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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Journal Feed
- by Elisabeth Van den AbeeleNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Given the number of identified risks associated with influencer sharenting, momfluencers are increasingly adopting a more mindful approach to sharing information about their children online. Prior qualitative research suggests that followers respond positively towards these mindful sharenting practices, especially when motives are communicated. However, there is a lack of experimental exploration into this finding and its potential explanations. Therefore, drawing upon theoretical insights regarding self-disclosure and self-determination theory, this experimental study with 176 mothers seeks to investigate the impact of momfluencers providing an explanation regarding mindful sharenting practices, proposing the need for relatedness […]
- by Tamar AshuriNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. In recent years, public institutions have turned to data-driven firms for solutions to the many complex operational challenges they face. This study explores the growing ties between public institutions and data-driven firms by focusing on the case of the Tel Aviv Municipality and a (data-driven) startup accelerator it established in the city. Based on semi-structured interviews with the Municipality staff and with representatives of the data-driven firms in the accelerator, I present a grounded framework that outlines the characteristics of the resulting collaboration and describes the mechanisms that facilitate and contain the dynamic […]
- by Sara ReinisNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This article employs Critical Technocultural Discourse Analysis (CTDA) to analyze the affective public surrounding the hashtag #christiantiktok. We find that “Christian TikTok” discursively negotiates the unpredictable visibility affordances of TikTok’s algorithm by ascribing layers of spiritual significance to how the algorithm delivers content. Our research uncovered four key themes to this spiritualized conceptualization of algorithmically controlled visibility: (1) Algorithm as directed by the hand of God, (2) Context collapse as an evangelism opportunity, (3) Boosting visibility as a spiritual obligation, and (4) Invisibility as persecution. Following our analysis, we develop an understanding of […]
- by Shuaishuai WangNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. With 600 million daily users in 2020, Douyin faced monetization challenges after increased advertising led to a decline in user engagement. The app pivoted successfully to “shoppable videos” and livestream shopping by operating as a retail infrastructure. This article analyzes this transformation, arguing that Douyin strategically limits data availability, creating an artificial scarcity for capturing advertising and infrastructural rents. This approach is sustained by Douyin’s carefully crafted vision for career and business success derived from data’s speculative value. The app established reciprocal relationships with music creators and later video creators and sellers through […]
- by Myojung ChungNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. The double-edged nature of generative artificial intelligence (AI) underscores the importance of understanding complex and paradoxical public views about this emerging technology. Heeding to this call, this study examined how the general public perceives and reacts to Chat GPT and the implications of these perceptions, drawing on the third-person and first-person effect. A national survey in the United States (N = 1004) revealed that individuals tend to believe they would personally benefit from the positive influence of Chat GPT, while others will benefit relatively less. Also, results showed that people believe that self is more […]
- by Atsushi NakagomiNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. The study identifies the predictors of four patterns of shift in Internet use and frequency among older adults from the pre-COVID-19 to later stages of the pandemic. Our data included 4699 participants from a nation-wide panel study, the Japan Gerontological Evaluation Study from 2019 to 2022. The findings demonstrated that 322 of 1884 (17.1%) nonusers initiated Internet use in 2019, while 418 of 2815 (14.8%) users discontinued Internet use in 2019. Older age, low education, and low population density predicted less initiation, greater discontinuation, less increase, and more decrease in Internet use. Participation […]
- by Tom DivonNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Our article delves into the emergence of ‘kidfluencers’ within the content creator economy, highlighting how children’s participation intertwines their identities with monetisation strategies on platforms. Focusing on TikTok, we blend ethnographic and legal analysis of 215 videos from 23 kidfluencers in Israel, New Zealand and the Unites States, illuminating the complexities of monetising childhood across cultures. We highlight four monetisation and visibility practices in which children are exposed, mobilised and commodified in their parents’ content: (1) kids as props; brands as playmates, (2) transactional childhood, (3) aspirational child-ification and (4) regulative parenthood. Our […]
- by Ali UnluNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This study investigates online hate speech in Finland, particularly Twitter messages targeting people of Muslim faith and the LGBTQ+ community, using a mixed-methods approach that combines quantitative text classification with a BERT model and qualitative thematic analysis via BERTopic and examination of highly interacted posts from 2018 to 2023. The study shows increasing instances of hate speech occurring online, primarily against Muslims, with topic modeling uncovering 32 topics for Muslims and 41 for the LGBTQ+ community, featuring themes of violence, cultural conflict, and challenges to traditional values. The LGBTQ+ community is depicted as […]
- by Tali GazitNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Social media has become instrumental for older adults in maintaining social connections, which are an integral component of older adults’ well-being. However, little is known about how daily positive/negative social media emotional experiences are associated with older adults’ subjective views of aging. The current study examined daily emotional experiences related to WhatsApp groups and their association with subjective age (feeling younger/older than one’s chronological age). Data were collected from 42 Israeli older adults who confirmed daily WhatsApp usage (Mage = 74.30, SD = 8.39). Participants reported their daily WhatsApp emotional experiences in family/other groups and daily subjective […]
