Journal description
“Not only a key resource for keeping up to date in this fast-moving field, this journal is proving a vital resource for wide-ranging, insightful analyses of the social contexts and consequences of new information and communication technologies.” Sonia Livingstone
New Media & Society is an international journal that provides an interdisciplinary forum for the examination of the social dynamics of media and information change.
New Media & Society engages in critical discussions of the key issues arising from the scale and speed of new media development, drawing on a wide range of disciplinary perspectives and on both theoretical and empirical research.
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This journal is a member of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
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Journal Feed
- by Simin Michelle ChenNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Based on social identity theory and the resilience literature, this study explored the ways social media impacted Asian Americans’ emotional well-being, racial identity negotiation, and coping strategies amid the surge in anti-Asian discourses during the Covid-19 pandemic. We interviewed 32 Asian Americans aged 18–59 (M = 26.63, SD = 7.66; 28% = Ethnic Chinese) who had experienced anti-Asian sentiment on social media during the pandemic. Our study shows that social media played a contradictory role in how Asian Americans experience and cope with the surge in anti-Asian sentiment. Findings from our thematic analysis demonstrate that (1) the negative experiences […]
- by Nicole KashianNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. A 2 (influencer type: nano with 5000 followers vs mega with 1.1 million followers) × 2 (influencer self-disclosure: low depth vs high depth) between-subjects online experiment tested the different pathways social media influencers take to achieve persuasion outcomes in one model. Participants viewed an Instagram influencer’s profile page with either 5000 or 1.1 million followers, and a post from the influencer with either low or high depth self-disclosure. Participants then answered questions regarding social attraction, parasocial relationship, perceived expertise, persuasion outcomes, covariates, and demographic information. Results showed three serial pathways facilitate persuasion: two pathways through […]
- by Yu GuoNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This study investigates the impact of Fitspiration on women’s body shame and sexual assertiveness. By integrating the tripartite influence model’s focus on media influence with self-objectification theory, we explore the mechanisms connecting Fitspiration consumption to female sexual autonomy. Specifically, we examine the mediating roles of perceived realism, ideal body internalization, appearance comparison, and body shame, as well as the moderating effect of social media usage habits. Data from 818 Chinese women were analyzed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. The results indicate that exposure to Fitspiration content increases perceived realism, which in […]
- by Jason NgNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. There has been much debate concerning the changing nature of cultural production and distribution in the digital creative economy. Music production work has been especially affected by promotional conventions established by social media and music streaming platforms. This article critically builds atop perspectives on the platformisation of cultural production to investigate how independent hip-hop music producers develop their careers in the era of digital media platforms. It examines how traditional media and digital platform gatekeepers affect producers’ abilities to professionalise, promote creative work to audiences and manage precarious conditions for their labour. Insights […]
- by Sedona ChinnNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Calls to “do your own research” (DYOR) on social media promote a range of claims, from expert-recommended treatments to conspiracy theories. Exploring how the slogan is used offers insight into how individuals navigate concerns about information accuracy in an abundant but low-trust media ecosystem. This quantitative content analysis investigates how DYOR messages in Facebook and Instagram posts about reproductive health, food and diet, and vaccination are used to raise alarms, promote personal agency, and disclaim responsibility. We additionally examine how DYOR messages are associated with content including risk information and product promotion. While […]
- by Chelly MaesNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This study explored youth’s intention to engage in active bystander behavior in response to non-consensual forwarding of sexts (NCFS). The study paid attention to the possible conditional boundaries of these suggested dynamics based on youth’s empathy levels and sex. An online survey was conducted among 1337 Belgian respondents, of which 78.4% were female (Mage = 21.64 years, SD = 3.57 years). Structural equation modeling showed that positive attitude and injunctive norms, higher descriptive norms, and greater perceived behavioral control regarding active bystander behaviors in the context of NCFS were related to youth’s intention […]
- by Mengxue OuNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. The evolution of artificial intelligence (AI) facilitates the creation of multimodal information of mixed quality, intensifying the challenges individuals face when assessing information credibility. Through in-depth interviews with users of generative AI platforms, this study investigates the underlying motivations and multidimensional approaches people use to assess the credibility of AI-generated information. Four major motivations driving users to authenticate information are identified: expectancy violation, task features, personal involvement, and pre-existing attitudes. Users evaluate AI-generated information’s credibility using both internal (e.g. relying on AI affordances, content integrity, and subjective expertise) and external approaches (e.g. iterative […]
- by Emilija GagrčinNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Algorithms profoundly shape user experiences on digital platforms, raising concerns about their negative impacts and highlighting the importance of algorithm literacy. Research on individuals’ understanding of algorithms and their effects is expanding rapidly but lacks a cohesive framework. We conducted a systematic integrative literature review across social sciences and humanities (n = 169), addressing algorithm literacy in terms of its key conceptualizations and the endogenous, exogenous, and personal factors that influence it. We argue that existing research can be framed in terms of experiential learning cycles and outline how this approach can be […]
- by Saifuddin AhmedNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This study advances the theoretical understanding of the effects of incidental news exposure on political knowledge by probing the mechanisms through which exposure transfers to learning. Two studies in the U.S. across both non-election and election settings test the centrality of political discussion on social media with strong and weak ties in explaining this relationship. Findings across both studies show no significant direct associations between incidental news exposure and political knowledge. However, mediation analyses suggest that incidental news exposure can influence political knowledge when mediated by interpersonal political conversations on social media: discussions […]
