in countries with a long-standing history of armed conflicts – such as Colombia, the setting of this study. In this context, this article explores how violence is mediated through and within social media platforms among Colombian young adults. More specifically, by drawing on Jesús Martín-Barbero, this study explores
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A different playbook for the same outcome? Examining Google’s and Meta’s strategic responses to Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Diana Bossio, Andrea Carson, James Meese
In March 2021, Australia enacted the News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC) legislation, which compels Google and Meta to pay for third-party news content on their platforms. To date, Australian newsrooms have made deals with both platforms totalling approximately AUD$200 million (US$126.4 million). The 1-year review of the Code has prompted questions about not just the legislation but also the lack of
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Building resilience to misinformation in communities of color: Results from two studies of tailored digital media literacy interventions New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Angela Y Lee, Ryan C Moore, Jeffrey T Hancock
Interventions to build resilience to misinformation should consider the needs of communities of color, who experience (mis)information in unique ways. We evaluated digital media literacy interventions to improve misinformation resilience among four communities of color in the United States (Black, Latino, Asian American/Pacific Islander, Native American), which were designed by the nonprofit PEN America
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Serial mediation effects of ubiquity and notification on the relationship between habitual social media checking behaviors and self-control failures New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-29 Hyun Jee Park
This study investigated the correlation between habitual checking behavior and self-control failure during social media use among South Korean university students. The study also examined how the ubiquity of and immediate responses to social media notifications affect this relationship, both independently and serially. An online survey was conducted with 400 undergraduate students at South Korean universities
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Beyond extraction: Data strategies from the Global South New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Heather A Horst, Adam Sargent, luke gaspard
This article draws upon a desk-based review and expert interviews with practitioners in the Global South to understand the diverse forms of data mediation that have become increasingly visible in the wake of the global coronavirus disease-19 pandemic. In contrast to accounts that frame the Global South solely as a site for the extraction of data and cheap, unskilled digital labor, we explore alternative
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Where are the pandemic drones? On the ‘failure’ of automated aerial solutionism New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Anna Jackman, Michael Richardson, Madelene Veber
In the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, excitement broke out around the potential for drones to generate aerial solutions to devilish pandemic problems. But despite the hype, pandemic drones largely failed to take to the sky and far from the scale initially imagined. This article pursues the failure of the pandemic drone to materialise, showing how it nevertheless functioned as a locus of experimentation
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Disaster, facial recognition technology, and the problem of the corpse New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Christopher O’Neill
The overlapping disasters of the Australian 2019–2020 bushfire season and the COVID-19 pandemic, figured alongside the imaginary of projected future disasters, have provided a space of legitimation to experiment with controversial facial recognition technologies (FRTs). Drawing upon interviews conducted with senior Australian government administrators and researchers, I argue that FRTs are being used
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Acting like a bot as a defiance of platform power: Examining YouTubers’ patterns of ‘inauthentic’ behaviour on Twitter during COVID-19 New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Ariadna Matamoros-Fernández, Louisa Bartolo, Betsy Alpert
This article examines YouTubers’ ‘bot like’ behaviour on Twitter and conceptualises it as a defiance of platform power in delimiting the boundaries of ‘authenticity’. This entrepreneurial capture of ‘botness’ is understudied and deserves attention. We focus on a platform with a clear monetisation scheme, YouTube, and on patterns of ‘inauthentic’ behaviour in how people shared YouTube videos on Twitter
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Future notification: Living and breathing in post-pandemic climate change New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Sarah Pink, Yolande Strengers, Hannah Korsmeyer
In a post-pandemic context, everyday life, technology and media have become increasingly focused in the home. This has implications for how people will live with automated and smart technologies in possible futures, for electricity demand, transition to net zero emissions and ultimately planetary health. Here, we explore these unfolding circumstances through the prism of notifications, and their capacity
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The artificial intelligence divide: Who is the most vulnerable? New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Chenyue Wang, Sophie C Boerman, Anne C Kroon, Judith Möller, Claes H de Vreese
This study investigates users’ artificial intelligence (AI)-related competencies (i.e., AI knowledge, skills, and attitudes) and identifies the vulnerable user groups in the AI-shaped online news and entertainment environment. We surveyed 1088 Dutch citizens over the age of 16 years and identified five user groups through the latent class analysis: the average users, the expert advocates, the expert
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Granular biopolitics: Facial recognition, pandemics and the securitization of circulation New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Mark Andrejevic, Chris O’Neill, Gavin Smith, Neil Selwyn, Xin Gu
