Visuality is central in social media experiences, but complex to research. In this paper, we introduce aggregated autoethnography for nuanced analysis of socially mediated visual practices. The approach starts from guided autoethnographies which help to empower participants to explore their own experiences and build thick descriptions, and moves through multiple levels of aggregation, integration and synthesis (from individual autoethnographies to national datasets of coded snippets, to datasets specific to arguments emerging out of multinational patterns). The aggregated autoethnography approach makes unexpected topics accessible; offers dynamic, rather than static insight; makes visible that which is routine and tacit, as well as that which is experienced as ambivalent. Further, aggregation allows synthesis of multiple perspectives, revealing patterns across contexts that are otherwise difficult to detect. The approach detailed here is used to move back and forth between the singular pieces of visual content and the flows they are part of; to remain loyal to the situational perspective that the visual communication becomes meaningful in; to capture relevant artifacts as well as people's practices; and to be mindful of the affective, embodied and material aspects of ways of seeing with social media.

This article showcases a speculative methodology for recreating interactions between a human and Google Search’s Auto-Predict interface as conversations, to explore how AI-based systems are both persuasive and deeply personal. Using ethnomethodology tools and a symbolic interactionist lens, the paper presents three versions of a single Google search, each variation building a slightly different angle on the plausible utterances and interpersonal dynamics of the human and nonhuman partners. This thought experiment emerges from a decade of classroom-based digital literacy exercises with young adults, training them to analyze their lived experiences with digital media, algorithms, and devices. Transforming information exchanges into personal conversations provides a creative method for analyzing how relations are co-constructed in the granular processes of interaction, through which mutual intelligibility is built, meaning about the world is made, and identities are formed. This critical analysis extends methods for human–machine communication studies and elaborates notions of algorithmic identity.

Purpose This paper aims to explore how critical digital and data literacies are facilitated by testing different methods in the classroom, with the ambition to find a pedagogical framework for prompting sustained critical literacies. Design/methodology/approach This contribution draws on a 10-year set of critical pedagogy experiments conducted in Denmark, USA and Italy, and engaging more than 1,500 young adults. Multi-method pedagogical design trains students to conduct self-oriented guided autoethnography, situational analysis, allegorical mapping, and critical infrastructure analysis. Findings The techniques of guided autoethnography for facilitating sustained data literacy rely on inviting multiple iterations of self-analysis through sequential prompts, whereby students move through stages of observation, critical thinking, critical theory-informed critique around the lived experience of hegemonic data and artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructures. Research limitations/implications Critical digital/data literacy researchers should continue to test models for building sustained critique that not only facilitate changes in behavior over time but also facilitate citizen social science, whereby participants use these autoethnographic techniques with friends and families to build locally relevant critique of the hegemonic power of data/AI infrastructures. Originality/value The proposed literacy model adopts a critical theory stance and shows the value of using multiple modes of intervention at micro and macro levels to prompt self-analysis and meta-level reflexivity for learners. This framework places critical theory at the center of the pedagogy to spark more radical stances, which is contended to be an essential step in moving students from attitudinal change to behavioral change.

The book was inadvertently published with the following errors as listed below and belated corrections have been incorporated. Chapter 2: Figure citations have been updated Chapter 5: Figures and section headings have been updated Chapter 9: Copyright text in the images in the Figures have been updated Chapter 11: Appropriate page breaks has been updated Chapter 13: Box and Text alignment, and Footnotes have been updated Chapter 14: Figure citations have been updated The corrected chapters and the book have been updated with these changes.

Disinformation, inaccurate information spread intentionally for profit, ideology, or harm is a major public issue and a significant object of study across disciplines However, much scholarship treats “disinformation” as an irritant without recognizing that it often harnesses metanarratives about inequality and identity, and disproportionately impacts marginalized communities. For example, counting how many “sockpuppet” accounts contribute to a Twitter hashtag reveals that they do not represent genuine opinions of unique individuals, but does not capture whether they advance cultural narratives about race and gender. Disinformation campaigns are also often mischaracterized as “information warfare” or “psychological operations” and reduced to military-style masculinized logics of conflict and dominance in which “threat” is framed as a matter of “cybersecurity." This leaves out complex dynamics of identity, intersectionality, affect, labor, and material infrastructures. Feminist theory, methods, and perspectives are particularly well suited to exploring such issues. This panel brings together scholars working at different edges of this nascent discipline to explore what disinformation studies can learn from feminist scholars in rhetoric, communication, and science and technology studies.

