Search

This special issue of Information, Communication, and Society (ICS) is edited by the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology (CITAMS) section of the American Sociological Association and includes papers that were first presented at either the 2021 or 2022 ASA meetings or Media Sociology Symposia. For this special issue, an innovative editorial approach was taken that brought the editing process into a graduate classroom. That process is described below along with a brief introduction to themes of the selected articles. Key themes for this special issue include content analysis, ethics, privacy, new economy, and digital inequality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issue in ICS showcasing select works presented at the previous year's American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. Papers in the 2022 CITAMS Special Issue reflect a social context defined by a prolonged global pandemic and wrought by democratic uncertainty. Across these social circumstances, technology and media loom large. Simultaneously, everyday life continues and classic CITAMS scholarship sustains relevance for the ways people interact, construct identity, consume, and mobilize. All of this and more are contained in the pages of this year's Special Issue, from which readers can get a sense of what CITAMS has to offer and consider how their own work may fit within the broad CITAMS umbrella. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are currently no concerted attempts to understand the role of whistleblowers in the new social and political environment created by digital ICTs. Digital ICTs drive an accelerating visibility where elites and citizens constantly acquire new tools to track, surveil, and scrutinize each other. Moreover, these technologies make possible a new kind of invisibility. Increasingly complex modes of digital data production and usage generate grey areas that seem to escape legal jurisdiction and democratic oversight. With their privileged access inside these grey areas, conscientious employees-turned-whistleblowers are likely to become key sources for the disclosure of serious wrongdoing in the coming years. The argument is empirically illustrated through three cases that represent different types of grey areas in advanced democracies: big data surveillance (Edward Snowden), tax havens (Antoine Deltour and the Panama and Paradise Papers), and digital political profiling (Christopher Wylie). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper draws on my experience over two decades as part of an early generation of scholars who graduated with a PhD in sociology into a career as a researcher and teacher in the multidisciplinary field of digital media. I reflect on my experiences to offer an assessment of the state of digital media scholarship within sociology and the field of communication. The study of digital media remains underdeveloped within sociology. In part, this is due to disciplinary failures, an array of relevant, specialized areas within sociology have yet to fully realize the role of digital media. Sociological perspectives are also constrained through a dominant 'communication perspective' at the center of the field of communication. Communication is home to most digital media scholars and uses its institutional dominance to arbitrate what qualifies as scholarship. Whereas communication serves as a plural disciplinary catch-all for the subjects of the social sciences, it often does so without crossing the boundaries of a relatively homogeneous, epistemological framework. That framework does not adequately represent sociological perspectives on digital media. I point to key differences between sociology and communication that tend to marginalize sociological perspectives. These differences have also served to render the field of communication less relevant to sociology (and likely to other disciplines in the social sciences). I stress the importance of building institutions and practices that support (multi)disciplinary representation in the field to strengthen sociology and other perspectives and avoid a myopic lens on our understanding of digital media and social life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technologies change users' existing social, cultural, and material practices by providing new opportunities for reflecting on and managing their lives. As technological advancements pervade our private and professional lives, users are tempted to see them as 'magic bullets' that can help them become more organized and efficient. In this paper, we introduce the term 'time hacking' to capture the various ways technologies mediate users' time perception and perspective. We will use the examples of virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa and the Quantified Self Movement to illustrate how people feel that they are capable of hacking time by using devices and programs. Imagining tools as neutral entities that help them better manage their lives in a world that seems increasingly sped up, users are often blind to the multifarious ways these technologies, and the companies that produce them, shape what they attend to and how they make sense of information. The concept of time hacking helps us examine what narratives users construct and share about timesaving tools and how users' perception of and perspective about time changes in response to emerging technologies. Most importantly, time hacking can help to explain the allure of timesaving technologies, why users might be enthusiastic about taking them up and integrating them into their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, a number of high-profile initiatives across the globe are concrete implementations of the 'digital sovereignty' principle: i.e., the idea that states should 'reaffirm' their authority over the Internet and the broader digital ecosystem, to protect their citizens, institutions, and businesses from the multiple challenges to their nation's self-determination in the digital sphere. According to this principle, sovereignty depends on more than supra-national alliances or international legal instruments, military might or trade: it depends on locally owned, controlled and operated innovation ecosystems, able to increase states' technical and economic independence and autonomy. Presently, digital sovereignty is understood primarily as a legal concept and a set of political discourses. As a consequence, it is predominantly analyzed by political science, international relations and international law. However, the study of digital sovereignty as a set of infrastructures and socio-material practices has been comparatively neglected. This article explores how the concept of digital sovereignty can be studied via the infrastructure-embedded 'situated practices' of various political and economic projects which aim to establish autonomous digital infrastructures in a hyperconnected world. Although the article focuses primarily on outlining the agenda for a wider and comparative research program, I will place a specific focus on Russia, subject of an ongoing research project, as a pilot case. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online, anyone's words can easily be amplified – and on Twitter, the platform's algorithm highlights tweets that gain attention from other users, which can exponentially reinforce a tweet's popularity. Moreover, retweets can help spread a message well beyond the reach of its original poster. Thus, users' interactions with posts containing or making reference to racism or sexism both illuminate the ways individuals accept, challenge, or engage with racism and sexism online, and shape how those messages spread. Using an original dataset of 59.5 million tweets, I test how particular features of messages referencing Black and Asian women predict user engagement (retweets, likes, and replies). This analysis further focuses on messages including terms that express racist or sexist content. Generally, messages including covert racist or sexist insults have a modest positive effect on all measures of user engagement (retweets, likes, and replies), which may suggest that social media environments allow individuals the time and opportunity to contend with topics that can be more difficult in-person. Additionally, variations in engagement with tweets that include references to women, Black or Asian individuals implies that users respond differently to messages involving references to and normative images of different racial, ethnic, and gendered identities. This research illuminates how specific manifestations of racialized and gendered language referencing women, Black and Asian people can not only encourage more engagement, but also share, accept, or challenge messages about marginalized identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As Internet freedom movements build infrastructures to promote online privacy, they enrol a wide range of different kinds of of technological work [Coleman, E. G., & Golub, A. (2008). Hacker practice: Moral genres and the cultural articulation of liberalism. Anthropological Theory, 8(3), 255–277]. I explore the cultures of the wider forms of technical work involved in these struggles through a sociological study of the Tor Project, involving twenty-six qualitative interviews with people in the Tor community and extensive archival research in Tor's mailing lists and design documents. Tor is an online privacy infrastructure whose practice of radical transparency makes it uniquely accessible, and it constitutes an example of a successful, widely used infrastructure which directly undermines the centralisation of governmental power online. Tor is not united around a single worldview, instead exhibiting three distinct framings of its work. Using Susan Leigh Star's social worlds framework, I characterise these three 'social worlds' of Tor. I argue that Tor has in the past accommodated its internal clashing perspectives through an ambiguity around politics and a shared construction of the users of Tor, which allow individuals to bridge and translate between these worlds. In recent years, this political ambiguity has become unsustainable. As Internet platforms and infrastructures extend further into social life around the world, so too are they being forced to come to terms with the shaping forces they exert on society and the values they represent. Tor is not exempt from this, and as it navigates these issues it is becoming increasingly mindful of its own relationships to power, values and politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]