bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
RESEARCHING YOUTH PERSPECTIVES – GROUP DISCUSSIONS IN NON-FORMAL DIGITISED EDUCATIONAL ARRANGEMENTS
Authors: Bosse Eva M. , Wiese Amelie , Kutscher Nadia
Published: February 2025

In striving for equity, it is key to understand enabling and impeding factors of educational and digital participation of (marginalised) youth. Even though formal education is often focused on in the discussion on educational inequalities, non-formal and informal education need to be further considered, especially with regard to digitalised societies (Jeong et al. 2018; Spanhel 2020). Applying a broad understanding of education as a transformation of self-world-relations (Jörissen/Marotzki 2009), non-formal educational arrangements that revolve around digital media activities potentially contribute to educational and digital equity among youth by enabling processes of learning and experiences of self-efficacy.

Therefore, this paper focuses on investigating the accessibility of educational participation from a marginalised youth perspective: Do non-formal digitised educational arrangements recognise (marginalised) youth realities? Our research aims at identifying conditions that enable resp. limit participation of (marginalised) youth in relation to their orientations within two non-formal educational institutions that specialise in digital media activities.

Group Discussions are implemented with youth who take part in the researched educational arrangements and with youth who belong to the potential target group but do not participate. In Group Discussions, depictions and narrations are unfolded by the participants. Analysing Group Discussions with the Documentary Method allows for the reconstruction of collective patterns of orientations that influence everyday practice (Bohnsack 2010). Based on data extracts presented at AoIR 2024, conditions of participation in non-formal digitised educational arrangements from a (marginalised) youth perspective will be discussed.
SMALL-SCALE ENTREPRENEURSHIP ON THE EARLY WEB: SOCIO-ECONOMICAL PRACTICES OF LOCAL/REGIONAL BUSINESSES
Authors: Fridzema Nathalie , Aasman Susan , Slootweg Tom , Smit Rik
Published: February 2025

The paper explores small-scale entrepreneurship on the early web, specifically identifying socio-economical practices of local/regional business in the Netherlands during the emergence of the new economy in the mid-90s and early 2000s. The new economy has been described in prior research as not only a novel, financial system but also as a cultural shift. Public media highlight the widespread optimism and subsequent disillusionment of the dot-com era; a period in which many traditional local/regional businesses migrated to the digital realm. In the Netherlands, a push is notable from ideological initiatives and state actors to make the internet accessible and functional for everyone. One can identify an interesting mix of neoliberalism, commercialism, and individualism, as well as everydayness and amateurism that created the backdrop against which local/regional industries took their businesses online for the first time. Following a grassroots approach and a mixed methodology, including computational analysis and content examination of archived websites, the research identifies the integration of domestic and commercial spheres on early websites, as well as a shift towards more professionalized e-business strategies over time. The paper contributes to the field by theorizing small-scale entrepreneurship in the move of local/regional businesses onto the web, offering a methodological framework for archival exploration, and enriching the historiography of the Dutch public web and the new economy from a bottom-up perspective. By foregrounding local/regional perspectives, it aims to provide a cultural-historical understanding of the web and encourages comparative analysis between under-studied narratives and dominant interpretations in the field of Internet History.
RETHINKING AI FOR GOOD: CRITIQUE, REFRAMING AND ALTERNATIVES
Authors: Hardcastle Faranak , Raman Sujatha , De Silva Christer , Davis Jenny , Tavakoli-Nabavi Ehsan
Published: February 2025

AI for Social Good (AI4SG) initiatives have emerged in various sectors. However, AI's non-neutral nature challenges claims that the “good” can simply be inferred by association with broad goals such as the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The lack of a clear definition of "the good” or what it entails in practice risks making AI4SG an empty signifier. This ambiguity allows unchecked interventions, undermining societal efforts to align future AI developments with public good. In this article, we adopt a socially situated public good framework from the social studies of quantum technologies proposed by Roberson et al (2021) and use insights from critical AI scholarship to tailor this framework to AI4SG initiatives. Analysing AI4SG initiatives, and building upon existing critical literature, we scrutinize these initiatives with regards to the framings of the research problems, the wider social and institutional context in which AI initiatives are imagined to be applied and used, as well as the wider network of scientists, stakeholders and publics involved in their co-production. We argue that much of the AI4SG literature abstracts AI from social and contextual realities, making it difficult to clarify the ways in which they might in fact have an impact in the world. Outlining our first iteration, we argue that co-creating this framework demands iterative refinement and ongoing dialogue with diverse stakeholders, especially in the Global South.
GROOMERS, ‘TITTIES’, & STREAMERS, OH MY!: TOWARD AN UNDERSTANDING OF ANDROCENTRIC PLATFORM GOVERNANCE ON TWITCH
Authors: Harris Brandon C. , Maddox Jessica
Published: February 2025

