The study examines the emerging field of knowledge representation in the context of the semantic web and linked data, with a focus on knowledge produced within the social sciences - particularly in sociocultural anthropology. It starts from the premise that natural language, especially its textualized form, has long been the primary vehicle for producing and communicating anthropological research. Informed by theoretical approaches from information science, the study explores how computational methods may offer alternative modes of structuring and representing anthropological knowledge. It challenges the dominance of text as the sole representational medium and highlights the potential of semantic modeling to open new epistemological pathways. At the same time, it acknowledges the conceptual and methodological challenges involved in such a transition. This approach shifts emphasis away from metrics and programming, foregrounding processes of conceptualization, semantics, meaning, and reasoning as key to engaging with anthropological knowledge in digital environments.
TikTok is currently one of the most topical social media platforms in modern democracies due to its ability to reach large, young audiences and the concerns over outside influences and the algorithmic nature of feeds. In Finland, the parliamentary elections of 2023 marked an increase in interest for the platform. At the same time, polarisation is also a trending subject in European social media and society, with TikTok being discussed as one of the drivers of this division. This study investigates whether TikTok comments reveal polarisation through the formation of disruptive right-wing publics alongside publics acting against disruptions during election campaigns. The dataset of the study consists of TikTok videos with their comments from the Finnish parliamentary parties that were present on TikTok before the 2023 parliamentary elections. The comments are analysed through a framework designed to uncover right-wing discursive patterns, with the goal of identifying disruptive right-wing publics that form in the comment sections of TikTok videos. This study also seeks to uncover the precise language used by commenters and thus identify what constitutes different blocs through vocabulary choices. The results indicate that a large disruptive public consisting mainly of right-wing commenters was present on TikTok. The language used by these publics was clearly leaning towards a confrontational position, thus polarising the comment sections. The study also revealed that there did not seem to be a singular right-wing disruptive public, but rather one that was driven by the nationalistic Finns Party, as evidenced by the language present on other right-wing parties’ comment sections. On a broader scale the results indicate that disruptive publics have effects on both polarisation and discussion quality on TikTok, and that comment-based discussions are relevant spaces of identity work on a video-first platform.
Authenticity is a central concept in social media influencer scholarship and typically associated with influencers' economic success. For political influencers, perceived authenticity relates to their credibility. However, the ways in which they cultivate and sustain authenticity remain under-researched. This paper examines political influencers’ authenticity labor on Instagram, focusing on practices by nano- and micro-influencers. Employing a case-study on a recent liberalization in German abortion regulations, the analysis draws on in-depth interviews with nine influencers who publicly addressed the issue on their profiles. The findings highlight the centrality of cultivating authenticity in the political realm, revealing influencers’ strategies, tensions, and the integration of political and personal spheres in their political content. Distinctively, political influencers curate ideologically coherent Instagram profiles but face pressures to maintain this coherence. The study adds political influencers’ own perspectives to scholarship on authenticity on social media and discusses implications for how they may shape political online discourse by personalizing debates and emphasizing value-driven engagement.
Ground in a critical realist framework, this article examines the habitual and addictive cycles through which social media engagement is produced, sustained, and transformed. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 22 social media users, the study explores how participants experienced and negotiated their relationships with social media across roles as consumers, producers, and prosumers of content. Findings reveal that engagement is shaped not only by individual motivations but also by the interaction of algorithmic recommendation systems, platform business models, visibility cultures, and influencer economies that encourage ongoing participation. Through retroductive analysis, two conceptual models - the habitual cycle and addictive cycle of social media use - are developed to explain movement between routine and compulsive forms of engagement. The models demonstrate that users shift between these modes under changing social, cultural, and platform conditions rather than occupying fixed categories of either habitual or addictive use. The article further shows how experiences commonly described as addiction emerge from underlying structural and cultural mechanisms that encourage continual engagement whilst simultaneously individualising responsibility for its regulation. It argues that understanding social media harms requires attention to the relationship between user agency and platform structures, shifting analysis beyond individual behavioural explanations towards broader questions of platform governance, prosumption, and social harm.
