It's Crowded at the Bottom

Trust, visibility, and the deepening of existing inequalities are major themes within the platform care work literature. However, no study to date has applied these themes to an analysis of worker profiles. I investigate both how workers communicate trustworthiness through their profiles on Care.com, the world’s largest care work platform, and which of these profiles are rendered more and less visible to clients. Through a qualitative content analysis of profiles (n=60) sampled from the top and bottom search results in three different US zip codes, I find that visibility is often related to connectivity, response time, and positive reviews, and who is rendered visible mirrors preexisting inequalities. The language of “passion” for the job is common across top and bottom profiles, indicating a contradiction between the deemphasis on professionalization and the high level of connectivity and responsiveness present in top profiles.

Ethical Use of Informant Internet Data

This article explores the scholarly concerns and conflicts debated by authors in the field of the use of informant internet data in research. The importance lies in informant protection and how to minimize harm to them, a long-standing cornerstone of research practice. It is also a public domain issue as increased calls for data privacy grew because of reported data breach scandals. Although not a new problem, academic researchers and university ethics boards struggle with concerns over data use and are in conflict about managing the problem. This article uses thematic analysis to identify, analyze and interpret patterns of concerns and conflicts over internet data use. Data was obtained from academic publications on these issues. Three themes from this data are discussed with examples demonstrating the types of, and complexity of, scholarly concerns and conflicts. These themes are: the problems of informant data use risks, gaining mass informed consent and the challenges ethics boards face, especially conflicts with researchers over internet data use on projects. This article contributes insights into a widely, and continuously, debated area which is constantly evolving as privacy laws and public awareness place pressure on researchers and ethics boards to address protecting informant public internet data.

Memetic Moments

This paper examines how speed shapes internet culture. To do so, it analyses ‘memetic moments’ on Twitter, short-lived and rapidly circulated memes that quickly reach saturation. The paper examines two ‘memetic moments’ on Twitter in 2018 and 2019 to assess how they develop over time. Each case study comprises a week’s worth of relevant tweets that were analysed for temporal patterns. We analyse these ‘memetic moments’ through Lefebvre’s (2004) work on rhythmanalysis, arguing that the temporal patterns of memes on Twitter can be understood through his concepts of repetition, presence and dialogue. While seemingly trivial, memetic moments underscore the didactic relationship between social media and news media while also providing a way to approach complex social issues.

Comparing the victimization impact of cybercrime and traditional crime

This paper addresses the importance of building knowledge on the impact of cybercrime victimization. Because the topic is understudied, it is unclear whether the impact of cybercrime differs from that of traditional crime. Our understanding of potential impact differences needs to be improved, considering that society and criminality are digitizing and, consequently, more people are likely to become victims of cybercrime. From a practical perspective, knowledge about the impact of different crimes is important to develop victim policies within law enforcement and other relevant agencies, and to treat victims appropriately. In this paper, a literature review is provided, as well as future research directions to address the current knowledge gap. The future research directions are divided in three topics: (1) distinguishing between cybercrime and traditional crime, (2) classifying cybercrime and traditional crime, and (3) measuring the victimization impact of cybercrime and traditional crime.

"Within the hour" and "wherever you are"

The use of healthcare apps for medical advice is becoming increasingly common. This paper explores apps that offer interaction with medical experts. Working from the supposition that digital technologies are intimately entangled in their cultural context, we argue that the apps do more than just neutrally mediate contacts and offer medical and psychological advice. The article addresses the cultural dimensions of healthcare apps and answers questions about the ways in which such apps contribute to forming changing notions of what “healthcare” and being a “patient” entail. Three popular Swedish apps and their marketing material is studied using a discursive interface analysis of the apps’ affordances. The results show that the apps significantly contribute to producing a marketable narrative about app health care that includes accessibility, security/safety and personalisation, and which is partly produced as an alternative to what is offered by Swedish public health care. The results further show that this narrative primarily represents and addresses users who are young, busy, urban consumers of care – partly contrasting policy expectations and hopes.