- by Fatima GawNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This study investigates gray areas of contemporary political campaigning from a political economy perspective. Using qualitative field and digital methods, computational methods, and economic modeling, it analyzes the scope, scale, and cost of commissioning social media influencers in the 2022 Philippine Elections across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok. The researchers find that there is a high demand for influencers to campaign for candidates, characterized by premium and dynamic incentives under informal and obscure arrangements. We identified 1425 influencer accounts across the four social media platforms that engage in covert political campaigning and categorized […]
- by Rohan GroverNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Research on user experiences with datafication, the transformation of social life into data, identifies “digital resignation” and “privacy cynicism” as rational responses to feeling overwhelmed and disempowered. But how, exactly, do shared feelings and emotions mediate relationships between datafication and disengaged responses – both individually and institutionally? We develop a relational analysis of datafication, deploying an infrastructural perspective and drawing on affect theory to develop the concept of data disaffection, which we define as the structural cultivation of accepting data accumulation as inevitable. Data disaffection is a structure of feeling that conditions processes […]
- by Arttu SiltalaNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. We suggest that the theory of group styles, based on the pragmatist idea of people creatively using cultural tools for meaning-making, can be a fruitful way forward to study the cultures of anonymous online communities such as imageboards. We argue that users creatively build these ‘glocal’ cultures on affordances but also globally disseminated cultural toolkits of, in this case, imageboards. We present such an empirical analysis of Ylilauta, a Finnish-language imageboard with important similarities but also differences to previously studied English-language imageboards such as 4chan. Users of Ylilauta construct strong social boundaries, bonds […]
- by Justine HumphryNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This article examines emerging online safety issues for Australian teenagers (12–17 years) in their use of social media, apps and online games drawing on findings from a multi-phase, mixed-methods research project carried out from January 2022 to July 2023. Based on the research, we develop a new understanding of ‘social digital dilemmas’, situating our analysis within the rapidly changing social media environment that uses algorithmic technologies and recommendation systems to automatically feed and personalise content to users. These social digital dilemmas are negotiated within relational social networks taking into account digital skills and […]
- by Stefano De MarcoNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Does digital stratification foster inequalities in access to work and employment? We address this question by examining inequalities related to online job search skills and the outcomes of the online search process. Results from a representative survey of 1103 Spanish jobseekers show that online job search skills positively affect the chances of getting an interview through employment platforms but that they are unevenly distributed. Online job search skills are more important than other digital resources, including basic digital skills, in determining positive outcomes of online job searches though there are still inequalities in […]
- by Melanie HirschNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Political microtargeting practices aim at exposing social media users to political content that aligns with their preferences and interests. Hence, such exposure becomes a personal experience, dependent on individual perceptions. So far, research has rarely investigated young social media users’ personal experiences with targeted political advertising (TPA). In the present study, five qualitative focus group interviews with 20 young social media users (Mage = 19.30, SD = 1.59) were conducted to descriptively explore young social media users’ experiences with TPA. The insights indicated little intuitive reflection about TPA and targeting disclosures on social media. Participants often based […]
- by Marta Fernández-RuizNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. The gig economy has been explored recently in the media through videos, films, and series. Similarly, different video games have shown the ideology, values, and mechanisms that govern the gig economy. This article applies six mechanisms of algorithmic control at work to achieve a dual objective: to analyze how platform workers experience algorithmic control and to examine the extent to which video games, as a medium for raising critical awareness, reflect these workers’ experiences. We analyzed interviews with 42 platform workers in different sectors and six video games that address this topic. Our […]
- by Errol SalamonNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This article examines how social media creators in the United Kingdom navigate regional labor dynamics in small urban cities and towns and their perceptions of potential resistance strategies. Grounded in a creator workers’ inquiry and thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with creators (N = 53), it expands the notion of peripheral creator labor. It reveals how digital factors and historically entrenched regional disparities exacerbate the global platform precarity experienced by different types of peripheral creators and the relative privilege of peripheral English-language Western-based creators. The study introduces the concepts of regional monetization precarity and localized […]
- by Limor ShifmanNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising three general value orientations (Do well, Do good, and Feel good) and four communicative value orientations (Inform, Influence, Bond, and Express). We drew on extensive cross-national research to construct the framework […]
- by Heather Hensman KettreyNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Scholars have argued that college hookup culture is facilitated by the unique physical and social context of college campuses and that young adults are increasingly using dating apps to initiate hookups. This has inspired calls for researchers to examine the digital interactions that precede face-to-face hookups. In this study, we used a “sexual market” framework to investigate the processes by which college hookups are “digitally brokered” via dating apps. Using data from focus groups conducted with 49 college students representing diverse sexual identities, we analyzed dating app users’ stories of their transitions from […]
- by Roland VerwiebeNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Algorithmic systems wield substantial influence in contemporary society. Since it is mostly unknown how algorithms specifically work, content creators (CCs) on YouTube who rely on them for economic reasons are in a constant state of sensemaking regarding the characteristics and perceived preferences of the algorithm. To understand these perceptions, we draw from previous research on technological agency and examine the ways in which CCs view the algorithm as an independent entity with agentic features. We do this by conducting a thematic analysis of 30 interviews with German CCs on YouTube. We find that […]