This article develops a Marxist account of the US attention economy through Donald Trump’s media presence. It argues that Trump operates as a “volatility asset” within platform capitalism, a figure valued for producing rapid spikes and crashes of attention that can be converted into advertising inventory and behavioural data. Bringing Marx’s commodity analysis into dialogue with Smythe’s audience commodity, communicative capitalism, surveillance capitalism and data colonialism, the article introduces “spectacular accumulation” to name the fusion of media spectacle, metrics and data extraction. It reframes Marx’s distinction between formal and real subsumption to theorize the real subsumption of political discourse under platform capitalism, where political communication is organized around engagement metrics and data capture. Using an illustrative mapping of high salience Trump media events, it shows how scandal driven communication reorganizes newsroom labour and platform participation. It concludes that decommodifying attention requires not only regulatory reform but also struggles over the ownership and control of communicative infrastructures, in order to weaken the profitability of political volatility.
Systemic crises disrupt cultural production and collective meaning-making, yet digital platforms increasingly mediate how societies articulate identity, value, and solidarity under disruption. Drawing on platform theory and affective publicness, this study examines how Spanish cultural discourse was reconfigured on Twitter during the early COVID-19 pandemic (2019–2020). Analyzing 78,908 geolocated tweets through computational topic modeling, discrete emotion mapping, and spatial-temporal analysis, we trace shifts in thematic salience, geographic distribution, and affective valence before and during the national lockdown. Results reveal twelve discursive topics that consolidate into three cultural themes: artistic production, culture as everyday practice, and dimensions of Spanish identities. Geospatial mapping demonstrates how platformed visibility reproduces Spain’s historical territorial pluralism—Mediterranean corridors express hybrid regional-cosmopolitan identities, Madrid anchors institutional and national framing, and peripheral municipalities negotiate cultural equity through critical advocacy. Crisis conditions did not homogenize digital culture; instead, they catalyzed affective realignment, intensifying positively framed regional solidarity, shifting discourse from celebratory consumption to infrastructural preservation, and polarizing sentiment around social and resource inequality. These findings challenge dominant narratives of crisis-driven national cohesion, demonstrating that platforms function as agonistic cultural fields where territorial pluralism is preserved, amplified, and emotionally mobilized under systemic disruption. The study advances digital sociology and computational cultural studies by theorizing platform-mediated crisis discourse as a site of structural negotiation rather than cultural erasure, and offers empirical and theoretical insights into how digital ecologies shape collective meaning-making amid societal rupture.
This article explores how discourses of gender become a vehicle for political antagonism on Spodeli, an anonymous Bulgarian Q&A forum. Drawing on over one million posts from nearly two decades of forum activity (2007–2024), it combines Structural Collocation Analysis (SCA) with a qualitative analysis of discursive shifts to trace how conversations around the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’ become entangled with the logic of adversarial politicisation – a process that, as the article argues, is marked in the contemporary moment by the normalisation and mainstreaming of exclusionary narratives. The analysis maps both large-scale shifts in linguistic patterns and gradual transformation of meaning-making practices through discursive shifts. Findings reveal a progression from personal grievances around gender roles to politicised narratives, including misogynist and reactionary rhetoric, amplified by the forum’s anonymity and asynchronous structure. The study conceptualises this process as everyday extremism, showing how ostensibly innocuous anonymous digital spaces mediate the proliferation of extremist narratives in casual online discourse.
Digital and social media are reshaping the repertoires of contemporary labour activism, as trade unions increasingly use these platforms to mobilise members and contest managerial power. Drawing on the concepts of collective and connective action, affective publics, and distributed leadership, this article examines how the University and College Union, affiliated activists, and supporters used Twitter during a boycott of marking and assessment duties in the UK, situating the case within a broader shift towards hybrid, digitally mediated mobilisations. Based on a dataset of over 10,000 tweets and retweets collected during the boycott's initial phase, the study adopts a mixed-methods design, combining GenAI-assisted computational analysis of user activity, engagement, and network structure with thematic analysis of original tweets. Findings reveal a leaderful mobilisation in which collective and connective dynamics are intertwined and bridged by affect: national union accounts provide coordinating frames, branches translate these into context-specific action, and members and activists personalise and circulate messages through storytelling. While Twitter proved effective for information-sharing, solidarity-building, and rapid mobilisation, the analysis also identifies missed opportunities for strategic messaging diversification, broader stakeholder engagement, and dialogic interaction. By outlining how institutional structures and digital publics jointly shape mobilisation, bound together by affect, notably outrage, the paper advances theoretical debates on digitally mediated union activism. As a further contribution, it demonstrates the value and limitations of integrating GenAI tools in social media research
This article investigates the social mechanisms at play during the formation of a gaming habitus—the core set of values, beliefs, and judgments apparent in different players of digital games. In-depth interviews were held with 36 Swedish players of digital games, detailing their current and previous gaming habits and preferences, as well as their childhood and school experiences. The results, presented as vignettes, describe four distinct pathways into the habit of gaming, resulting in four forms of gaming habitus: cultural-casual, cultural-hardcore, sporty-casual, and sporty-hardcore. The article offers a detailed exposé into the inner workings of the gaming habitus of different players, and proposes a widened perspective on the impact of socialisation as an important impetus in the gradual shaping of a taste for digital games.
