The expansion of global digital platforms has significant implications for public service media (PSM), which now operate within a platform ecosystem in which a small number of transnational technology companies increasingly shape the conditions under which media are produced, distributed and consumed. In this introduction to a special issue of Convergence on ‘Comparative Approaches to PSM in the Age of Platforms’ we set out how platformisation fundamentally reshapes the institutional conditions under which PSM operate, challenges the public service remit, reconfigures core values and invites a reconsideration of PSM as a democratic institution. Arguing that this represents a profound transformation, we identify five key dimensions that distinguish platformisation from earlier processes of digitalisation: platforms have created a fundamentally different democratic environment; platforms operate at global scale; platforms create asymmetric dependencies; platforms alter the cultural logics of audiovisual production; platformisation challenges PSM’s normative foundations. Building on the Public Service Media in the Age of Platforms (PSM-AP) project, this introduction argues for the importance of comparative research for understanding this transformation and sets out an agenda for the future of PSM studies based around six core themes: values, ecosystem, audiences, portals, content and role. The introduction argues for the urgency in addressing these themes if we are to understand how PSM—as a systemic intervention designed to drive public and societal value—is to be preserved in the age of platforms.
As European public service media (PSM) corporations adapt to the platformed context, the challenge of preserving diversity, one of their essential elements of public value, has become increasingly complex, especially in the case of regional corporations. In this context, this article focuses on a Spanish case study and examines how the four Spanish regional PSM with Broadcast Video on Demand (BVOD) services – EITB (Basque Country), CCMA (Catalonia), CSAG (Galicia), and RTVA (Andalusia) – integrate diversity in the design and management of these portals (Primeran, 3Cat, AGalega and CanalSur Más). For an empirical and comparative analysis of the strategies, constraints, and tensions that are developing, the study draws on twelve in-depth interviews with the BVOD managers, content directors, and innovation officers of these PSM online services, conducted between 2023 and 2024. The findings show that online portals offer new opportunities to promote diversity as a multidimensional element of public value that goes beyond cultural representation to encompass governance, production, and programming. The study identifies two diversity management strategies – visible and invisible – each reflecting different operational logics that contribute to the renewal of the social contract between PSM and the societies they serve.
This article introduces Ludo-Iconological Analysis, a staged interpretive method for examining visual symbolism in digital games through an art historical perspective. Informed by Erwin Panofsky’s iconological framework, the method is adapted to the temporal and participatory conditions of games. While existing scholarship has demonstrated the value of analysing games through artistic sources and visual traditions, the present study develops a more explicitly structured framework for tracing how culturally coded imagery is activated and complicated within an interactive medium. The method is applied to Blasphemous (The Game Kitchen, 2019), a title distinguished by a dense religious visual language rooted in Spanish cultural history. Its symbolic vocabulary draws upon penitential garments, the crown of thorns, public devotional ritual, and historically situated works of sacred art without treating any single visual tradition as the privileged measure of symbolic complexity. This combination makes Blasphemous a particularly productive case for demonstrating Ludo-Iconological Analysis, revealing how historical, theological, and ideological meanings are reconfigured within the visual and interactive structures of the game. By introducing Ludo-Iconological Analysis, this study proposes a focused interpretive framework that integrates established principles of art historical research into the study of digital games. Rather than claiming universal applicability, the article demonstrates how the method can illuminate a game whose visual design is densely structured by historically and culturally coded motifs. The framework is intended as a basis for further comparative application to games in which symbolic imagery is meaningfully connected to narrative progression, player encounter, and interactive context.
Non-fiction VR and 360-degree immersive video are widely used to depict the experiences of victimized, marginalized, and traumatized people, in both historical and contemporary contexts. Immersive VR content frequently engages topics of war and conflict, forced displacement, disability, precarity, incarceration, impact of climate change, and diverse forms of oppression and discrimination. Difficult social topics are introduced experientially, promising the audience an encounter with the lived realities of hardship, suffering, and injustice. The article argues that the democratic stakes of such uses of VR are best understood not by asking whether immersion produces empathy, but by asking what kinds of self–other relations and what kinds of agency are enacted and rehearsed through immersive proximity to suffering and crisis. Drawing on political psychology and indirect-trauma research, I show how immersive proximity to suffering and crisis can shape democratic dispositions via perceived control, threat salience, and victimhood framing. Immersive proximity to suffering and crisis may support solidarity and empathy, but it can also generate personal distress, feelings of helplessness, heightened threat sensitivity, and self-focused victimhood, which may undermine social trust, openness to pluralism, and a sense of civic efficacy. Engagement with distressing content in immersive media should enable reflective processing of difficult experiences, as well as support self–other differentiation, the sense of agency, hope, control, and efficacy, instead of leaving audiences feeling powerless and overwhelmed. The article advances a heuristic for evaluating and designing non-fiction VR depictions of suffering and crisis in ways that support democratic dispositions.
A key question in crisis informatics is how social media and other forms of many-to-many communication can be utilized as sources of actionable information in public emergencies. Reviewing crisis informatics literature before, during, and after the COVID-19 pandemic, this study finds that the issue of social media veracity took on new significance during the pandemic, as policymakers became increasingly concerned about medical misinformation and disinformation. Changes to the guidelines, policies, and business practices of social media platforms, especially X, have also presented social media studies and crisis informatics with new methodological challenges. The contribution of this article is to employ the concept of ‘emergency politics’ to unpack assumptions in the field of crisis informatics in which social media are understood mainly as resources for citizen engagement, and to discuss the ramifications of pandemic and post-pandemic developments in the social media communication space for the future of crisis informatics research. Highlighting impacts of emergency measures on the flow of information on social media platforms, the study also contributes to the critical literature on social media surveillance and freedom of expression during states of emergency.
