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The aim of this article is to outline ‘communicative robots’ as an increasingly relevant field of media and communication research. Communicative robots are defined as autonomously operating systems designed for the purpose of quasi-communication with human beings to enable further algorithmic-based functionalities – often but not always on the basis of artificial intelligence. Examples of these communicative robots can be seen in the now familiar artificial companions such as Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa, the social bots present on social media platforms or work bots that automatically generate journalistic content. In all, the article proceeds in three steps. Initially, it takes a closer look at the three examples of artificial companions, social bots and work bots in order to accurately describe the phenomenon and their recent insinuation into everyday life. This will then allow me to grasp the challenges posed by the increasing need to deal with communicative robots in media and communication research. It is from this juncture from where I would like to draw back on the discussion about the automation of communication and clearly outline how communicative robots are more likely than physical artefacts to be experienced at the interface of automated communication and communicative automation.

The contemporary outbreak of right-wing populism in combination with increasing migratory flows toward Europe raises concerns about the social construction of migrations and migrants and the policy orientations toward them. Research indicated worrying tendencies to perceive migrations negatively and criminalize migrants. However, this paper focuses on a different tactic adopted by a number of populist forces: the criminalization of sea-rescue NGOs. In particular, it presents the case-study of Sea-Watch 3, an NGO sea-rescue vessel which docked in Italy with several migrants on board in June 2019, after a long struggle with Minister of Internal Affairs Matteo Salvini, the leader of the League (a right-wing, anti-migrants populist party). By means of content analysis, the paper discusses Salvini’s Facebook communication strategy about the event. The aim of this study is to cast new light on how the criminalization of NGOs can be exploited to reinforce other aspects of right-wing populism, such as anti-elitism, nationalism, exclusionary politics, personalization, and polarization. In this respect, the implications of criminalizing sea-rescue NGOs for policy orientations and policymaking are also highlighted.

Debates about the role of media and communication in social change are central to our discipline, yet advances in this field are hampered by disciplinary fragmentation, a lack of shared conceptual language and limited understanding of long-term shifts in the field. To address this, we first develop a typology that distinguishes between approaches that foreground the role of media and communication as an agent of change, and approaches that treat media and communication as an environment for change. We then use this typology to identify key trends in the field since 1951, including the sharp downturn in work focusing on economic aspects of change after 1985, the decline of grand narratives of social change since 2000 and the parallel return to media effects. We conclude by outlining the key traits of a processual approach to social change, which has the capacity to offer the basis for shared language in the field. This language can enable us to think of media, communication and social change across its varied temporal and social planes, and link together the processes involved in the reproduction of status quo with fundamental changes to social order.

Paolo Gerbaudo’s book The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest, whose approach is reflected in his Crosscurrents piece in the issue of Media, Culture & Society at hand, is a response to these societal, political and academic challenges. This CrossCurrents comment asks, I ask, the following: Why is it that right-wing authoritarian populism in recent times has become much more popular than left-wing movements? How do right-wing authoritarian movements communicate? Why is it that right-wing political communication strategies seem to garner and result in mass support? The critical theory of authoritarianism advanced by the Frankfurt School and related authors on fascism, Nazism, and the authoritarian personality help us to critically analyse the communication of authoritarianism. In this context, particularly the works by Franz Leopold Neumann, Erich Fromm, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Leo Löwenthal, and Willhelm Reich are relevant.

Within the Lusophone community of over 250 million speakers only a minority developed a sense of belonging based on their common language, a phenomenon that is still very real today. According to the Mozambican writer, Mia Couto, Lusophony is not a ‘loud’ reality, rather a “luso-aphonic” one, that is, a place of low voices, no knowledge and no acknowledgement of the commonalities between themselves in this vast geographic and cultural space. Recognizing precisely this gap, Communication research associations in Lusophone countries (Lusocom) have promoted the setting up of a research cooperation network primarily between Portuguese and Brazilian researchers, and then extending it to the Galician community, and subsequently to the entire Lusophone space. This movement is based on the assumption that linguistic diversity enriches science and that science should be globally and contextually relevant. Lusophony can be discussed from various points of view, all related to the cultural identity of the Portuguese-speaking countries. I would like to explain my point of view, focused on the social status of language. Then, I will refer to the English language has a dominant language. Finally, I would like to point out some challenges that, from my perspective, the Lusophone research groups have to face in a global world dominated by English and anglo-saxon paradigms. My approach is in fact focused on the perspective of language, understood as a cultural manifestation, the expression of thought, a relational space, and an instrument of symbolic organization of the world. Such understanding is coincident with the symbolic power of language (Pierre Bourdieu’s theory), and with the post-colonial perspective which questions the domination, submission, subordination and control of peripheries, minorities, diasporas, migrants…, (undefined), info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Communication systems are now converging, but communication policy has evolved to treat different media with different doctrines. Most solutions for a post-convergence communication policy are adjustments to inherited regulatory categories. Instead, this article revisits the underlying goals of policymaking across all media. First, this article presents a conceptual model for the communication policy process as one of inertia punctuated by crisis. Second, it applies this model to a very brief history of policy in the US, considering print, post, telephony, broadcasting, and the Internet. Third, from this analysis it suggests useful approaches in a converged environment, distinguishing three underlying goals for policy: the right to publish, the right to private exchange, and the right to design communication platforms., Os sistemas de comunicações estão convergindo, mas a política de comunicação tem evoluído no sentido de submeter as diferentes mídias a diferentes doutrinas. Muitas das soluções para uma política de comunicação pós-convergência são ajustes às categorias regulatórias herdadas do passado. Em vez de seguir com essa tendência, este artigo revisita os objetivos subjacentes de formulação de políticas públicas de todas as mídias. Em primeiro lugar, este artigo apresenta um modelo conceitual para a política de comunicação como um processo de inércia marcado por crises. Em segundo lugar, ele aplica esse modelo a uma brevíssima história dessa política nos Estados Unidos, enfocando a imprensa, os correios, a telefonia, a radiodifusão e a internet. Em terceiro lugar, a partir dessa análise, o artigo propõe abordagens úteis num ambiente resultante do processo convergente, distinguindo-se três metas políticas subjacentes: o direito de publicar, o direito de intercâmbio privado, e o direito de conceber plataformas de comunicação.