Twitch is the largest social live-streaming platform in the Global North, and has historically been an important advertising and community hub for the gaming industry (Johnson & Woodcock, 2018). Twitch’s owner, Amazon, demands increasing growth and profit (Yin-Poole, 2024), so the platform must continue attracting new streamers, viewers, and advertisers. However, these new audiences may be at odds with Twitch’s core base of white, Asian, cisgender men (see Cote, 2020). This means many of Twitch’s policies and attempts at platform governance are often implemented inconsistently or in an ad-hoc manner, leading to greater confusion about what is and isn’t permissible on the platform (Winslow, 2024). Platform governance, also known as content moderation, harkens to how “platforms don’t make content, but they will make important choices about that content; what they will distribute and to whom, how they will connect users and broker their reactions, and what they will refuse” (Gillespie, 2018, pp. 254-255). As Twitch struggles to grow its audience but remains faithful to its core base, questions emerge as to who may be experiencing unfair moderation practices.
“OH, YOU MEAN… GAY?”: RELATIONAL LABOUR AND THE INDUSTRIAL ARTICULATION OF HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY BY ANDREW TATE AND HIS FOLLOWERS
Authors: Kelly Anthony Patrick
Published: February 2025

This paper examines how the figures and imaginaries of hegemonic masculinity are co-produced and contested among a reactionary influencer fandom. It assumes an intersectional masculinities approach to the question of how Andrew Tate and his social media audience(s) articulate and mobilise anti-feminist and anti-LGBTQIA+ discourses online. Affective intermediation is proposed as a concept that situates relational labour within the influencer ecosystem in terms of the affective production of masculinity as a cultural and economic category. Data consist of a 15-month sample of Andrew Tate’s posts on the video-sharing platform Rumble (n=213) and a purposive sample (n=17) of Tate's posts on X (formerly Twitter). The dataset includes all user responses to posts on Rumble (n=112,656) and X (n=14,796). The methods used are constructionist thematic analysis, which orients towards the sociocultural contexts of discourse and computational discourse analysis, including topic modelling. Incorporating perspectives on fandom, labour, and the manosphere, preliminary findings suggest three key points of tension. First, the tension created by audience directives about who Tate should interact with and how he should conduct himself in order to avoid collaborations with creators who appear “gay’. Second, the tension between “simping” and support that fans and followers must navigate when expressing approval of Tate whilst trying to avoid being seen as “gay”. Third, the tension between demands of cultural and economic production, including how audiences articulate their expectations with regard to the production of masculinist content.
INDUSTRY 4.0: DIGITAL TWINS AND ACCOUNTABILITY
Authors: Lauriault Tracey P. , Theus Anna Lena
Published: February 2025

Digital twins are characterized as NextGen smart cities, part of cyber-manufacturing processes and as industry 4.0 systems. They are digital replicas of ‘real’ world physical assets, with real-time information interchanges via sensors between digital replicas and their material assets. They can be immersive 3D environments of cities rendered in game engines and engaged with via VR headsets. Uncritical, enthusiastic and technologically solutionist rationales are generally offered for their creation in IT, engineering and vendor literature. Digital twins are often touted as a system to predict, preempt, prevent and plan for the impact of climate change and for emergency preparedness scenario planning. This paper discusses preliminary observations from a transdisciplinary archival and AI research project of an urban digital twin in the architecture, engineering, construction and owner operated (AECOO) sector, theoretically framed by critical data studies, archival digital diplomatics, digital records forensics and social and technological assemblage theory. A hybrid methodological approach combines a technological walkthrough with twin developers mapping data flows and technological processes, guided by a semi-structured interview instrument to identify what constitutes a record of automated and AI/ML actions that affect social and material outcomes. Preliminary observations identified a complex set of technopolitics, myriad procurement and contractual arrangements where data and technology ownership remains with vendors. It has become clear that digital twins are very messy and poorly governed infrastructures of infrastructure, which are mostly proprietary, lack interoperability and standards. The aim is to understand urban digital twins so that they may be governed in the public interest.
AUTONOMY UNDER SURVEILLANCE: A FAILED EXPERIENCE ON PLATFORM COOPERATIVISM IN BRAZIL
Authors: Lemos André , Walmir Estima
Published: February 2025

This research seeks to comprehend power relations in a platform cooperativism experience in Araraquara, São Paulo, Brazil, in 2022. The project was initiated by a workers' cooperative that acquired the franchise of the Bibi Mob platform with the support of the city's municipality through its solidarity economy incubator. The experience failed eight months after its inception.

This article applies a neo-materialist perspective, mapping the datafication process in the app to analyse how the global power relations of infrastructural global platforms - mainly Google and Amazon - were crucial to the end of the experience. The dependence on a global platform ecosystem and the franchised platform limited the workers' ability to act.

Drawing from a Southern Global experience, the research challenges platform cooperativism, colonialism and data sovereignty. The article argues that the modus operandi of platform power is exercised through a disciplinary power that produces "autonomy under surveillance".

