This article examines how Big Tech became absorbed into local moral and political frameworks in Nigeria, Africa’s largest digital market, where the majority of the population is under 20. It maps Nigeria’s evolving platform regulations and situates recent state interventions within broader socio-economic tensions, culminating in the youth protest movement #EndSARS. The article traces how #EndSARS emerged from the entertainment industry and carried forward the organizational logic and political ethos of the globally connected, youth-led Afrobeats industry. It shows how the digital platforms that recently enabled Afrobeats’ rise not only served as infrastructure for organization and amplification, but were also called upon to actively provide corporate support against government oppression. Corporate sponsorship of the protest was simultaneously an aspirational horizon for protesters, a limited material reality through tech companies’ involvement, and a perceived threat for the political establishment. With this case study, the article intervenes in the academic consensus that conceptualizes Big Tech companies as engines of neocolonialism to draw attention to the ambivalence of emic reinterpretations, especially in contexts of generational and ethno-regional tensions. It underscores the need to understand the local dynamics that shape platforms’ symbolic power, as they can pose obstacles to effective regulation.
“VTubers” are live streamers who use 2D or 3D digital avatars to interact with audiences in real time. In this study we investigate how VTubers construct gender representations in online spaces, showing that the creation of a VTuber’s online gender is not static, but rather a dynamic process that adapts through interactions between the avatar’s design and fictive persona, their “offline” identity, and viewer engagement. We also demonstrate that while VTubers are afforded the ability to explore fluid and non-binary gender presentations, their portrayals are often sexualised. Equally, while certain VTubers foster inclusive spaces that celebrate diverse identities, others limit explicit audience expressions of gender empowerment by enforcing chat guidelines, highlighting the complexity of this area. This study thus contributes to scholarship on identity construction in avatar-mediated spaces, offering insights into how VTubers as gender representations both reflect and redefine online gender identities, especially concerning marginalised groups within live-streaming communities.
While much has been written about the volatility of digital assets, academic scholarship has largely overlooked how blockchain technologies have been adopted and reimagined by LGBTQ+ communities. This article addresses that gap through a digital ethnography of queer NFT communities active during the crypto craze of 2022, combining online participant observation with semi-structured interviews. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s concept of queer futurity, it examines how queer users imagined blockchain as a speculative platform for alternative economic and social possibility—despite the financial risks embedded in the technology’s libertarian and capitalist structures. The article interrogates the utopian rhetoric of inclusion, decentralisation, and wealth redistribution that was deployed within these communities to justify their interest in and holdings of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) and cryptocurrency. Queer leaders leveraged the blockchain to foster inclusive digital communities and promote wealth circulation amongst LGBTQ+ individuals, while community members embraced the technology as a risky opportunity for queer economic mobility. The article positions blockchain as a contested site where competing futurities collide—offering the illusion of liberation and the reproduction of existing inequalities. It argues that while queer users sought to make the blockchain ‘queer from the start,’ their efforts were ultimately constrained by the capitalist logics that underpin the technology.
Despite disability’s centrality to digital inclusion debates, scholarship on disabled influencers remains limited, focusing primarily on representation rather than material advocacy conditions. This study examines how disabled influencers navigate platform constraints while pursuing digital advocacy, extending Van Dijk’s access framework to content creation contexts through semi-structured interviews with sixteen Italian content creators on Instagram and TikTok. Digital inclusion emerges not as linear progression but as ongoing negotiation with systematically biased technological and commercial systems. Findings reveal sophisticated adaptive strategies including “algorithmic advocacy literacy” and “experiential pedagogy” that transform lived experience into educational resources. However, these operate within structural constraints including “systematic advocacy suppression” through shadowbanning, automated content removal, and monetization restrictions. The study introduces “accessibility maintenance work,” invisible, uncompensated labour creators perform to make platforms genuinely accessible, while revealing economic stratification where resource availability directly correlates with advocacy capacity. Results challenge approaches privileging technological solutions over systematic reform, demonstrating how platform governance constrains advocacy through accumulated algorithmic bias and automated moderation lacking contextual understanding.
This study examines how platform capitalism transforms temporal distress into economic value through “nostalgia bait”—algorithmically optimized content that remediates recent cultural artefacts to extract engagement from users experiencing technological acceleration. Integrating Toffler's (1970) concept of future shock with Sharma's (2014) power-chronography, the research demonstrates how platforms incorporate the psychological conditions they claim to address, converting temporal anxiety into a core profit mechanism. Using dual methods—thematic analysis of 5610 TikTok comments and semi-structured interviews with ten music industry professionals—the study traces recursive relationships between user temporal displacement and creator labor constraints. Findings reveal three dynamics of temporal exploitation: (1) platforms commodify psychological responses to acceleration through manufactured nostalgia, with 42% of comments expressing temporal displacement; (2) algorithmic systems restructure creative labor through recommendation dependencies, compelling producers to optimize content around seven-second attention windows and content calendar logic rather than artistic vision; (3) embodied nostalgic affect becomes extractable behavioral data through the standardization of sensory language, including phrases such as “unexplainable chills” and “core memory.” The research advances three theoretical contributions: extending future shock theory to demonstrate how conditions identified in 1970 become engineered features of 21st-century business models; operationalizing power-chronography through empirical analysis of platform temporal architectures; and systematically connecting production and consumption dynamics to reveal self-reinforcing cycles of extraction. The findings carry implications for temporal sovereignty in algorithmic culture and for the development of alternative infrastructures oriented toward human continuity rather than platform profit.