The integration of digital technologies into museums has redefined public engagement, offering innovative virtual experiences that transcend physical access. Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory, this paper positions virtual museum visiting as recontextualized experience and examines the phenomenon through a case study of the Palace Museum on WeChat. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography with walkthrough elements, we found that these visits construct a new knowledge system that invites self-referential, spontaneous and heterogeneous connections. We therefore argue that the visiting experience drives the virtual museum rhizormorphous thanks to its performance of unpredicted and heterogeneous mapping. By addressing the various mediators involved in virtual museum visiting, this paper calls for a reconceptualization of (dis)connections in the audience’s engagement with virtual museums. It offers a novel framework for understanding virtual museum visiting as a lived experience.
This article explores how public health information was contested on social media during the COVID-19 pandemic. Through digital ethnography of four Finnish alternative health influencers, we examine their role in politicising and polarising health attitudes and pandemic governance, and how these dynamics evolved from the early to later stages of the crisis. Drawing on social media content from three key periods – early pandemic (January–June 2020), late pandemic (October–December 2021), and post-pandemic (March–April 2025) – the study reveals that influencers amplified politicisation and polarisation of health and distrust in authorities by leveraging: 1) lay expertise rooted in personal pre-pandemic healing narratives, 2) alternative immunological framings, 3) explicit political opposition to public health measures, and 4) engagement with conspiracy narratives. Influencer communication was characterised by opportunism, blending political activism, commercial interests, and personal wellness branding. By aligning with values of authenticity and trust, influencers cultivated belonging within alternative or conspiritual health communities. Yet, their trajectories varied in terms of politicisation and conspirituality, illustrating how pandemic-driven polarisation unfolded within the alternative health scene. This study offers critical insights into the evolving dynamics of the health politicisation and the role of social media in shaping public trust in medical expertise.
Adopting culturally responsive technology-based pedagogies that recognize and accommodate students' diverse learning needs, styles, and experiences is crucial in challenging epistemic justice and improving learning outcomes. The objective was to explore how integrating an understanding of individual students' distinctive traits into developing technology-based pedagogies informed by students' different ways of knowing can increase learning outcomes. In this article, I discuss how adopting culturally responsive technologies in classrooms can redress epistemic injustice and improve learner outcomes by promoting student engagement, hands-on experiential learning, and culturally aware learning. The concept of epistemic justice inspires efforts to enhance learning environments and cultivate a sense of connection and community among students. The cases draw from my experience adopting the intervention and are presented within an analytical framework of culturally responsive technology-based pedagogies in selected hybrid and in-person media production courses.
Online platforms have become fertile ground for the emergence of social media personas and trends, blurring the boundaries between personal, professional, and public life. The negotiation of identity and assumption of public roles have undergone significant transformations. This study explores the strategic visibility negotiation of LGBTQ+ content creators on TikTok, particularly within Hungary’s increasingly restrictive socio-political landscape, where LGBTQ+ rights are under growing pressure. Drawing on a critical technocultural discourse analysis of 400 TikTok uploads by 4 prominent LGBTQ+ content creator, and 16 in-depth interviews with Hungarian LGBTQ+ youth, this research identifies four predominant roles fulfilled by these creators: Casual Creator, Influencer, Activist, and Influencer–Activist. Creators strategically engage with platform affordances to navigate audience, and market demands while maintaining a central narrative grounded in the lived LGBTQ+ experience. Hungarian LGBTQ+ creators, however, must carefully balance commercial and political roles within an increasingly hostile socio-political climate, often adopting subtle forms of activism and community-driven content to mitigate risks. By leveraging humour, cultural references, and coded messaging, they carve out spaces of resistance while meeting the expectations of their diverse audiences. The study underscores the nuanced negotiation of visibility undertaken by LGBTQ+ content creators, highlighting how they balance online identities to navigate the complex interplay between consumerist and political demands.