- by Zizhong ZhangNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Building upon platform-swinging, this study introduces the concept of identity-driven “group-swinging” within a single platform, focusing on how users with multiple minority identities strategically curate corresponding identities through this process. Collecting all created and engaged posts (n = 31,084) from 102 lesbian gamers in both lesbian gamer and female gamer groups, this research utilizes structural topic modeling to delineate their productive and consumptive curation across different groups. The results indicate that lesbian gamers often prioritize discussions on women and queer issues within the female gamer community while presenting a more gamer-centric identity in […]
- by Sarah RousselNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. The gynaecological examination (GE) is a major public health issue, with bad experiences of this examination widely reported as a disincentive to cervical cancer screening. In France, a movement to denounce gynaecological and obstetrical violence is expressed through a massive publication of testimonies on social networks. Via a socio-representational approach and from a critical gender perspective, this article aims to explore how people use digital media to communicate about the GE, and to analyse the experiences related to the GE and the representation systems underlying them. Using an inductive strategy, a corpus of […]
- by Tommaso TrillòNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This article investigates the characteristics and communicative values of the popular PoV meme on TikTok to uncover mechanisms of community building on the platform. An analysis of the content, form, and stance of 250 videos revealed that creators of PoV memes lip-sync to audio remediated from pop culture and mimic how they imagine “you” would act in a given scenario. I offer the concept of “echoic affiliation” to describe how PoV memes leverage TikTok’s “use this sound” function to construct ephemeral bonds between users. Furthermore, PoV memes textually articulate multiple perspectives, producing intersubjective […]
- by Darja WischerathNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. The mainstreaming of conspiracy narratives has been associated with a rise in violent offline harms, from harassment, vandalism of communications infrastructure, assault, and in its most extreme form, terrorist attacks. Group-level emotions of anger, contempt, and disgust have been proposed as a pathway to legitimizing violence. Here, we examine expressions of anger, contempt, and disgust as well as violence, threat, hate, planning, grievance, and paranoia within various conspiracy narratives on Parler. We found significant differences between conspiracy narratives for all measures and narratives associated with higher levels of offline violence showing greater levels […]
- by Sara Van BruysselNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Drawing from a two-year ethnography with sixteen adults in Flanders and Brussels, Belgium, this study disentangles the social, material, and individual obstacles experienced in day-to-day life that hinder and foster digital well-being. Findings show how these obstacles are interrelated, laying bare the tensions that cut across social relations, digital devices, and spaces. Moreover, (gendered) responsibilities and social relations impact whether someone can, or even desires, to overcome obstacles to digital well-being. We thus observed a “constrained agency” that limited individual efforts in feeling digitally well. Emphasizing the relational characteristics of connected everyday life, […]
- by Tzlil SharonNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This article explores how podcasters address their invisible—and thus imagined—audience. Based on in-depth interviews, we examine how different ways of imagining the listener evoke specific strategies of addressivity and analyze the connection between these imaginaries and the concept of intimacy as understood and performed by podcasters. We introduce a working definition of the “imagined podcast listener” and present a typology of eight types of imagined relationships between podcaster and audience. By juxtaposing these findings with the contexts in which podcasters describe “intimacy,” we argue that while podcasters may envision a diverse audience, their […]
- by Ziyu DengNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Female gamers have long suffered from gender-based online abuse in the gaming community. Apart from commonly observed quitting and gender-masking behaviors from female gamers, this study explores what female gamers understand as sexism, how female gamers react to it, and why they choose certain reactions instead of others. Findings show that female gamers are keenly conscious of normalized sexism in gaming culture, and thus often prioritize preventing personal interaction with strangers online, resulting in their shared preference for gaming with trusted acquaintances, which makes gaming an online-offline juxtaposition. Shouldering gender norms in doubled […]
- by Nataliia LabaNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. As a sociotechnical practice at the nexus of humans, machines, and visual culture, text-to-image generation relies on verbal prompts as the primary technique to guide generative models. To align desired aesthetic outcomes with computer vision, human prompters engage in extensive experimentation, leveraging the model’s affordances through prompting for style. Focusing on the interplay between machine originality and repetition, this study addresses the dynamics of human-model interaction on Midjourney, a popular generative model (version 6) hosted on Discord. It examines style modifiers that users of visual generative media add to their prompts and addresses […]
- by Mengyu LiNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This study proposes affordances for discursive opportunities (ADO) as a theoretical framework that leverages the concept of technological affordances and the theory of discursive opportunities to understand platform potential in shaping social media activism. Specifically, ADO underscores how social media platform affordances (e.g., algorithmic curation, shared group identity and culture, connectivity) shape movement visibility, resonance, and legitimacy, all of which can mobilize activism efforts. We further situate our discussion in the cross-platform context to explore both differences and interconnections between different platforms in facilitating digital activism. By analyzing 20,363,128 English posts related to […]
- by Britta C BrugmanNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Misinformation thrives on social media, prompting much research into social media interventions such as debunks. This paper tests debunking’s effectiveness against an understudied but prominent form of online misinformation: misleading organizational claims of corporate social responsibility, or CSR-washing. British participants (N = 657) took part in a preregistered experiment with a 2 (debunk: present, absent) x 3 (CSR-washing: greenwashing, bluewashing, purplewashing) between-subjects design. They saw an Instagram ad from a fictional clothing company that showcased its dedication to environmental sustainability, gender equality in the workplace, or the elimination of child labor. Half of […]
- by Je Hoon ChaeNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Efforts to scale up fact-checking through technology, such as artificial intelligence (AI), are increasingly being suggested and tested. This study examines whether previously observed effects of reading fact-checks remain constant when readers are aware of AI’s involvement in the fact-checking process. We conducted three online experiments (N = 3,978), exposing participants to fact-checks identified as either human-generated or AI-assisted, simulating cases where AI fully generates the fact-check or automatically retrieves human fact-checks. Our findings indicate that the persuasive effect of fact-checking, specifically in increasing truth discernment, persists even among participants without a positive […]