Digital information and communication technologies feature prominently in programmes to promote social inclusion and to implement extensive reform in public service provision across Europe. The transition to an all-digital communications environment and the digital ‘switchover’ of public services bring to the fore a need to rethink access as a goal of public policy. This article probes patterns of internet diffusion among disabled people using capabilities framework and resource-based models of access. The analysis highlights the multi-dimensional character of media access capability as the space to evaluate policies for social inclusion; the relational character of disability as a phenomenon of the interface between personal circumstances and structural disadvantage; a capability failure resulting from a gap in policy commitment to promote universal access for disabled people and other excluded groups; and a requirement for policies sensitive to the need for additional resources to equalize the media access capabilities of these individuals.

This paper argues that the current disinformation studies literature lacks any sustained analysis of a crucial element in any communication campaign – its sources of funding. The paper argues that crowdfunding platforms are arguably better networked and ‘cross platform enabled’ than most social media sites to spread disinformation. And that disinformation actors have weaponized crowdfunding to amplify and sustain the spread of their grievances and forms of disinformation. The paper offers a rich qualitative study of a set of election fraud and 5G themed campaigns on the GoFundMe crowdfunding platform. The study questions how networked content and financial appeals in the crowdfunding pitch can contribute to the disinformation literature and potential solutions.

In this crosscurrent contribution, we approach the notion of welfare through the lens of the data welfare state. We, further, suggest that datafied welfare can be fruitfully studied with the capabilities approach to better understand how ideas and values of data welfare intersect with and may allow for the ‘good’ life and human flourishing. The main aim is to highlight the deep-seated changes of the welfare state that emerge with the delegation of care and control tasks to algorithmic systems and the automation based on datafication practices. Welfare provision is undergoing major shifts that imply fundamentally rethinking the role of technology that supports and enhances welfare with the help of data.

Forcibly confined in a precarious and overcrowded space amidst the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, prisoners in Lebanon resorted to their smuggled cellphones. They produced and circulated images, videos, and sound bites documenting the dire experiences of living under a failing infrastructure. This article addresses this phenomenon by examining a corpus of ‘prison cellphone recordings’ mediated on social media platforms and Lebanese local news. I adopt the media as practice theory to claim that such fragmentary amateur cellphone media messages are the product of strategic and hybrid prison media practices. In addition, I employ the conceptual notions of hybrid media activism and media witnessing to investigate the political and testimonial function of prisoners’ illicit engagement with digital technologies. I propose a typology of the mediated prison cellphone recordings and argue that these representations serve to mobilize support and relay visual evidence of prisoners lived experiences during the pandemic. Finally, I attempt with this article to instigate an approach to the examination of media from the prison; an approach that prioritizes illicit media practices behind bars and their ‘traces’ in the media.

Peer reviewed: True, Predictive language technologies – such as Google Search’s Autocomplete – constitute forms of algorithmic power that reflect and compound global power imbalances between Western technology companies and multilingual Internet users in the global South. Increasing attention is being paid to predictive language technologies and their impacts on individual users and public discourse. However, there is a lack of scholarship on how such technologies interact with African languages. Addressing this gap, the article presents data from experimentation with autocomplete predictions/suggestions for gendered or politicised keywords in Amharic, Kiswahili and Somali. It demonstrates that autocomplete functions for these languages and how users may be exposed to harmful content due to an apparent lack of filtering of problematic ‘predictions’. Drawing on debates on algorithmic power and digital colonialism, the article demonstrates that global power imbalances manifest here not through a lack of online African indigenous language content, but rather in regard to the moderation of content across diverse cultural and linguistic contexts. This raises dilemmas for actors invested in the multilingual Internet between risks of digital surveillance and effective platform oversight, which could prevent algorithmic harms to users engaging with platforms in a myriad of languages and diverse socio-cultural and political environments.

