bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
THEORISING TOGGLING: BEING PUSHED AND MOVED BY UI
Authors: Lalvani Simiran
Published: February 2025

In this paper, I briefly recount the evolution in the use of the word ‘toggle,’ and build off it to theorize it as a concept.Today we know toggling as a verb, and the user interaction (UI) of switching between and moving across apps and activities. Prior to this, toggle was a noun that referred to fasteners on garments and on walls that held things in place. This evolution from a noun to a verb, helps attend to the fact that as people, we have always used our hands, heads, and objects to hold things together, as we switch between doing and being.

To theorize toggling, I will first detail my motivation, methods, and methodology. Then I will illustrate how toggling as a concept, enables reframing two dominant views on (1) how information is imagined to push users to do things and (2) how being a user, especially a consumer, is imagined to move us “out of touch.”

Toggling as a conceptual vessel places UI in this history of how our hands and fingers have interacted with surfaces of objects like buttons and made sense of the world. Placing interaction in our hands makes room for us as scholars to ask: how do people make sense of information and hold everything together as they switch between doing livelihood-care and being workers, consumers, business owners, householders and so on?
BORDERLINE CONTENT AND PLATFORMISED SPEECH GOVERNANCE: MAPPING TIKTOK’S MODERATION CONTROVERSIES IN SOUTH AND SOUTHEAST ASIA
Authors: Liu Diyi
Published: February 2025

Content moderation comes with trade-offs and moral dilemmas, particularly for transnational platforms governing borderline content where the boundaries of acceptability are subject to debate. While extensive research has explored the legality and legitimacy of $2 in democratic contexts, few address the complexities of less-than-democratic developing nations. Through socio-legal analysis and controversy mapping of TikTok’s localised moderation in South and Southeast Asia, the study examines how major actors negotiate the shifting boundaries of online speech. The analysis reveals that neither the platform nor regional states effectively govern borderline content. Primarily, TikTok localises its moderation based on pragmatic necessity rather than moral obligations, intentionally sidestepping contentious political controversies. Governments demonstrate strong will to control online discourse, leveraging legal uncertainty to advance political interests. Local content governance thus always relies on vague rationales around securitisation and morality. The contradictory goals of (de)politicising borderline moderation seemingly counterbalance each other, yet in practice lead to an accountability vacuum without legitimate interests. Given the lack of normative common ground, the study highlights the significance of procedural justice and civic participation to mitigate rhetoric that rationalises imposition of speech norms hinging on imbalanced political power.
AUTOMODERATOR AS AN EXAMPLE OF COMMUNITY DRIVEN PRODUCT DESIGN
Authors: Lo Claudia , Walton Sam
Published: February 2025

Rushes to adopt the latest technologies to the field of community moderation are generally inequitable for volunteer communities. The closed-door nature of product development at the majority of tech companies means that the logic underlying the creation of new features is opaque. What does this mean for those who want to equitably employ newer technologies in service of volunteer moderators? We present the development and deployment of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Automoderator product as a contemporary alternative to product development processes.

We focus on the collaborative process undertaken between the Moderator Tools product team at the Wikimedia Foundation, and volunteer moderator communities, to design and build Automoderator. Automoderator is an automated anti-vandalism tool, which uses a language-agnostic ML model that predicts the probability of an edit being reverted. The product team integrated volunteer feedback and direction on a continuous basis. This included the use of existing community-created tools to guide Automoderator's direction, the creation and dissemination of a spreadsheet-based testing tool, soliciting user feedback on a central project page, and integrating an extension to allow communities to control Automoderator's behavior directly. We conclude by discussing the limitations and trade-offs of this approach to product development.
THE PROFESSIONALISATION OF NETWORKED AND REFRACTED MISOGYNY AMONG ESTONIAN MANFLUENCERS ON TIKTOK
Authors: Lott Kaarel
Published: February 2025

In recent years, a specific type of influencers has notoriously popularised – misogynist influencers, with Andrew Tate standing out as the most prominent one. While popular and networked misogyny (Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016) and various parts of the manosphere, together with related conceptualisations have been well studied, Andrew Tate and other misogynists as (aspirational) influencers have received little academic attention. This study will focus on these aspirational misogynist content creators, exploring the circulation of their misogynist content on social media, the professionalisation and monetisation of misogyny, and lastly, how these communities keep registering ‘under the radar’ (Abidin, 2021).

Using a mixed-method approach, this study will focus on misogynist influencers in Estonia. Digital ethnography (Pink et al., 2016; Markham, 2017) will be the dominant method employed, exploring the strategic circulation, professionalisation (Greenwood, 1966; Trice, 1993) and monetisation aspects of misogynist content on various social platforms. Secondly, a combination of qualitative content analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) and socio-semiotic visual analysis (Kress & van Leeuwen, 2020) is used to study the textual and visual methods of social steganography (boyd & Marwick, 2011). Very preliminary results show that in the process of professionalisation, ideologies of masculinities are created, each of which emphasises different aspects (e.g., financial, physical, sexual, etc). The results of this study are crucial for understanding the circulation and professionalisation of misogynistic content in the context of networked misogyny (Banet-Weiser & Miltner, 2016) – an important phenomenon related to the influencer industry.
MIXED FEELINGS: THE PLATFORMISATION OF MOODS AND VIBES
Authors: Lupinacci Ludmila
Published: February 2025

