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Online self-disclosure: An interdisciplinary literature review of 10 years of research New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Tamar Ashuri, Ruth Halperin
The term “self-disclosure” refers to actions by which individuals reveal information about themselves. The interest in such conduct has resurged with the development of networked participatory technologies, which enable creation, dissemination, analysis, and use of large amounts of personal information, thereby increasingly augmenting the effect of online self-disclosure on disclosers and disclosees
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Friction in the Netflix machine: How screen workers interact with streaming data New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-05-10 Nina Vindum Rasmussen
Data-driven streamers like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have expanded into the European screen landscape with a significant appetite for locally produced content. These players leverage advanced data analytics to gain deep customer insights, but they prefer to keep a lid on their algorithmic operations. This article examines how screen workers interact with streaming data despite widespread secrecy
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Hate-sharing: A case study of its prevalence and impact on Gab New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Moira Weigel, Adina Gitomer
This article brings frameworks from literary and cultural studies and methods from network science to bear on a central topic in political communication research: polarization. Recent studies have called into question the argument that digital “echo chambers” exacerbate polarization by preventing members from encountering a diversity of information and opinions. Using Gab, a far-right social media
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Influence of hate speech about refugees in search algorithms on political attitudes: An online experiment New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-29 Franziska Pradel
This article assesses the effects of hate speech compared to positive and neutral content about refugees in search engines on trust and policy preferences through a survey experiment in Germany. The study uncovers that individuals with an extreme-right political ideology become more hostile toward refugees after being exposed to refugee-related hate speech in search queries. Moreover, politically biased
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Dynamics of scale shift: Contentious places and hybrid activism on social media New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-25 Zozan Baran, Daniela Stoltenberg
This article investigates the role of social media in scale shift of contention. Contentious politics research grapples with questions of scale shift, while digital activism explores connective potential of social media. Yet, the potential of social media is not fully explored in the scale shift processes. We conduct an explorative semantic network analysis to understand how activists create connections
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Infrastructural platform violence: How women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon experience abuse on WhatsApp New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-25 Martin J Riedl, Azza El-Masri, Inga K Trauthig, Samuel C Woolley
Technology-facilitated abuse and violence disproportionately affect marginalized people. While researchers have explored this issue in the context of public-facing social media platforms, less is known about how it plays out on more private messaging apps. This study draws on in-depth interviews with women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon to illustrate their experiences of infrastructural
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VR technology and humanitarian crisis: Political ideology and the intention to donate in the case of the Syrian refugee crisis New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-23 Porismita Borah, Bimbisar Irom, Lee Yoon Joo, Danielle Ka Lai Lee, Di Mu, Anastasia Vishnevskaya, Eylul Yel, Ron Price
Scholars have studied the role of technology in humanitarian crises and have noted an increase in positive attitudes and behavior. Of interest to us is Virtual Reality (VR). We set out to understand the role of VR technology and its relationships with empathy, sympathy, and donation intention in case of the Syrian refugee crisis. We conducted two experimental studies to examine these relationships
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To whom do people reply in comment sections? Effects of attitude (un)congeniality, age, confidence, and knowledge New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-22 Jürgen Buder, Nadia Said
Phenomena like echo chambers and societal polarization have often been linked to an individual preference for like-minded information (selective exposure). This view has been challenged recently: behavior on comment sections in online forums suggests the opposite dynamic, with users more likely to reply to attitudinally uncongenial content. Three experimental studies (total N = 1524) explore boundary
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Do inclusive incentive systems encourage prosocial or competitive behavior in online communities? New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-22 Lichen Zhen, Marlon Twyman
Platform designers create and implement incentive systems to encourage users to contribute content to online communities. This article examines the effect of a multidimensional incentive hierarchy in motivating users to engage in competitive and prosocial activities. Utilizing an external change observed in the data science community, Kaggle, and applying a quasi-experimental design, we compared users’
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Posting vulnerability on LinkedIn New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-17 Shani Orgad
Digital spaces such as LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional digital network, constitute central sites for self-promotion, where job seekers and the employed present their polished “best” professional selves. However, in recent years, LinkedIn members are increasingly publishing accounts that highlight their vulnerabilities and struggles. This article examines the emergence of vulnerability on
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Exploring the presence of Cymraeg on TikTok New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Daniel Cunliffe
Many of the world’s languages are endangered or vulnerable. For some of these languages, a presence in technological domains can illustrate vitality and demonstrate relevance to the lives of younger speakers. A presence on social media is often seen as particularly significant for younger speakers due to their high levels of social media use. This article explores the presence of Cymraeg (the Welsh
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Images of protest in movement parties’ social media communication New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Matthias Hoffmann, Christina Neumayer
This research investigates the strategic use of protest imagery on social media by movement parties, bridging the gap between protest and institutional politics. We apply a mixed-methods analysis of 9584 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram image posts by seven movement parties between 2015 and 2021. We find that protest images frequently serve to amplify movement grievances. Yet, parties’ involvement
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Immaterial intimacy: The neoliberal entanglement of digital technologies in social movement volunteer work New Media & Society (IF 5.31) Pub Date : 2024-04-15 Jessica Gantt-Shafer
Outside of visible moments of mass mobilization, ongoing latent work, such as direct service and mutual aid, is a long-standing tradition in social movements. Yet, like all labor, personal digital devices have changed the norms and practices of direct service social movement work. In this article, as situated in the technology–media–movement complex (TMMC), I analyze qualitative interview data ( N
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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