Televised football in Spain enjoys great popularity as it is watched by millions of people every year. It has also been suggested as a site where ideas about race/ethnicity are (re)produced and national football teams have been proposed as key elements in the formation and/or confirmation of national identities. In this qualitative research we analyse the transcripts of 11 televised football matches of the Spanish national team with the goal of understanding how football commentators contribute to the construction of meanings about race/ethnicity and its intersections with nationality. Results showed how football commentators constructed racial difference by describing football players of diverse backgrounds in different ways. Furthermore, commentators made use of warlike language and national heroes in their construction of a narrative about the nation. These results will be interpreted and placed within the larger socio-historical context in the Discussion section.

Situated within the field of platform governance studies, this paper shares findings from an ‘autoethnography of automated powerlessness’, drawing from the researcher’s disempowering experience of being a heavily moderated social media user. Using theoretical frameworks blending affordances and World Risk Society theories, this paper contextualises my experiences of moderation of my pole dance instructor, activist and blogger account @bloggeronpole from February to October 2021 within social media’s broader de-platforming of nudity and sexuality, finding fallacies within platforms’ own affordances, which lack mechanisms to aid or rehabilitate de-platformed accounts. With little to no information from platforms about the details of their moderation, qualitative, ethnographic and autoethnographic explorations of their governance are all users currently have to fight and understand their puritan, patriarchal censorship of nudity and sexuality, which are often conflated with risk. This study concludes with recommendations for different options for better, more equal and community focused moderation.

In this paper, I recount my experiences with western media theory. Working on my PhD thesis marked my turn to decolonial theory. I used the creolisation strategy of putting critical western Marxist theories in conversation with African, black and Latin American decolonial theories. I worked on my PhD thesis under conditions informed by the Rhodes Must Fall (RMF), the Fees Must Fall (FMF) and other broader protests in South Africa whose connecting thread was the demand for the decolonisation of both the academy and public life. It is my conviction that, although work has already begun, there is still a lot of work to be done in decolonising the disciplines of journalism, media and cultural studies.

This article explores how smartphone videos produced by migrants during border crossings challenge Eurocentric visualizations of borders. Implementing video analysis and iconographic interpretation, I explore three interrelated aspects of the smartphone videos: (1) By circulating videos via digital platforms, migrants create a countervisuality of border crossing that destabilizes the visual politics that shape current border regimes. (2) Unlike journalistic, humanitarian, or surveillance-oriented visual images produced from above, from a safe distance, from rescue or patrol ships, migrants’ smartphone footage puts their own narratives at the center of visualization. (3) Whereas Eurocentric visualizations of migration and borders aim to elicit affects and emotions such as pity, empathy, fear, or panic, migrants’ smartphone videos depict emotions such as joy and happiness after successful border crossings. These affective visualizations of individual migration stories confound binary representations of migrants as either victims or invaders. I argue that the shaky smartphone videos with their wandering focus and disordered mode of vision create a productive vantage point for seeing and sensing a world that is unimaginable for the normative, focused lens that structures views projected by journalism, humanitarian appeals, political mobilization, and surveillance technologies.

The algorithmic imaginary as a theoretical concept has received increasing attention in recent years as it aims at users’ appropriation of algorithmic processes operating in opacity. But the concept originally only starts from the users’ point of view, while the processes on the platforms’ side are largely left out. In contrast, this paper argues that what is true for users is also valid for algorithmic processes and the designers behind. On the one hand, the algorithm imagines users’ future behavior via machine learning, which is supposed to predict all their future actions. On the other hand, the designers anticipate different actions that could potentially performed by users with every new implementation of features such as social media feeds. In order to bring into view this permanently reciprocal interplay coupled to the imaginary, in which not only the users are involved, I will argue for a more comprehensive and theoretically precise algorithmic imaginary referring to the theory of Cornelius Castoriadis. In such a perspective, an important contribution can be formulated for a theory of social media platforms that goes beyond praxeocentrism or structural determinism.

Aiming to enrich the conceptual vocabulary of platform and app studies, this article provides a critical political economic perspective on the media industry to understand how platform power is operationalized in the app economy. Using the China-based tech conglomerate Tencent as a case study, four mechanisms are discussed: conglomeration, financialization, platformization, and infrastructuralization. These mechanisms show how Tencent leveraged both a conglomerated corporate structure and access to finance capital. This was combined with the infrastructuralization of the MyApp app store and the WeChat platform by providing vertically integrated app development and distribution services, which are nested in Tencent’s holdings and investments. Taking Tencent as the starting point for theory building, this article attempts to “provincialize” US-based platform companies by charting Tencent’s corporate evolution and its path to mobile dominance.

