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Far-right movements tend to have an ambivalent relationship with mainstream media. On the one hand, they often express animosity towards traditional media, accusing them of spreading ‘fake news’ and being part of a hostile conspiracy against ordinary (white) people. On the other hand, this often antagonist perception of the media does not stop far-right actors from using mainstream reporting for their ideological online messaging. This contradictory relationship is situated in a broader societal context shaped by, among other factors, widespread mistrust towards the media, an increasingly polarised media landscape and the recent proliferation of a hyper-partisan online media ecosystem at the far-right fringes. Against this contextual backdrop, this multimethod study analyses over 45,000 posts from Australian users of the far-right alt-tech online platform Gab to examine the use of mainstream media sources for their ideological messaging. This is complemented by a qualitative in-depth analysis of 298 posts that share mainstream media content, identifying posting patterns of incorporating or reframing mainstream media outputs that seek to communicate far-right ideologies within the ideologically charged online community on Gab.

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.

This article contributes to research on China’s (differential) media regulations by studying China’s management of mukbang and online eating disorder communities, both of which feature binge eating in varying media forms. China tolerates the former insofar as the content is modulated and monetised but has completely eradicated the latter. This research draws on Luzhou Li’s cultural zoning to address China’s differential regulations that expedite media products’ monetisation while upholding the Party’s socialist legacy. The article demonstrates commercialising potential in participants’ capacity and willingness to be monetised and absorbed by the internet industry and argues that this is a critical factor contributing to China’s differential governance of the two media forms. The research adds nuances to China’s internet and censorship research by highlighting the multiplexity and adaptivity of China’s censorship with new cases.

This commentary discusses an important disconnect between different literatures dealing with the power of algorithms – a disconnect that has important implications for the narratives about the role of algorithms in today’s societies that the humanities and social science construct. Theoretical work has regularly depicted algorithmic systems in the hands of large tech companies as powerful devices for effectively influencing behaviors through persuasive targeted information offers in online environments. However, this account goes against existing empirical evidence on the effectiveness of algorithm-based targeting. The paper highlights the different stories about the power of algorithms that these literatures tell and discusses why addressing this gap matters. In a nutshell, while the idea of people being steered by powerful algorithmic systems is arguably an intriguing aspect of digital-era capitalism, it risks distracting from more mundane, but also more relevant aspects of algorithms operating in online environments and how they can sustain power relations.

This paper reflects on the impact of dating apps’ removal of ethnicity filters on racial minority users. Many scholars, mass media, and dating app users believe that ethnicity filters mark an institutional endorsement of racism which is embedded in digital infrastructure. Accordingly, they have called for the removal of these filters. This advocacy is based on the assumption that expressions of racial preference are inherently racist. In the summer of 2020, many dating apps removed ethnicity filters to show solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement. However, I argue that racial minorities often express intra-racial desires through ethnicity filters to valorize their own sexual capital, evade discrimination or fetishization, and gain sexual opportunities. Consequently, removing the ethnicity filter makes it harder for racial minorities to connect. Even worse, it creates a culture of compulsory interracial intimacy, exposing minority users to more vulnerability and racial trauma. Moreover, the lack of discussion on whether to remove filters other than ethnicity reveals the negligence of intersecting oppressions on dating apps. Thus, this paper highlights the need to be more attentive to racial minorities’ alternative uses of filters for self-empowerment, and to intersectional oppressions that should be tackled in designing inclusive dating apps.

This study focuses on the role of ICT in transnational communication between family members, mainly between elderly parents and adult children living abroad. A semi-structured interview study ( N = 32) was conducted during Fall 2015 in three neighborhoods in the city of Sousse, Tunisia. In the study, Skype played a central role in the respondents’ transnational communication and a driving factor of technology adoption. Families used Skype to communicate with their migrant family members and virtually engage in family activities such as cooking and attending wedding events through the screens of their laptops, tablets, and mobile phones. In other words, Skype evolved from a simple online communication medium to a platform for a transnational family space; it assumes a Tunisian identity and essence stemming from the social practices and experiences of the Tunisian users and becomes shaped by their values and traditions.