The COVID-19 pandemic has provided opportunities for facial recognition technology and other forms of biometric monitoring to expand into new markets. One anticipated result is the wholesale reconfiguration of shared and public space enabled by the automated identification and tracking of individuals in real time. Drawing on data from several industry trade shows, this article considers the forms of
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Automated responses to the coronavirus disease-19 pandemic: An overview New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Mark Andrejevic, Chris O’Neill
The pandemic response was a thoroughly mediated phenomenon – one that paired digital information technologies with automated logistical systems to address inter-related crises of circulation. In the logistical sphere, automated media were used to manage flows of people, commodities and even (in the case of ‘smart’ ventilation systems) air itself. In the media realm, automated systems played a role
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Supermarket ‘dark jobs’ and rapid grocery delivery: Transformations in labour, technology and logistics New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Lauren Kelly
As demand for rapid grocery delivery surged during the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia’s supermarket duopoly set about transforming relations of labour, technology and logistics to secure dominance in the growing sector. I consider the rise of ‘dark jobs’ of the supermarket and what this means for affected workers. My research encompasses in-depth interviews with 17 supermarket workers, including personal
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Beyond the ‘critical incident’: COVID-19, data journalism and the slow road to editorial automation in Australian newsrooms New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Silvia X Montaña-Niño, Jean Burgess
This article draws on a qualitative interview-based study and the framework of the ‘critical incident’ to explore whether, how and for whom the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic saw an increased uptake of data-driven automation in Australian newsrooms and with what implications for the field. Our findings show that, while news workers combined and adapted existing technologies to meet increased demands
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QR codes and automated decision-making in the COVID-19 pandemic New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Gerard Goggin, Rowan Wilken
In this article, we explore Quick Response (QR) codes (machine-readable optical labels that link to information) and how, after a period of having fallen out of favor, they have been reactivated and have come to underpin COVID-19 automation and contact-tracing efforts. During the pandemic, they were used especially for “safe entry” and other kinds of check-in to locations to facilitate contact tracing
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Digital citizenship and disability in the covid era New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Georgia van Toorn, Lloyd Cox
The covid-19 crisis has accelerated automation and digitalization in many aspects of social life. Social distancing and lockdowns, combined with the imperative to preserve economic activity, have seen much work and education move online, while the digitalization of government services has intensified. These developments slowed the spread of covid-19 but their broader effects, both positive and negative
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No sweat: How wet bodies negotiate wearables as repairables New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-24 Rachel Plotnick
As embodied technologies, wearable devices—from fitness trackers to virtual reality head-mounted displays—interact not only with wearers’ movements but also interface with their skin and temperature. In so doing, people sweat. Perspiration occurs during physical activity and from close bodily contact and can culturally signify productive body-work or generate “grossness” and disgust. Wearable manufacturers
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“It’s weird for the people who aren’t used to it. And I want to make it less weird”: Blindness community bloggers as legitimate voices of their lived experiences New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Ibrahim Helmy Emara, Beth A Haller
In this study, 19 bloggers from the blindness community discuss the meaning of blogging both for themselves and for other persons within this community. Bloggers with visual impairments, their relatives, and blog editors of blindness organizations are interviewed to answer the following questions: (1) What motivates people from the blindness community to still use blogs? (2) How does blogging enable
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Online discourse and chronotopic identity work: A longitudinal digital ethnography on WeChat New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Luyao Li, Jing Huang
This article presents a sociolinguistic analysis of online identity construction through the lens of chronotope. Based on a longitudinal digital ethnography spanning 2019–2022, we examined 253 WeChat Moments posts collected from a participant referred to as ‘Green’. Our aim is to understand how individuals with migration experiences tactically draw on multimodal and translingual resources to construct
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Calls to (what kind of?) action: A framework for comparing political actors’ campaign strategies across social media platforms New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Anders Olof Larsson, Hedvig Tønnesen, Melanie Magin, Eli Skogerbø
Politicians can use social media to prompt citizens to engage by means of calls to action—statements, often in imperative form, that explicitly encourage audiences to take immediate action. This study makes a twofold contribution to this field: (1) Theoretically, we relate three factors shaping social media campaigns (audiences, affordances, genres) to calls to action related to three main campaign
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Setting the misinformation agenda: Modeling COVID-19 narratives in Twitter communities New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Ali Unlu, Sophie Truong, Nitin Sawhney, Tuukka Tammi
