Search

Building on prior studies suggesting that social media can facilitate offline political participation, this study seeks to clarify the mechanism behind this link. Social media may encourage social learning of political engagement due to their unique affordances such as visibility (i.e. once-invisible political activities by others are now visible on social media feeds). By analyzing a two-wave survey conducted before the 2016 presidential election in the United States, this study tests a theoretical model in which observation of others’ political activities on social media inspires users themselves to model similar political behaviors, which foster offline political participation. Autoregressive models show that the link between political observation and activities on social media is stronger among users surrounded with similar others and politically homogeneous networks. The results highlight the need to cultivate engaged citizenship norms for individuals’ political activities on social media to be carried over to participation beyond the realm of social media.

Creative workers in the social media industries face the imperative to brand themselves to audiences, corporate sponsors, and potential customers. This study complicates the role of self-branding on social media through the case of real-time creative labor on a social live streaming platform. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and in-depth interviews with live creators and viewers, this study suggests that the affordances of social live streaming platforms create a media and relational environment wherein personal branding practices are belabored by both creators and audiences. This phenomenon, which we term participatory branding, redistributes the labor of personal branding on social media and emphasizes the work of audiences in helping to shape the brand of a creative worker. We then advance a typology that maps the terrain of personal branding on social media as it relates to platform affordances, cross-platform promotion, and audience activity in content creation.

This qualitative study explores how technological affordances of the digital space, facilitate the anti-feminist discourses which characterise the digital community Incel (Involuntarily Celibates). The data in this article are drawn from a variety of sources, including video ethnography and an analysis of long-form interviews drawn from a year-long documentary project, to examine the experience of young men in Incel communities, and the process of indoctrination into misogynistic extremism. Results reveal that contrary to the ‘lone wolf’ narrative that surrounds Incels, there is a sophisticated community that contributes to a 5-step pattern of behaviour, converting the lonely, into the angry and potentially violent. A rich toxic cultural tapestry, the Internet echo-chamber and the celebration of Incel mass murderers (Incelebrities), create a continuous loop that transforms digital hate speech into physical violence. These patterns of indoctrination can, and should, be monitored, and intercepted for the purposes of personal and public safety.

The novel affordances and unique features on social media have transformed the way people assess public opinion. Drawing on the spiral of silence (SOS) theory, this study examines the roles that user-generated comments (UGCs) and aggregated user representations (AURs), represented by reaction emojis, play in shaping perceptions of the opinion climate. It also investigates how features on the platform trigger perceptions of source credibility to influence willingness to speak out. Results from a 3 (opinion cues: UGCs-only vs AURs-only vs UGCs and AURs) × 2 (opinion climate congruency: congruent vs incongruent) × 2 (source credibility: high vs low) between-subjects experimental design revealed that audiences perceived reaction emojis to reflect public opinion. Source credibility was found to affect willingness to speak out and moderate opinion climate congruency. The findings extend the SOS theory by highlighting the significant role that novel affordances have on SOS components operating online. Implications of the findings were discussed.

This project explores how lower class individuals living in a small rural Japanese community employ digital media in their daily lives and how this use of technology shapes their sense of self. Drawing from ethnographic research, it considers the locally specific ways in which individuals have embraced digital technology and how the technology’s “imagined affordances” intersect with their cultural, regional, and class identities, both locally and in relationship to national and global contexts. It argues that despite community members’ active use of digital technology, numerous barriers (both imagined and actual) continue to limit their ability to fully engage in digital culture and discusses how these barriers lead to a sense of simultaneous connection and disconnection from both urban contexts and an imagined global community. It concludes that more carefully situated local accounts of digital praxis are a necessary step toward developing a deeper understanding of the digital world.