Analysing a failed partnership allows one to discuss platform cooperativism and examine the manifestations of power in the Global South.
FROM TECH-SOLUTIONISM TO COMMUNITY-CENTRED DATA CAPABILITY FOR DISASTER PREPAREDNESS
Authors: McCosker Anthony , Kang Yong-Bin , Shaw Frances , Albury Kath
Published: February 2025

The urgency of enhancing community resilience in the face of escalating disasters necessitates a shift in disaster preparedness strategies. This paper presents a novel approach developed in collaboration with the Australian Red Cross, focusing on community-centred data practices for disaster resilience. Recognising the limitations of traditional digital humanitarianism, which largely relied on crowdsourcing and social platform data, our project shifts the paradigm towards empowering communities with data capabilities. We developed a Community Resource Mapping Pipeline, and a prototype platform to map community resources and strengths, emphasising community-led processes and local data capability development to improve local disaster preparedness and response. Our organisational participatory approach involved workshops with stakeholders to co-shape research questions and platform design within a human-centred framework. Our prototype demonstrates the potential of community-led data capability building in enhancing disaster preparedness, underscoring the importance of involving communities in both data collection and decision-making.
FOCUSING ON VIRTUAL GROUPS: A METHOD FOR FOCUS GROUP INTERVIEWS IN XR/VR GROUP SETTINGS
Authors: Milik Oskar Tadeusz , Jang Dayeoun , Foxman Maxwell , Klebig Brian , Beyea David , Leith Alex , Ratan Rabindra
Published: February 2025

The art of Internet Research is always developing, while also firmly rooted in the theoretical frameworks of the past. As technologies have evolved over time, new ways of interacting have become pervasive, and with them, a need for a different means of analyzing such interactions. Through all of this change, internet researchers have discussed and developed effective methodologies to suit the needs of research. Significant work has been done on digital ethnographies, digital interviews, and surveys using online systems. One area not as widely discussed and developed is the use of online focus groups in synchronous video forums like Zoom or Extended Reality (XR) spaces such as ENGAGE or VRChat. This paper describes our approach to methodological systems for better understanding digital interaction through focus group interviews within such media.

Specifically, we present the theoretical underpinnings and design of an upcoming focus group study we are conducting within a virtual world setting. We focus on questions of how to incorporate different types of virtual avatars for the participants and how to collect observable data in the virtual space, including language and avatar behavior. Finally, we describe how such data can be used to understand questions of communication, power, individual agency, and identity that occur in these group settings.
THE WORK OF DIGITAL INCLUSION: EXPOSING THE DIGITAL LABOUR OF COMMUNITY WORKERS FOSTERING DIGITAL PARTICIPATION
Authors: Mitchell Peta , Marshall Amber
Published: February 2025

This paper presents findings from a national-scale project that worked with disadvantaged communities across Australia to examine digital inclusion in low-income families and the role of social infrastructure (e.g., schools, libraries, charities, government services) in supporting digital participation. Drawing on data collected in interviews and community workshops in an outer urban community with significant socioeconomic challenges, we illuminate the digital labour of community sector workers who routinely act as digital mentors. These workers support family members who often lack access to digital devices and services along with the requisite skills to use digital technologies to perform everyday tasks, such as helping families to contact telecommunications providers, access government apps, and apply for jobs or rental leases online.

In light of our results, our study extends the concept of digital labour to include work undertaken in the service and advocacy of digital inclusion in community contexts. Specifically, we articulate the activities, challenges, frustrations, and costs (in time and resources) that characterise digital inclusion support of low-income families, often beyond role expectations. In doing this, we seek to expand understandings of digital labour both as a category and concept. Overall, the paper demonstrates that digital inclusion initiatives must not only accommodate the intersecting socio-cultural needs of low-income families, but include appropriate support and resourcing for community workers performing critical digital mentoring work.
CULTURES OF SEX ADVICE: EXAMINING TIKTOK COMMUNITIES AROUND SEXUAL HEALTH IN THE US
Authors: Pinch Annika Caroline , Suenzo Facundo
Published: February 2025

This study investigates how sexuality experts communicate sexual advice on online platforms and how audiences interact with and perceive these experts. Through a comprehensive analysis of the dynamics inherent in this communication process, we seek to gain insights into the evolving landscape of sexual advice and health in the digital age. Furthermore, our objective is to address a notable gap in this body of literature by incorporating how audiences engage with this content. We conducted a thematic analysis of TikTok videos and comment sections, combined with in-depth interviews with sexuality experts, to explore how experts build credibility amongst their audience, and how audiences engage with their content and evaluate expertise and credibility. Preliminary results suggest that creators employ various strategies when their expertise is questioned, including responding to comments, crafting replies to videos, and utilizing humor to connect with users. Audience members also play a vital role in validating creators' expertise. We also found that sexual health advice was not solely coming from creators, but also from those engaging in comments, fostering a culture of advice related to the video’s theme, challenging the conventional top-down hierarchy in sexual education where expertise is unilaterally shared. Ultimately, our study aligns with this year’s conference theme – examining the emergence and continuation of industries like sexual health education – highlighting the dynamics that arise within online spaces.
AN ALGORITHMIC EVENT: THE CELEBRATION AND CRITIQUE OF 'SPOTIFY WRAPPED'
Authors: Rasmussen Nina Vindum , Rasmussen Nina Vindum
Published: February 2025