Over the past few years, digital platforms from different sectors have started tailoring their content to both respond to and create certain moods, vibes, or ‘ambiences’. In so doing, they become ‘atmospheric architectures’ (Bohme 2020), entering the industry of emotional regulation. I posit that a critical-phenomenological framework is a productive epistemological, theoretical, and methodological resource for scrutinising this shift precisely at the intersection of embodied affect and the political economy of platformisation. By critical phenomenology I mean a phenomenological disposition that is not blind to the social, technical, and political environment in which it is situated (Couldry and Kallinikos 2018). This paper also dialogues with recent discussions both in public discourse and the relevant scholarship about a latent change in our digital sociality, in which the values for which we once celebrated digital media are now being replaced by a different mode of consumption, fruition, and attention (John 2022). Using the contemporary case studies to flesh out these new formations in emotional capitalism (Illouz 2007), I propose that we are entering a new stage in programmed sociality (Bucher 2018), focused less on sharing, connecting, or engaging, and more on the platformisation of the merely felt. The examination of this phenomenon demands us to acknowledge the significance of those mixed feelings – which involve an interplay of the affective and the computational – and of their entanglement with a profit-oriented corporate technoscape.
ASSESSING OCCUPATIONS THROUGH ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: A COMPARISON OF HUMANS AND GPT-4
Authors: Lutz Christoph , Gmyrek Paweł , Newlands Gemma
Published: February 2025

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 have raised questions about the changing nature of work. Research has started to investigate how this technology affects labor markets and might replace or augment different types of jobs. Beyond their economic implications in the world of work, there are important sociological questions about how LLMs connect to subjective evaluations of work, such as the prestige and perceived social value of different occupations, and how the widespread use of LLMs perpetuate often biased views on the labor markets reflected in their training datasets. Despite initial research on LLMs’ world model, their inherent biases, attitudes and personalities, we lack evidence on how LLMs themselves evaluate occupations as well as how well they emulate the occupational evaluations of human evaluators. We present a systematic comparison of GPT-4 occupational evaluations with those from an in-depth, high-quality survey in the UK context. Our findings indicate that GPT-4 and human scores are highly correlated across all ISCO-08 major groups for prestige and social value. At the same time, GPT-4 substantially under- or overestimates the occupational prestige and social value of many occupations, particularly emerging occupations as well as stigmatized or contextual ones. In absolute terms, GPT-4 scores are more generous than those of the human respondents. Our analyses show both the potentials and risks of using LLM-generated data for occupational research.
POLICY AT ODDS- DIGITAL INDIA VERSUS INTERNET SHUTDOWNS
Authors: Madapathi Manisha
Published: February 2025

The government of India, in 2014, launched a flagship programme called Digital India, with a vision to transform India into a ‘digitally empowered society and knowledge economy’. A similar intention is reflected in another initiative called BharatNet. The USO Fund was established with the fundamental objective of providing access to telegraph services, including mobile services, broadband connectivity and ICT infrastructure creation in rural and remote areas.

However, it is interesting to note that India has also been notorious at shutting down the internet. In Access Now’s report (2021), India has consistently raked number one, in the total number of hours spent under internet shutdown. In India, shutdowns have occurred during citizen protests like the anti- CAA protests in late 2020, and early 2021, and the Farmers Protest in 2021.

When we look at these two actions by the government- one, to digitise governance and provide connectivity to all citizens to digitally empower them allow for the participation in networked economy; and two, to disrupt these very connections when citizens use networks to express dissent.

In this paper I take a closer look at the policy documents and the building of information infrastructure that is written into it. While also studying how infrastructure gets suspended during dissenting movements led by citizens. I use the case of the two protests to understand this disruption. Using newspaper analysis and interviews, I examine how infrastructure gets denied and disrupted to citizens when digital networks are used in ways that are unintended by the government.
SURREPTITIOUS EXPERIMENTATION: DIGITAL INFRASTRUCTURES AND STRUCTURAL VIOLENCE IN THE HUMANITARIAN INDUSTRY.
Authors: Madianou Mirca
Published: February 2025

The humanitarian sector is known for its reliance on technological pilots as part of the digitisation and datafication of aid operations. Drawing on ten years of research in the aid sector, this paper outlines a new type of technological experimentation which I term surreptitious experimentation. This type of experimentation is possible as digital technologies and practices become enmeshed with the infrastructures of aid. This process of infrastructuring allows for a continuous flow of experimentation, which is not named as such, and which operates in the infrastructural background, and therefore remains hidden – yet in plain sight. Surreptitious experiments take place outside the laboratory, without clear boundaries, meaningful consent or processes of accountability. In so doing, surreptitious experiments compound the power asymmetries of humanitarianism with significant risks and harms for some of the world’s most vulnerable people.
DECOLONISING THE INTERNET: EXPERIENCES OF (CYBER)BULLYING AND DEVELOPING COLLECTIVE CRITICAL CONSCIOUSNESS FOR YOUTH OF AFRICAN DESCENT IN ATHENS
Authors: Maqbool Kainaat , Liza Tsaliki
Published: February 2025

This study explores the intricate convergence of Afrophobia and its projection through (Cyber)Bullying for youth of African descent in Greece. It comprehensively documents the colonialistic nature of the internet and Western scholarship in perpetuating racial (cyber)bullying. Furthermore, the study experiments with the idea of $2 and its application to transform the internet into a race-sensitive industry.

