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 Johanna CohoonNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Drawing on multiple sources of qualitative data, I describe a case of open science infrastructure (OSI) abuse. The case illustrates how developers navigated scholarly value tensions and issues of epistemic and platform legitimacy while battling spam on their open science webapp. Notably, their struggle used precious financial resources and drew attention away from other development tasks like feature expansion. This research makes evident that not only is OSI abuse like spam a financial burden, but it puts scholarly information security—specifically, the legitimacy of open science content—at risk. However, protecting against such abuse is […]
- by Tamar AshuriNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. The term “self-disclosure” refers to actions by which individuals reveal information about themselves. The interest in such conduct has resurged with the development of networked participatory technologies, which enable creation, dissemination, analysis, and use of large amounts of personal information, thereby increasingly augmenting the effect of online self-disclosure on disclosers and disclosees. This article reviews 309 empirical studies about online self-disclosure published between 2010 and 2020 and aggregates insights thereof into an overarching model describing the ways in which this socio-technical undertaking unfolds. The review shows that online self-disclosure research overwhelmingly focuses on […]
- by Nina Vindum RasmussenNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Data-driven streamers like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video have expanded into the European screen landscape with a significant appetite for locally produced content. These players leverage advanced data analytics to gain deep customer insights, but they prefer to keep a lid on their algorithmic operations. This article examines how screen workers interact with streaming data despite widespread secrecy. Drawing on interviews and an interface ethnography, I explore the ways these workers access, sense, generate and resist streaming data throughout their creative process. As such, the article provides a framework for understanding the subtle […]
- by Xiyu CaoNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Taking facial recognition access control (FRAC) as an example, this article examines the changing and fluctuant infrastructuralization process of facial recognition technology (FRT) in China. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, observations, and qualitative content analysis, we provide empirical accounts of how local governments, commercial entities, and community residents perceive FRT in different logics and how FRAC terminals become a key site for social negotiations unfolding through combinations of relation, power, and capital. The article outlines a new framework “beta-infrastructure” to capture the semi-material and semi-social characters of technology artifacts in nowadays digital society. The […]
- by Di CuiNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. The rise of platforms has reshaped fan participation. Based on participant observation and in-depth interviews, this study examined celebrity fandom in China, where the Internet-powered entertainment industry and fan economy have flourished. We propose an operationality perspective as a wider-angle lens to conceptualize the multitude of fan practices emerging in platform-mediated environments. Moving beyond the text-centered approach, the operationality perspective sees fans’ platform practices (e.g. cross-platform engagement, curation of fan texts, data work) as a new logic of participation in digital fandom that could generate distinct identities and lifestyles. Operationality can be understood […]
- by Moira WeigelNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This article brings frameworks from literary and cultural studies and methods from network science to bear on a central topic in political communication research: polarization. Recent studies have called into question the argument that digital “echo chambers” exacerbate polarization by preventing members from encountering a diversity of information and opinions. Using Gab, a far-right social media platform, as a case study, we offer further evidence that even members of highly polarized publics do engage in “cross-cutting.” However, we develop a distinct concept of hate-sharing, or sharing content for the purpose of disagreeing with […]
- by Franziska PradelNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This article assesses the effects of hate speech compared to positive and neutral content about refugees in search engines on trust and policy preferences through a survey experiment in Germany. The study uncovers that individuals with an extreme-right political ideology become more hostile toward refugees after being exposed to refugee-related hate speech in search queries. Moreover, politically biased search engines erode trust similarly to politicized sources like politicians, and positively and negatively biased content is trusted less than neutral content. However, individuals with a right political ideology trust more hate speech content than […]
- by Martin J RiedlNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Technology-facilitated abuse and violence disproportionately affect marginalized people. While researchers have explored this issue in the context of public-facing social media platforms, less is known about how it plays out on more private messaging apps. This study draws on in-depth interviews with women and queer journalists and activists in Lebanon to illustrate their experiences of infrastructural platform violence on WhatsApp. Specifically, we distinguish between identity-based violence propagated on platforms, and violence propagated by platforms due to infrastructural neglect of vulnerable populations. Our results document how perpetrators employ the affordances of WhatsApp in harmful […]
- by Zozan BaranNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This article investigates the role of social media in scale shift of contention. Contentious politics research grapples with questions of scale shift, while digital activism explores connective potential of social media. Yet, the potential of social media is not fully explored in the scale shift processes. We conduct an explorative semantic network analysis to understand how activists create connections between contentious places to facilitate spatial and substantive scale shift. We define contentious places as places bearing demands and grievances on themselves, expressed with hashtags and connected via co-hashtagging practices. We employ the notion […]
- by Porismita BorahNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Scholars have studied the role of technology in humanitarian crises and have noted an increase in positive attitudes and behavior. Of interest to us is Virtual Reality (VR). We set out to understand the role of VR technology and its relationships with empathy, sympathy, and donation intention in case of the Syrian refugee crisis. We conducted two experimental studies to examine these relationships, where participants watched “Clouds Over Sidra” a VR film for the United Nations. The participants in the VR condition watched the documentary using VR, while in the non-VR condition, participants […]