Each year, Spotify encourages its users to share aesthetically pleasing data stories ‘wrapped’ and repackaged from their listening behaviour. We approach ‘Wrapped’ as an ‘algorithmic event’, defined as a moment in time in which there is a collective orientation towards a particular algorithmic system and associated data. To examine how people make sense of ‘Wrapped’ as an algorithmic event, we bring together ordinary Spotify users to explore datafication through a series of prompts and creative activities, including a modified version of the ‘walkthrough’ (Light et al., 2018) and a craft-based exercise. These exercises allow participants to tease out how normative assumptions are baked into ‘Wrapped’ and mobilise particular understandings of individuals, their habits, tastes and identities. Importantly, we position our participants as co-analysts, following the work of Robards and Lincoln (2017) and Markham (2021), and in our analysis highlight themes that arise from their contributions. Emerging findings allude to highly ambivalent feelings towards ‘Wrapped’ as an algorithmic event: Our participants both celebrate and critique how Spotify claims to ‘know’ them as individuals. They also contest the way ‘Wrapped’ is framed as revealing the ‘truth’ about music consumption and taste. As such, we argue that algorithmic events like ‘Wrapped’ are useful ways to think through data capture and algorithmic systems. The phenomenon of ‘wrappification’ – by which we mean the repackaging of behavioural data that captures a particular activity throughout the year and the responses to the belief that we can ‘know’ ourselves in this way – speaks to such impact.
THE ZEALOUS PRACTICES OF TECH INDUSTRY LEADERS
Authors: Reinis Sara
Published: February 2025

Prepping for the apocalypse. Fighting for eternal life. Building separatist compounds for like-minded people. Reproducing to fill the world with chosen ones. Manifestos to recruit believers. All these practices are age-old characteristics of religious zealots and sound like the makings of a promising cult docuseries. And yet, they are also increasingly common obsessions of leaders of the American tech industry. From building luxury bunkers to hoping cryonic freezing could make resurrection possible, many billionaire and multi-millionaire founders, engineers, and VCs are investing time, money, and attention into speculative pursuits that are often considered the realm of religious paranoia. Through a conjunctural analysis (Hall, 1978), this research gathers evidence of four key religiously coded practices that are coursing through the Silicon Valley elite and examines the guiding ideologies behind them. By connecting the techno-solutionist practices of today’s tech elite to questions that have historically been explored via religious interventions, I hope to decenter appeals to rationality and expose the underlying values and emotions that drive these decisions. Additionally, this framework requires taking these practices seriously as symptomatic of an underlying belief system—rather than just the quirks of people with too much money on their hands. This research will unpack three core focuses: separatist communities, conquering death, and apocalypse prep.
DO YOU SEE WHAT I SEE? EMOTIONAL REACTION TO VISUAL CONTENT IN THE ONLINE DEBATE ABOUT CLIMATE CHANGE
Authors: Rossi Luca , Segerberg Alexandra , Magnani Matteo , Arminio Luigi
Published: February 2025

In this paper, we explore the visual echo chamber effect in climate change communication. We leverage the ongoing monitoring activities of both progressive actors and counter actor groups involved in the online public debate surrounding climate communication. Our focus is on whether visual content possesses unique characteristics that enable it to bridge ideologically diverse communities.

We do note a small amount of shared visual content. Interestingly, when we examine the emotional reactions elicited by this shared visual content, we find that they often diverge significantly, suggesting that pre-existing ideological positions heavily influence interpretation. This work contributes to our detailed understanding of the social

dynamics that create and sustain the online echo-chamber effect observed

in climate change debates.
DIGITAL SOCIAL CONNECTION AT THE LONELY URBAN FRINGE
Authors: Savic Milovan , McCosker Anthony , Farmer Jane
Published: February 2025

This study explores how individuals in outer metropolitan areas use digital tools to maintain social connections in settings with physical isolation and limited social infrastructure. Based on interviews with 44 participants, the research identifies four layers of digital social connection: close relationships, social support networks, group participation, and community engagement. The findings show that people use a variety of digital platforms, such as messaging apps and social media, to navigate these layers. The study emphasizes the role of digital literacy and adaptability in fostering social connection and suggests that local governments and community organizations can apply these insights to better support residents in these areas.
HOW DO THE DIVERSE DRIVERS OF CHILDREN’S (6-12) DIGITAL PLAY MEDIATE THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN DIGITAL GAMES AND CHILDREN’S SUBJECTIVE WELLBEING?
Authors: Scott Fiona Louise
Published: February 2025

Though discursive shifts signal increasing enthusiasm for children's digital play when instrumental educational outcomes are evident, limited attention has been paid to its possible wellbeing benefits or the reasons that children engage with it. The time that children invest in digital game play presents an opportunity for the global digital games industry to contribute positively to children’s well-being. Empirical research must first examine the diverse relationships between children’s digital play and their wellbeing.

