Networked Publics

The current study used structural topic modeling to investigate the ways in which news of the 2017 Quebec mosque shooting mobilized global public discourse on Twitter. The resulting globally generated Twitter conversations were divided into 9 relevant topics, the prevalence of which were examined based on geographic and informational proximity to the location of the incident. Tweets posted from locations geographically closer to the shooting location prevalently incorporated individual-oriented and conflict-focused storytelling. Conversely, tweets geographically farther from the incident prevalently featured macro-narratives that pointed to societal implications. This study also explored informational distance, which defines the ability to access to in-depth news sources. Results showed that there were topical differences between journalist/institutional tweets and laymen tweets. This study concludes that proximity influences global conversations related to hate crime news.

Online video-sharing platforms, such as YouTube, afford queer young people new opportunities to document, discuss and explore sexuality and gender identity. However, there remains limited work undertaken on how these digital stories are produced for sites such as YouTube—“networked publics” (boyd, Networked self: Identity, community, and culture on social network sites, Routledge, 2011)—and who the imagined audience/s these digital stories are constructed for. In this chapter, I draw on Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus, field and symbolic power to examine how nine LGBT filmmakers and storytellers in East and South-East Asia construct digital stories for YouTube. The findings show how the networked platform is perceived to afford new possibilities for presenting intimate stories of LGBT life to diverse multi-layered imagined audiences, across local, national and transnational space/s. The stories are produced to provide support for those with diverse sexualities and genders, as well as (re)shape representations of sexuality and gender identity locally and transnationally. The films seek to disrupt the symbolic meaning of sexuality, and are created to shift the habitus of the imagined viewers. In doing so this extends the filmmakers’ and storytellers’ existing activist practices and queer interventions within the world. YouTube, as a networked public, is thus an important structuring medium for collective queer world-making, which gets used for its perceived capacity to present legitimate and alternative visions of sexuality and gender diversity to multi-layered transnational audiences.

As of January 2021, the video production and sharing app TikTok had 689 million monthly users. Though it is hard to measure precisely how many of those users are young people, there is no doubt that the app is particularly popular among children and teens. Much of the discourse around TikTok in the mainstream media has taken a negative view of this, portraying the app as a discrete entity capable of having a direct effect on its young users. This view fails to appreciate the complexity of the relationships between the app and its users, and has led to an unbalanced understanding of the app itself. In an attempt to redress that balance, this study seeks to acknowledge the popularity of TikTok with young people in order to better understand its use, asking the seemingly simple question: why TikTok? That is to say, what is it specifically about TikTok that has made it such a success with young people? Starting with a re-interpretation of the app as a media using a framework derived from mediatisation research, practice theory is used to hone in on the particular ways in which young people use TikTok. Four videos which exemplify the concept of the ‘main character’ - a video ‘trend’ on the app - are analysed through this practice-based lens. In an attempt to interrogate the fixed nature of the categories adult/child and structure/agency, a basic language of media practice is established which helps us to comprehend the ways in which young people are negotiating their own spaces for exploration in a world which otherwise offers them very little tangible power. This has been undertaken with the aim of better comprehending how and where young people choose to engage with the world around them and what part new digital media such as TikTok have to play in that process.

Tesis de Doctorado en teología moral en la Pontificia universidad de la Santa Cruz (Roma). Redes sociales: definición, historia, puntos de interés en clave moral, problemáticas y  desde las ciencias. Concepto de virtud y su necesidad en el ambiente digital. Propuesta de acción desde las virtudes cardinales. Completos capítulos 1,2 y conclusiones.

This paper aims to analyze the italian culture of connectivity, produced by the interrelation of social media and social ties evolution, by highlighting the dynamics of power and participation and overcoming the dichotomy between the “manipulative” and “democratization” media theses. The essay therefore focuses on the specific transition between web 1.0 and web 2.0 tracing a change, worked by the spread of social networking platforms, in the discourses on the social sense of connectivity: in other words, reconstructing an history of technological and communicative transformations coupled with specific events capable of producing a different social consciousness of connectivity. The approach adopted to analyze this transition in terms of the social history of the media will be periodization, while the mediatization approach will serve as the broader framework for understanding and interpreting the relation between the spread of the social media and the evolution of a sense of social ...

This paper investigates the structure of networked publics and their sharing practices in Persian Twitter during a period surrounding Iran's 2017 presidential election. Building on networked gatekeeping and framing theories, we used a mixed methodological approach to analyze a dataset of 2,596,284 Persian tweets. Results revealed that Twitter provided a space for Iranians to discuss public topics. However, this space is not necessarily used by voiceless and marginalized groups; and the uses are not limited to discussing controversial issues. The growing body of conservative crowdsourced elites emerged to defend the regime's ideology. Moreover, the dominant networked frames were shaped around normal and routine subjects in an election time. Thus, Twitter was not a platform for only seeking liberal demands. It was to some extent used to serve the regime's political interests. Furthermore, while many ordinary users rose to prominence, mainstream media continued to act as powerful players. This study contributes to the existing literature into networked practices, digital democracy, and citizen journalism; particularly in restrictive contexts.