The study bridges the gap in racially sensitive, decolonial research on (Cyber)Bullying by involving those affected as knowledge-holders in Creative Participatory Action Research. The findings advance AfroGreek youth's proclamation of social media as a breeding ground for racism and how their proactive participation can help reshape the internet. It also results in developing Critical Consciousness as mapped out through the knowledge-holders' involvement in Critical Action, Political Self-Efficacy, and Critical Reflection.

The output actively contributes to creating impactful internet-based interventions and towards a more inclusive and informed societal framework. Finally, the study proves the efficacy of critical and diverse involvement through the launch of a youth-directed $2 .
MONETIZING QUEERBAITING: BOYFRIEND DAILY CHECK-INS AS A STRATEGY TO ENGAGE QUEER FANDOM
Authors: Meng Fancheng
Published: February 2025

This study aims to investigate the increasingly prominent phenomenon of queerbaiting in Chinese social media, which is to bait and lure the queer audience in for an existing media text, through queer representations including erotica. With the development of streaming media and its innovative application in e-commerce especially during the COVID-19, social media platforms such as Douyin have become a rich site for economic and cultural analyses. This project is significant that since the Chinese government and platforms regulate queer content in a seemingly strict way, for example, those who express ‘abnormal’ sexual orientation will be banned. However, queerbaiting as a genre of media production still finds its way through short videos and gets away with tightened regulatory regimes. At the same time, Douyin’s huge monetization potential with e-commerce in various formats (e-gift-giving, sponsorship, advertorials) makes queerbaiting as a marketing strategy an indispensable part of Chinese social media that attracts scholarly and market attention. Furthermore, most queer content creators would self-present on the Douyin as straight especially when they engage with queerbaiting strategies, making both their media production sustainable in a tight regulatory regime and data accessible for my research. The study emphasizes a departure from fan-centred queerbaiting research and instead examines from the producer's perspective, dissecting the actions and goals of influencers to attract followers, monetize and profit by manipulating audience interpretations and queer imaginations as their strategies, at the same time, to navigate and protect themselves from homophobic regulatory and social environments.
TINDER FOR TEENS: AN IN-DEPTH EXPLORATION OF YOUTH INTIMATE CULTURES AND SEXUAL AND GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE ON SNAPCHAT
Authors: Milne Betsy , Ringrose Jessica , Horeck Tanya , Mendes Kaitlynn
Published: February 2025

Snapchat has long been a pivotal space for youth digital intimate and sexual cultures, as well as gendered and sexual risks and harms. Despite being one of the most widely used social media platforms among youth in England and America, there has been little in-depth research that connects Snapchat’s unique features and affordances with an analysis of young users’ practices, behaviours, and experiences on the platform. Responding to this gap, our paper explores our mixed-methods research findings on British young people’s diverse social, sexual, and intimate experiences on Snapchat. We explore how Snapchat’s unique features, such as disappearing images (“Snaps”), algorithmic friend recommendations (“Quick Adds”), and user engagement metric ("Snapscores”), form new conditions and environments for young people’s experiences of digital courtship, sexting, and sexual and gender-based violence. In addition, we contextualise youth user experiences with Snapchat’s community guidelines, safeguards, and protections for youth, which we argue fail to understand or address the actual lived experiences of youth users. We conclude with recommendations for interventions dedicated to increasing platform-specific digital literacy (particularly for parents, policymakers, and educators), and preventing and responding to youth experiences of online gendered risks and harm—while upholding their digital and sexual rights.
FINANCE APPS AND THE DATAFICATION OF CHILDREN’S ECONOMIC LIVES
Authors: Nansen Bjørn , Bliss Lauren
Published: February 2025

Children’s finances are increasingly datafied through the emergence and development of applications for managing chores, saving, and spending. These finance apps incorporate features for both parents and children, enabling the setting and tracking of chores, the payment of allowances or pocket money, as well as supporting and managing children’s saving and spending habits.

The paper draws on and contributes to children’s financial socialisation and digital platform studies. This paper offers a novel contribution to these fields, applying the concept of datafication to children’s financial lives through a feature analysis of children’s finance apps. The feature analysis reviews information in Appstore descriptions, company websites, and product reviews to identify and map the range of features spread across these apps.

Our analysis considers three emergent themes in which these apps are significantly impacting children’s financial lives: management of child household labour; mediation of children’s financial agency; and datafication of children’s economic participation.