This article examines the contemporary popularization of Tarot reading on China’s prominent online video platform Bilibili. It tries to make sense of the cultural and political import of the phenomenon through the conceptual lens of techno-cultural domestication, defined as a process in which a non-native cultural artifact or practice becomes embedded in and tamed by a techno-cultural arena in a receiver country. Based on digital ethnography and textual analysis, the article presents how Chinese online Tarot diviners constructed their participatory ritual by drawing upon the symbols of Western occultism and the technological affordances of Bilibili, especially the function of danmu. However, Tarot divination was also brought in line with dominant social values and state ideologies. It ultimately became a form of ‘sheer entertainment’ promoting common sense ideas, an image of a good Chinese citizen, private solutions to life’s challenges, and a positive social atmosphere.

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.

This study builds a framework for research on relationships between national media systems and the cultural systems of specific social problems. In the case of U.K. and U.S. news coverage of the social problem of climate change, ethnographic fieldwork and a computational text analysis method known as topic modeling show that three processes are highly salient for understanding the connections between media systems and the cultural systems of social problems: (1) the economic underpinnings of media organizations; (2) relationships between media outlets and between outlets and their audiences; (3) longer histories of research, activism, and policymaking around social problems. This framework can enhance research on the specific, evolving roles that media play in supporting democratic processes and addressing social problems in different national economic, political, and media system contexts.

Nation anthropomorphism refers to the symbol and the symbolization process in which human-like characteristics are metaphorically attributed to a nation. In China, the Homeland-Mother ( zuguomuqin) is a widely accepted anthropomorphic image representing the nation. However, a brotherly national image named Azhong-Brother ( azhonggege) derived from subcultures was created and went viral on social media platforms with fierce controversy since 2019. Based on 23 in-depth interviews with China’s young netizens of wide variations, this study explored the differences between these two symbols, Chinese youths’ identification with the nation through the symbols, and their identity negotiation amid the controversy surrounding the image of Azhong-Brother. We discussed the symbolic contestation between traditional hegemonic and emergent soft masculinities within Azhong-Brother, the instrumental and sentimental national attachment associated with Homeland-Mother and Azhong-Brother, and the conflicts arising from the negotiation of multiple identities in relation to Azhong-Brother.

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.

Climate activists and environmental communicators stress that addressing the climate crisis requires both global and local advocacy for transformational change-making. While journalists in small, rural communities are known to actively advocate on issues for the common good, there has been little investigation of local media advocacy on climate change in rural Australia: a region at the forefront of global heating. This paper analyses the accounts of local journalists of their media coverage of the School Strikes 4 Climate in rural and regional Australia, as an empirical entry point for a conceptual discussion of local media advocacy in reporting climate change. We find that normative ideas about journalism coupled with polarised community views on climate change hindered these journalists from taking an advocacy stance. We explore and critique the tacit ‘quiet advocacy’ practices used by these journalists reporting on climate in rural and regional Australia.

A concept of visibility frames much scholarship and public writing on LGBTQ+ representation in film and television, and underpins diversity reporting and inclusivity measurement. Although visibility is often depicted as a social good, there is a growing critical interest in asking if there are different kinds of visibility, and how these might be differentially valued. This paper reports insights gained from interviews with Australian stakeholders involved in the production of screen entertainment with LGBTQ+ content. The study found that stakeholders are motivated by to create texts that make LGBTQ+ stories and characters visible. The range of approaches to visibility was, however, nuanced and diverse: some understood any LGBTQ+ representation as valuable, while others discussed visibility in contexts of character depth, anti-stereotyping, and visibility tempered by concepts of human dignity. Although visibility is perceived diversely, it remains a significant lens by which creative artists involved in LGBTQ+ texts understand their work.

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.