Sociotechnical imaginaries and national imaginaries are intrinsically linked, as visions for the role of technology often go hand in hand with aspirations for economic growth and political power within specific countries. Discourses around Asian “tech nations” such as China and South Korea exemplify this dynamic, as they are frequently portrayed as technology leaders. Arguably, digital technologies have become prominent features in the portrayal and perception of nation states, while, simultaneously, expectations surrounding these technologies shape the sociotechnical imaginaries that emerge around them. A critical analysis of this relationship—and how it becomes manifest through framing practices in global media discourses—can reveal the extent to which oversimplified (mis)representations amount to forms of digital orientalism, particularly among foreign commentators. These include the selective emphasis on either predominantly negative or positive portrayals of Asian countries and their relationships with emerging technologies. Digital orientalist sentiments conflate sociotechnical and national imaginaries to promote highly selective representations of a given “Eastern” culture and its role in technological development. Social media platforms such as Twitter (now X) are important sites for such tech-nation discourses, featuring media commentators, politicians, entrepreneurs, and tech professionals. This article offers a critical analysis of discussions on Twitter about China, India, Japan, and South Korea in the context of digital technology. Using computational text analysis on a large sample of tweets from 2010 to 2021 (N = 2,077,232), the study explores how Asian countries are portrayed within the global Anglophone tech discourse and the extent to which they are subject to forms of digital orientalism. The findings highlight how online discourses, sociotechnical imaginaries, and national imaginaries intersect, with an emphasis on both commonalities and differences in the framing of Asian countries based on cultural, political, and economic factors.
This article explores the increasing use of social media, particularly Facebook groups, by social workers for professional socialization and support. Social media platforms are used individually to promote services and develop professional identities, and collectively for knowledge sharing, mutual support, and critical reflection. The study focuses on Quebec social workers, examining their use of Facebook groups to connect, share experiences, and reduce work-related stress. Data were collected from a private Facebook group, posts within the group, and interviews with 14 social workers. The analysis identified three main action logics behind group usage: integration (community belonging), utility (finding tools and information), and subjectivation (questioning practices) (Jauréguiberry & Proulx, 2011). The study found that social workers use these groups primarily outside working hours for professional practice discussions, personal opinions, social mobilization, and job-related posts. Prudence emerged as a key theme, with participants exercising caution to protect their psychological well-being and professional reputation. Facebook groups serve as important spaces for professional socialization, offering support and resources while requiring careful navigation to avoid potential risks.
This paper presents an innovative digital research methodology that imbricates feminist, participatory, and computational epistemologies to research the role of data in social contestation. Focusing on the social media conversation about feminicide, specifically on Spanish-speaking Twitter (now X), the study examined a dataset of 2.86 million posts to find which emotions and actions are involved in encounters with data, surfacing the “affective politicality” of data. The research is grounded on digital methods and develops through moments—personal and collective, human and computational, extended and focused—of “dwelling with data” across different research scenes. The contribution of this methodological reflection is to showcase a feminist mode of digital social research that integrates participation, encounter, emotion, and ethical commitment in the production of knowledge about and with the digital.
In this paper, I will provide a brief overview of Hubert Dreyfus’ and Margaret Archer’s views on the concept of a person, with the question of the possibility of AI-human interactions in the background. My aim is to explore how the contrasting views held by the two thinkers on human-AI relationships might help to map the terrain within which philosophical discussions about this topic are meaningful. Before examining their views, I will contextualise their thinking by focusing on the following questions: Is the traditional definition of the human being as a rational animal tenable from the perspective of AI? What are the scenarios concerning the possible cohabitation of humans and robots? Ought we to modify our views of the human place in the universe if personhood is not restricted to the members of the human species? The comparison of the two thinkers highlights decisive differences in approach: While Dreyfus’ main question is how the digital environment affects human nature, Archer focuses on AI personhood, suggesting the fluidity of boundaries between humans and robots.