This article provides an exploratory discussion of the misogynist online incel community and its discourses around mental health. Incels’ discussion of mental health conditions, trauma and victimhood is outlined in relation to Allen Meek’s development of the concept of the symbolic wound. It is argued that incels’ alleged trauma constitutes the construction of a symbolic wound as a marker of group identity as well as a means of shocking and potentially traumatising others. The concept of the symbolic wound is further developed through the psychoanalytic notion of dis/inhibition which shows how incels are torn between modes of desiring and symbolically destroying women. The collective identity of the symbolic wound and its (non)-relation to trauma can thus be more fragile and contradictory than has been discussed in the literature so far.

This article provides a new direction in digital media and communication studies and develops an emergent analytical lens of digital media and immobility in the context of forced migration. Drawing on a qualitative multi-sited research approach, I shed light on digitally mediated transnational care among the Rohingya diaspora in refugee camps in Bangladesh and in Brisbane, Australia. I draw on Massey’s idea of the ‘power geometry’ with a combination ‘immobility turn’ to consider how the socio-spatial mobility is restricted and regulated, and how these immobilities are crucial to understanding family care practices. I argue that the idea of transnational families existing beyond nation-states, and the social and spatial immobilities may help us to identify the linkages, discrepancies and power asymmetries that exist in cross-cultural settings. The findings offer a critical stance on immobility, which impacts and shapes transnational caregiving practices of forced migrants in the age of digital media.

This paper contributes to the ongoing debate on the precarisation of journalistic work by looking at the case of Syrian exiled journalists in Turkey, whose professional and personal lifeworlds are underpinned by multiple layers of precarity. The article builds on data collected during a 3-month-long period of participant observations at the newsroom of Enab Baladi, a Syrian news outlet based in Istanbul, Turkey. It develops a relational notion of precarity through insights from the growing body of work on precarity in the journalistic field, as well as research on precarity and migration. It proposes a multidimensional understanding of the ‘precarious newsroom’ that takes into account the people, organisation and place, as a way to map how different layers of precarity, and responses to them, are articulated, experienced and negotiated. Our research underlines the complex anatomy of the precarious newsroom as a paradoxical place and an amalgamation of precarity and agency.

The different strategies explored by parents managing their children’s digital practices, the associated challenges, and the conditions for a successful outcome are central in the literature on digital mediation within families. However, few studies consider the family context in its entirety, which is essential if we wish to capture the meanings, perceptions, and negotiations that are played out in the daily family routine. Based on an ethnographic survey on the place of screens in Swiss families’ socialization processes, the paper shows, first, how paternal use undermines digital mediation within the family and, second, that this mediation is ultimately a maternal concern and responsibility. By interviewing all family members (including children) on their assessment of screen use by all family members (including parents), our research design provides access to the backstage of parental digital mediation. Our data shows that women confront fears and guilt in the face of social norms that a ‘good’ mother should regulate screens ‘well’ within her household. We conclude that parental digital mediation is embedded in a gendered social and relational context, where fathers and mothers do not adopt the same roles, the same duties, nor the same mental burden.

From its origins in Black grassroots activist and political consciousness raising spaces, the term ‘woke’ has shifted in its significance. Now broadly synonymous with statements on social media that are assumed to indicate an investment in tackling social injustices, specifically, antiblackness and racial injustice, it has also become the subject of heated critique. Using key case studies such as the ‘I take responsibility’ and Instagram ‘blackout’ campaigns of 2020, this commentary clarifies how the cultural conventions and affordances of both social media and celebrity have shaped conceptualizations of ‘wokeness’. In its marketization, we suggest that ‘wokeness’ goes beyond the associations of progressive politics that advertisers attempt to attach to brands. Rather, we suggest that ‘wokeness’ is also conceptualized in terms of the quality of individual practices connected with antiracism and left politics more broadly. Observing that desires for ‘wokeness’ underpin its visibility and contestation, we explore the affective entanglements of ‘wokeness’ with whiteness, neoliberal identity culture, genres of social media content, and perceived expressions of sincerity. In doing so, we theorize the digital development, hyper-visibility, and marketization of ‘wokeness’, to grapple with how internet, consumer, and celebrity culture is implicated in contemporary understandings and expectations of social justice work.

This article investigates how affective hashtags on Instagram can contribute to forming intimate feminist entanglements transcending the digital sphere, resulting in offline demonstrations and rallies. In tracing the use of three Swedish hashtags emerging in the wake of #metoo, all surrounding women’s experiences with sexual harassment and violence, it is argued that affective hashtags can be a central component for explaining how social media-based campaigns can surpass online spaces and transition into more traditional forms of non-mediated feminist activity. Drawing from a 3-year immersion in feminist communities on Instagram, the article shows how hashtags here are reconceptualized into ‘affect triggers’, intimately entangling human and nonhuman entities along the way. It is suggested that a combination of feminist affect theory and insights from science and technology studies (STS) may offer a fruitful methodology for providing insights into the political potential of affect in forming augmented feminist realities.

