Making sense of the future is a precarious endeavor because there
is no such thing as a definitive forecast. For that reason, data-driven
news has been welcomed as a source of more reliable outlooks
that strengthen journalism’s contribution to anticipating future
events and setting the public agenda. However, despite large-scale
investment into computational and data-rich previsions, little is
known about the way these prognoses are told. Based on a sample
of cases, we venture into this area of sensemaking and examine
the diagrammatic patterns along which data-based projections
have been crafted into a journalistic story. In our analysis of this
nascent genre of data journalism, we characterize three forms of
predictive storytelling: concentration on a single scenario, contrasting
different scenarios, and the conjunction of several future scenarios
into a prognostic tendency. In all these forms of predictive
data stories, more or less conclusive information is arranged into a
sequence of events and trends. In most of the resulting stories,
issues of probability and uncertainty are not submitted for interactive
exploration but become integrated into a directed explanation
offered by the news pieces. Read the full version here.
Leben und Arbeiten in gegenwärtigen Gesellschaften sind mehr denn je von Medien durchdrungen. Kaum eine Beschäftigung und selten ein Austausch, die ohne digitale Geräte und vernetzte Dienste auskommen. Medien sind zentrale Instanzen von Lebensgestaltung und Beziehungspflege, von Arbeitsprozessen und kultureller Sinnstiftung. Medienvermittelte Kommunikation ist damit kein Teilbereich unseres Alltags, sondern der im Grunde permanente Zustand, in dem dieser stattfindet. Angesichts der elementaren Bedeutung digitaler vernetzter Medien und Kommunikationsformen bietet das Buch eine Einführung in die Neue Kommunikationswissenschaft. Es buchstabiert aus, wie Medienkommunikation aktuell verstanden und untersucht werden kann.
The Theme Issue invites researchers and scholars to engage with chronometric inequalities and chrononormative concepts, and to interrogate how they shape the experience, assessment, and management of time in an environment of pervasive social platforms. This is important and urgently needed because time use is a critical factor for well-being, mental and physical health, and relationship quality, with algorithmic media being blamed for eating up excessive amounts of screen time, thus inducing depression, anxiety, distress, and weak social connections. Taken together, these contributions open a broader conversation about what might be called the temporal turn in platform and AI studies. They suggest that understanding contemporary digital societies requires asking not only what platforms do, how they govern, or whose interests they serve, but also how they organize time itself. Such a perspective reveals the extent to which contemporary struggles over attention, intimacy, mobility, memory, authenticity, and even mortality are simultaneously struggles over temporal experience. By bringing together studies of interfaces, infrastructures, migration, mobility, intimacy, generative AI, and digital afterlives, this Theme Issue offers a foundation for future research into the politics, practices, and possibilities of time in platformed sociality.
This conference seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners interested in making queer and feminist interventions in digitally mediated cultures of the Caucasus. In this rich linguistic, cultural, and politically diverse space stretching from Dagestan to northwestern Iran and Türkiye, the digital dimension has been an active arena of negotiating agency in the twenty-first century. Multiple diasporas around the world further enrich the complexity of digital imaginaries, participation, and belonging in the Caucasus. We invite contributions from across Cultural Studies, Media and Communication Studies, Literary Studies, Performance Studies, Visual Studies, History, Art History, Gender Studies, and adjacent fields, as well as from outside academia, that critically engage with digital culture, politics, and society in the Caucasus. How do, for instance, regimes of visibility and opacity shape digital cultures across the Caucasus and in the diaspora? How could practices of surveillance, policing, and their contestations inform our analytical approaches to regional digital ecosystems? And how might we conceptualize the “gaze” across geopolitical and cultural terrains? The conference will be held at University of Regensburg, March 3–5, 2027.
Conference organizers: Tatiana Klepikova (University of Regensburg | Research group on Queer Literatures and Cultures under Socialism); Christian Pentzold (Leipzig University); Ilgar Seyidov (Atılım University | Department of Public Relations and Advertising).