Previous research has examined how political expression on social media can affect young people’s engagement in political life. Yet a focus on dominant platforms (i.e. Facebook) and a lack of experimental studies have impeded theoretical understanding of how different features and affordances shape youth political expression. This study used a novel experimental paradigm to test how the design of social media sites can influence young people’s political expression. Participants (18–24 years) interacted with a fictional social media app that was manipulated in terms of identifiability and geo-boundedness. Users in anonymous (vs identifiable) environments reported less political self-presentation concern and were more likely to express their political opinions. In addition, unbounded (non-local) environments were perceived as better places to exert political voice and influence than bounded (local) environments. This study offers a promising starting point for studying and designing social media in which youth political expression can flourish.

Dating apps have received rapid uptake, with Tinder as one of the most popular apps in the heterosexual market. However, little research has investigated the experiences of women seeking women (WSW) on this app. This article combines two interview studies of WSW in Australia, Canada, and the United Kingdom to investigate their self-presentations of sexual identity on Tinder. By configuring settings to “seeking women,” participants perceived they were entering a space conducive to finding WSW. However, men, couples, and heterosexual women permeated this space, heightening the need for participants to signal non-heterosexual identity. Their signals fused references to lesbian and queer culture with Tinder’s infrastructure to evoke a digital imaginary, as a routinized set of practices imagined to resonate with a shared community. Although signals within this digital imaginary were sometimes playful and ambiguous, their default toward a recognizable lesbian identity often rendered other sexual or gender identities invisible.

Social media are recognized as important outlets for youth political expression, yet the affordances of different platforms may shape the forms and styles of expression that young people deploy. In order to gain a deeper understanding of the ways social media affordances shape youth voice, this article examines young people’s political expression on the popular app musical.ly in the context of the 2016 US presidential election. Employing quantitative and qualitative content analysis on 1651 youth-created videos, we examine how young people use platform affordances, political hashtags, and memetic dimensions to convey a range of expressive political practices. In particular, through the analysis of content, form, and stance, our research illuminates how social media afford collective political expression for youth, by allowing them to deliberately connect to an assumed like-minded audience with similar beliefs through the use of shared symbolic resources.

Online harassment is increasingly applied as a form of information control to curb free speech and exert power in online public spheres. In recent years, states have appeared to be particularly invested in weaponizing information against dissidents in an attempt at dominating social and political discourses. Reports by prominent human rights institutions, as well as anecdotal evidence, indicate that Iran remains among the states with a track record of such actions. The scope of targeted cyber abuse varies by case. This study investigates the size and perpetrators of online violence, harassment, and abuse against critical members of the Iranian diaspora, including journalists, civil society activists, and artists, among many others. This study substantiates findings of qualitative interviews with a quantitative study of Instagram accounts of related individuals and explores the patterns and communities involved in disseminating hate speech in an attempt at manipulating public opinion and suppressing voices of dissidents.

Women across a range of industries are creating women-only private Facebook groups for professional support, networking opportunities, and career development. Through interviews with 26 women, this research shows how private Facebook groups provide affordances for creating spaces reminiscent of second-wave consciousness-raising groups. Within these groups, separate from cisgender men, women discuss their work experiences and share advice, leading to changes for women beyond the groups’ borders. Thus, private Facebook groups for professional women support feminist practices despite not being labeled as explicitly feminist. However, these activities are limited in their usefulness for the wider feminist project by the exclusion of some women across lines of difference such as race, class, and age. This study illustrates empirically how social media is used for everyday politics, contributing to understandings of the digital fourth wave of the women’s movement.

The Internet architecture is widely perceived as engine for innovation by providing the equal opportunity to deploy new protocols and applications. This view reflects an imaginary that guides the co-production of policy and technology that can be traced back to the early days of the Internet, which is still prominent among the engineers in one of the main governance bodies of the Internet, the Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). After the privatization of the Internet architecture in the 1990s, the interplay between the architectural principles of end-to-end, permissionless innovation, and openness subverted equality among Internet users and hampered their ability to redesign the Internet. I draw on media studies, science and technology studies and international political economy, and use a combination of qualitative and quantitative methods to show how the Internet architecture’s affordance structure got reconfigured, and how this facilitated the prioritization of corporate interests over the interests of end users.