This paper analyzes how stakeholders in the Korean media industries understand the penetration of Netflix and other foreign streaming video-on-demand (SVoD) platforms and how they respond to global SVoD players. Based on interviews with cultural workers and bureaucrats, the findings of this paper explore how stakeholders in the media industries interpret Netflix as both an investor who would enable them to produce a variety of content and introduce their products worldwide and as a competitor that has the potential to threaten domestic media production. Considering structural asymmetries caused by disparities in technologies and financial strength between local and global players in the market, as well as the distribution power which streaming moguls have enjoyed for years, the growing presence of Netflix in the domestic market may reduce the position of Korean media production as mere subcontractors of the platform. The paper’s findings shed light on analyzing the relationship between global streaming platforms and local cultural producers.

This paper analyzes the role of print media in framing incidences of sexual harassment in public transport; particularly in the context of Bangladesh, where gender-based violence is highly prevalent in the public sphere. This article uses Douglas’ cultural theory to reflect on media practices and its institutional power to reframe the social problem through risk and blame attribution. We conducted a discourse analysis of 71 news articles extracted from four of the widely circulated and influential newspapers of Bangladesh. Our findings reveal that the hegemonic discourse of gender-based violence in public transport is systemic and/or primarily reliant on legal recourse. By contrast, discourses presenting sexual harassment as symptomatic of broader gender inequality is less frequent. Moreover, these media platforms belong to an assemblage of patriarchal social-power holders that collaborate with established law and order to facilitate a blame game, thereby relieving the same stakeholders of ownership and accountability. Given the power of news media in constructing meta-narratives of safety (and nudging policymakers), journalists must tread responsibly on issues of blame, women’s safety, and their rights to the city.

As Brexit negotiations continue to draw criticism nearly two years on from the UK’s withdrawal from the European Union, many media outlets have concentrated on making sense of what has been dubbed the ‘Brexit circus’. In particular, significant media attention has been directed towards obstacles to Brexit’s progression, such as the issue of the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland and the ‘backstop’ arrangement. Through an examination of different media efforts to explain the border issue, this paper will discuss how conventional reporting methods have been unable to make this issue comprehensible to the individual. This paper will suggest that a hypertextual aesthetic form would provide a more effective means of making sense of the complexity of the border issue and its relationship to global political and economic structures. However, an understanding of the border issue also requires an understanding of the affective reality of life in this region and the history upon which this reality is founded. In this manner, this paper also argues that representational regimes capable of conveying affective realities could contribute important experiential dimensions to efforts to render dominant political and economic structures both cognisable and contestable.

Should regional context overshadow theoretical contributions of a doctoral dissertation or an international journal article? In this essay, we argue that expendable region-centricism diminishes the contributions of Majority World Countries to the media and communication discipline. We propose that ‘de-contextualized’ studies – which accentuate the theoretical, conceptual, or methodological import of research – could complement current efforts to decentre knowledge.

Populism has become a widely used concept in both academia and the media. The term’s popularity has encouraged scholars to question how it is applied and to theorize on the consequences of its use. However, there is little empirical research on the temporal and cross-country changes in the use of the term in the public sphere. This article analyses the significations given to the terms ‘populism’ and ‘populist’ in six countries’ daily newspapers over a period of nearly two decades. It presents the results of a quantitative content analysis of texts ( N = 3252) published in legacy daily papers in Finland, Sweden, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands and Turkey in the years 2000–2018. The article shows how the salience, meanings and perceived repercussions of ‘populism’ change over time and vary between the countries. The study reveals how, towards the end of the 2010s, the term is increasingly used in the context of right-wing populism and as a reference to political ideas that are detrimental to democracy. The results are examined in the context of developing academic discussions regarding the effects of ‘populism’ becoming a ubiquitous signifier in the media.

The male-male romance web series The Untamed reached a height of media interest in the summer of 2019 in China. Numerous Chinese young women were obsessed with the drama centred on the relationship between the two male protagonists, and many fan followers identified themselves as ‘ The Untamed Girls’. Through online observation of young female fans of the male-male romance web series, this study articulates how they were self-organised as a counterpublic and utilised strategic ways to negotiate with the party-state censorship. Drawing upon the conceptualisation of ‘ambivalence’, the study analyses a dual ambivalence in their collective actions. It is argued that The Untamed Girls’ participation as a popular feminist project is, however constantly intertwined with an assumption of heteronormativity and an internalised misogyny, where these seemingly empowered women are simultaneously reaffirming a heterosexual regulation of sexual desires and devaluing women when they celebrate the male-male romance embodied in such a drama series.