Immigrants have played a fundamental role in shaping the life and form of urban public spaces for generations. Their efforts, as many scholars have observed, mostly aimed at creating places of comfort in new and sometimes hostile receiving countries. In recent years, the combined contribution of the built environment and screen-based experiences have shaped migrants’ sense of community and belonging, thus making the concept of online community central to ideas about space and public life. Drawing upon a 3-year online ethnography, the article discusses to what extent new media constitute spaces of digital togetherness, where diasporic experiences and transnational identities are constructed and negotiated. It presents a transnational model of creative media consumption, which helps give insight as to how diasporas and ethnic minorities contribute to the transformation of public space in the Digital Age.

This paper aims to analyze the italian culture of connectivity, produced by the interrelation of social media and social ties evolution, by highlighting the dynamics of power and participation and overcoming the dichotomy between the “manipulative” and “democratization” media theses. The essay therefore focuses on the specific transition between web 1.0 and web 2.0 tracing a change, worked by the spread of social networking platforms, in the discourses on the social sense of connectivity: in other words, reconstructing an history of technological and communicative transformations coupled with specific events capable of producing a different social consciousness of connectivity.
The approach adopted to analyze this transition in terms of the social history of the media will be periodization, while the mediatization approach will serve as the broader framework for understanding and interpreting the relation between the spread of the social media and the evolution of a sense of social ties as an expression of culture of connectivity. In specific terms, linking the periodization perspective to the mediatization angle will involve taking the temporal dimension into account on at least three levels: an events-based, micro-type temporality, capable of identifying specific media events or widespread media practices; a meso-type temporality, marked by a succession of media waves which underline the disruptive effect of certain ecosystemic configurations of media devices, capable of significantly altering both market and cultural dimensions; a macro-temporal dimension, suitable for tracing a succession of technological ages, such as the passage described in the literature as the transition from the age of the industrial revolution to the information or digital age.
This framework provided by the mediatization used through a periodization approach to digital evolution in Italy has enabled us to detect – in the context of a long-term perspective on the digital age – the countercyclical role of digital in Italy which, especially in the mid-period, both fostered and characterized the transition from web 1.0 to web 2.0. More specifically, by adopting a short-term, evenemential logic to analyze the time span from 2009 to 2014, it has proved possible to trace the way in which the mediatization of the social tie, achieved by the diffusion of web 2.0 in Italy, resulted in a swift transition from a rhetoric of “friendship” to a rhetoric of “participation” which was widely perceived as becoming, in a political sense, increasingly critical.

In this article, I use a case study analysis of two white nationalist movements online, in the Australian context, to consider whether the prevalence and everyday uses of social media by white nationalist groups today has impacted on race relations and multiculturalism in Australia 12 years after the Cronulla riots. Social media affordances present a set of conditions that were absent during the 2005 riot, and yet, are today mobilising distinct variants of white nationalism online. Rather than these expressions being locally situated, social media allows these performances to be connected up virtually, extending the white nationalists’ capacity to occupy and terrorise a range of networked public and intimate spaces and influence mainstream political culture. Nonetheless social media affordances, which situate these movements in a virtual ‘ecology of subcultures’ also contributes to their instability and ambivalence, with the uncivil ‘trolling’ practices of online movements undermining broader social goals and contributing to even more extreme and unstable expressions online.

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Received opinion holds that pro-ana are “sites that promote anorexia”. In this paper, I will describe the stigmatization process operating in digital environments and the evolution of pro-ana identities in the light of the theories that view eating disorders (EDs) as culture-bound syndromes. I will then illustrate the findings of an ethnographic study of the ana-mia (from the contraction of anorexia and bulimia) culture that has emerged on Italian social media (blogs and visual SNSs such as Instagram). Analyzing the forms of self-representation drew back the curtains on the “popular discourse” of the ana-mias, whose digital bodies express the need for self-discipline typical of post-feminist identity in neoliberal societies. Ana-mias represent themselves as #anawarriors: their life is an ongoing battle against their illness and to defend themselves from outsiders, but is some cases also to gain visibility and reach the status of microcelebrities.

This article investigates user-generated political satire, focusing in particular on one genre: fake political accounts. Such fakes, created as social media profiles, satirize politicians or political organizations by impersonating them. Through interviews with a sample of Italian fake accounts creators, I explore how the fakes navigate their fakeness vis-à-vis the affordances of social network sites and their publics. First, I map how the publics of the fake accounts react to the satire along two axes: one referring to the public’s understanding of the satire and the other to the uses that the public makes of the satire. Second, I show how fakeness is part of everyday interactions in networked publics. Third, I argue for fakeness as a playful, powerful, and sincere critique of the political and its pretense to authenticity. By focusing on fake political accounts, this article provides insights on the place of fakeness in online communication beyond the debate around “fake news.”

Л" ilí Ri others who share their interests, desires, and hopes; and the change in technol-ogy, in which people worldwide have rapidly adopted digital technology and new forms of telecommunication in everyday life.6 As we might expect, the network goes even further, extending deeply ...