This Machine Kills Secrets is how Greenberg explains the widespread adoption of digital encryption and anonymity tools in practices of disclosure. We consider how that machine works, to the extent that new and sustained political practices in society have emerged through digital disclosures. We offer the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) as a paradigmatic case to inform new metaphors of what disclosure is and what it does in democratic governing. The empirical work focuses on how ICIJ’s data mining, manipulation and visualisation interface with traditional governing institutions of accountability. The article relates the affordances present in the ICIJ to modes of societal control that are available through Brighenti’s consideration of visibility as a social category and governmentality scholarship through three theoretical moves: bifurcating affordance theory on communicative and political planes, relaying a complimentarily delineated model of media apparatus and considering how such apparatuses shift towards proto-institutions.

In the emerging context of hashtag feminism, this article explores the #SupportIslandWomen pro-choice initiative in Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. The movement gained visibility by using the altered image of Anne of Green Gables (rogue Anne) on posters and graffiti throughout PEI and on social media. Drawing from organizational discourse theory, we analyse how rogue Anne was invoked by activists who spoke in her name, thus enacting the polyphonic nature of discourse. Our case study was built by performing non-participant observation online and by conducting a search in Canadian blogs and newspapers. First, we detail the discursive practices developed within the #SupportIslandWomen movement and underline their constitutive effects, namely, by focusing on the organizing properties of the hashtag feature. Then, we investigate the benefits and limitations of using rogue Anne as a unifying symbol and reflect on the discursive struggles that led to and were generated by her usurpation.

A growing body of literature shows how important content is in terms of news sharing. Nevertheless, the same literature overlooks the theory and corresponding effects on audience metrics produced by news routines adapted to platform affordances. This article aims to contribute to closing this gap by investigating 99 Facebook news pages covering 13 countries ( n posts = 823,184). Causality tests demonstrate that a combination of posting regularity, the use of native video and balance of posting may lead to a virtuous cycle of news sharing. Since this is not a trivial endeavour, we conclude that success of news media requires strategic planning of news routines to make them suitable to each platform. In terms of implications for future research, the accumulated knowledge on news sharing should be reassessed since our data show that the same content has greater chances of being shared according to the variables investigated in this research.

This article investigates the Trump campaign’s strategic use of digital platforms and their affordances and norms that contribute to a technological performance of populism. To do so, I build on theories of populism as a performance, rather than a set of identifiable qualities, and make a theoretical intervention calling for the need to add a material and technological focus to how scholars approach the concept in our contemporary media environment. This article presents a model for understanding populist affordances as those that center “the people” to various degrees, and applies that model in a case study of how campaigns in the 2016 US presidential race engaged in a technological performance of populism across a variety of platforms, including email, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and campaign-created mobile apps. Central to this analysis are campaign strategies of controlled interactivity, amateurism, participatory/user-generated content, and data-driven campaigning.

Guided by the Uses and Gratifications 2.0 approach, this study examines the role played by three classes of affordances (i.e. modality, agency, and interactivity) in explicating the gratifications derived by older adults on Facebook. Data from a content analysis of Facebook profiles and an online survey with older adults (aged 60 years and older) who have used Facebook for at least 1 year ( N = 202) show that while status updating and posting personal stories are associated with activity and community-building gratifications respectively, profile customization is key for obtaining agency-enhancement gratification, and participating in conversations on comment threads plays an important role in providing interaction gratification. These findings advance our understanding of social networking site (SNS) use among older adults and suggest interface designs that maximize gratifications for older adults.

Drawing on data gathered during ethnographic fieldwork in Mardin, a medium-sized town in southeast Turkey, this article shows that social media users actively appropriate online platforms and change privacy settings in order to keep different social spheres and social groups apart. Keeping different online social contexts distinct from each other is taken for granted as a way of using social media in Mardin. By contrast, social media scholars have extensively discussed the effects of social media in terms of context collapse. The article highlights how context collapse is the result of patterns of usage within Anglo-American contexts and not the consequence of a platform’s architecture or social media logic. It then suggests a theoretical refinement of affordances, and proposes the concept of affordances-in-practice.