This research investigates the dynamics of COVID-19 misinformation spread on Twitter within the unique context of Finland. Employing cutting-edge methodologies including text classification, topic modeling, social network analysis, and correspondence analysis (CA), the study analyzes 1.6 million Finnish tweets from December 2019 to October 2022. Misinformation tweets are identified through text classification
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Technology is a wish your heart makes: How Disney harnesses practical magic discourse to legitimize MyMagic+ New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Kelley Cotter, Priya Kumar, Ankolika De, Ryan Tan
This article explores how Disney employs magical discourse to legitimize its MyMagic+ system. Through an analysis of the Disney Parks blog, we introduce the concept practical magic discourse, which entices users to indulge in the fantasy of transcending the constraints of reality, while obscuring the labor involved in the system’s development and maintenance. Practical magic discourse differs from
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Geek nostalgia: The reflective and restorative defence of white male geek culture New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-23 Andreas Ottemo, Maria Berge, Heather Mendick, Eva Silfver
During recent decades, geek culture has become increasingly visible, and the geek has left the cultural margins, becoming more popular than ever. At the same time, nostalgia has emerged as a central component of geek culture. Framed by a post-structural understanding of gender and race and drawing on cultural theorist Svetlana Boym’s distinction between reflective and restorative nostalgia, this article
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Platform visibility and the making of an issue: Vernaculars of hereditary cancer on Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Twitter New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-19 Stefania Vicari, Hannah Ditchfield
We investigate the relationship between platform visibility and meaning making. Drawing on a quanti-quali investigation of hashtag practices in a cross-platform dataset, we explore how hereditary cancer is constructed, as an issue, on social media. Our findings provide strong evidence of significant variations across Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, with hashtag practices on these platforms tapping into
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How to grow a transnational field: A network analysis of the global fact-checking movement New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-15 Laurens Lauer, Lucas Graves
The worldwide fact-checking movement has grown rapidly over the last decade and achieved remarkable prominence. This study investigates that global movement as a case of deliberate institution-building to consolidate a new transnational field. We use a comprehensive network analysis of the first eight years of the annual Global Fact conference to ask how fact-checkers grew their young field, examining
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Flagging as a silencing tool: Exploring the relationship between de-platforming of sex and online abuse on Instagram and TikTok New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Carolina Are
This article investigates Instagram and TikTok’s approach to malicious flagging through users’ experience. Similar to liking, commenting and sharing, flagging is a reaction social media platforms allow users to highlight content that potentially violates community guidelines. However, flagging’s influence on moderation remains opaque: users who flag are largely unaware about the success of their reports;
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The politics of tech responsibility: Understanding companies’ responsibility as representative claims New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Anke Sophia Obendiek
This article explores responsibility claims by private tech companies. While the business literature has extensively discussed the notion of corporate social responsibility, it does not fully grasp the political significance of responsibility claims. This article proposes a novel conceptual understanding of responsibility by drawing on the concept of representative claims. It argues that by claiming
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Does high-quality news attract engagement on social media? Mediatization, media logic, and the contrasting values that shape news sharing, liking, and commenting on Facebook New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Jieun Shin, Seth C Lewis, Soojong Kim, Kjerstin Thorson
Despite the concern over deteriorating news quality on social media, few studies have empirically examined how much high-quality news is rewarded on social media. Guided by the mediatization literature, we compared the extent to which normative values (i.e. factual reporting and public importance) in news stories as opposed to social media values (i.e. popularity) contribute to actual engagement such
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Transferred expectations of human presence: Folk theories among older adults who are inexperienced users of online services New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-07 Hilde Sakariassen, Brita Ytre-Arne
This study analyses the expectations of older adults who are inexperienced users of online media and services, examining their sense-making processes when using the internet for informational and practical purposes. Research on older users often focuses on access and abilities, but this study instead explores older adults’ expectations of what it means to interact online. We apply a ‘folk theory’ framework
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An attack on free speech? Examining content moderation, (de-), and (re-) platforming on American right-wing alternative social media New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-02-05 Brittany Shaughnessy, Eliana DuBosar, Myiah J. Hutchens, Ilyssa Mann
Contemporary research on social media looks different than it did in the late 2010s, with users facing a high-choice social media environment as new platforms emerge. Subsequently, alt-right sites have experienced a rise in users—sometimes those who have experienced content moderation by traditional social media sites. As such, scholars have investigated the impact of this content moderation (e.g.