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.
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
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.
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.
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.
The article looks at artistic impressions of future robotics and considers how they inspire research into human–machine interaction. Our analysis of visual scientific practices and the epistemic ramifications of these speculative drawings emerges from a long-term participant observation study in a multi-disciplinary project on smart and autonomous technologies in public spaces. We discuss the design, appropriation and modulation of visual scenarios and scrutinize how these diegetic futurescapes are imaginatively engaging and suggestive of scientific progress and experimentation. We argue that the future-oriented scenes defy common notions of post hoc scientific representations. Instead, they are ex ante presentations of the ambition to imagine human–machine relations in the future and to draw the large-scale research venture together. The register of evaluation thereby shifts from aesthetic criteria to scientific parameters. More than just visual tokens, the scenarios became a catalyst for collaboration. The full article can be read here.
This paper reconstructs the sociotechnical imaginaries of “Big Data” in Germany, South Africa, and the United States over ten years. Our inquiry into the meaning-making undertaken on expansive datafication processes began from the observation that since its inception circa 2010, the buzz phrase “Big Data” has not only denoted a technology but has also gestured toward a vast array of ambitions and concerns that are reflective of values, economic perspectives, and cultural preoccupations. We use a frame analysis to investigate the unfolding journalistic discourse and discuss the sociotechnical imaginaries of Big Data in cross-national comparison. We found three dominant views that centered chiefly on rebuilding a datafied society, reviving datafied business, and retooling datafied surveillance. Despite substantial data scandals and whistleblower revelations, affirmative views prevailed. The trope of reviving datafied business was most often evoked from 2011 to 2013, but rebuilding a datafied society became the central perspective from 2014 onward. This order of prominence existed in the United States and Germany, whereas a business-oriented view predominated in South African media. Some publications in all three countries ran counter to the general trend but only exerted limited influence on the overall picture. Read the full text here.
There has been much enthusiasm around the use of digitally networked information and communications technologies to foster political participation. Given their potential to engage citizens in rural development via online tools and processes, there are particularly high expectations that these technologies will mitigate some disadvantages of nonurban places. Yet, even if these hopes are reasonable, there is still little knowledge about the enduring establishment of digital political participation for rural development. In response, our study centers on six exemplary regional case studies in Germany concerning the obstacles to and catalysts of digital political participation. The public administrators; members of associations, businesses, and nonprofits; and citizens we interviewed pointed to the importance of administrative infrastructures, tailored offers, and resourceful citizens. What these factors could, however, not achieve was a culture of participation that may inspire attitudes and lived practices. This has implications for understanding and facilitating digital political participation for rural development. By locating the incentives and barriers to civic engagement within a culture of participation, our work underscores the need for holistic, long-term endeavors to develop and encourage politically involved citizenship. Read the OA article here.
Media practices are the talk of the town. Hardly any conference or syllabus that does not include notions of practice or praxis. Sometimes, this choice of words is accidental and could easily be replaced by other terms like action or activity. Yet increasingly often, references to media practices and people practicing media entail far-reaching conceptual and methodical implications. Sometimes, they are spelled out in terms of performance and praxeology, with respect to habitus and ritual, or in reference to a duality of agency and structure. Sometimes, they remain implicit.
In any case, the notion of media practices seems alluring and opens up an array of useful tenets to think with. What is missing, however, is a concise overview of what to expect from the notion and the horizon of axioms and assumptions it opens up. Rightly because it has become a common trope in media and communication, and in fact in many other areas of the social sciences and humanities, it seems pertinent to clearly spelled out its theoretical fundamentals and implications, to identify its methodological stance, and to draw out avenues for practice-inclined studies. The book is exactly doing this. The book provides an accessible introduction to media practices. It states what they are and it draws out how different approaches to think and conceptualize practices relate to each other, what strengths and challenges are associated with them, what implications they have for understandings of media and media users and how scholars can analyze media practices empirically. Our book offers these theoretical and methodological reflections in a compact form by a.) bringing together current debates on media practices from different fields of research and inquiry; b.) systematically discussing the fundamental lines of tension in practice-inclined scholarship about the agency of people, things, and technologies and about the significance of the material and symbolic dimensions of media. A further focus is c.) on the discussion of empirical methods for studying what people and media are doing, on capturing digital media practices, and on how to unpack their elements.
This Special Issue seeks to explore the impact of ADM on welfare and well-being from
European perspectives. It starts from the position of those directly involved: the engineers and
designers, the case workers who collaborate with these systems in welfare and service
provision decisions, and the people whose data fuel the systems and are affected by
automation efforts. The Special Issue aims to address the digital transformation of the citizen–
state relationship by examining the development, data work, and human-machine
collaboration within ADM, alongside the technological, social, and cultural dynamics that
either facilitate or impede progress in automating welfare for the public good.
A people-centered approach builds on the idea that welfare in societies is fundamentally about
fostering the conditions for the flourishing of everybody. Hence public goods and services
provision becomes a question of justice and equity. When welfare is increasingly automated
this consequently has implications for social justice for the people more generally and must be
addressed through the lens of the people implicated in the process of automation. Read the full call here.
The book on peer production breaks new ground. Peer production: A concise introduction will provide a general, accessible, and focused account of peer production that draws on scholarly literature without drifting into the weeds of arcane debates, research methods, or jargon. It will be the first concise introduction to peer production. It addresses the formidable gap in the market that does not offer any succinct overview on the tenets, conditions, and ramifications of this way of generating informational goods and services. We hope readers will take away a few central ideas from this book. First, peer production has become a critical mode of collaborative knowledge production that impacts billions of people on a daily basis. Second, although peer production represents a novel type of social collaboration, our understanding of it can be informed by learning from our understanding of the ways people have interacted, organized, and advanced collective interests in the past. Third, peer production offers both unique advantages over previous forms of collaboration as well as distinct shortcomings and challenges.
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.
We develop an integrative conceptual framework and research agenda for studying epistemic authorities in the digital age. Consulting epistemic authorities (e.g., professional experts, well-informed laypeople, technologies) can be an efficient fast-track to knowledge. To fulfill this functional role, those who claim epistemic authority need to be both subjectively recognized (have a perceived advantage in knowledge) and objectively justified (have an actual advantage in knowledge). In a digital media context, new and unconventional knowledge sources have emerged that can fulfill the functional role of epistemic authorities. But false authorities that disseminate misinformation have emerged as well while other sources with important knowledge remain unrecognized. We further analyze the functional role of epistemic intermediaries that can mitigate such problematic developments by correcting false authorities and by providing endorsement for unrecognized authorities. We conclude with a research agenda to study functional forms of epistemic authorities and epistemic intermediaries in the digital public sphere. Read the full article here.