We are witnessing an era of increased intensity of consumer activism (and its discontents) within the arts, cultural and media industries. Ethical, radical, activist and even ‘woke’ consumer interests are now actively catered to across almost all goods and services, from food, fashion and fast-moving consumer goods to tourism, transport and finance. The aim of this paper is to analyse another field where these practices have recently focussed – the media and cultural industries. Drawing on interviews with 20 self-identified feminist and ethical consumers, this article examines how hyperconscious ethical consumption of cultural and media content is lived out and experienced as careful consumption. How are these careful audience activities described, rationalised and understood by the interview participants? What deliberative processes do they undertake and how does that guide them to certain conclusions about what media, art and culture they are willing to watch or not, where they draw the line, and why? This article shows how perceptions of consumer choice, responsibility and culpability are being channelled into an aspirational ethics, involving forms of self-improvement, self-care and self-control such as screening and filtering content, ‘cancelling’ and boycotting media, and attempts to correct, optimise and diversify our tastes and interests.

Bloggers have long been seen as challenges to journalistic authority. This study focuses specifically on professional travel bloggers and their own self-understandings of what it means to be a professional. Is this understanding distinct from the professional structures that guide journalism? How might these different self-understandings impact the knowledge produced by each group of media workers? The implications of this project are particularly important given that people rely on travel media to help construct their own understandings of distant locations. It is crucial to understand the epistemic foundations of that location-based knowledge. Findings from this purposive survey sample indicate that travel bloggers’ specialized knowledge comes largely in the form of self-marketing and creating a recognizable brand. In keeping with previous findings from blog content analyses, showcasing authenticity is also seen as crucial for blogging success.

Media as a site of reproduction of existing social relations and inequality is a significant area of research. This article explores how mainstream print media contributes to an area of entrenched inequality in India: caste-based inequalities and dominant-subordinate power relations. It explicitly examines how Dalit communities, who for centuries were forced to abide by casteist notions of hierarchy, are framed by Indian news media. A comparative approach using content and framing analysis have been undertaken to analyse the news media reports on Dalit discrimination published in the leading English (Times of India) and Hindi newspaper (Amar Ujala) from 2011 to 2014. Conceptualising the data along the lines of framing theory in a transitioning society, this study explores a new-casteist approach to reporting Dalits. The news media reports the Dalit grievances but ignores the complexities of ethnocultural minorities in a transitioning democratic society and involves Dalit passive-fixation and/or demonisation.

The pixel is a fundamental element of contemporary visual culture, with pictorial and perceptual properties that affect the interpretation of the digital composition as a whole. Despite its importance, however, the pixel remains a neglected object of analysis in cultural sociology and critical media studies. To advance a framework of pixel studies I present a hermeneutical approach. Empirically, I focus on the pixel’s political and socio-technical dimensions through satellite images of violence in the Syrian conflict zone (2011–2017). Through interviews and observations, I study the satellite programmers, technicians, archeologists, and anthropologists who comprised an interdisciplinary effort to interpret satellite pictures of archeological damage and other forms of cultural violence during the war. Their interpretations, some of which were the basis for consequential decisions by US policymakers, involved isolating as few as two pixels on the screen. To explain what this entailed, I draw on theories from Alberto Romele and Don Ihde to situate the pixel within a hermeneutic circle through which satellite images were ‘read’ at different levels. My findings have implications for broader sociological and media studies critiques of the epistemic status of digital media in light of their deep interrelations of politics, technology, and people.

The rise of user-generated content (UGC), such as internet memes and amateur videos, enables new possibilities for mediatization of the past. However, these possibilities can facilitate not only more diverse and less top-down engagements with memory, but also lead to its trivialization and distortion of historical facts. The latter concerns are particularly pronounced in the case of memories about mass atrocities (e.g. the Holocaust), where online media are often used to promote denialism and attack the victims’ dignity. To better understand the relationship between UGC and memory mediatization, we examine a selection of internet memes dealing with Anne Frank, an iconic Holocaust victim. Using a combination of inductive content analysis and close reading, we identify four classes of Anne Frank memes: (1) ad hominems; (2) deniers; (3) trivializers; and (4) thought provokers. Our findings demonstrate the multi-faceted functionality of memes, which are used not only to trivialize Holocaust memory, but also to reinforce canonical narratives about Anne Frank, and highlight the dependency of memes on other forms of memory mediatization, thus raising questions about the interrelations between UGC and institutionalized forms of remembrance.