This paper reports on an international, ecoculturally and ethnographically informed and semi-longitudinal study in collaboration with a children's digital game industry partner and a global child's rights organisation to consider: what drives the digital play choices and practices of a diverse cohort of children?; and how do these findings contribute to understanding the relationship between children’s digital play and their wellbeing? This paper draws on a subset of UK data (20 families) amongst a total 50 case study families who were involved across four countries.

The study provides diverse examples of digital play supporting dimensions of children’s subjective wellbeing. However, children’s digital play choices and practices were influenced by diverse and often intersecting factors, most compellingly, by different deep interests, desires and needs, understood in the present study as ‘digital play drivers’. The findings offer an empirically grounded expansion of past ‘needs’ approaches and foreground the mediating role played by digital play drivers in the relationship between digital games and children’s subjective wellbeing. Implications for the children's digital game industry are discussed.
MEDICAL CANNABIS INDUSTRY AND THE REFRACTED PUBLIC OF POLISH DRUG USERS FORUM
Authors: Siuda Piotr , Wanke Michał
Published: February 2025

Drug users use surface, deep, or dark web to enhance their activity. This paper examines the intersection of the digital space and illicit substances and analyzes a Polish drug forum as a refracted public (Abidin, 2021). To illuminate the accommodation of the medical cannabis industry in the social worlds of users, their digital presence below the radar is studied through qualitative thematic analysis of the content of the major Polish surface web drug forum. The study draws on more than 8000 forum posts. The results reveal that there has been a widespread subcultural accommodation of medical cannabis for non-medical use in the form of a backchannel about the quality of the product and ways of obtaining it. We also observed an emergence of self-care and reflexive cannabis narratives, where traditional cultural framing of the substance as source of fun and pleasure converged with medical purposes narrative. Also, complicated self-regulation of use was revealed based on experimenting with tolerance, acknowledging one’s harmful use, and counteracting potential harms. We also unveiled the peer harm reduction potential of this space. Taken together, the forum accumulates knowledge and know-how for the consumers that is otherwise lacking due to the illicit or stigmatized nature of the cannabis market in Poland. Looking at what the digitally enabled discussions reveal sheds light on the possible social accommodation of cannabis ahead of significant societal and legislative transformations.
NAVIGATING THE GRAY: THE ECONOMIC UNDERBELLY OF TIKTOK'S SIDE HUSTLES
Authors: Terenzi Massimo
Published: February 2025

This study investigates the nexus between the attention economy and digital disinformation on TikTok, drawing from Esposito's adaptation of Luhmann’s system theory to the digital age and Swartz's exploration of the socio-economic layers of digital transactions. It zeroes in on cryptocurrency scams as a case study to illuminate how disinformation is propagated for economic gain, using TikTok's API for comprehensive analysis. The research employs advanced data analytics to examine how digital platforms, via algorithmic filtering, shape the flow and influence of content, thereby enabling the proliferation of disinformation markets. By thematic clustering of problematic Facebook narratives and identifying scam-specific jargon, this study pinpoints tactics used on TikTok related to the 2024 Bitcoin halving. It scrutinizes how manipulators exploit technical and platform-specific vulnerabilities for profit, integrating Luhmann's double contingency theory to elucidate the feedback loops that enhance content virality and algorithmic dissemination. This theoretical framework illuminates the complex interplay between user interactions and algorithmic preferences, which, in turn, feed into the economics of disinformation markets. The research underscores the strategic manipulation of digital platforms to foster disinformation, spotlighting the role of algorithms and user engagement in the commodification of attention within these markets. Through this lens, the study aims to provide insights into the operational dynamics of disinformation markets, offering a nuanced understanding of how digital misinformation is not merely a byproduct of technological advancement but a structured market leveraging the inherent vulnerabilities of digital platforms and their users.
FAIRNESS IN THE WORK BEHIND THE AI INDUSTRY: HOW ACTION-RESEARCH APPROACHES CAN BUILD BETTER LABOUR CONDITIONS
Authors: Valente Jonas Chagas Lucio , Ustek Spilda Funda , Alyanak Oguz , Brittain Lola , Graham Mark
Published: February 2025

The paper presents findings about the labor conditions on the work behind AI development, with two main goals. First, the aim is to investigate the current labor conditions in the AI industry and point out the lack of quality of outsourced jobs offered by digital labor platforms and Business Process Outsourcing companies, calling attention to the challenges faced by workers and the human costs of AI systems development. Second, it presents a global research project results on how not only to carry on international studies on the topic but also how to use an action-research approach to generate impact through public scoring companies and encourage the adoption of best practices by them.