Internet, social media, and app shutdowns have become frequent, not only in authoritarian states but also in emerging and fragile democracies. As Russian authorities enforced a legal blockage to Instant Messenger Telegram during the past 2 years, many users kept using the app seamlessly thanks to what we call a subversive affordance: a built-in proxy functionality that allows users to seamlessly circumvent the blockage. We claim it is subversive because it allows users to overcome the blockage as the consequence of the app’s development, with a significant fraction of users who did not have to take action to bypass the blockage. By conducting an online survey and performing a meta-cluster analysis, we found a group we labeled the undeprived: people that, despite presenting traits frequently associated with digital divides—such as gender, age, and low levels of digital skills—were able to keep using the app.

This article offers a conceptual framework of Facebook’s sub-platforms: Profiles, Groups, and Pages. We demonstrate the crucially different affordances that these sub-platforms possess, and the various resulting social practices and dynamics that they enable. With mourning and memorialization as a case study, our findings point at emergent practices ranging along a personal-to-public spectrum of communicative functions and media uses: Profiles offer a personal quality, albeit differently for the bereaved’s Profile and the deceased’s Profile; Groups possess a hybrid nature, combining self-expression alongside public aspects, reviving thus premodern bereaved communities; and Pages possess a distinctly public quality, serving as online memorialization centers where the deceased becomes an icon and a resource for mobilizing broad social change. This comparative and integrated approach may be applied productively to other contexts and other social media (sub-)platforms.

This article focusses on the courtship rituals and practices of intimacy among young dating app users, aged between 20 and 33, in Berlin. Dating app users participate in ‘rituals of transition’ as they signal mutual interest and heightened intimacy by moving conversations from dating apps to social media messaging platforms such as WhatsApp. These rituals of transition play a far more prominent role in signalling romantic interest than the matching-mechanisms inherent in the design of dating apps. Drawing on ethnographic data incorporating 36 semistructured interviews and 45 chat interviews across three popular dating apps, Tinder, Bumble and OkCupid, the study finds that users code the apps installed on their smartphones as hosting spheres of varying intimacy. These spheres are substantiated through the infrastructure of notifications on users’ devices. Rather than drastically altering how users communicate across different apps, rituals of transition are a key moment of communication in themselves.

Popular discourses surrounding contemporary digital media often misrepresent it as immaterial and ephemeral, overlooking the material devices that store and generate our media objects. This article materially ‘descends’ into a selection of prior media forms that make up the genealogy of the hard disk drive (HDD) to challenge our reliance on conceptual misrepresentations. This material analysis is used to situate digital media in a genealogy of prior media forms, to enrich our understanding of how media’s affordances arise from the interplay of both formal and forensic materiality and to demonstrate the value of reintegrating materiality back into the study of media.

With the pervasiveness of mobile technologies, witnesses have the opportunity to mediate up-close and seemingly truthful recordings of events. As such, “witness videos” have become prominent in news reports and serve as authoritative resources in the construction of memory. However, once they are uploaded to video-sharing sites and popular archives such as YouTube, they are being reassembled and remixed by distinct actors, along the lines of their own ideological agendas. Focusing on the chemical attack on Ghouta, Syria, this article investigates how witness videos are represented by uploaders (ranging from established media to activists) and structured by the affordances and sociotechnical practices associated with the platform. Hence, we argue, although the future memory of the attack is constituted by witness videos, it is powerfully shaped by various actors, both human and nonhuman. These mechanisms of memory construction are empirically explored by qualitative and quantitative analyses of meta-data and (remixed) content.

This article explores the elective affinities between autism and new media. Autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) provides a uniquely apt case for considering the conceptual link between mental disability and media technology. Tracing the history of the disorder through its various media connections and connotations, we propose a narrative of the transition from impaired sociability in person to fluent social media by network. New media introduce new affordances for people with ASD: The Internet provides habitat free of the burdens of face-to-face encounters, high-tech industry fares well with the purported special abilities of those with Asperger’s syndrome, and digital technology offers a rich metaphorical depository for the condition as a whole. Running throughout is a gender bias that brings communication and technology into the fray of biology versus culture. Autism invites us to rethink our assumptions about communication in the digital age, accounting for both the pains and possibilities it entails.