This panel explores the theories, concepts, and methodologies appropriate to the exploration of the “vibratory power” of transduction where sound and other digitally mediated forms of reverberation conjure affective and corporeal bonds of resonance and solidarity. The first three papers engage in a critical interrogation of sound as epistemology and ontologies in digital networked media, with a focus on streaming internet radio. More specifically, these papers examine diverse uses and experiences of streaming ‘radio’ and its deployments for community-building, emotional sustenance, and an online reconstitution of place. In their explorations, these papers consider which methodologies are appropriate and useful to examine the affordances of streaming radio, enabling in turn analysis of informing ideas of ‘community’, intimacy, territorialization/deterritorialization, and questions of what comprises ‘radioness’ itself. Is radio still radio if it is online? What happens to the "community" that is conjured into being by terrestrial broadcast radio when the "station" is internet only?’ What does thinking from place mean when the tangibility of place is physically transcended and thus broken up and reconstituted as elements of locality, of community? The fourth and final power transposes the “perspective of frequency, force and affective tone” in transduction to the wider field of social media practices during the early stages of COVID. In this paper, the obsessive-compulsive ritual of “doomscrolling” becomes the practice through which rhythms of resonance and reverberation become imprinted upon the flows of everyday life through the transductive modulations of digital networked media.

The COVID-19 pandemic prompted a further extension of the sociotechnical logics of digital platforms to every realm of social life. Given the colonialist, oppressive and exploitative dynamics through which digital platforms work, several scholars supported the need to embrace an openly activist role to help individuals contrast the ways in which they are trapped in loops of dependency and trajectorism. Drawing on the results of 40 auto-ethnographic diaries, this paper showcases the usefulness of critical pedagogical techniques in enhancing critical awareness regarding hegemonic datafication structures, while also arguing that despite a good level of consciousness raising, it remains difficult for people to go beyond subalternity and make more concrete changes in personal and collective behaviors. We contend that to break persistent feelings of dependency, it is necessary to go further with a two-step process combining autoethnographic tools, aimed at increasing critical algorithmic awareness, with the development of data science skills that can help individuals acquiring more precise knowledge schemes and scaling down the power of giant corporations, thereby building individual and collective capacities to use data for developing counter-narratives about possible futures.

As our metaphorical conceptualizations of the term “Internet” become more concrete, walls of meaning are constructed around us, reifying a “box” that we will be asking ourselves to think outside of in the future. As scholars working along the cutting edges of Information and Communication Technologies, we are partially responsible for shaping what the Internet (substitute your own preferred word here) means in real terms to real people. It behooves us at this juncture of Internet Studies to step back and consider the manner in which scholars, policy makers, and designers are, through their linguistic practices, building knowledge about new communication technologies. By doing so, we can begin to interrogate both the possibilities and limitations imposed on invention and practice within these meaning structures. This paper offers the first step of this reflection by explicating three distinctive and interrelated metaphor categories that shape our conceptualizations of Internet related technologies. These three metaphors; Internet as Tool, Internet as Place, and Internet as Way of Being, though not mutually exclusive, both invoke and foster divergent ways of making sense of computer-mediated communication (Markham, 1998). As a continuum of sensemaking, this framework appears not only in user discourse but also in pop culture depictions of new communication technologies, advertising, news media, scholarly works, and software and web designer discourse.

This book sits in the transdisciplinary space between digital ethnography, autoethnography, arts-based research and creative pedagogies. It contributes to the growing body of literature responding to the COVID-19 pandemic (Mathiyazhagan in Overcome COVID-19: Creative expressions of young people 2020), and centres around a 21-day digital autoethnographic collaborative online experiment in which over 165 participants from 26 countries responded to daily prompts in a range of affective and creative modalities, to express our experiences of isolation, community, sense-making, and life as it changed under the first few weeks of COVID. Teachers, artists, academics, philosophers and makers all drew from our own practices and geo-political perspectives to collectively find commonality in exploring the macro conditions through to the microscopic and granular experiences of our culturally diverse lives.