The paper’s methods are based on the project’s action-research approach and methodological framework. The project scores companhies based on principles that address the major issues that define labour relations, namely, pay, conditions, contracts, management, and representation.

The paper presents the result of the assessment of cloudwork platforms conducted in 2023. In addition, it paper will examine labour relations in BPO companies in the AI supply chain using a case study of the company Sama, which is based in the United States and operates in many African countries.

Among the findings are problems such as non-payment situations, lack of policies to ensure minimum wage, significant rates of unpaid labour, poor measures to promote health and safety, problems in management practices and weak collective bargaining practices.
REPLATFORMIZATION: RACIAL CAPITALISM AND THE STACK-CONSCIOUSNESS OF KIWI FARMS
Authors: Van Schenck Reed
Published: February 2025

Over the past decade, service providers have taken on larger roles in the regulation of violent digital networks. As reactionary platforms like Gab and Parler emerge to cater to far-right users estranged from mainstream social networking sites, their stack suppliers – domain registrars, web hosts, app stores, etc. – may enforce their Terms of Service, revoking access to services, in what José Van Dijck et al. term “deplatformization.” Deplatformization has proven circumstantially effective as in the 2021 destruction of Parler by Amazon Web Services. However, reactionary platforms have responded by building their own service providers, marketing them as “cancel-proof,” and seeding a cottage industry of far-right infrastructure firms immune to deplatformization. In this trend, which I term “replatformization,” far-right networks scale their capacity to fracture and terrorize online publics. This paper investigates replatformization through a diachronic analysis of the stack of Kiwi Farms, a text forum known for its deadly transmisogynistic harassment campaigns, its history as “victim” of service denial by multiple firms including Cloudflare, and its in-house solutions such as DDoS mitigator “KiwiFlare” and web host “Final Solutions LLC.” Anchored by materialist critical theory, I argue that the replatformization of far-right platforms reifies the role of reactionary digital networks within the social reproduction of racial capitalism. I trace an emerging reactionary Stack-consciousness as KF users become a vanguard in digital service provision. Efforts to regulate online hate culture must attend to the fact that the private ownership of the means of mediation empowers reactionary webmasters with inordinate leverage.
TAPPING THE "UNTAPPED RESOURCE": HOW TWENTIETH-CENTURY INDUSTRIAL PRIORITIES HAVE SHAPED CONTEMPORARY NEW MEDIA ART PRACTICES
Authors: Vasudevan Roopa
Published: February 2025

Contemporary artists using emerging technologies in their work are often positioned as innovators, mavericks, and diagnosticians, who work “outside” of the tech industry and thus bring sorely needed perspective to its developments. However, viewing new media artists as fully independent actors, devoid of any connection to industrial and corporate aims, serves to eclipse the long-standing and substantial ties that the field has to the protocols and priorities of the mainstream technology industry. These, in fact, have existed for as long as artists have attempted to integrate computation, electronics, networking, or other high-tech components into their work—both when these tools are owned and operated by corporations, but also in more diffuse, ideological ways.

This contribution, which draws from my larger dissertation work, traces the evolution of the cultural imaginary surrounding new media artists, defined in my research as practitioners who expand, reinvent, or misuse technological expression. By explicitly placing archives from three twentieth century “art and technology” initiatives against interviews with new media artists and cultural workers I conducted in the present day, I emphasize the foundational connections that new media artists have to industrial practices—and argue that this relationship can be traced back to the first attempts to place artists into collaborations with industry. As a result, industrial mandates have, to a large degree, shaped the popular conception of the new media art field, guiding both the practicalities of working with digital systems as well as notions of what artists “should” be doing with their work.
ALTERNATIVE FUTURES! FOSTERING ECO-DIGITAL AGENCY IN GENERATIVE AI WORKSHOPS WITH YOUNG PEOPLE
Authors: Vigren Minna
Published: February 2025

The ability to imagine alternatives is important in fostering hope for more just futures. However, it is not easy. In fact, it has been argued that the decline of imagination has prevented us from finding effective solutions to urgent planetary crises and alternatives to capitalism. In this paper, I present how the challenge was methodologically tackled and ways to spark imagination searched for in an ongoing research project. The paper presents methodological reflections, observations, and critical considerations from a workshop experiment which an AI image generator was used as a tool for imagining. The starting point was that young people's perceptions, hopes, and fears about the future matter because the future concerns them particularly. Yet, their voices often remain unheard.

