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The unprecedented growth of video-on-demand (VOD) streaming platforms has brought both new optimism and new complications to concerns around screen 'diversity'. To what extent have major global and smaller regional VOD platforms invested in screen diversity, at the level of genres, languages, country-of-origin, social representation or creative labour? Just how 'diverse' are the catalogues of VOD services? How is this content represented to audiences and made discoverable through platform interfaces and recommendation systems? How might this vary across the major US-based services, compared with smaller and more niche platforms, or with local broadcaster VODs, or with national public service VODs? This introduction to a special collection on diversity in the streaming era surveys recent developments in screen and media studies scholarship that attempt to address these questions. In doing so, we examine how streaming platforms are addressing diversity at the levels of industry, policy, texts, technologies and audiences. At each level, we observe different definitions, operationalisations, and practices of 'diversity' that are informed by a range of disciplinary theorisations, policy histories and priorities, and national and regional contexts, all of which come to intersect with each other in new and challenging ways in the VOD era. In conclusion, we argue that to properly respond to the problem of 'diversity', research on screen diversity and on VODs must engage with these diverse dimensions of 'diversity'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2020, the Misogyny Speech resurfaced and went viral on the social media platform TikTok, almost a decade after former Prime Minister Julia Gillard first presented it in Australian Parliament. This research aims to comprehend the speech's virality through a lens of fandom theory using qualitative content analysis, to explore how users foster community and perform elements of political fandom. It considers the influence of the platform's affordances and architecture on the formation and productivity of this fandom community. The speech's resurgence in popularity can be characterised as a manifestation of political fandom, shaped by the platform in which it thrives. The way users embody the elements that typify political fandoms – productivity and consumption, affect, community, and contestation – is profoundly influenced by the affordances and structures of TikTok. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the past decade, there have been several efforts in Melbourne, Victoria, Australia to increase the opportunities and improve the experiences of women cyclists in recreational and racing contexts. However, cycling in Victoria and Australia more broadly continues to be a male dominated sport. This study incorporates a digital ethnography of two Melbourne-based women's cycling Facebook groups including 11 interviews with stakeholders over the period of 2017–2018 to analyse how women and girls are harnessing social media to create counter sports spaces to enhance women's cycling. The paper explores the emergence of the "virtual clubhouse" which operates as a digitally networked counterpublic, providing a space for women and gender diverse cyclists to connect, coproduce and engage in knowledge sharing practices, and build a more inclusive culture for cycling that challenges dominant, mainstream narratives of women's sport. The "virtual clubhouse" addresses a gap in the physical bicycle landscape in which cycling and cycling knowledge (including bicycle maintenance) is largely mediated by men and cycling clubs are configured as masculine spaces within Australia. This research adds further depth into a specific localised network of women cyclists to consider how physical and online sports cultures and communities are intertwined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Automation has a long history in cultural production, but the contemporary moment presents a range of new possibilities and demands for the deployment of automated and autonomous systems in the shaping of our cultural and social worlds. The cultural implications of the deployment of automated systems for producing, curating, and distributing a growing range of cultural texts and artifacts extend beyond the realm of content to encompass their pace, rhythm, and scale. Understanding the significance of these shifts remains a central task for cultural studies research that builds on the field's historical engagement with the entwinement of cultural practices, social relations, and power. This theme issue builds on the historical and recent concerns of cultural studies to provide a range of approaches to the cultural significance of automation. Given the scope of the transformations, the coverage of possible topics is indicative rather than exhaustive. The articles in this collection range across the realms of automated news curation, credit scoring, image curation, deep fakes, data science, the gig economy, and content moderation. They engage with possible responses to the real and potential pathologies of automation in the cultural realm – while highlighting the links between culture, politics, and economics. Taken together they develop a range of critical approaches to the sometimes creeping, sometimes galloping automation of cultural production, curation, and distribution. While stressing the moments of historical continuity with earlier forms of bureaucratic and administrative rationality, they simultaneously indicate that we are, in many ways, still in the very early stages of a process that is likely to encompass an expanding range of cultural practices and texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we seek to understand how shipping and anti-fan practices intersect to create meaningful audience engagement and civic discourse about contemporary social and political issues in the "politics of viewing" CW's adaptation of Riverdale. By examining tagged posts from January 3, 2017 to June 26, 2019, we elicit how fan-rhetoric operates in a digitally networked environment and interrogate the intra-fan rivalries between shippers, anti-shippers, and anti-fans that underpin the Riverdale fandom on Tumblr. In doing so, we begin to sketch out a taxonomy of shipping-specific anti-fan practices, extending Gray's work into different types and modes of anti-fandom to consider the role shipping plays within consumption practices, fandom stratification, and the production of civic discourse