Social media has created new, horizontal channels for both vernacular surveillance and discipline. Social media influencers are often at the receiving end of both. This article explores the Instagram account Influencers in the Wild (IITW), which shares secretly recorded videos of individuals taking photos of themselves in public spaces, as an example of vernacular surveillance on social media. Through an analysis of posts and comments on IITW, this article aims to understand the mechanisms of vernacular surveillance constructed by IITW and its audience, and how they are affixed to public shaming on social media. Both the IITW’s content aggregation and the audience contribute to the construction of the influencer category. The posts on IITW suggest that the criticized behaviours depicted in the videos are often associated with self-obsession, inauthenticity, as well as the negative traits linked to selfies. By compiling these videos under a single account, chance encounters where strangers film other strangers are transformed into a category under surveillance.
Global socio-political discourse on social media is often heavily colored by its highly volatile and divisive nature. Nonetheless, social media remains central to political communication, becoming its own public square with the unique distinction of also intersecting with the multiverse of public squares across nations and platforms. While the sociological value of studying this discourse is undeniable, successfully deciphering the meaning of large corpora of polarized political content remains elusive. AI machine learning methods can tackle large datasets but are limited in their abilities to decipher highly convoluted and nuanced meanings associated with language. Using a historical dataset of Donald Trump-related tweets from 2016 to 2017 (immediately before and after his inauguration in January 2017), this study evaluated ChatGPT compared with humans in effectively discerning sentiment from controversial political discourse. Using human coding of sentiment and 10 sociolinguistic attributes, we found that ChatGPT and humans achieved similarly low levels of agreement-not because AI has reached human-level proficiency, but because both struggled considerably with this type of polarized political content. Human coding itself fell well short of acceptable reliability standards, meaning AI's comparable performance reflects a shared deficiency rather than a shared strength. The agreement between human and machine coders (kappa = 0.308) fell well short of expectations and should not be interpreted as evidence of AI adequacy. We highlight the most problematic areas for machine learning such as its inability to analyze tweets because of special characters, tweet length, and links. For humans, things like misspellings and abbreviations brought confusion. Our findings urge caution in deploying a large language model (LLM)-based sentiment analysis of politically divisive discourse in the near future.
This article critically examines the vernacular web as a notion that exists in conceptual ambiguity between Media and Internet Studies, Web History, and artistic and activist practice. Drawing on Ruth Levitas’s argument that utopian implications are often embedded within the Social Sciences and can be critically excavated (2013), it argues that the vernacular web operates across two registers: an analytical concept describing amateur, non-institutional, and ostensibly autonomous forms of online practice, and a temporally grounded imaginary that invests the early web with utopian value. By analysing the reciprocity between these two registers, the article traces how utopian assumptions about autonomy, participation, and digital well-being circulate across scholarship, historical narratives, and activist practice. Through the cases of Olia Lialina's essays and The Yesterweb, it identifies three constituent values of functional autonomy, while arguing that this imaginary remains half-baked: oriented towards aesthetics and affect rather than a reflection on the feasibility, limitations and potential risks.
Public service media (PSM) across Europe face ongoing challenges related to declining audience use, particularly among younger generations, who increasingly turn to social media platforms and commercial media. These developments have often been interpreted as signalling a crisis of legitimacy of PSM and their public value. This paper explores such assumptions by examining how young people themselves understand, experience, and articulate the value of PSM. The paper draws upon an exploratory comparative study of focus group discussions conducted with young adults in Sweden and Estonia. The findings show that while participants in both countries rarely use PSM as part of their routine media consumption, they nonetheless attribute significant societal relevance and value to these media. They consistently associate PSM with decommodification, trustworthiness, education, inclusion, accessibility, and national continuity, often defining these values explicitly in contrast to commercial and social media platforms. They were also associated with childhood memories and family rituals. Although these themes were common across the two national contexts, there were differences pertaining to their history and sociopolitical context. We conclude that limited use of PSM among young people does not necessarily signal a lack of recognition of their public value.