Although YouTube explanatory videos are a successful video genre, there has been little research into the ways they form part of adolescents’ collective learning practices. To address this gap, the article examines the social relations and forms of collective interaction by which young people come to use explanatory content on YouTube. Our study of German pupils aged between 14 and 20 examines how and to what extent they engage with, view, recommend, and communicate about user-generated audiovisual instructions and explanations that cover school subjects and hobbies. The results show that the potentials of YouTube for collectively using learning- and education-related content often remain untapped, especially for school-related content. While YouTube videos occupy an important place as a source of information for hobbies, they have not prompted equal engagement with school subjects. Read the full article here.
This article examines the sensemaking around Big Data in user-generated content on Reddit, Facebook, and Twitter/X. Big Data is not only a technology but an issue of public concern. Yet given that the buzzword “Big Data” has been around for more than a decade, there is a dearth of knowledge about how the cultural motifs used to make sense of the notion have changed over time. Little is known too about how Big Data has featured in user-generated content that could equally reverberate or dispute the views established by elite forums of news and high-profile publications. To fill this gap, we use a semi-automated content analysis for examining the ensuing discourse around “Big Data” over a period of ten years. We focus on cultural motifs that anchor Big Data frames in sensemaking. Our analysis, which integrated manual annotation with automatic classification using a transformer-based language model, revealed three predominant cultural motifs out of seven examined. These recurring motifs primarily emphasize themes of profit and prediction, the evolving datafication of society, or the pursuit of innovations for societal advancement. The motifs encapsulate a range of topics that point us to a diversity of adjoining discourses on datafication writ-large. Full article here.
Big data discourses are integral to how we come to understand and engage with datafication. This IJoC Special Section explores the semantics of big data in contemporary society. By weaving together three central themes—big data’s materiality, the role of emerging technologies, and the sensemaking around datafication—it interrogates how communication, imagination, and social practices shape and are shaped by the expanding landscape of data-driven innovation. The contributions offer interdisciplinary perspectives on the semantics, imaginaries, and social implications of big data, drawing on empirical research and critical theory to illuminate the evolving relationship between technology, discourse, and meaning-making in the digital age. Full article here.
What potentials and pitfalls emerge through digital formats in
participation processes in rural regional development? The paper
discusses in six regional case studies how digital formats are used in civic
participation in regional development processes in German rural areas.
Results show (1) that digital participation formats vary in terms of level
of complexity, serve different objectives, are in their success highly
dependent on other context factors (e.g., participation culture, socioeconomic
factors and digital competency) and do not automatically
enable more participation by hardly represented groups. In terms of
spatial relations (2) there is a lack of specifically rural examples as urban
areas are overrepresented in contexts of digitalisation. Consequently,
opportunities for action remain limited by spatial structures, and the
engagement of individuals remains pivotal. Regarding the impact on
practices of communication and interaction, (3) the main objective of
digital formats is to strengthen citizens’ identification with the region, and
digital formats turn out to qualify to varying degrees for implementing
participation. Municipal and regional administrations, in particular, are
key drivers for digital transitions in rural areas. Regarding chances of
participation, we conclude that digital formats can create easier access,
especially when linked with everyday practices. Hence, they contribute to
a culture of participation. Yet, reaching target groups underrepresented in
participatory processes remains a challenge. Read the full text here.
Communicative remembering refers to the ongoing process by which people actively
construct, negotiate, and share memories through everyday interactions, whether in face-
to-face conversation or via digital media. Rather than viewing memory as fixed or stored in
archives and monuments, this approach foregrounds remembering as something enacted
through conversation, storytelling, image-sharing, and participatory media practices. In
today’s media-rich environments, both the exchanges themselves and the technological
systems that filter, amplify, or automate them shape what and how we remember together.
Consider, for example, posting anniversary photos on Instagram or exchanging messages in
a family WhatsApp group. These ordinary acts help recall personal milestones and shape
what is shared, remembered, or valued today. This special collection explores such everyday
communications of memory and examines how platforms, algorithms, and AI are reshaping
the everydayness of both media and memory. Full piece can be read here.
AI is widely regarded as a transformative force, reshaping our understanding of both life and death. One experimental frontier is its ability to recreate deceased human beings. Our paper explores a nascent AI application situated at the threshold of existence. We analyze 50 cases from the United States, Europe, the Near East, and East Asia and distill three principal modes of AI resurrections: (1) Spectacularization, the public re-staging of iconic deceased cultural figures via immersive recreations for entertainment spectacle; (2) Sociopoliticization, the re-invoking of victims of violence in political or commemorative contexts, often as posthumous testimonies; and (3) Mundanization, the everyday re-vival of loved ones, allowing users to interact with the deceased through chatbots or synthetic media. To engage with the underlying exploitation of digital remains, we introduce the notion of spectral labor, arguing that the use of AI to animate the dead raises pressing legal and ethical concerns around posthumous appropriation and control. Read the full article here.