Digital labour platforms have become important sites of negotiation between expressions of micro-entrepreneurship, worker freedom and dignity of work. In the Global South, these negotiations are overlaid on an already fraught relationship mediated by the dynamics of caste and culture, to the usual politics of difference. Urban Company (UC), an app-based, on-demand platform in India that connects service providers offering home-based services to potential customers, lists professionalised services that have hitherto been considered part of a ‘culture of servitude’, performed by historically marginalised groups afforded little dignity of labour. Such platforms offer the possibility of disrupting the entrenched ‘master-servant’ relationship that exists in many traditional cultures in the Global South by their ostensibly professional approach. While service providers now have the opportunity for self-employment and gain ‘respectability’ by being associated with the platform, UC claims to have leveraged AI to automate discipline in everything the providers do. Using interviews with UC women service providers involved in beauty work and software development engineers, this paper explores the agency afforded to service partners in both professional and personal spheres. Further, we propose the term blended cultures to think about the ways in which algorithms and human cultures mutually (re)make each other.

In this work, I argue that hegemonic AI is becoming a more powerful force capable of perpetrating global violence through three epistemic processes: datafication (extraction and dispossession), algorithmisation (mediation and governmentality) and automation (violence, inequality and displacement of responsibility). These articulated epistemic mechanisms lead to global classification orders and epistemic, economic, social, cultural and environmental inequality. Hegemonic AI can be thought of as a bio-necro-technopolitical machine that serves to maintain the capitalist, colonialist and patriarchal order of the world. To make this point, the proposed approach bridges the macro and micropolitical, building on Suely Rolnik’s call for understanding the effects of the macropolitical in the micropolitical, as well as what feminist black scholar Patricia Hill Collins made visible about oppressive systems operating at the structural, institutional and individual levels. A critical AI ethics is one that is concerned with the preservation of life and the coresponsibility of AI harms to the majority of the planet.

Moon Mode, an algorithmic program pre-installed on Huawei’s flagship smartphone P30 Pro, intelligently detects and enhances images of the moon captured by the phone. A heated social media discussion was triggered after a Chinese tech critic interpreted Moon Mode as photoshopping/superimposing details onto the original shot. The controversy centered on the line between AI enhancement and superimposed alteration when black-boxed algorithms stand between the user/viewer and the world viewed. The controversy is analyzed, together with Huawei’s marketing materials. Drawing on MacKenzie and Munster’s idea of distributed invisuality, AI-enabled photography is examined as a multiplicative data-processing event that traverses hardware and software, eliding any singular, meta-observational position. The author argues that algorithmic photography can be understood as a dynamic event of algorithmic processuality, indicating a new form of human-nonhuman entanglement in meaning-making practices, which cannot be discussed under the rubric of indexical representation.

This article focuses on new media technologies and practices that are reshaping how human rights media activism is practiced, disseminated and received. Through an examination of two works by the research agency Forensic Architecture, we examine how these new technologies and practices aim to reframe and deploy forms of raw media evidence in human rights struggles and broader modes of political activism. We also consider how these nascent forms of activist media practice are indebted to the broader legacies of radical documentary practice, particularly through the theoretical lineage of the “camera as weapon.” The new technological and aesthetic strategies being developed and utilized by these groups are radically reshaping investigatory methodologies and collaborative practices across contemporary human rights, documentary, and new media practice. Ultimately, within these new ecologies of media practice, raw forms of media evidence are reframed and redeployed; entering into larger assemblages and ecologies to examine – and concomitantly resist – formations of political power and state violence. This is a practice that we term “mediated forensics.”

Political scandals are rarely the focus of major academic research in Zimbabwe where tight control of the dominant state media by the ruling party ensures that scandals involving senior government officials are suppressed. Informed by Altheide and Snow’s media logic and Thompson’s concept of mediated political scandals, this article uses framing analysis to examine The Herald’s logic behind exposing the ZIMDEF scandal involving former Minister of Higher and Tertiary Education, Jonathan Moyo. We therefore view the scandal as a political power scandal within ZANU-PF as two main factions, the Lacoste faction led by then Vice-President and now President Emmerson Mnangagwa and the G40 faction fronted by the then Minister of Higher Education Jonathan Moyo, who fought a nail-biting contest over the succession of long-time ruler Mugabe as his reign entered the twilight. The article argues that the scandal evolved like a choreographed sting operation, in which the objective was not to expose public corruption, but to neutralise a formidable political foe as the race to succeed former president Robert Mugabe intensified.

The proliferating online social networking sites have created opportunities for Chinese queer women to meet new friends and lovers; yet, research on lesbian online dating in mainland China is scarce compared to heterosexual and gay online dating. This article investigates lesbian/ lala women’s online dating experiences in the context of economic reforms and the trust crisis in urban China. It is based on 16 in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in Guangdong from June 2018 to July 2019. It focuses on two digital platforms: Douban Group and WeChat. This article explores how online anonymity and stranger sociality shaped queer women’s moral practices regarding turning virtual strangers into real-life partners. Queer women in this research expressed concerns about being cheated by low quality( suzhi) lovers, swindlers, and married women. This article suggests that the emerging online stranger sociality has both enabled and constrained lesbian/ lala women’s practice of seeking loving relationships, while they must internalize the potential risks by themselves.