This introduction to the special issue on algorithmic governance in context offers an outline of the field and summarizes each contribution to the issue.

This data paper documents a dataset that captures cultural attitudes towards machine vision technologies as they are expressed in art, games and narratives. The dataset includes records of 500 creative works (including 77 digital games, 190 digital artworks and 233 movies, novels and other narratives) that use or represent machine vision technologies like facial recognition, deepfakes, and augmented reality. The dataset is divided into three main tables, relating to the works, to specific situations in each work involving machine vision technologies, and to the characters that interact with the technologies. Data about each work include title, author, year and country of publication; types of machine vision technologies featured; topics the work addresses, and sentiments shown towards machine vision in the work. In the various works we identified 874 specific situations where machine vision is central. The dataset includes detailed data about each of these situations that describes the actions of human and non-human agents, including machine vision technologies. The dataset is the product of a digital humanities project and can be also viewed as a database at http://machine-vision.no. Data was collected by a team of topic experts who followed an analytical model developed to explore relationships between humans and technologies, inspired by posthumanist and feminist new materialist theories. The dataset is particularly useful for humanities and social science scholars interested in the relationship between technology and culture, and by designers, artists, and scientists developing machine vision technologies.

On Method is a collaborative knowledge-translation project that combines critical pedagogy with arts and independent-filmmaking production strategies to develop compelling video content for researchers. In this article, the authors analyze four key principles of research translation contributing to the successful creation of On Method, a nine-episode video textbook that explores key concepts and approaches in qualitative methods. The principles include how to assemble a strong team; how iteration works in this context; the collaborative nature of the process; and building content for varied audiences. On Method aims to update previous media-based approaches to education by showcasing a primarily virtual production process that generated rich content to attract media-savvy audiences to a consideration of qualitative methods in the digital sphere and to build critical thinking in the public sphere. RÉSUMÉ On Method est un projet collaboratif d’application des connaissances qui associe la pédagogie critique à des stratégies de production artistique et cinématographique indépendante afin de développer un contenu vidéo qui soit attirant pour les chercheurs. Dans cet article, les auteurs analysent quatre principes clés de l’application de la recherche qui ont contribué à la réussite de On Method, un manuel vidéo en neuf épisodes qui explore les principaux concepts et approches des méthodes qualitatives. Ces principes sont : la constitution d’une équipe solide, l’utilité de l’itération dans ce contexte, la valeur d’une approche collaborative, et la création d’un contenu ciblant des publics variés. La série On Method vise à mettre à jour les approches médiatiques antérieures envers l’éducation en se fondant sur un processus de production essentiellement virtuel qui a généré un contenu riche dans le but de motiver les publics versés dans les médias à réfléchir sur les méthodes qualitatives dans la sphère numérique. On Method vise en outre à contribuer à la pensée critique dans la sphère publique.

How do we make sense of the global and granular at the same time? This visual essay explores the relationship of the macro and micro through everyday practices of image making, cropping, and sharing. It asks whether new ways of knowing emerge or if perhaps patterns of sensemaking pre-exist, a psychological or social equivalent to fractals in nature. This becomes relevant when we consider that it is precisely within the mundane details of everyday actions of sensemaking that future structures are born. In wonders about how, in times of global trauma, might these micro practices reinforce or resist existing relations among humans, technologies, and the planet.

In what ways have forms for engendering the interconnection and materiality required for creative production changed in the time of COVID-19? How and why have our notions of imagining and visualizing cross-cultural production and its modes of research, analysis, and representation shifted? The global pandemic and responses to it through various forms of cultural production have seen an explosion of productivity and collective social actions as well as the reinforcement of entrenched systemic racism and other forms of discrimination and imbalance. In this special issue, authors weave together a series of dialogues, methodological approaches, and materialities that reflect on the visuality of the experiences that were first developed through shared critical autoethnographic practices during and after an international Massive Micro Sensemaking experiment involving 165 people.