African Australian diasporic literature has drawn attention to the anti-Black racism Black African young people endure in everyday Australia. By drawing on a multi-method approach consisting of social media ethnography and multiple participant interviews, this paper explores the use of social media by Black African young people (n=15) to visibilise their experiences of racism. We situate the murder of George Floyd on May 25, 2020, as a significant ‘turning point’ when the social media practises of our participants radically transformed. Our findings indicate that prior to the murder of George Floyd, participants evoked careful boundaries around the type of racial content they posted for fear of the punishments or backlash that could occur if they disrupted the white racial comfort of their friends and followers. After the murder of Floyd, participants used the resurgence of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement to visibilise their own experiences of anti-Black racism and racial violence in Australia, sharing content on social media that marked whiteness, demanded safety and challenged white silence and performative allyship.

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.

This article examines the performance of philosemitism in contemporary Germany through media representations of Jews in 2014–2020. It claims that philosemitism is practiced in Germany as a routine accomplishment of civility. It is performed in three interconnected social domains: institutional, where state institutions declare their commitment to protecting Jews as a religious minority; group, where the contingent relations between love for the Jews and exclusionary statements about them appears, mostly in casting Jews as both strange and unknown and embraced; and individual, where individuals exhibit positive sentiments toward Jews as an ideal collective, while contemplating what and who they are. It further suggests that in performing philosemitism German society examines and articulates its relations to Holocaust memory, to minorities and to the resilience of the German democracy.

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.

Individuals and communities increasingly depend on, and fill their lives with, machine cultures, in the form of both interfaces and infrastructures. This global push for machine cultures has given rise to an increasing demand for data and engendered a proliferation of public, private and public-private dataset repositories. While datasets form a foundational element of machine cultures, they rarely come into focus as objects of critical study. But in recent years a critical discursive formation on datasets has begun to emerge, which disturbs the idea of datasets as operational instruments of digital knowledge production and seek to instead ‘bring people back in’. The present article identifies these preliminary explorations as ‘critical dataset studies’ and draws on critical archival studies to articulate the ethico-political surfaced by these studies. Specifically it argues that critical dataset studies shows the need for an expanded ethical and conceptual approach to datasets that not only relies on linear notions of deletion and accountability but also on iterative frameworks of remains and response-ability.

Reality television has featured over 15 years of weight loss competitions reflecting American obsession with obesity and weight loss. Qualitative content analysis was performed on 16 premiere and finale episode pairs for six seasons of NBC’s The Biggest Loser (TBL) using a Foucauldian confessional framework. Analysis shows how TBL presents contestants as sinful, fat bodies in need of redemption with the show and the viewing audience as the confessional stage. Contestants frame their motivations for weight loss in gendered ways related to family responsibility. Women felt like role model failures, while men worried about early death and family abandonment. Season finales were the settings of redemption through extreme weight loss where women were now able to be the thin parent role models, shepherding their whole family into weight loss and men were reborn, on a path toward living forever for their families.

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.

This article seeks to contribute and engage with debates pertaining to epistemology, knowledge production, and positionality of ‘International Communication Studies’ (ICS) in sub-Saharan Africa. The study operates on the assumption that International Communication studies in most Sub-Saharan Africa are characterized by tales of marginalization, poverty, wars, and tribal conflicts. While this approach speaks to the notion of development communication, it is insufficient to bolster the contributions of African scholarship to the global literature. In turn, ICS in Africa is treated as second class and dependent on Western scholarship for survival. Against this backdrop, the study interrogates the position of African scholarship, arguing that most research contributions are treated as repositories for raw data with no epistemological knowledge to contribute to the global network platform.

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.”

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.

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

What happens to journalists when hit by a pandemic in a country governed by authoritarian media regulations? We examine journalists’ experience in Turkey’s mainstream and alternative media and find that while the pandemic has deepened their economic precarity, journalists further suffer from bodily and political precarity. In the context of Covid, the body emerges as a site on which precarity with multiple dimensions (economic anxiety, illness, and state violence) is inscribed. Under the conditions of what we deem political precarity, most journalists cannot speak truth to power as the pandemic is politically instrumentalized. This retheorizing of precarity dewesternizes the term by connecting it to state-induced forms of violence relying on relations of political recognition and value ascription. We urge journalism and media labor studies to refrain from Eurocentricism and technological determinism that center the standard employment model and the disruptive cultures of technology at the expense of body and politics.