This paper calls for renewed critical examination of the representational practices of commercial brands on social media, in particular their appropriation and adaptation of user-generated “amateur” or “vernacular” cultural styles. It proposes that this appropriation parallels processes of professionalization, influencer culture, and self-branding on social media. Focusing empirically on the official Instagram accounts of 12 leading fashion brands, we identify three distinctive patterns: (1) Regramming: sharing and crediting users’ photographs on the brands’ official feed; (2) Vernacular celebrity: posting the amateur-style photographs of a celebrity or model associated with the brand; (3) Brandfies: selfie-style images created by corporations where the brand appears to be a “self” performing its own representation. We argue that these appropriations position brands more fully as social beings, as tech-savvy cultural amateurs familiar with platform affordances, and as physically embodied selves. Self-branding is thus systematically complemented and brought to fulfilment by brand-“selfing.”

Working conditions in the creative industries are a growing academic concern among researchers in the Global South, particularly in Latin America. However, beyond the celebratory narratives that dominate the field, more study is needed to understand the sector’s actual impact on employees’ lives. The working circumstances of state-owned television producers in Colombia are the subject of this article, as public media have long been important actors in the local creative economy. The opinions and experiences of producers are investigated using empirical evidence and survey data collected between 2014 and 2019. It is argued that precarity, an intrinsic descriptor of creative work, takes on a different hue when put into a Latin American setting, where clientelism, censorship and bureaucracy propose new contextualized understandings of creative work in a non-commercial industry and a specific national context

Research exploring digital intimate publics tends to consider social media platforms and dating/hook-up apps separately, implying distance between social and sexual communication practices. This paper troubles that delineation by drawing on LGBTQ+ young people’s accounts of negotiating safety and risk in dating/hook-up apps, in which friendship practices are significant. We explore four key themes of friendship that arose in our analysis of interviews and workshop discussions: sharing mutuals (or friends-in-common) with potential dates/hook-ups; making friends through apps; friends supporting app negotiations; and friends’ involvement in safety strategies. Through analysis of these data, we firstly argue that friendship is often both an outcome and an organising force of LGBTQ+ young people’s uses of dating/hook-up apps, and secondly, that media sites commonly defined as social (e.g. Instagram) or sexual (e.g. Tinder) are imbricated, with friendship contouring queer sex and dating practices.

The COVID-19 pandemic began in 2019, spread to the rest of the world in 2020 and still holds nations in its grip in 2021. There is scant research on the way it has affected Holocaust awareness. Based on scholarly work on Holocaust awareness in Israel, the top-down memory of the Holocaust in the media and the vernacular Holocaust memory on social media, this article analyzes the ways the Holocaust became a frame of reference in Israel for the interpretation of the COVID-19 pandemic and the newest link in a long chain of using the Holocaust as a prism for other topics in Israeli society. The article centers on the evolution of the COVID-19 – Holocaust references and the role of media and social media in it. It shows that the initial panic created a wave of comparisons between the Holocaust and the pandemic in the media and social media. In the second half of the year, as the restrictions and two more lockdowns became part of life, references to the Holocaust changed – negative reactions to COVID-19 government regulations and law enforcement were compared on social media to Nazi acts. The Israeli media did not create these comparisons but reported them widely and contributed to their circulation.

This paper examines the changes and continuities in TV representations of Chinese Communist Party’s revolutionary history and interprets them within the broader context of China’s political, economic and cultural transformations since the 1990s. Drawing on a comparative analysis of three state-sponsored TV dramas produced between the late 1990s and mid-2010s, it traces how the state-sanctioned revolutionary narratives have changed over time in response to the Party’s propaganda imperatives on the one hand, and to the market-oriented production environment on the other. The paper argues that while recent TV productions in the new century have made increasing concessions to audience taste by adopting visually stimulating depictions and introducing fictional characters as points of identification for the audience, the revolutionary narratives were still aligned with the Party’s propaganda agenda at different times. This shows the ongoing competition between ideological and commercial interests in Chinese TV production during the era of market reforms.

Live blogging from legal trials has become one of the most accessible ways in which the public can gain direct insight into legal proceedings, particularly in countries where television cameras are denied entry into the courtroom. Whilst live blogging constitutes an important way of ensuring the transparency and openness of legal processes and documents – a principle known as open justice and a key component of many democratic societies – the risks stemming from opening up the courts not only to more immediate and detailed scrutiny, but also to a larger, virtual audience are lesser known. A deeper understanding of how a legal trial’s transformation into a live event due to live blogs has impacted on the legal sphere is therefore needed. The aims of this article are thus twofold: to show how live blogs are changing legal professionals’ work practices and to discuss what it is about live blogs that leads to these changes in professional practices. The analysis draws on qualitative interviews with legal professionals in Sweden and Denmark and finds that live blogs increase reflection in professional performances stemming from an awareness of performing to a virtual audience. Surveillance thus leads to performance adjustment. Live blogs also lead to changes in professionals practices and transform the audience/participant boundary into a fluid one most notably regarding the Danish respondents in comparison to those in Sweden. The article also suggests a hierarchy of liveness with live blogs considered to be less intrusive than televised trials.