We argue that the data produced by child finance apps simultaneously enables increased agency and control of children’s financial lives by initiating a lifelong digital trace.
MEASURING MISOGYNY: DEPP V HEARD AND THE LIMITS OF ATOMISTIC CONTENT MODERATION
Authors: Nelson Lucinda , Suzor Nicolas
Published: February 2025

Over the past decade, social media companies have come under increasing pressure to make their platforms safer for women. While they have made some changes to their policies and design, their foundational approach to content moderation has remained largely the same. Platforms continue to focus on identifying, assessing and responding to individual pieces of violating content, like overt hate speech, direct threats, and doxxing. This approach is ill-equipped to deal with structural harms like misogyny, which cannot be understood in terms of isolated instances, but instead as part of a continuum. ‘Everyday’ experiences of sexism and misogyny form part of the same dynamic as the more widely recognised, extreme forms of violence, but existing tools for identifying this type of harmful but not prohibited content are extremely limited.

This paper presents the preliminary findings of a study that investigates how everyday misogyny manifests on social media platforms, using the online discourse around the $2 trial as a case study. We use a combination of topic modelling and in-depth qualitative analysis of content, informed by the literature on believability and doubt in cases of domestic and sexual violence. We find that everyday misogyny is widespread, and manifests partly in double-standards and double-binds in the expectations imposed on Amber Heard. We aim to use these findings to develop new methods and frameworks for understanding misogyny in aggregate.
RECIPROCAL PLATFORM LABOUR IN THE NIGERIAN SOCIAL MEDIA VIDEO INDUSTRY
Authors: Nieborg David , Simon, Godwin Iretomiwa
Published: February 2025

This paper explores how content creators in the Nigerian social media video industry navigate the economic, infrastructural, and cultural logics of digital platforms through practices of reciprocal labour. As is the case in many global contexts, the economic formalization of social media platforms, such as YouTube, Facebook, and TikTok, have enabled the emergence of for-profit social media video production in Nigeria. This paper focuses on the under-studied intersection of platform logics and labour relations in this industry. Drawing on 10 semi-structured interviews with Nigerian content creators, combined with analysis of the domestic trade press, we observe that creators struggle to generate visibility in a highly saturated social media landscape. This visibility imperative is not unique to Nigeria. What sets Nigeria apart, however, is the local political economy of video production, which translates into high production costs, which are offset by orchestrating practices of informally organised reciprocal labour. Nigeria thus provides a relevant perspective to ongoing debates in platform research that seek more regional specificity and seek to decentre the Global North as their point of reference. To heed that call, the specific labour practices we highlight, those of reciprocal labour, reflect the broader informal economies and traditional kinship norms in Nigeria. Exploring this mode of work showcases the intersections among creative labour and cultural dynamics in a given national context vis-à-vis the unifying business models and centralized governance frameworks of platform companies.
SIMULATING SUBJECTIVITY - BAUDRILLARD AND THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF LLMS
Authors: Quelhas Freire Sebastião
Published: February 2025

Despite the rise in commercial applications of LLMs, scholarship has neglected an in-depth appreciation of the free contribution of subjects communicative social action as the engine of training data production as a necessary moment in digital processes of valorisation. This issue was popular in the analyses of the post-operaist tradition of free labour, but have since been missing in examinations of more recent technological developments, specifically in what concerns AI. Although the work of Baudrillard is semi-frequently evoked in descriptive critical assessments of new technologies, there is little integration of Baudrillard's work in contemporary studies of AI. This paper aims at contributing in this direction, by showcasing the utility of Baudrillard’s concepts of simulation, subject function, masses, and the social, for an understanding of immaterial free labour in the context of Large Language Models (LLMs).

Drawing from the recent phenomena of the sale of Reddit communications content to OpenAI as training data, I propose the notion of digital common as the pre-trained collected and recorded data of actual human communication through digital systems. I propose the framework of the subject function as expounded by Baudrillard, in both its individual and collective aspects, as a necessary conjuncture to understand how commercial applications of conversational LLMs fit into the broader landscape of digital political economy. I suggest that the role played in this specific application derives from the appropriation of freely generated user-data as constituting the digital common and as carrying a specific conception of subjectivity as functional.
‘IT’S A CANDY STORE. YOU CAN SEE THE CANDIES, BUT THE DOOR IS CLOSED.’ (NEURO)QUEERING THE HOOK-UP APP INDUSTRY IN NON-METROPOLITAN FINLAND.
Authors: Rawlings Richard Eric , Brown Genavee , Sorainen Antu , Thomas Lisa , Coventry Lynne
Published: February 2025

Industrial time and space produce marginalities and resistance: Queer time rejects linearity and potentiates alternate experiences (Halbertsam, 2005). Today, many experience phones or smartwatches as mediating temporal ruptures in daily lives (Mowlabocus, 2016), and hookup app industries monetise intimacies. Given permanent online connectivity, work and leisure are more porous than in a factory, yet corporate industries mediate marginal socialities. Industrious rural queers wrestle control of spatiotemporal intimacies from totalising platforms.

This study maps rural sexuality and hook-up app (dis)comfort and visualises whether hook-up contacts penetrate social networks. Seven semi-structured interviews took place in Finland. Three themes were determined: (in)visibility due to (fears of) marginalisation; categories and borders of app design inadequately reflecting indigenous/gendered, (neuro)queer, rural, linguistic, infrastructural and economic realities; and resisting spatiotemporal app logics.