The impact of social media use on youth subcultures, such as graffiti writers, has been rapid and dramatic, bringing with it a number of significant transformations that present both opportunities and challenges. This paper explores the impact of the Internet and social media on a community of graffiti practitioners. I argue that the rise and uptake of online social networking platforms such as Instagram and You Tube have offered a range of affordances to the practice of graffiti writing. These affordances include: greater accessibility to graffiti culture; learning opportunities; and opportunities for wider distribution and curation of graffiti pieces. Simultaneously, social media challenges the significance of ‘community’, that is, the physical social interaction afforded by participation in real world graffiti crews. The findings suggest that while there are tangible benefits from the use of the Internet and uptake of social media by the graffiti writing community, it is the physical communal bonds experienced within a graffiti crew that are vital to the wellbeing and continuity of the culture. This paper contributes to our understanding of how social media affects youth more broadly and specifically how social media platforms are transforming the experience of youth subcultural practice.

The emerging trend of online self-presentation that cause the selective release of photos and thus create biased city images circulating in social networks deserves greater research attention. As a response to this, the paper investigates the image of Wangfujing Beijing on Instagram, which cements its reputation as a symbol of traditional food culture but limits its potential to be the embodiment of cosmopolitan urban living. After arguing that the exotic images of the food market can better help Instagrammers play an urban adventurer before followers, the paper analyzes over 5500 sets of Instagram data, and then examines three narrative patterns used to describe the place, corresponding to the context description, the connection establishment, and the visual emphasis of the dominant theme. The visual storytelling techniques used in them will assist in understanding the image-based communication between social network users and thereby increase the possibility of managing the online city image.

The current article explores journalism practice amid waning press freedom in Indian Kashmir. Contextualising the recent renovation and introduction of authoritative new media policy 2020, the article maps the constant struggles of the journalists in the region. I consulted five working journalists to have a broader understanding of press freedom in Indian Kashmir, one of the world’s most dangerous places for journalists. I argue that frequent internet shutdowns, disinformation, declining dissent and direct control on the press contribute to the amassing struggles of Kashmiri journalists. The strategic politics endorse jingoism and punitive populism, which affects the overall image of Kashmiris including the journalists. Constructive journalism practice, however, aids Chomsky’s claim of “openings”, which keep the press viable during the severe authoritarian siege on the press freedom in Kashmir.

Associations between trauma and media theory are longstanding, going back at least to Walter Benjamin’s observations on technology and modernity, which were themselves informed by Freud’s 1920 speculations on war trauma following WWI. A century later, and in the wake of numerous conflicts, catastrophes, and far-reaching technological transformations—and of course the COVID pandemic—it is time to reconsider the relation between trauma and media, digital platforms in particular. While some significant scholarship has noted the intersections of modern media technologies such as photography, film, radio, television, and recently digital and algorithmic media, with the conception and experience of trauma, a more systematic theoretical consideration of the relation between media and trauma remains to be developed. And with the intensifying reliance on new and old media in these pandemic times the question of these relations is increasingly urgent. Moving beyond conceptions of media as representing or inducing trauma, this special section of Crosscurrents explores how (digital) media and trauma shape one another.

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

How do we evaluate the value of a medical mask? And how does the mask acquire its meanings? In this paper, I approach the mask as a media entity: a mediated and mediating thing whose meanings and values arise from within a complex network of relations. The recent political divide regarding mask-wearing has roots in the ambivalence and confusion about their efficacy in the first few months of the pandemic. It remained unclear for some time whether masks protected the wearer or those around them, but nonetheless a global mask-making cottage industry emerged, shaped by DIY and citizen science. The DIY community cleverly leveraged this core ambivalence, foregrounding multivalence, and thereby feeding into a binary ethical obligation: for whom does one wear a mask? The mask was thus baptized into regular usage by the ‘I/You’ utterance that we are now familiar with: ‘I wear my mask to protect you, as you wear your mask to protect me’. This paper reframes the facemask as a complex media entity, one that absorbs its presuppositions, while also being placed into new arrangements by its arrival through an emerging relational network.