The performance of cover songs in popular music has long been a subject of critical discussion and debate due to the artistic, social, cultural, and commercial issues that covers raise. In non-Western societies, most popular songs covered by artists are Anglo-American, a situation which implicitly privileges Western music and reinforces both the “west and the rest” trope and the cultural imperialism thesis. Taking American amateur artists and their online videos performing Filipino popular music as case studies, this article examines how social media platforms facilitate and problematize center-periphery relations in popular music through a diffusion of cultural products “from the rest to the west.” Moreover, we show that more than the promise of audience reach, the phenomenon reflects how these cover artists embody cultural and social situatedness in Filipino culture. As they mimic the mimics, they also embody an identity in motion.

Media agencies have become one of the key actors in the contemporary media industry: by channelling marketing budgets to some media and some platforms and not to others, media agencies play an important role in creating the digital media infrastructure and laying the tracks of the public sphere. Yet we know very little about these commercial middlemen between advertisers and audiences, what they do, and how we should understand their role in the digital media ecology. This article discusses the role of media agencies in relation to platformization with a focus on the news media sector. Based on interviews, publicly available material and trade journals, the article depicts an industry deeply engaged in digitizing, tracking and commodifying media audiences, while at the same time aware of ethical challenges of the digital media infrastructure. This leads to a call for more political attention and critical research on the democratic implications of the new value chains between platforms, advertisers, audiences, media agencies and news media as well as the many tech companies providing derived digital services and products.

This study explores a case of public service media finding itself in a predicament between adhering to its civic mission to serve the public interest, and prioritizing its self-preservation by bowing to political power. Contrasting the media coverage with epidemiological data, the study suggests that the COVID-19 risk in Tokyo was cut from the news agenda by Japan’s public broadcaster NHK ahead of the official postponement of the Olympic Games in March 2020. This case highlights the challenging balancing act of a semi-independent media organization between following a political agenda, that is, pushing a mega sports event, acting in its own economic interest as a media stakeholder of the Olympics, and at the same time protecting public health. On a methodological level, this case study aims to provide a showcase of how the agenda-cutting concept is concretely operationalized and how it can contribute to the analysis of various contexts, such as the complex relationship between public media and politics in times of a global pandemic.

Douyin, which is also known as the Chinese version of Tiktok, is currently the most valuable digital advertisement platform in China. One of the most significant features of this short-video platform is the heavy reliance on algorithmic production and distribution of media. In this emergent configuration, algorithms and data shape the production and circulation of media beyond social networks. Such a system develops by meshing grassroots and professionally generated content, leading to the audience engaging in the production of commercial content for profit. My essay explores the political context and economic logic that underpins these developments. It draws specifically on official reports from Douyin, as well as interviews with users, including individual users and Multiple Channel Network (MCN) employees. This essay proposes the idea of the ‘data attraction model’ based on the investigation of the emergence of new forms of algorithmic production and distribution. It argues that the data attraction model is characterised by an extreme logic of flexible accumulation, which is radically transforming the content production of participatory media in China

In this paper, I approach platform governance through algorithmic folklore, consisting of beliefs and narratives about moderation systems that are passed on informally and can exist in tension with official accounts. More specifically, I analyse user discussions on ‘shadow banning’, a controversial, potentially non-existing form of content moderation on popular social media platforms. I argue that discursive mobilisations of the term can act as a methodological entry point to studying the shifting grounds and emerging logics of algorithmic governance, not necessarily in terms of the actual practices themselves, but in terms of its experiential dimension that, in turn, indicates broader modalities and relationalities of control. Based on my analysis of the user discussions, I argue that the constitutive logics of social media platforms increasingly seem to run counter to the values of good governance, such as clarity and stability of norms, and consistency of enforcement. This is reflected in how users struggle, desperately, to form expectations about system operation and police themselves according to perceived rules, yet are left in a state of dependency and frustration, unable to take hold of their digital futures.

This article investigates the boundary work of young people who disclose personal experiences of mental health illness and trauma in a reality TV series. The programme in focus features group therapy sessions led by a professional psychologist, supplemented by personal video diaries. Combining disclosure theory with media sociological perspectives, the article analyses how boundaries are drawn, negotiated or trespassed in the production process. Data is based on in-depth interviews with participants, supplemented with background interviews with the production team and therapist. A main finding is that participants’ experiences in retrospect vary greatly: from accounts of meaningful self-disclosure to regret, increased strain and flare up of illness. Participants with negative experiences highlighted a lack of control over their stories, alienating representations of themselves and guilt about revealing information about third parties. The article concludes that interventional ‘do-good TV’, which builds authority and rhetorical ethos by offering professional therapy to participants, calls for careful consideration of the often-opaque relations of power and instrumental interests involved in this production setting.