History has shown the rise of industry as precariously subject to queer temporal forces lacking predictable directions, ultimately declining. Nonetheless, emergent digital industries, such as queer hookup apps, re-attempt to totalise expression via universal logic. They inadequately account for the cultural, linguistic, neurodiverse, gender diverse, disabled, indigenous and local contexts of queer lives beyond major cities, just as clock-time undermined working labourers while empowering colonial interests. We hope to demonstrate the ingenuity of users in questioning and queering social norms, with the hope of building improved digital queer social worlds that do not fetishise queer bodies as visible yet unreacable products for capitalist consumption but rather facilitate spatiotemporal possibilities that fulfil rural, queer, digital, and social needs.
CHINESE SMART CITY, AN ORGANIC ENTITY IN THE AGE OF AI: A GENEALOGY OF CHINESE SMART CITY METAPHORS
Authors: Shen Jie
Published: February 2025

Since the 1980s, Chinese cities have been built based on the image of a mechanized city. Maçães perceives them as a product “in the age of mechanical reproduction”, repressing "genuine spontaneity; the stirrings and desires of life”. However, with the increasing integration of digital and intelligent technologies in Chinese cities, smart cities with a new image are rising. They are imagined as organic entities, a human brain, namely "City Bain". The City Brain is anticipated to sense what happening in the city in real time and make overall decisions. More importantly, the organic smart city is expected to dedicate to serving the people.

These two contrasting images represent a shift in Chinese visions of intelligent technologies' role in society. In contrast to mechanic cities, the organic entities concerns more about citizens' role in an intelligent environment and how this intelligent environment reconfigures the governance mode. Then the questions are: What does this organic metaphor mean, why it has emerged, why it is so important that local government even made a regulation centering this metaphor?

Through the combination of the fieldwork and discourse analysis, this work studies the genealogy of the discursive developments of Chinese smart city metaphors. AS a result, this study identifies the hidden historical undertakings and societal strivings behind current metaphor of organic entity. This work also casts a light to the shift from mechanization to intelligentization in China, by analyzing and outlining the features of the intelligent transformation in China.
HOW FACT-CHECKERS ARE BECOMING MACHINE LEARNERS: A CASE OF META’S THIRD PARTY PROGRAMME
Authors: Skop Yarden , Schjøtt Hansen Anna
Published: February 2025

A recent development in the field of fact-checking is what some scholars call the “debunking turn” in which fact-checking organisations move from fact-checking expressions of politicians and public figures to checking claims made on social media. A main driver of this change is the proliferation of a paid program initiated by Meta, where fact-checkers check and label claims on the platform in exchange for monetary remuneration. This paper draws on interviews with and fieldwork amongst fact-checkers who are or have been part of the Meta partnership. Based on the empirical insights we argue that the human-machine assemblage in fact-checking is (1) enabling a move beyond the ‘debunking turn’ by turning journalists into ‘machine learners’ and (2) cements a ‘politics of demarcation’ in which public contestation over public facts is diminished and moved into networked infrastructures.

With this argument, the paper highlights an additional aspect of the platformisation of journalism, as the labelling and claim-checking work of journalists now also enables large tech platforms to expand technical infrastructures that commodify journalistic work by turning it into training data aimed at improving their ML systems and algorithms. This enables platforms to move further beyond their current market role, as they also participate in the further industrialisation and standardisation of fact-checking. As large tech companies become industry leaders in the provision of ML systems, for example, for fact-checking, the need to understand what politics they produce equally increases, as they become integral in the production of democratic ideals of citizens and public debate.
AI AS “UNSTOPPABLE” AND OTHER INEVITABILITY NARRATIVES IN TECH: ON THE ENTANGLEMENT OF INDUSTRY, IDEOLOGY, AND OUR COLLECTIVE FUTURES
Authors: Tacheva Zhasmina , Appedu Sarah , Wright Mirakle
Published: February 2025

The world today is awash with narratives of artificial intelligence (AI) as an "inevitable," "unstoppable" force destined to "revolutionize" society. Using the concept of "entanglement" from Black and Indigenous feminist science, technology, and society studies, we provide a critical examination of the AI industry's complex intersections with sociopolitical dynamics, technological determinism, and oppression. Instead of viewing AI advancement as a predetermined path, we show how this perspective is socially constructed and has dire consequences for the environment and society alike, especially for marginalized communities in the global and local Souths.