Over the past decade, academic research has shown a markedly increasing interest in the concept of digital disconnection, a phenomenon frequently conceptualized as the disconnection turn. Despite the various methodological and analytical approaches examined by previous literature reviews, the field still lacks a clear thematic framework and a disciplinary definition for the several practices of disconnection examined by this literature. This narrative literature review addresses the growing academic field of disconnection studies, seeking to map the main thematic areas that have emerged in the literature and the meanings attributed to them by scholars. Utilizing a mixed (qualitative-quantitative) methodological approach on a corpus comprising 432 contributions, the study identified seven thematic clusters. The analysis phase yielded a conceptual map of the core thematic areas within the literature, complemented by an explanation of the distribution of articles in the corpus across the three ERC (European Research Council) domains. The clusters are subsequently synthesized in a two-dimensional analytical framework. This framework distinguishes ‘Disconnection as Resistance’ from ‘Disconnection as Privilege’, while also highlighting the difference between disconnection as a ‘Performative act’ and disconnection as a ‘Collective issue’. The findings provide a theoretical framework for understanding the main conceptual approaches emerging in disconnection literature, while simultaneously offering a broader critical perspective of the structural factors that regulate disconnection practices in the age of platform society.
This article addresses and unpacks the phenomenon of wellness creep – the increasing pervasiveness of ‘wellness culture’ in digital media and society – examining its proliferation into music streaming platforms. This conception of well-being as an individual responsibility that can be managed through consumption now dominates different sectors, becoming particularly prominent in contemporary digital platforms and social media environments. Through platform walkthrough and critical interface analysis of Spotify, Apple Music and Amazon Music, this article considers how industry discourse, user interfaces, and playlist products increasingly push pseudoscientific and individualistic ideas of health and self-care as tools for the pursuit of an aspirational good life through music consumption. Our analysis demonstrates how wellness creep operates on three increasingly normative levels. First, we focus on how platforms push ‘chill’ as a dominant aesthetic category and affective disposition, which in turn paves the way for more profound layers of wellness creep . Second, we demonstrate how platforms stage wellness atmospheres as ways of acting and feeling that reproduce normative conceptions of physical, emotional, and spiritual well-being. In doing so, we show how the promise of wellness can be mobilized to promote conservative and even extremist regimes of subjectivity and governmentality. We conclude by arguing that the normalization of wellness creep sets the stage for the recommendation and consumption of ‘aural slop’, understood as the low-quality, commercially optimized musical products of generative artificial intelligence.
This article investigates the intersection of generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the book industry, focusing on the use of copyrighted literary works for training large language models (LLMs). As LLMs require enormous volumes of content for training, published books and other media have become valuable sources of data. Many training datasets appear to have been assembled without authorization or transparency, raising acute legal, ethical and cultural questions. In this article, we provide a detailed empirical analysis of the Scandinavian content within the Books3 dataset, used to train multiple major AI systems, characterizing it by publication year, publisher, authorship, genre, and language. As comparatively small language markets situated outside of the main hubs for AI development, the Scandinavian countries provide a relevant context for exploring the local implications of global AI deployment. The findings are discussed through a theoretical lens drawing on Michel Serres’s concept of the “parasite.” We argue that the inclusion of Scandinavian books in Books3 is part of a multidimensional ecology of parasitic exchange. This framework interprets the relationship between AI developers, shadow libraries, and publishers as a cascade of information appropriation, signifying a reconfiguration of cultural production and ownership in the age of generative AI.
Older adults are often perceived as vulnerable to digital exclusion, a notion exacerbated by the Covid-19 pandemic and the increased reliance on digital technology. This study investigates how older users perceive their own digital inclusion and explores whether they are influenced by stereotypes associated with older individuals and digital technology. Through an analysis of 37 semi-structured interviews with older users in Belgium, this research reveals that older individuals interpret their digital inclusion through a life course lens. Previous education and professional experiences contribute to their current level of digital inclusion. However, participants demonstrate awareness of ageist stereotypes and use them to differentiate themselves from older non-users. Interestingly, while they actively challenge and refute these stereotypes in their own digital engagement, they occasionally unintentionally employ the same stereotypes when describing individuals who do not use EICT.
Wikipedia is one of the most influential platforms for digital knowledge production, organized around community-based consensus and open participation. These ideals are increasingly strained in politically sensitive areas, raising questions about minority editors’ inclusion and their ability to participate meaningfully in consensus-building processes. This study examines how Jewish editors experience contributing to English Wikipedia and how their participation is shaped by conflict-related dynamics and identity-based challenges. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 19 Jewish veteran editors of the English Wikipedia, this study outlines a four-phase model of editorial engagement: idealistic entry, emergent friction, emotional erosion, and adaptive coping or emerging silences. The findings reveal how structural and procedural community dynamics can facilitate the exclusion of minority voices, enabling dominant groups to capture and shape public knowledge and narrow the space for contested perspectives.