The pedagogical approach was a combination of feminist, critical, anarchist, speculative, and utopian pedagogies. The use of an AI image generator allowed the playful creation of images, simultaneously providing opportunities to critically examine AI’s ethics and sustainability. It fostered the participants’ $2 in creating a collective space in which hopes and fears were voiced and heard, and today’s society and needs for its transformation discussed. Yet, there are issues in using generative AI as a research tool. Proprietary applications prevent researchers from evaluating their ethical foundations and sustainability. With datasets consisting of images harvested from the past and present, the question is to what extent it is possible to imagine something completely new and previously unimaginable with them.
STRATEGIC AUTONOMY IN FLUX: EXAMINING POWER DYNAMICS IN TIKTOK SHOP'S MANAGED MODELS
Authors: Zhu Silei , Liu Xuanbo , Peng Xinyi , Luo Yaqin
Published: February 2025

The article delves into the transformative impact of TikTok's new business model, TikTok Shop, which has revolutionized cross-border e-commerce by introducing managed models for merchants. This shift has led to significant challenges for merchants, including reduced profitability and loss of autonomy, particularly under the hosting model. Employing online ethnography and examining platform policies, the study sheds light on power dynamics within the TikTok ecosystem, revealing the platform's influence over economic activities and its implications for stakeholders. Through an exploration of TikTok's vertical integration and control of the value chain, the article underscores the precariousness of platform-based business models and highlights the need for public accountability. This analysis offers insights into the complex interplay between platform power, merchant autonomy, and economic activities within the TikTok ecosystem, contributing to a deeper understanding of the evolving dynamics in digital commerce.
REVITALISING THE CONCEPT OF THE EVERYDAY IN INTERNET RESEARCH
Authors: Lupinacci Ludmila , Hesmondhalgh David , Campos Valverde Raquel , Siles Ignacio , Valerio-Alfaro Luciana , Arriagada Arturo , Burgess Jean , Albury Kath , McCosker Anthony , Wilken Rowan
Published: February 2025

In an academic milieu in which a lot of critical attention is dedicated to the data-grabbing, algorithmically biased, and asymmetrical power of massive techno-corporations, this panel explores how a focus on situated ordinary practices can provide us with a more complex, nuanced, and even at times contradictory account of what happens when pervasive digital technologies are experienced in everyday life. It does so via a combination of empirical research and theoretical development in a number of platformised and datafied domains: social media, music and generative AI. Juxtaposition of these topics and approaches, and dialogue between the authors and audience, will, we hope, forefront struggles, disputes, and ambivalences concerning what people actually do with the digital systems that they engage with. As feminist scholars established many years ago, the everyday is trivial and yet profoundly politically charged; ordinary experience is always imbued with power dynamics, hierarchies, asymmetries, and emerging modes of governmentality. Using empirically-based case studies, the panel engages with a tricky question: how can we theorise power and agency while making sense of the textures and poetics of everyday life, if the everyday is precisely in the unremarkable, the unnoticed, in that which escapes our grasp?
CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON COMMUNICATIVE AI
Authors: Hepp Andreas , Couldry Nick , Bolin Göran , Velkova Julia , Brevini Benedetta
Published: February 2025

Current media coverage surrounding ChatGPT, LaMDA, and Luminous has brought questions about the automation of communication into the mainstream. Artificially intelligent media are no longer merely mediating instances of communication but are themselves becoming communicative participants. This has generated broad public discussion about these systems and others and the challenges they bring to domains such as education, public discourse, and journalistic production. Much of this new “AI hype” revolves around the question of whether such systems will soon “replace” humans as workers in these various domains, whether they will develop “super intelligence” and as a result challenge or even marginalize the human species.

With this panel, we would like to give this discussion a new twist by asking what a critical perspective on communicative AI should look like. If these systems of “automated media” are not about intelligence, but about communication, what should a critical approach to them consider? Raising this question, we want to present five key critical perspectives on communicative AI.

The first paper develops a critical perspective on the visions of pioneer communities. It poses the question of whether today's pioneering communities ultimately reproduce basic patterns of the old Californian Ideology in relation to communicative AI. A second paper focuses on the perspective of data colonialism. In essence, it is about showing that a critical engagement with communicative AI means addressing the question of the extent to which systems of automated communication are linked to existing data infrastructures and nexus models of exploitation. The third paper highlights the perspective of economic value production. Since more and more social situations include human-machine communication, more social interactions become possible to monetize. This relates not only to commercial settings, but also in the public sector as it relates to the welfare state. The fourth paper focuses on a material perspective. At its core is the question of how Big Tech procures power for data centres to construct the emerging geography of cheap computational labour needed for communicative AI. The fifth paper deals with the perspective of an eco-political economy of communicative AI. Through this prism, the question of the ecological consequences of communicative AI can be addressed.