In countries where state institutions and the public largely reject LGBTQIA+ identities and issues, queer people struggle with visibility. Next to governments and technology providers, what queer people do, who they connect to, and how they express themselves is being watched and scrutinized by their families and proximate relations. This lateral surveillance is afforded by social media that establish, as we argue in this article, a prism. Here, LGBTQIA+ lives become refracted as extensive though incoherent patterns of digital traces. How queer people respond to this situation where the binary of visible versus invisible falls apart is poorly understood. To address that gap, we interrogate the precarious management of visibility attempted by LGBTQIA+ people in Azerbaijan with its heteropatriarchal, honor-driven culture. Based on our exploratory interview study, we find that queer Azerbaijanis were confronted with a highly ambivalent scopic setup where context collision loomed large. In effect, they supported LGBTQIA+ visibility but had personally decided not to live or promote it. Yet whilst their attempts to remain opaque may contradict their activistic compliancy, this was a logical reaction to hard to handle terms of visibility. Read the full OA paper here
Despite their collaborative intentions, co-design workshops usually pivot on expert facilitators. They select methods that move participants toward an agreed-upon goal. This can impose high demands on them and it risks marginalizing the contribution of participants in what should be a joint practice. With a focus on the unfolding interactions between organizers and participants, the article reflects on an adaptation of the Tiles IoT toolkit. We propose a repertoire of ten general situational moderation actions with which those involved attempted to influence the process and the conditions of workshop participation. Zooming in on ad hoc forms of moderation prompts us to acknowledge that methodical choices and social activity intertwine. From this, we draw three lessons for facilitators: plan for adaptability, establish responsive relationships, and promote reflexive engagement. The full article can be read here.
The workshop aims to bring together and connect scholars of temporality and algorithmic media so as to identify common ground, stimulate exchange, and initiate critical comparative research. Organizing the workshop in connection to this year’s AoIR will allow us to particularly involve researchers from Latin America and interconnect their work and insights with the research drawn out by colleagues joining from other parts of the Global South as well as Europe, Australia, and North America.
This half-day workshop opens up a forum to think theoretically and empirically about digitally mediated temporalities. It features contributions that examine how and under what conditions users experience, assess, and deal with the ambivalent opportunities and constraints of having time and losing time that are an innate element of their daily engagement with algorithmic – or, algo-rhythmic – media.
As a pre-conference workshop of the Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in Niteroí, Brazil, the event took place 15 October 2025. It was organized by Ludmila Lupinacci, Leeds University, Ignacio Siles, University of Costa Rica, and me.
The international workshop “Creative AI Exploration and Imagination: Innovative Methods for Alternative Digital Futures” took place at Leipzig University from 24 to 26 September. During three days, artists and civil society actors came together to explore artificial intelligence and digital transformation through creative approaches.
This workshop aimed to test methods from art, design, and participation to think beyond technology-focused perspectives on alternative digital futures. It addressed questions about the social and cultural implications of artificial intelligence, while opening up discussions on future scenarios that take into account social, ethical and aesthetic dimensions.
To address these questions, artistic intervention, narrative approaches, and performative formats were combined with scientific inputs and discussions that open up new perspectives on the topic of AI, leading participants to reflect on the impressions gained and to place them in a broader social context.
Using an interdisciplinary exchange, the workshop highlighted the importance of negotiating digital transformation in a scientific context that includes the voices from different areas of society, so future developments can be plural, inclusive, and sustainable.
During the event, participants discovered that alternative methods open up space for collective imagination, which led them to view AI merely as a technological challenge or resource. Because of it, it became clear how artistic and participatory processes can help to formulate new questions, challenge existing power relations, and identify scope for action, to shape a democratic digital future.
The event was organised by the universities of Graz, Leipzig, Maynooth and Padua, with the support of the Arqus Alliance and the German Academic Exchange Service DAAD. More here.