online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 13 January 2019, Gillette launched a short film on YouTube entitled We Believe as part of a campaign addressing negative behaviour among men that perpetuates toxic masculinity. However, the video was subject to a large backlash with over 1 million downvotes on YouTube and thousands of critical comments accusing Gillette of playing into the 'feminist agenda'. This article examines the configuration of the backlash, specifically examining the networked properties, structure and key actors of the backlash represented in the comments below the YouTube video to understand how masculinities are (co)produced and reproduced in a post-#MeToo digital sphere. The analysis incorporates social network and thematic analyses of the comments posted under the Gillette YouTube video. The study contributes insight into the structure and configuration of a digitally networked backlash public and identifies how digital tactics are employed by a masculine public to achieve digital hegemony in the networked sphere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an era of datafication, data visualisation is playing an increasing role in civic meaning-making processes. However, the conventions of data visualisation have been criticised for their reductiveness and rhetoric of neutrality and there have been recent efforts to develop feminist principles for designing data visualisations that are compatible with feminist epistemologies. In this article, we aim to examine how data visualisation is used in feminist activism and by feminist activists. Drawing on the example of digital street harassment activism, we analyse how street harassment is visualised in and through a selection of prominent activist social media accounts. We consider the platform affordances utilised by activists, and how these are harnessed in making street harassment 'knowable'. Moreover, we critically interrogate which and whose experiences are 'knowable' via digital techniques, and what remains obscured and silenced. In analysing digital feminist activists' practices, we argue that what constitutes 'data visualisation' itself must be situated within feminist epistemologies and praxis that centre lived experience as the starting point for knowledge production. Such an approach challenges and disrupts normative constructions of what constitutes data visualisation. Our findings demonstrate how feminist activists are adopting 'traditional' practices of speaking out and consciousness-raising to the digital sphere in the creation of a range of visualisations that represent the issue of street harassment. We consider the efficacy of these visualisations for achieving their intended purpose and how they might translate to policy and government responses, if this is indeed their goal. Further, we document a tension between feminist epistemologies and the prevailing logic of datafication or dataism and note how in an attempt to unite the two, some digital feminist activism has contributed to reproducing existing power structures, raising concerning implications at the policy level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In October 2017, millions of people shared public testimonials of sexual abuse and harassment in an expression of global vulnerability using the hashtag #MeToo. While #MeToo was triggered by Hollywood actress Alyssa Milano, the phrase can be traced back a decade earlier to when African-American activist Tarana Burke said "me too" in a private exchange of solidarity with young black girls who were survivors of sexual assault. This study examines over 200,000 tweets from the first three days of #MeToo to understand how the meaning and narratives of the feminist hashtag were discursively negotiated. Combining social network analysis and discourse analysis, the paper draws attention to the exclusivity of popular and networked feminism and elevates the voices of the multiply marginalised survivors who were erased from the dominant narratives of #MeToo. It is a call to white feminist researchers and activists to be mindful of the voices that are excluded when examining popular feminist actions. The study contributes an understanding of the power dynamics within digital feminist networks that reproduce colonial violence and oppression within mainstream neoliberal feminism and academia, and extends support to the existing research that documents how digital networks do not empower marginalised voices equitably. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) are a separatist Manosphere group (digital manifestation of the Men's Liberation Movement) who focus on individualistic, self-empowering actions as opposed to traditional collective actions typical of Men's Rights Activists and Incels. This study investigates how the ideology and rhetoric of MGTOW propagates and normalises misogynistic beliefs through online harassment, using a multi-phased content and thematic analysis of 10,280 tweets from three of the most active MGTOW users on Twitter. The findings document a link between the MGTOW ideology and toxic masculinity, showing that the online harassment generated is deeply misogynistic and polices the boundaries of a heterosexual, hegemonic masculinity. The analysis demonstrates that while the misogyny and violence produced by MGTOW is not extreme in nature, their appeals to rational thinking make it seem like common sense. The article develops new knowledge about the heterogeneous nature of the Manosphere and its constructions of masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New social movement theories have been developed to address the organisational structures of activism in the age of digital platforms, but have tended to focus on structural questions rather than interpersonal dynamics. This paper engages with Bennett and Segerberg's theory of connective action but uses a feminist lens to foreground the interpersonal dynamics between digitally equipped activists to develop a uniquely feminist account of connective action. It draws on Jo Freeman's 'tyranny of structurelessness' to illustrate how informal organisation pervades new forms of connective action and continues to hamper the feminist movement. However, it also introduces and identifies the 'feminist manager' as an attempt to address the problematic practices of structurelessness and informality, and paves the way for consciously recognising the organisational structures required to advance the movement beyond consciousness-raising initiatives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]