By contrasting these five critical perspectives on communicative AI, we want to discuss what an overarching, critical approach to communicative AI might look like.
AI INDUSTRY EXPECTATIONS AND UNDERPERFORMING IMAGINARIES
Authors: Stanusch Natalia Barbara , Rogers Richard , Baym Nancy , Liu Chuncheng , Shaw Ryland , Katzenbach Christian , Richter Vanessa , Kannengießer Sigrid , Mollen Anne , Brause Saba Rebecca , Yang Heng , Schäfer Mike , Zeng Jing
Published: February 2025

The panel takes up AoIR’s theme of how industry pre-mediates the future of internet technology and its effects and inquiries into alternatives. Utilising ideas from the study of sociotechnical imaginaries, it aims to locate, map, and critically examine AI imaginaries together with counter-imaginaries that engage with and intervene in those of the AI industry. First, it maps the discursive landscape of Big Tech ‘AI talk’ as a means to study ‘new media concentration’. Which Big Tech AI imaginaries are stabilising? More normatively, do they seek to cement their interdependence both generally but also with respect to the future of internet technology? More specifically, how does the AI industry imagine regulation, sustainability, and the hoped (and feared) AI futures? Recent imaginaries research has emphasised multi-actor, non-linear approaches revolving around the notion of 'public imaginaries'. Along those lines, in the panel we bring together studies of AI imaginaries performed within but also beyond the AI industry. The panel considers the AI industry’s relationships with various actors, such as governments, media outlets, and academia, and the complex interplay that produces imaginaries as well as the issues that come with them. In addressing these questions and interests, the panel also presents various methodological entry points to the study of imaginaries of the AI industry and the larger ecosystem from direct interviews and distant and close readings of (cross-cultural) media coverage to an analysis of online environments such as websites and social media platforms.
SOCIAL MEDIA AS A KEY ACTOR IN REDEFINING HEALTHCARE INDUSTRY DYNAMICS
Authors: Westwood Hannah Louisa , Tylstedt Beatrice , Stein Krysten , Holroyd Deanna
Published: February 2025

This panel argues that social media is a key actor in the health and wellness industries, influencing how users participate in discussions and conversations related to wellbeing, health, and embodied experience. Drawing together interdisciplinary qualitative methods to advocate for a critical, feminist approach, the panel focuses on the influence of health-related social media content on users, as well as the effects of these platforms on professional content creators. The first presentation poses a methodological intervention, using Situational Analysis to map the FemTech industry, contending that social media is an important site of research. The second paper presents a close reading of FemTech influencer advertisements on social media, considering the role of influencers in promoting health and medical products. The final paper considers how everyday social media users are emerging as key actors in shaping understandings and definitions of ADHD. Together, the panel sheds light on how social media platforms have become crucial sites of information about bodily health and wellness for both traditional healthcare industry actors, non-professional users, and content creators. In conversation with one another, the papers present a detailed discussion of the relationships between social media and health, advocating for critical methodological approaches and frameworks. This interdisciplinary and globally engaged panel ultimately highlights the influence of social media on reproductive health technologies, influencer marketing, mental health, and the healthcare industry at large.
STUFF (IS SOMETHING) WHITE PEOPLE LIKE: ON THE WHITE PROTOTYPICALITY OF FACEBOOK
Authors: Rutherford McEwan S.
Published: February 2025

This project examines the life and death of Facebook’s “ethnic affinity” targeted advertising category. The category was the subject of several lawsuits that alleged it violated the Fair Housing Act, by allowing advertisers to exclude protected classes from the audience of an advertisement. It argues that the category serves to negotiate tensions between the supposedly “post-racial” aesthetic of web platforms, and the political economy of targeted advertising online. Using media genealogy as a method, it traces the introduction, transformation and eventual removal of “ethnic affinity” from Facebook’s interface. It reads across several archives that span a variety of stakeholders in the production and circulation of “ethnic affinity” in order to reconstruct how the category is understood, both as a technical object and as a discursive formation. It argues that technical discourse obscures the persistence of racial discrimination in algorithmic targeting by highlighting disparities between Facebook’s instructions to developers, its public-facing statements, and how advertisers understood its technical changes. “Ethnic affinity” is then best understood as a racial technology, one that constructs and enforces the boundaries of race. I argue that this has historical antecedents in the deployment of colorblindness as justification for racial disparity. This project contributes to studies on the relationship between technologies of racialization and platform capitalism.
Burden and Needs of Primary Family Caregivers of Schizophrenic Patients: A Qualitative Study
Authors: Ghosh Suman , Nath Kalpana , Mazumdar Trishna
Published: February 2025

Background: Caregivers need to look after all the requirements of the mentally ill person which become very tiresome and challenging. The study aimed to explore burden and needs of primary family caregivers of schizophrenic patients.
Methodology: A qualitative study was conducted using phenomenological design. A total of 17 primary family caregivers of schizophrenic patients from Psychiatric Department of Gauhati Medical College & Hospital, Guwahati were selected using purposive sampling technique. Data were collected by conducting one to one interview using semi-structured interview schedule. Data analysis was done by thematic analysis.
Result: Five major themes and twenty sub-themes were identified. The five major themes were: Challenges encountered, Psychological impact, Unpleasant experiences, Requirements of caregivers and Emotional impact.
Conclusion: The findings of the present study clearly confirmed that the family caregivers faced a lot of challenges while caring for the individual with schizophrenia.

Key words: Burden of caregivers, needs of caregivers, schizophrenia patients, family caregivers.