As ethnographers, we plan our fieldwork thoroughly in advance, but circumstances on the ground sometimes force us to abandon our plans. Especially in conflict(-affected) settings, access to the field is not always guaranteed and circumstances can rapidly change. In this paper, we discuss how digital ethnography can be integrated into ethnographic projects, when researchers find themselves unable to travel or return to the field. We argue that embracing the digital, both as a tool and as a space, is a viable avenue to continue ethnographic fieldwork under such circumstances. We discuss the opportunities and challenges that such an approach offers, by discussing existing research and by drawing from our own experiences in Lebanon, Kosovo and Medellín (Colombia). The discussion encompasses the two focal components of ethnography: participant observation and interviews. In the part on participant observation, we make a distinction between two different approaches of using the digital for ethnography. The first is approach is grounded in digital ethnographic work, where the digital spaces are considered as field sites. The second approach uses digital tools for collecting data from physical spaces. The objective of the paper is to provide methodological tools to ethnographers who are not trained in digital methods, and to offer practical yet sound and rigorous tools. Our focus is on ethnography in conflict(-affected) settings, which presents rather specific challenges.
The co-constitution of social media and the Symbolic Order – the system of norms, law, culture, and language conditioning intersubjectivity – has generated an unprecedented political ontology marked by commodified performativity under neoliberalism. This ontology displaces the experience of the political in favour of its consumption as a spectacle. This spectacle expedites the misrecognition of far-right discourses as anomic rather than central to the neoliberal Symbolic Order. This paper explores how the relationship between social media and the neoliberal Symbolic Order sustains the normalisation of the far-right as an ontologically-securitising fantasy. I develop a Lacanian framework entangling the concepts of antagonism and ontological security. Through it, I examine the architecture of social media in terms of programmability (the mutual influence between users and algorithms) and homophilic networks (neighbourhoods of ‘love for sameness’). Based on the transition from ‘hate of the other’ to ‘love for the same’, I synthesise this framework and social media architecture into the novel notion of liebesraum or ‘space of love’. Liebesraum constitutes a spatial-affective apparatus that mediates the occlusion of traumatic encounters with anxieties of sociocultural collapse by situating them in a deceptive homeostasis of commodified antagonism on social media. Through the politically-stunting oscillation between transgressive enjoyment and corrective ‘love’, and in fostering faux agency, liebesraum reinforces neoliberalism’s ideological grip while simultaneously hollowing it by algorithmically mainstreaming ideologies of exclusion, supremacy, and brutalisation. I illustrate liebesraum in two political crises in the US: the 2021 Capitol Hill insurrection and Donald Trump’s 2024 electoral victory.
In the digital age, technology increasingly shapes environmental engagement, transforming how individuals perceive the natural world. While digital tools support awareness of environmental issues such as climate change, pollution and deforestation, they also challenge the quality of nature experiences. This mixed-methods study investigates how environmentally conscious digital users conceptualise nature, interact with it, and balance screen time with nature time. Data collection involved an online survey of 220 Australian and American participants, and semi-structured interviews. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to examine participants’ perceptions and practices regarding nature and digital technology. Findings show that digital technology is largely perceived as a mediator – not an obstacle – to nature connection. When used intentionally, especially alongside voluntary digital disconnection, it is seen as a neutral tool that can foster positive engagement with nature. Although participants strongly identified as part of nature, they maintained culturally embedded human-nature dualisms, particularly around human-made objects, including digital devices. The study also introduces the concept of digital solastalgia – the emotional distress experienced through witnessing environmental degradation online. Findings illustrate the complex ways individuals navigate their relationships with nature in the digital age, challenging binary framings of nature engagement as either online or offline, and suggesting a more hybrid understanding of human-nature-technology interactions.