In recent years, research on online impression management has received considerable scholarly attention, with an increasing focus on how the affordances of new media shape the impression management process. However, scant attention has been paid to how individuals perform their identity online in places where surveillance is the norm—and punishment for non-compliance to behavioral codes is severe. This qualitative study of Azerbaijan, an honor culture with a norm of surveillance and serious repercussions for deviating from behavioral codes, explores how young adults balance the tensions between wanting to connect, create, and interact in these spaces while still adhering to behavioral codes. Findings from interviews reveal a complex set of strategies young people employ to both adhere to and break free of the restrictions they experience in offline settings. In many ways, these strategies are similar to those identified in research on more open societies; however, the ramifications for behavioral violations are so severe that careful and controlled impression management becomes paramount for Azerbaijanis, and especially so for women, who face significantly more restrictions than men.

A February 2014 iteration of Facebook’s software upgraded the number of options for gender identification from 2 to 58. Drawing on critical theoretical approaches to technology, queer theory, and insights from science and technology studies, this iteration is situated within a 10-year history of software and user modifications that pivot around gender. I argue that the gender binary has regulated Facebook’s design strategy while the co-existence of binary and non-binary affordances has enabled the company to serve both users and advertising clients simultaneously. Three findings are revealed: (1) an original programming decision to store three values for gender in Facebook’s database became an important fissure for non-binary possibilities, (2) gender became increasingly valuable over time, and (3) in the deep level of the database, non-binary users are reconfigured into a binary system. This analysis also exposes Facebook’s focus on authenticity as an insincere yet highly marketable regulatory regime.

This study examined how self-presentation on social media influences the way people view themselves. It also examined whether that varies with sites using two temporal features: posts which have a short life (ephemeral) and those which live indefinitely (permanent). Drawing on both the notion of public commitment and self-symbolizing, our experiment provided a critical test of two rival theory-driven hypotheses—one suggesting a greater internalization of presented self on permanent rather than ephemeral social media and the other suggesting the opposite pattern. Supporting the self-symbolizing perspective, those who publicly presented themselves on ephemeral social media internalized their portrayed personality. Also, such a difference in internalization between the two conditions was triggered by an introverted self-presentation. Results suggest that ephemerality enhances self-symbolizing efforts and the subsequent internalization by affording nonstrategic self-presentation and reducing impression management concerns. Implications for understanding self-concept change in social media contexts are discussed.

While it has been more than 15 years since the Korean pop culture phenomenon known as the Korean wave or hallyu emerged, academic analyses have not sufficiently addressed its dimension as a media environment from a global perspective. In this regard, drawing on qualitative interviews with North American fans of the recent Korean wave, this study explores how the hallyu phenomenon is integrated into a social media-driven cultural landscape, which will be referred to as the social mediascape. The social mediascape of hallyu reveals that the technological affordances of social media platforms and fans’ sociality interplay with each other, resulting in the rapid spread of hallyu as a set of impure cultural forms.

This essay is an early ethnographic exploration of the Dark Web Social Network (DWSN), a social networking site only accessible to Web browsers equipped with The Onion Router. The central claim of this essay is that the DWSN is an experiment in power/freedom, an attempt to simultaneously trace, deploy, and overcome the historical conditions in which it finds itself: the generic constraints and affordances of social networking as they have been developed over the past decade by Facebook and Twitter, and the ideological constraints and affordances of public perceptions of the dark web, which hold that the dark web is useful for both taboo activities and freedom from state oppression. I trace the DWSN’s experiment with power/freedom through three practices: anonymous/social networking, the banning of child pornography, and the productive aspects of techno-elitism. I then use these practices to specify particular forms of power/freedom on the DWSN.