Using discourse analysis and critical quantitative techniques, we analyze the discourses surrounding AI, examining over 1,200 pieces of digital content to show how language shapes both technology's development and our collective imaginations. By tracing the ideological roots of AI back to colonial and eugenic practices, we demonstrate the industry's deep entanglement with interlocking systems of oppressions.
THE TECHNOPOLITICS OF WAITING: CASE STUDIES OF AI TRAINING IN CHINA AND HOMELESS SERVICES SYSTEMS IN THE U.S.
Authors: Tracey Pelle , Zhang, Ben Zefeng , Garcia Patricia , Haimson Oliver , Thomas Michaelanne
Published: February 2025

Many theorists of the information economy have argued that digitization has resulted in a “speeding up” of our experience of time (i.e. Gleick, 1999). This work contends that for many, especially those with less power, the techno-utopian vision characterized by datafication and Artificial Intelligence (AI) instead produces a state of prolonged waiting. Drawing from two long-term ethnographic studies examining the production and implementation phases of data-driven technologies in China and U.S., we demonstrate how the “long-standing but mistaken belief, hegemonic in Silicon Valley, that automation will deliver us more time” (Wajcman, 2019) belies the highly stratified temporal impacts of automation, datafication, and AI. Specifically, this work uses AI training and the homeless services system as case studies to reveal the politics of waiting; despite the promise of data-driven technologies, pervasive waiting serves as evidence of an enduring residue—an unequal power structure. Our findings also suggest that the technologies which mediated the experience of waiting in the first, more immediate sense, also impacted how people conceptualize the future.
HAIRY INDUSTRIES: THE POLITICS OF ADVERTISING HAIR PRODUCTS AND SERVICES TO SOUTH AFRICA ON FACEBOOK AND INSTAGRAM
Authors: Walton Marion , Aderibigbe Deborah
Published: February 2025

This paper investigates messaging by smaller businesses in the hair and beauty industries in South Africa who use targeted ads to promote products and services to Facebook and Instagram users in South Africa. These ads are currently not considered “political” ads, despite the fact that racialised notions of hair and beauty have played and continue to play a key role in white supremacist discourses in South Africa. Using the Facebook Ad Library, we obtained a purposive sample of ads posted to Meta platforms over a six month period (N=558) by 99 different advertisers whose ads matched the query “hair”. We review image-based adverts in this sample, asking how visual signifiers of gender and ethnicity address potential consumers and represent their hair. Multimodal content analysis was used with the aim of identifying current micro-targeting practices on the platforms. Our analysis of the messaging about hair in the ads found hegemonic racial ideologies and binary gendering in campaigns addressing ethnically differentiated audiences of women in SA. The relative absence of men from the messaging suggested that the burdens and pleasures of hair care and maintenance remain distinctly feminised while the hair industry is actively involved in production of gender. WoC were targeted with messaging which, at best, promoted a new aesthetic or promised to save money or time. At worst, it was promoting harmful products and perpetuating racialised discourses. Built on dataveillance, such micro-targeting may be fuelling feedback loops that further entrench the country’s extreme racialised inequality.
WHEN INDUSTRY LORE DOESN'T WORK: EXPLORING MCNS' LIMITED INTERMEDIARY ROLES IN PROMOTIONAL CULTURE
Authors: Ye Zhen
Published: February 2025

Originating as supplementary firms that operate in and around YouTube’s advertising infrastructure, Multichannel Networks (MCNs) have become a renewed form of cultural intermediaries shaping platform-based cultural production (Lobato 2016; Craig and Cunningham 2019). The emergence of MCNs represents “an opportunity to revisit some elements of the theory base around intermediaries and update it for the platform economy” (Lobato 2016, 350). To hold with this appeal, this research investigates MCNs’ operations in the context of China’s e-commerce livestreaming industry and rethinks its position within the complicated social commerce landscape based on a three-month participatory observation (from December 2021 to March 2022) taken place in an MCN organization (pseudonymised as W company) in Guangzhou, China. For providing a more grounded analysis, 15 in-depth interviews with media professionals working in MCNs (within and outside W company) or working in the e-commerce livestreaming sector as content creator, advertiser, or manufacturer were also included. I employ the concepts of “trade stories” (Caldwell, 2008) and “industry lore” (Havens, 2014) to describe MCNs professionals’ meaning-making practices when navigating a complex network of actors including platforms, livestreamers, brands and retailers. Whilst MCNs are important “platform complementors” (Poell, Nieborg and Duffy 2022, 11) fulfilling an intermediary role in compliance with platforms’ commercial logics, practitioners also struggle to keep up with the changing business models. The deeply integrated components between cultural production and marketing activities in MCNs’ work are supported and determined by the digital platforms they operate around, making the MCNs’ intermediary roles limited, contingent, and oftentimes failing.
SEX AS/AND/ON SOCIAL MEDIA
Authors: Monea Alexander , McGlotten Shaka , Paasonen Susanna , Sundén Jenny , Tiidenberg Katrin , Jacobsson Robert
Published: February 2025

Sex is central to the internet. It exists everywhere online and yet is everywhere constrained, sanitized, normalized, and invisibilized. This panel will investigate the ways in which sex seeps, spills, and oozes across boundaries, both online and off, despite efforts to control and limit its impact beyond consumer capitalism. Author 1 examines online ‘gooning’ communities, oriented around prolonged masturbation sessions to multiple streams of pornography. Gooners build community around the fetishization and roleplaying of porn addiction, but simultaneously produce a problematic queerness that reifies some elements of heteronormativity. Author 2 examines the ways that Generative AI imagines queerness, probing AI systems by asking them to imagine the figure of the ‘twink’. The end result is “glitchcraft,” which refers to creative practices of engagement that underscore the excitatory enchantments of generative AI, their frustrating constraints, and the accidents–exploited or serendipitous–that might result. Authors 3, 4, and 5 examine alternative social media aimed specifically at enabling users to engage in sexual expression. They document both the affordances of these platforms for creating sex-positive and kink-friendly online spaces, and their constraints, as they introduce new norms, and thus new forms of exclusion and marginalization. Author 6 examines anal sex practices as mediated by gay hook-up apps like Grindr and shows how these apps increasingly mediate larger portions of gay men’s everyday lives. Grindr inflects the way they imagine, propose, seek out, and react to a diverse spectrum of anal activities (such as fisting, spanking, caressing, and rimming).
SEXUAL CONTENT MODERATION
Authors: Monea Alexander , Are Carolina , Stegeman Hanne , Franco Rébecca , Stardust Zahra
Published: February 2025