- by Jürgen BuderNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Phenomena like echo chambers and societal polarization have often been linked to an individual preference for like-minded information (selective exposure). This view has been challenged recently: behavior on comment sections in online forums suggests the opposite dynamic, with users more likely to reply to attitudinally uncongenial content. Three experimental studies (total N = 1524) explore boundary conditions of this uncongeniality bias by measuring participants’ tendency to reply to comments on climate science. Studies 1 (student sample) and 2 (non-student sample) replicate the uncongeniality bias. However, Study 3 (representative for age and gender in Germany) yielded […]
- by Lichen ZhenNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Platform designers create and implement incentive systems to encourage users to contribute content to online communities. This article examines the effect of a multidimensional incentive hierarchy in motivating users to engage in competitive and prosocial activities. Utilizing an external change observed in the data science community, Kaggle, and applying a quasi-experimental design, we compared users’ engagement levels before and after introducing a multidimensional incentive hierarchy. We found that implementing a multidimensional incentive system directed users from submitting answers to Kaggle competitions to participating in Kaggle’s online forum discussions. However, our additional analyses suggest […]
- by Shani OrgadNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Digital spaces such as LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional digital network, constitute central sites for self-promotion, where job seekers and the employed present their polished “best” professional selves. However, in recent years, LinkedIn members are increasingly publishing accounts that highlight their vulnerabilities and struggles. This article examines the emergence of vulnerability on LinkedIn by analyzing how vulnerability is articulated in a sample of 40 posts (2021–2023). It identifies three genres: (1) Triumph over tragedy: vulnerability as a vector for self-growth and resilience; (2) Snap: vulnerability as a breaking point; and (3) Subversive commentary […]
- by Daniel CunliffeNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Many of the world’s languages are endangered or vulnerable. For some of these languages, a presence in technological domains can illustrate vitality and demonstrate relevance to the lives of younger speakers. A presence on social media is often seen as particularly significant for younger speakers due to their high levels of social media use. This article explores the presence of Cymraeg (the Welsh language) on TikTok. Through the analysis of a corpus of 200 videos, the article reveals a complex and richly bilingual content space with considerable intermingling of Cymraeg and English. Commenting […]
- by Jessica Gantt-ShaferNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Outside of visible moments of mass mobilization, ongoing latent work, such as direct service and mutual aid, is a long-standing tradition in social movements. Yet, like all labor, personal digital devices have changed the norms and practices of direct service social movement work. In this article, as situated in the technology–media–movement complex (TMMC), I analyze qualitative interview data (N = 26) with volunteers from a yearlong ethnographic project at an abortion fund hotline in the reproductive justice movement in the US South. To name hotline volunteers’ digital care labor, I offer the term immaterial intimacy […]
- by Matthias HoffmannNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. This research investigates the strategic use of protest imagery on social media by movement parties, bridging the gap between protest and institutional politics. We apply a mixed-methods analysis of 9584 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram image posts by seven movement parties between 2015 and 2021. We find that protest images frequently serve to amplify movement grievances. Yet, parties’ involvement with contentious protest forms undergoes temporal shifts, influenced mainly by their evolving positions within the polity. Moreover, parties’ engagement with protest images differs by country and ideological leaning. Movement parties on the Right express a […]
- by Jung Ah LeeNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Mothers are heavily engaged in social media, and mommy influencers have become key sources of information and targets for social comparison. This study investigates the psychological mechanisms by which mothers’ parental stress is affected by social comparison with mommy influencers. An online survey was conducted among South Korean millennial mothers (N = 237). The results revealed that mothers who frequently compare themselves to mommy influencers may experience both positive and negative effects depending on the envy type. While social comparison was positively associated with both benign and malicious envy, the relationships between these two forms […]
- by Nick PolakNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Musicians are believed to increasingly “optimize” their music to positively influence discoverability and engagement on music and social media platforms. Common examples of such optimization strategies are skipping intros, quickly moving to the chorus, or inserting danceable “hooks.” But to what extent are optimization strategies actively considered in the creative production process? And, if so, in what stage of production? In this article, we explore how professional musicians reflect on the opportunities and constraints that optimization strategies offer in the creative music production process. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with early to mid-career […]
- by Ben SchollNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Collegiate esports are a key contributor to the North American esports field’s fledgling talent pipeline, where varsity student-athletes identify the streaming platform Twitch as a major component. Exemplified by Twitch, this article theorizes the role of platform algorithms as border objects—an analytical concept which frames the shared use of classification systems when a powerful party’s practices naturalize their interpretation over others. Twitch’s platform recommendation and moderation algorithms are classifiers used by competitive game-content creators and platform owners. Its algorithms are fundamental to allocating visibility among users, which, as collegiate esports players suggest, informs […]
- by Brian McDonoughNew Media & Society, Ahead of Print. Portable laptops, cell phones, touchscreen equipment and other mobile devices are changing the way commercial airplane pilots are handling information used for flying aircraft. Pilot expertise and skill are being transformed by a new approach in which fingertips are replacing traditional hands-on methods of controlling airplanes. Drawing on participatory and interview methods at a UK airbase, this article draws on ethnographic research with commercial pilots and pilot cadets, to trace the refashioning of cell phone media in an aviation context where touch-based computer screens replace traditional airplane technology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, this […]