At the end of its first decade, Facebook’s identity, popularity and characteristics are shaped in important ways by its becoming a form of mobile media. This article seeks to explore and understand Facebook as the important force in mobile media and communication it now is. It draws upon and combines perspectives from technology production, design and economy, as well as user adoption, consumption, practices, affect, emotion and resistance. This article discusses the beginnings of mobile Facebook and the early adoption of mobile Facebook associated with the rise of smartphones. The second part of the article explores Facebook’s integration with photography (with Instagram) and social games (such as Zynga’s Farmville). This article argues that Facebook’s mobile career is an accomplishment that has distinctively melded evolving affordances, everyday use across a wide range of settings, as well as political economies, corporate strategy and design.

“Profile work,” that is strategic self-presentation in social network sites, is configured by both the technical affordances and related social norms. In this article, we address technical and social psychological aspects that underlie acts of sharing by analyzing the social in relation to the technical. Our analysis is based on two complementary sets of qualitative data gleaned from in situ experiences of Finnish youth and young adults within the sharing mechanisms of Facebook and Last.fm. In our analysis, we identified social norms that were formed around the prevailing sharing practices in the two sites and compared them in relation to the sharing mechanisms. The analysis revealed that automated and manual sharing were sanctioned differently. We conclude that although the social norms that guide content sharing differed between the two contexts, there was an identical sociocultural goal in profile work: presentation of authenticity.

This article takes note of affordances for counterpublic communication on social networking sites (SNSs). Because of the important ways that counterpublic communication is tied to specific platforms, it is necessary to understand why certain platforms are especially conducive (or are seen to be conducive) to counterpublic address. This article uses the example of the asexual community’s use of the SNS Tumblr to explore the affordances of the Tumblr platform for counterpublic communication, comparing Tumblr to the bulletin boards on the popular Asexuality Visibility Education Network website. This article modifies and extends boyd’s analysis of SNSs as networked publics to account for the technological affordances for networked counterpublics. It ends by briefly considering ways that networked counterpublics can be antagonized.

This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typology and offering a theoretical explanation towards how political affordances are formed in digital democracy. Specifically, the article relates theories of affordance to an informing/deforming design process to explain how political positions are created in new media apparatus. The article traces iterations of WikiLeaks from 2006 to 2011, as well as derivative projects of radical transparency that existed in 2012 and 2013.

This article investigates how the Dance Central game series (Harmonix Music Systems) invites and persuades players to experiment with gender performance. Dance Central uses the Xbox 360 Kinect, a motion-sensing interface, to teach players full-body dance routines set to popular club music. This study offers evidence that performative, constructivist gender theories informed the development process for these games, and explores what happens when designers enlist players in putting theory into practice. Dance Central stages visceral encounters with gendered choreography, generating both embodied gender work in the course of gameplay and reflective gender discourse in public-sphere social media. Grounded in qualitative ethnographic research that gives equal attention to interface affordances, game design, player experiences, and game-related discourse, this article offers a case study for understanding how digital media become enculturated as technologies of gender.

The technology that allows readers to post anonymous online comments on newspaper websites gives readers unprecedented opportunities to participate, but poses challenges to the journalistic value of transparency, practice of gatekeeping, and conception of expertise. This nationwide survey of 583 US journalists explores whether the technology has affected their work practices, workplaces, or news coverage. The study, grounded in social shaping of technology theories, finds that journalists are not opposed to sharing their web platforms with readers’ comments, but dislike user anonymity and ignore reader input. Despite the technological affordance that provides journalists a means to receive instant, global feedback from readers, journalists are maintaining their jurisdiction over news content and are not participating with readers in mutual shaping. This study finds that journalistic norms and conceptions of expertise prevent journalists from engaging with readers.