This study draws on a dataset of 1394 flagged deepfakes from YouTube and TikTok annotated by the race, gender, profession and nationality of the ‘targeted’ individuals. The findings indicate that, by stark contrast to pornographic sites, mainstream deepfakes overwhelmingly feature individuals who are white, male, and—when in politics—authoritarian. A complementary qualitative analysis suggests that very few videos have a political edge, even when featuring politicians. Instead, it is proposed that the chief function of mainstream deepfakes is to be seen as a carnivalesque (apolitical) profanation of the faces of power. These findings challenge previous studies on the demographics of deepfake targets and broaden the scope of the current literature by shedding further light on how AI-assisted video doctoring is used beyond porn and disinformation.
Entertainment, information seeking, socialization: internet users are constantly dataveilled when relying on various online services to meet their diverse needs. Yet research that considers online-service peculiarities in shaping personal experiences in response to corporate data collection and analysis is scarce. This study investigates young adults’ dataveillance imaginaries, sense of dataveillance, and behavioral responses on YouTube, which extensively displays personalized content based on digital traces. Our thematic analysis of semi-structured interviews with frequent users demonstrated the perceived self-evidence of dataveillance on this major platform. Users tended to accept and take advantage of, rather than resist, pervasive dataveillance practices. The results also revealed that on YouTube, dataveillance brings greater benefits because it fosters user satisfaction and confirmed that individual attitudes and behaviors related to dataveillance are highly context-dependent. Our fresh service-specific approach contributes to refining user-centered research on everyday dataveillance beyond its expected adverse consequences.
This article analyses written online responses to Swedish retail stores’ social media advertisements broadly addressing the Muslim celebration of Ramadan. It is based on a selection of 19 social media advertisement posts that together generated a total of 2988 responses in discussion threads. The customer responsive comments are analysed through the theoretical lens of race and racism in the digital society and theories of everyday nationhood and nationalism. At large, the result shows that the social media platforms can be seen as facilitators of anti-Muslim racism. However, the advertisements and the responses to them, which express dislike of as well as support for the retailers, Muslim traditions and the Muslim community, illustrate a negotiation of nationhood which is characterized on the one side by racist anger and fear of loss of nation, and on the other side by support for inclusion. Inspired by the concept of ‘predatory inclusion’, the article argues that this paradoxical phenomenon illustrates both inclusion and exclusion. The retail stores’ social media platforms are not only spaces of hatred against Muslims but also a space in which resistance to anti-Muslim racism is articulated and where constructions of Swedishness are challenged.
The latest wave of AI hype has been driven by ‘generative AI’ systems exemplified by ChatGPT, which was created by OpenAI’s ‘fine-tuning’ of a large language model (LLM). This process involves using human labor to provide feedback on generative outputs in order to bring these into greater ‘alignment’ with ‘safety’. This article analyzes the fine-tuning of generative AI as a process of social ordering, beginning with the encoding of cultural dispositions into LLMs, their containment and redirection into vectors of ‘safety’, and the subsequent challenge of these ‘guard rails’ by users. Fine-tuning becomes a means by which some social hierarchies are reproduced, reshaped, and flattened. By analyzing documentation provided by generative AI developers, I show how fine-tuning makes use of human judgement to reshape the algorithmic reproduction of inequality, while also arguing that the most important values driving AI alignment are commercial imperatives and aligning with political economy.
Shared perceptions of the world are imagined with and within available media technological environments. In other words our communication environment conditions our social imagination and the ways in which we can see the world. The essay, based on the inaugural lecture of the author, discusses how this conditioning takes place and with what consequences in the contemporary digital societies. The essay draws on the research by the author on innovationism and discusses the concepts of reversed tools, content confusion and attention factory. Utilizing the study by Berg & Valaskivi (2023) on commercial image recognition services and their performance in recognizing religion in images as an example, the essay illustrates failures and imperfections of AI technologies which are often considered more neutral than human beings. The essay calls for critical thinking on digitalization and expansion of AI technologies and encourages prioritization of humane interests as well as social and cultural welbeing over commerciality in technological development.