Public attention on disconnection and digital detox focuses on the health and wellbeing associated with disconnecting without much attention on what happens to selfhood or identity when abruptly disconnected. In an age of ubiquitous internet and "always on" use practices, what does disconnection do? Focusing on what happens when we disconnect, at the micro level, reveals interesting echolocative communication patterns otherwise not noticed. Abruptly stopping the continuous call and response pattern of interaction among youth produces deep anxieties and feelings of existential vulnerability that are commonly brushed aside. The work in this article is part of a larger project related to echolocation as a theory of communication. In an era of constant connectivity and "always on" or more importantly, "always available" internet, the seemingly seamless and steady state of connectivity is, at the more granular level, a process of continual echolocation, in the way we might think of sonar, whereby certain animals like bats determine the shape and location of objects in space by sending steady streams of signals and attending closely to the quality of the echo. Echolocation challenges researchers and theorists to reconsider the core elements and processes in an era of continuous, machinic as well as human interaction in multiple and massive networks of information flow. This does not mean we no longer experience dyadic (two person) or intra interactions, of course, but echolocation, the process of moving, navigating, and positioning through radar-like call and response provides a promising model to apply to how humans make sense of who they are in the complexities of continuous and tangled data flows.

The idea of doing a self-guided series of prompts for a largescale project in the midst of a global pandemic emerged as a solution to the twin problems of distance and distraction. The goal of a "21-day autoethnography challenge" set of self-guided prompts was to build embodied sensibilities toward the material we study, practice autoethnographic forms of writing and analysis, and transform personal experiences through this COVID-19 moment into critical understanding of scale, sensemaking, and relationality of humans, nonhumans, and the planet. This article showcases the prompts to illustrate the method and flexible adaptation required for the project.

Over 3 years, researchers, artists, and activists collaborated on eight public engagement experiments in five countries. All focused on building critical consciousness about digital futures. The interventions worked: Once participants broke through the seamlessness of interface surfaces, they immediately thought more critically about how digital platforms actually operate. Yet even as participants reached into these black boxes, they did not imagine alternatives. This article offers a critical theory reading of the theme of inevitability, using the concept of discursive closure, whereby we can see how particular values and (infra)structures are naturalized, neutralized, and legitimated, closing off discussion of alternatives that might counter current hegemonic power. This article highlights the importance of considering iterative formats for speculative interventions, whereby facilitators can focus not only on imagining new or different digital futures, but find creative ways to identify and help overcome the current resignation to the inevitable.

Global events like a pandemic or climate change are massive in scope but experienced at the local, lived, microscopic level. What sorts of methodologies and mindsets can help critical internet researchers, functioning as interventionists or activists, find traction by oscillating between these levels? How can we push (further) against the boundaries of research methods to build stronger coalitions and more impactful outcomes for social change among groups of scholars/researchers? This panel presents four papers addressing these questions based on a large scale online autoethnography in 2020. This “Massive/Micro” project simultaneously used and studied the angst and novelty of isolation during a pandemic, activating researchers, activists, and artists to explore the massive yet microscopic properties of COVID-19 as a “glocal” phenomenon. The challenge? Working independently and microscopically through intense focus on the Self but also working with distributed, largely unknown collaborators, in multiple platforms. The emerging shape of the project itself showcases the challenges and possibilities of how research projects at scale can (or don’t) reflect and build social movements. The panel’s four papers situate the project through a kaleidoscope of perspectives featuring participants from 7 countries, who variously explore: the value of the project for precarious or early career researchers, how MMS worked as both collaborative space and critical pedagogy, how non-institutional or playful experimentation in asynchronous collaborations can lead to new synergies; and how MMS developed an independent life of its own, beyond studying COVID to generating multiple communities of future digital research practice.

In 5 months of COVID isolation, living out of a suitcase in temporary housing, countless fractal patterns emerged. I can’t say if I created these patterns by looking for them, or that I know the whole world by looking at a grain of sand. The truth of the matter is that it feels like the key for massive scale change is just in front of us, but slipping from our grasp. As we move through these days, weeks, and months, we have very little time before the difference recedes again. I address this matter of concern as a matter of method in performative grounded theory piece.