Review Essay

This review of two recent books, with further discussion of a third, addresses questions of the direction of democracy and the impacts of media circulation and data extraction on democratic culture. The reviewed books are Selena Nemorin (2018). Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing: World, Discourse, Representation, and Dipankar Sinha (2018). The Information Game in Democracy, with discussion also of Peter Csigo (2016). The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on “the People” in Late Modern Democracy.

What is digital activism anyway?

In recent decades, digital activism has received a lot of scholarly and journalistic attention. Even so, there remains no firm consensus on its precise definition and scope. This paper addresses this conceptual haziness and contends that there are analytical issues and conceptual implications in the openness of the term and its description as digital, as 'digitality' is neither the sole nor the primary feature along which activism has changed. Drawing on extant practices of digital activism and conceptual approaches to its scope, the paper aims to (1) critically discuss & highlight a range of conceptual obscurities in digital activism scholarship, (2) provide a glimpse into the concept’s evolution, and, through these (3) suggest that the term (incl. synonyms) suffers from myriad conceptual and epistemological fallacies: omissions of the concept’s complexity (e.g. hybridity, rhizomatism, multi- mediality), implications of digital dualism and therefore potentially technological determinism, and the invitation of stigma, luddite sentiment, and other social constructions of the technologies to which the term is attached.

Crowd science infused learning

In this article, we reflect upon the combination of crowd science and online teaching, which we refer to as Crowd Science infused Learning. We discuss Crowd Science infused Learning's conceptual design and its viability in sociology and related disciplines. For this purpose, our research project ‘Data Traces’ serves as an empirical case. In the project, we developed an online platform that provided a 45-minute teaching unit, training students in using different forms of digital data: websites, newspaper articles, and administrative register data. Afterwards, students were assigned to predefined, small-scale research tasks contributing to a real-world research project on the social relations in entrepreneurial groups. By completing the tasks, the students could apply their knowledge, gain insights, and contribute actively to an ongoing research project. This combination links students' learning experience with the collection of data for research purposes. We also implemented game elements in the platform's design to support students' motivation. After a brief outline of the Data Traces Project's chronology and key conceptual decisions, the article focuses on a critical discussion of the combination of crowd science and online teaching. Despite significant challenges, we believe that Crowd Science infused Learning is a promising approach and identify opportunities and conditions for a successful combination of crowd science and online teaching.

Does Numeracy in Digital Journalism Increase Story Believability?

This exploratory study contributes to the literature on numeracy in digital journalism studies by theoretically incorporating the audience/news consumers. While most studies have focused on journalists’ perception and role in the use of numeracy, this study examines how audience perceive stories with numerical values. Through an experimental design, and by comparing the United States, Zambia, and Tanzania, the study was able to demonstrate that news stories with numerical values diminished audience/readers’ affective consumption. In other words, news stories with numerical values were negatively associated with audience appeal. However, individuals with a lower understanding of probabilistic and numerical concepts seemed to trust news stories with numbers more than those with a higher level of numeracy. This was especially true in Zambia and Tanzania where most participants recorded lower numeracy levels. The overall sample in all the three countries seemed to favor news stories with less or no numeracy.

Feature Analysis

Many apps are designed to solve a problem or accomplish a task, such as managing a health condition, creating a to-do-list, or finding work. The solutions that app developers offer reflects how they believe that users and other stakeholders understand the problem. Each individual developer may have different ideas but analyzing many apps together can reveal the average or typical ways that developers in the set think about the problems that their apps are designed to solve. Building on content analysis, interface analysis, the concept of affordances, and speculative design, this article offers a new method that we call “feature analysis” to analyze what a set of apps designed to solve the same problem can tell us about the relationship between app design and ideology. By counting and classifying the features in a set of apps, feature analysis enables researchers to systematically answer questions about how app developers’ design choices reflect existing cultural norms, assumptions, and ideologies.