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.

The impact of iconic imagery on policymaking during humanitarian crises is oft-discussed within the literature. When rapid humanitarianization or sudden policy shifts emerge, researchers seek to identify why. One potential explanation is that of ‘focusing events’ – sudden, harmful events which destabilize political consensuses and elevate marginal agendas. While focusing events have been used to explain the impact of large-scale accidents and disasters, this paper extends their usage to activist-generated events such as the iconization of images of the drowned Syrian toddler, Alan Kurdi, during the 2015 migrant crisis. In exploring the Kurdi images’ impact on US media and political discourses of asylum, this paper finds that asylum-related discourses became increasingly sympathetic and domestically focused, eventually culminating in the announcement of an increase in resettlement targets for Syrian migrants. By expanding conceptualizations of focusing events to cases such as Kurdi’s, this paper supplements understandings of the agenda-setting function of iconic imagery.

What can cultural studies contribute to our understanding of Hong Kong’s print and broadcast media? We reorient the current preoccupation with politics in Hong Kong’s local media to focus upon culture. Drawing from cultural studies, and specifically the search for ‘common culture’, we explain divergent perspectives on migrant domestic worker (MDW) abuse in Hong Kong’s English and Chinese-language print and broadcast media. Whereas the English-language media relies upon international experts and NGOs to tell a story of human rights abuses against MDWs, the Chinese-language media is more likely to take us into local homes and to present the employer and community as victims of trickery from domestic workers and agencies. We use the kitchen sink drama as a metaphor to describe this reportage. What forces shape the production of these dramas? and what are the implications for the public understanding of MDW abuse and human rights?

Against a background of occlusion and medicalized portrayals, the emergent practice of birth photography allows women to see and to depict birth from their own perspective. Thus the delivery room, the digital camera, and the direct encounter between the artisan and her client enable exploring the possibility of alternative depictions in a neoliberal economy, and the significance of professionalism in a field dominated by expert amateurs. Drawing upon interviews with photographers and clients, our analysis highlights three tensions underlying birth photography as a documentary and entrepreneurial pursuit: the formulaic depiction of an extraordinary event; the exposure of an intimate experience; and the commercialization of the sacred. We find that in terms of content, birth photographs present restrained, conventional depictions, suitable for both the family album and the photographers’ social media portfolios. In terms of practice, although desired by their clients, birth photographers’ work is unstable and they must constantly invest in relational labor that balances intimacy and publicness, friending and advertising. We propose the notion of commercial authenticity to capture this contradictory amalgam of disciplined realism, edited documentation, and professional closeness that both clients and photographers expect, produce, and regard as appropriate in the context of artisanal photography.

This paper investigates the role of European Public Service Media (PSM) in the commissioning and scheduling of local series over the past three decades. With a comparative approach between the main European television markets (Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy and Spain), the schedules of 30 seasons of 25 general-interest channels have been analysed to explore how the changes in the markets have altered the role of public channels as promoters of domestic fiction and local culture. The study shows a clear division along a Northern European axis with a large, uninterrupted commissioning of locally produced fiction, while Southern European public corporations have had a lower, more erratic approach. Despite this difference, all European PSM organisations analysed have maintained and increased the volume of local series titles during the last decade despite the appearance of portfolio DTT channels and transnational SVOD services, in contrast to commercial corporations.

This commentary reflects on how creativity is dehumanised (and rehumanised) and how its labour aspects are hindered (and highlighted) in the three recent developments in our understanding of arts, culture and creativity: the creative industries; AI creativity; and creativity in everyday life. The creative industries discourse instrumentalises and dehumanises creativity by hiding labour perspectives and treating creativity as human capital and a generator of IP. Meanwhile, contemplating AI creativity helps us to look beyond the economic paradigm and consider key traits of human creativity and the creation process, some aspects of which are successfully emulated by AI. Yet, we also observe how AI dissociates creativity from human agency and how its cost-cutting effect can challenge human creators in many sectors. Finally, the idea of everyday creativity effectively rehumanises and democratises creativity; however, it not only lacks labour perspectives but also hinders them.