The more you know, the less you like: A comparative study of how news and political conversation shape political knowledge and affective polarization

The contemporary communication ecology contributes to affective polarization by presenting us with extreme exemplars of disliked groups. News exposure that is associated with political discussion networks is related to greater political knowledge, yet unlike previous eras where political knowledge and tolerance went hand in hand, this is no longer the case. We employ a comparative design to examine this idea among two democracies with differing levels of journalistic professionalism and political system: Mexico and the United States. Results show that greater political knowledge is associated with affective polarization, especially for the United States. Furthermore, there was a significant indirect path between media use and affective polarization, mediated through homogeneous political talk and political knowledge, but not in Mexico.

The curious absence of cybernationalism in Latin America: Lessons for the study of digital sovereignty and governance

In this article, we are interested in examining the factors that drive cybernationalism and digital governance in media policies. As scholars with a long-standing interest in media industries and policies in Latin America, we start with a simple empirical observation: the curious absence of debates and strong efforts to regulate digital media in the region grounded on nationalistic arguments. It is not exaggerated to affirm that for the past two decades, the region has largely adopted a laissez-faire, deregulatory approach on fundamental issues about the structure and functioning of the Internet, including the performance of global digital platforms, content traffic, data ownership and access, and speech. We believe that understanding the decades-long transition from nationalistic media regulations to pragmatism in digital policies in Latin America yields valuable insights for theorizing the conditions that foster (and discourage) nationalism and sovereignty in digital policies.

China’s viral villages: Digital nationalism and the COVID-19 crisis on online video-sharing platform Bilibili

When the COVID-19 virus broke out in China, foreign observers speculated whether the Chinese leadership was facing its ‘Chernobyl Moment’. China’s leadership, however, defied foreign expectations about its ostensibly floundering legitimacy and instead turned the crisis into a national success story. This article explores the role that digital media played in cementing this success, specifically how various actors mobilized nationalist sentiments and discourses on the online video-sharing platform Bilibili. By focusing on visual discourses, online commentaries, and the affordances of the digital platform, the article analyses the role that ‘hip’ and youthful content played in the authorities’ attempts to guiding online audiences to rally around the flag. The results of these efforts were viral villages of community sentiment that created strong incentives for conformity, and in which the official party line was able to reverberate with pop-culture memes and popular nationalism.

The BTS sphere: Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth’s transnational cyber-nationalism on social media

BTS fandom has been one of the strongest, and many Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth members have dedicated themselves to protect BTS from numerous controversies, while promoting the group’s messages, which can be identified as cyber-nationalism. By employing a critical discourse analysis on BTS fans’ social media posts and their online activities surrounding a few incidents, this article attempts to develop cyber-nationalism in the context of the BTS fandom. It investigates the formation of transnational cyber-nationalism, and then discusses how Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth members as citizens in the BTS nation utilize cyberspace, in particular, social media, not only to form alliances but also to protect BTS from any critical points of view. Finally, it articulates how transnational cyber-nationalism in tandem with BTS has shifted the notion of cyber-nationalism, which can be identified as negative, even patriotic parochialism, into constructive and socio-culturally corrected cyber-movements.

Media diversity and the analysis of qualitative variation

Diversity is recognised as a significant criterion for appraising the democratic performance of media systems. This article begins by considering key conceptual debates that help differentiate types and levels of diversity. It then addresses a core methodological challenge in measuring diversity: how do we model statistical variation and difference when many measures of source and content diversity only attain the nominal level of measurement? We identify a range of obscure statistical indices developed in other fields that measure the strength of ‘qualitative variation’. Using original data, we compare the performance of five diversity indices and, on this basis, propose the creation of a more effective diversity average measure. The article concludes by outlining innovative strategies for drawing statistical inferences from these measures, using bootstrapping and permutation testing resampling. All statistical procedures are supported by a unique online resource developed for this article.