Comparing new media to older media can help identify fundamental uses and perceived effects of communication technology. This study analyzes one soldier’s milblog (military blog) and one Civil War soldier’s letters and diaries to understand how milblogs compare to older forms of soldier correspondence. Despite the overt distinction in technical systems utilized, this analysis demonstrated that the communications through the milblog and letters/diaries share tremendous similarities. In composing their correspondence through these distinct media, each soldier maintained similar anxieties over technological affordances, perceptions of their audience, and motivations for corresponding. Though there were certainly differences in style and content, little that was done or accomplished via the milblog was without direct precedent in the Civil War letters and diaries.

This article reports on a case study of the web-based educational maths application, Mathletics. The findings are drawn from an ethnographic study of children’s technology use in Melbourne, Australia. We explore the experience, governance and commerce of children’s Mathletics use, and offer insights into the developing possibilities and challenges emerging through the adoption of Web 2.0 applications for learning and education. In analyzing the interaction between students and this software, this article deploys two key concepts in technology studies – affordance and technicity – to develop a relational understanding of Mathletics play. This conceptualization of play, which accounts for the playability or give of a technology, helps to illuminate some ways in which the aesthetics, functionality, and materiality of this online application accommodate a number of – and often competing – uses, interests and values: parental anxieties, pedagogical concerns and corporate stakes.

There is currently a diversity of understandings of digital democracy being deployed within popular commentary, research, policy making, and practical initiative. However, there is a lack of resources clearly outlining this diversity; this article undertakes such an outline. It provides a reconstruction of four digital democracy positions. These four positions are referred to here as liberal-individualist, deliberative, counter-publics, and autonomist Marxist. The delineation of each position draws from critical-interpretative research and has been developed with respect to three elements: the democratic subject assumed, the related conception of democracy promoted, and the associated democratic affordances of digital media technology. The aim is to draw attention to different understandings of what extending democracy through digital media means, and to provide a framework for further examination and evaluation of digital democracy rhetoric and practice.

The goal of this article is two-fold: to introduce the concept of augmented deliberation and to demonstrate its implementation in a pilot project.We look specifically at a project called Hub2. This community engagement project employed the online virtual world Second Life to augment community deliberation in the planning of a neighborhood park in Boston, Massachusetts. The local community was invited to gather in a physical space and a virtual space simultaneously, and a physical moderator and virtual designer orchestrated deliberation.This project demonstrates the design values central to augmented deliberation: (1) it is a multimedia group communication process which balances the specific affordances of digital technologies with the established qualities of face-to-face group deliberation; (2) it emphasizes the power of experience; and (3) it promotes sustainability and reproducibility through digital tracking. Augmented deliberation, when properly designed, provides a powerful mechanism to enable productive and meaningful public deliberation. The article concludes with directions for further research.

The explosion in social networking sites such as MySpace, Facebook, Bebo and Friendster is widely regarded as an exciting opportunity, especially for youth.Yet the public response tends to be one of puzzled dismay regarding a generation that, supposedly, has many friends but little sense of privacy and a narcissistic fascination with self-display. This article explores teenagers' practices of social networking in order to uncover the subtle connections between online opportunity and risk. While younger teenagers relish the opportunities to recreate continuously a highly-decorated, stylistically-elaborate identity, older teenagers favour a plain aesthetic that foregrounds their links to others, thus expressing a notion of identity lived through authentic relationships. The article further contrasts teenagers' graded conception of `friends' with the binary classification of social networking sites, this being one of several means by which online privacy is shaped and undermined by the affordances of these sites.

This article builds on a case study of the worldwide online dating site Match.com to develop a theoretical understanding of the place of communication and affect in the information economy. Drawing on theoretical debates, secondary sources, a qualitative survey of dating profiles and an analysis of the features and affordances of the Match.com site, the article argues that internet dating seeks to guide the technologically enhanced communicative and affective capacities of internet users to work in ways so that this produces economically valuable content. This is primarily achieved through branding, which as a technique of governance that seeks to work ‘from below’ and ‘empower’ users to deploy their freedom in certain particular, pre-programmed ways. The argument is that online dating provides a good illustration of how the information economy actively subsumes communicative action as a form of immaterial labour.