Despite popular understandings of the internet teeming with pornography and offering safe harbor for LGBTQIA+ content, social media platforms are cracking down on sexual expression and sex work online. This panel examines the role that content moderation and platform governance play in censoring sexual expression online and the communities that engage in it. It documents the impact that censorship, banning, shadowbanning, and demonetization have on internet communities and highlights potential alternatives for platform governance. Author 1 examines the pole dancing community on Instagram and the impact that banning, shadowbanning, and content takedowns have on its constituents. In particular, she examines the impact that Instagram’s new ‘Account Status’ feature has had on pole dancers’ labor to manage their visibility on the platform. Author 2 examines the role that early cisheteronormative content moderation practices have had on shaping the algorithmic imaginary of Queer TikTok. He shows that it has resulted in ‘algorithmic folk remedies’ – like ‘algospeak’ – that are still used by Queer TikTokers in attempts to avoid demonetization, shadowbanning, and/or deplatforming. Authors 3 and 4 examine erotic webcam streamers and platforms and document the ways in which webcam platform policies work to discipline the labor of erotic webcam streamers. Content moderation is leveraged to keep streamers on the platform and capture their revenue streams. Author 5 examines how new and emerging independent small-scale platforms and cooperatives moderate sexual content. She documents the incredible difficulty of maintaining an alternative, sex positive, business model in the current political and economic landscape.
INDUSTRY TENSIONS: LABOR SUBJECTIVITIES AND SELF-REINVENTION IN PLATFORM WORK
Authors: Arriagada Arturo , Duffy Brooke , Glatt Zoe , Wissinger Elizabeth , Wood Rachel
Published: February 2025

To move beyond the framework of platform labor as either exploitative or empowering, this panel considers intricate forms of self-reinvention within the realm of cultural work. Our inquiries into the labor subjectivities that emerge from processes of adaptation to platform work are oriented around the cultures, practices, and ideals of social media influencer careers.

These papers discuss the mechanisms by which different actors within the influencer industry navigate constantly changing organizational environments, a crucial aspect of what it takes for them to thrive across industries and labor markets. This involves reinventing themselves in an ever-changing technological environment, coping with being subjects of permanent control and evaluation by customers and employers, and making sense of their activities in highly-commercial environments. Consequently, notions of labor and value remain in a continuous state of contestation and redefinition within the influencer industry. The papers span topics ranging from visibility and authenticity to the reinvention of work through platform engagements, as well as the role intermediaries play in the quantification and qualification of influencer activities.
Pengaruh Media Digital Power Point Interaktif Terhadap Hasil Belajar Siswa Kelas IV di SD
Authors: Sari Riska Amelia , Hasim Wahid , Mulyanto Tri
Published: February 2025

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menganalisi hasil belajar siswa dengan menggunakan media digital powert point interaktif terhadap hasil belajar siswa kelas IV  di  SD Negeri 2 Riang Bandung.Metode dalam penelitian ini menggunakan metode kuantiatif dengan jenis penelitian eksperimen semu (quasi-experimental design).Untuk mengukur pretest dan posttest.Desain yang digunakan adalah One-Group Pretest dan posttest serta menggunsksn sampling jenuh karna populasinya yang relatif sedikit dengan 20 responden.Dari pengolahan data diperoleh nilai uji normalitas  Shapiro Wilk dengan nilai pretest sebesar 111 dan nilai sig dari postest sebesar 084 dapat disimpulkan bahwa data pretest dan posttest berdistribusi normal.Hasil uji paired sample t-test  adalah 0,000 < 0,05. Selisih antara pretest dan posttest adalah 55.25000. Maknanya hipotesis nol (Ho) ditolak dan (Ha) diterima bahwasannya pembelajaran dengan menggunakan powerpoint interaktif dapat meningkatkan hasil belajar siswa.
The Interplay Between Antibiotics and Probiotics: Implications on Gut Health and Antibiotic Efficacy The Interplay Between Antibiotics and Probiotics: Implications on Gut Health and Antibiotic Efficacy
Authors: Bhattacharjee Ushika , Joy Shradha Parvathy , Balaprakash Bhavani Aruna Rajeswari , Seetharaman Vinay
Published: February 2025

Patients undergoing antibiotic treatment are susceptible to antibiotic-associated diarrhea (AAD), which can lead to complications such as dehydration and longer hospital stays. Research indicates that probiotics can significantly reduce the incidence of C. difficile-associated diarrhea by up to 66%. These beneficial microorganisms help restore gut flora balance and enhance the intestinal barrier, making them effective in preventing and treating AAD in both children and adults. Probiotics exert their effects by modulating the immune response and inhibiting pathogen adhesion. Although numerous studies highlight the efficacy of various probiotic strains in managing infections, further standardized clinical trials are essential to validate these results and optimize treatment protocols.