Stepping back to move forward: Centering capital in discussions of technology and the future of work

Some researchers have warned that advances in artificial intelligence will increasingly allow employers to substitute human workers with software and robotic systems, heralding an impending wave of technological unemployment. By attending to the particular contexts in which new technologies are developed and implemented, others have revealed that there is nothing inevitable about the future of work, and that there is instead the potential for a diversity of models for organizing the relationship between work and artificial intelligence. Although these social constructivist approaches allow researchers to identify sources of contingency in technological outcomes, they are less useful in explaining how aims and outcomes can converge across diverse settings. In this essay, I make the case that researchers of work and technology should endeavor to link the outcomes of artificial intelligence systems not only to their immediate environments but also to less visible—but nevertheless deeply influential—structural features of societies. I demonstrate the utility of this approach by elaborating on how finance capital structures technology choices in the workplace. I argue that investigating how the structure of ownership influences a firm’s technology choices can open our eyes to alternative models and politics of technological development, improving our understanding of how to make innovation work for everyone instead of allowing the benefits generated by technological change to be hoarded by a select few.

Keeping it peaceful: Twitter and the Gezi Park movement

Over the last decade, social media platforms have become the leading communication tools for activists and protesters all over the world. Understanding protesters’ motivations and reasons for using social media is a challenging issue for researchers. In this article, we analyzed the use of Twitter during the anti-governmental protests in Istanbul that was launched in May 2013. We examined 13,794 tweets posted to the #direngeziparki hashtag over a 6-day period. Based on the results of a qualitative content coding of the tweets, we found that the Twitter platform was widely used to mobilize protesters, share information about the events, and express opinions about the policing of the protests. We argue that social media can help keep protests peaceful by preventing vandalism, informing the protesters about extremist or violent groups participating in the protests, and can help them to avoid engaging in violent acts against police forces.

Social media and the spread of fake news during a social movement: The 2019 Anti-ELAB protests in Hong Kong

This article summarizes the author’s observations and preliminary research findings about the politics of fake news and rumors during the 2019 Anti-Extradition Bill movement in Hong Kong. The fake news phenomenon is understood as grounded in the social-psychological needs of people in times of uncertainty, a political culture marked by polarization and normative disinhibition, and a mediascape that facilitates the fragmentation and privatization of public communication. The 2019 Hong Kong movement shows that, in the context of contentious politics, fake news and rumors can be used by political power to delegitimize a protest movement, but they can also be used by a protest movement to pressurize the political power and to sustain itself. It is argued that the roles, consequences, and normative desirability of fake news and rumors need to be examined in terms of how they are embedded in the power relationships and interactional dynamics of the movement concerned.

The entrepreneurial labor of reinvention in Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech district

Deploying the concept of the entrepreneurial labor of reinvention, this article contrasts the experiences of elite and grassroots IT entrepreneurs as they navigated China’s post-2008 economic restructuring centered around IT innovation and entrepreneurship in Beijing’s Zhongguancun high-tech district, also known as China’s Silicon Valley. By situating the changing labor practices and subjectivities of a new generation of Zhongguancun IT entrepreneurs in the history of the post-Mao evolution of IT labor and entrepreneurship, this article emphasizes the specificities of digital work that both continue from and reinvent historically situated local labor practices. It also deconstructs the universalism of the state-led entrepreneurialization campaign to highlight its regime of inequalities and persisting politics of exclusion.

Algorithmic precarity in cultural work

While work in the media and cultural industries has long been considered precarious, the processes and logics of platformization have injected new sources of instability into the creative labor economy. Among the sources of such insecurity are platforms’ algorithms, which structure the production, circulation, and consumption of cultural content in capricious, enigmatic, even biased ways. Accordingly, cultural producers’ conditions and experiences are increasingly wrought by their understandings—and moreover their anticipation—of platforms’ ever-evolving algorithmic systems. Against this backdrop, I urge fellow researchers of digital culture and society to consider how this mode of “algorithmic precarity” exacerbates the instability of cultural work in the platform era. Considering the volatility of algorithms and the wider cross-platform ecology can help us to develop critical interventions into a creative economy marked by a profoundly uneven allocation of power between platforms and the laborers who populate—and increasingly—power them.