Key words: AAD, Antibiotic, Probiotic, C. difficile, Gut flora
‘De hut' van Adriaen van de Velde
Authors: Schatborn Peter
Published: February 2025

In het artikel ‘«De Hut» van Adriaen van de Velde’ werden de afbeeldingen nr. 1 (blz. 160) en nr. 7 (blz. 164) abusievelijk verwisseld.
EVOLUSI PEMIKIRAN EKONOMI ISLAM KARYA MUHAMMAD ABDUL MANNAN: KAJIAN LITERATUR HISTORIS
Authors: Susila Haryadi Jaka
Published: February 2025

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk menyelidiki evolusi pemikiran ekonomi Islam yang diusung oleh Muhammad Abdul Mannan dari sudut pandang historis. Dengan fokus pada perkembangan teori dan konsep yang diperkenalkan oleh Mannan, penelitian ini menganalisis bagaimana gagasan-gagasannya telah mengalami perubahan dan perkembangan sepanjang waktu. Lebih jauh, penelitian ini juga mengeksplorasi dampak dari evolusi tersebut terhadap teori ekonomi Islam secara keseluruhan. Metodologi yang digunakan meliputi kajian literatur yang mendalam serta analisis kritis terhadap karya- karya Mannan, guna memberikan pemahaman yang lebih komprehensif mengenai kontribusi dan perubahan dalam kerangka pemikiran ekonomi Islam. Hasil dari penelitian ini diharapkan dapat memberikan wawasan baru tentang dinamika pemikiran ekonomi Islam dan memberikan kontribusi terhadap diskursus akademik dalam bidang ini.
A Review on Exercise Addiction in Mainland China
Authors:   Department of Counselling & Psychology, Hong Kong Shue Yan University, Hong Kong, China., So Kum Tang Catherine
Published: February 2025

The booming health and fitness industry in mainland China represents a positive shift towards greater health consciousness. While regular exercise is beneficial, over-exercising can lead to significant physical and mental health issues.
A 42-Year-Old Man with a Solitary Kidney
Authors:   Department of Medicine, Bugando Medical Centre & Catholic University of Health and Allied Sciences, Mwanza, Tanzania., Kalokola Fredrick
Published: February 2025

It is estimated that 1/2000 people have a solitary kidney and they are at risk for developing arterial hypertension and impaired renal function [1]. Hypertension is an independent risk factor for progression of renal disease in people born with a solitary kidney.
Volume 4, Issue 2 Foreward
Authors: Phillips John
Published: February 2025

Nearly 1 million souls were claimed in the 22-year period of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815), mostly from disease and deprivation, rather than from battlefield casualties.(1) Napoleon may have been unable to truly grasp the unheralded magnitude of the human suffering that lay in the wake of his campaigns but he was also responsible for establishing the first ambulance corps, battle-ready surgeons, and medical supply depots.(2) He was also concerned about the medical preparedness and training of civilian doctors who, ultimately, may have been called upon to serve a military role. As early as 1801, Napoleon established what we would recognize today as a resident physician and a kind of hierarchy that differentiated novices from the chiefs. The 2023 film Napoleon made no mention of the Emperor’s role in graduate medical education (GME) (focusing instead on the subjugation of mere nations) but his contemporaries sure did. In this issue of the Journal, Hunt et al. provide the important time line, from Napoleon Bonaparte to Hugh Hampton Young, of the development of the formal residency training program in urology whose goal of producing outstanding urologists has remained unchanged for 100 years.(3) The steerage of great programs falls on one shoulder- the Chair. One can little envy the person who would follow in Young’s pioneering footsteps at Hopkins. Grutman, from Baltimore, uses primary archival materials from the ‘Brady’ itself to relate to us the search for Young’s succesor, which intially fell upon the future Nobel prize winner, Charles Huggins. (4) There are many descendants and lineages from good training programs. Some individuals have such great influence in subsequent generations, that there contributions must be celebrated, perhaps to relive or even inspire us. Herr and Hadley provide us with a biography of RW Barnes, the California urologist who spent decades volunteering in underserved continents around the world.(5) Another Californian, the urologist Elmer Belt, was a founding member of UCLA’s medical school and whose nephew, Willard Goodwin, was the first chair of UCLA’s urology department. Belt was a devouted historian and we hope would have approved of the Journal. He and Frank Bicknell had first conceived of the idea of a Urology History forum at the annual meeting as early as 1965.(6) Belt also owned the most extensive collection of items related to Leondardo Da Vinci which later became the Library of Vinciana, part of UCLA. Hines et al. here report Belt’s pioneering clinical activity as the first urologist in the USA performing gender affirmation surgery (GAS), and the comprehensive steps he undertook, with others, to ensure high quality outcomes.(7)