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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]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including information technology; Media Sociology; and journalism.

The socio-technological context of health care wherein patient-consumer involvement is central increases the importance of examining the impact of Internet information on health-related attitudes and behavior. This paper examined the extent to which deployment of e-health information is associated with patient distrust and non-adherence. We examined the hypothesized associations in gender-stratified subsamples to uncover whether any differential patterns of associations exist among women and men. Our analyses allowed for estimation of significant covariate effects at the composite index and item level for both men and women while controlling for the moderation effect of race/ethnicity. Results indicate differential outcomes for patient distrust and non-adherence depending on socio-demographic characteristics. Findings suggest that it is not just health-related information that influences health-related behavior, but also mechanisms through which socio-demographic characteristics shape whether Internet use is associated with distrust and patient non-adherence. e-Health information consumers are overall less trustful and more likely to deviate from health care provider treatment. Non-adherence among those who consume e-health information is more pronounced for non-white women. Highly educated non-white men were more likely to diverge from their medical care provider's treatment recommendations than White men. Given the increasing diversification of the demographic profile of the U.S. population, understanding the dynamics though which health-related Internet use becomes racialized and gendered represents a critical contribution to the literature on Internet and health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the relationship between human agency and digital services. The capacity of digital services to create knowledge from a range of sources has led some commentators to argue that digital services are a factor in redefining human agency because these services link, combine, and compute data to create new knowledge [Lyotard, J. (1984) The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Manchester University Press, Manchester; Lash, S. (1999) Another Modernity, A Different Rationality, Blackwell, Oxford]. This, they argue, is resulting in non-human knowledge systems rather than knowledge created by humans within cultural frameworks. The paper critically engages with these debates to explore the ways in which digital services are made meaningful through the way individuals interpret and use them. It focuses on three contexts in which agency and digital services interact to provide insights into the framework and characteristics of agency in these settings. The three areas that are addressed are: virtual city modelling, digital or electronic-assisted living technology, and Second Life. The conclusion points out that agency is influential in these services in that it is situated in particular spaces and contexts, reflects on the past, assesses the present, and looks to the future. The agency of individuals is important in generating knowledge in digital services, and is part of a personalized form of participation in consumer culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relationships of subjects in the context of data and data technologies, and advances an original theoretical framework called Informatic Personhood to better conceptual subjects and their relationships. Because of the enormous structural change that data has contributed to, subjects are sometimes distant and backgrounded in studies of data, despite data having significant impacts on their lives. Data-mediated relationships mean an increased scale to a relationship, with individuals able to connect to much broader contexts of data, but also have these structures reach down to their subjective context through data. Informatic Personhood seeks to capture the dynamics of data present in everyday life, addressing this distance and better conceptualising the scale of data-mediated relationships. This framework has two parts. The first – The Informatic Context – explores salient structural developments around data and conceptualises this as being defined by the presence of 'data interfaces' (that connect individuals to digital contexts), 'data circulation' (trends in the movement and storage of data), and 'data abstraction' (data manipulation practices). The second part concerns the Informatic Person, and the embodied, affective, and sensemaking relationships of individuals occurring across and through the Informatic Context. This framework better addresses the scale of data-mediated relationships, and places subjects firmly in the foreground of how data is understood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses conceptual tools which might allow an elaborated sociological analysis of the relationship between information and communication technology on the one hand, and social inequalities on the other. The authors seek to go beyond the familiar idea of the 'digital divide' to develop a focus on digital social inequality, through discussing three bodies of literature which are normally not discussed together. The paper thus addresses issues in feminist theory; the sociological field analysis of Pierre Bourdieu; and the Actor Network Theory. This paper shows that there are unexpected commonalities in these three perspectives which allow the possibility of effective cross-fertilization. All seek to avoid positing the existence of reified social groups which are held separate from technological forces, and all stress the role of fluid forms of relationality, from which social inequalities can emerge as forms of stabilization, accumulation and convertibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the relevance of sociology of expectation in conceptualizing some of the tensions emerging in the UK context from the attempts to engage communities of social scientists, anthropologists and colleagues in cognate disciplines with e-social science. As the uptake of e-science proceeds fast in many scientific domains - from genetics to physics, from biology to clinical medicine - many social scientists and scholars in cognate disciplines remain apparently unaware or unimpressed by the promises of linking up large-scale data sets of fieldwork, and having access to the new tools and technologies that are being developed to cope with this scaling up of data set size. Science and Technology Studies (STS) has theorized technological innovations, and highlighted how they come packaged with expectations of their applications, their benefits and sometimes their risks. Future scenarios are projected in which a technology is integrated with society at large and with representations of everyday life. In line with an STS approach, instead of debating the likelihood of possible scenarios, this paper calls for uncovering the values and preferences that are implicitly inbuilt in the visions of the proponents of e-social science. It is only once these are rendered explicit that one can begin to explore the extent to which these values are shared across sections of the research community, or the extent to which they may be specific of certain stakeholders only. The process, it is argued, ultimately allows for a more transparent debate, and a negotiation of which values end up being up-taken in research policy and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the popularity and social significance of the gaming series Championship Manager / Football Manager . Sport-related games continue to be one of the most popular forms of digital gaming, and the series has proved to be one of the most successful of all time. Drawing on 32 interviews with game players and developers of this series, this paper argues that this series has proved particularly popular due to its ‘intertextual’ links to the sport of football, which allows this game to be drawn on as a resource in conversations and social networks. In particular, this paper argues that aspects of gaming, such as performativity and control, extend and cross-cut with wider social formations. Hence, the author argues that it is crucial that considerations of digital games seek to locate these within wider social and cultural patterns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although most surveillance studies scholars assume privacy is antithetical to surveillance, critics have recently warned that privacy-based criticisms may facilitate surveillance. That being said, we do not yet have data that show whether privacy claims were used in the past to legitimate government surveillance. This paper addresses that gap by analyzing claims made over one of the U.S.’s most controversial surveillance issues: government control over encryption technologies. A review of Congressional hearings and statements on the Congressional Record (n = 112) reveals that from 1993 to 1999, public debates were dominated by a market liberalization discourse in which participants supported loosening encryption controls as a way to protect privacy from criminal intrusions in market transactions. Also playing a role was a strong skepticism toward government power and a preference for markets as managers of crime prevention. Challenged by these critiques, lawmakers withdrew regulatory proposals and spent the following decade working quietly with private firms to ensure law enforcement surveillance capability. These findings show the expansion of privacy for consumers and entrepreneurs has in fact been used to achieve the contraction of privacy from law enforcement and intelligence agencies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite both scholarly and popular claims that citizen journalism (CJ) represents a growing democratizing force in the journalistic field, recent scholarship in the area has noted the decline of the organizational population of CJ. In this paper, we investigate how individual characteristics of sites and the dynamics of larger organizational population affect a CJ site’s risk of experiencing a mortality. Drawing on the largest sample to date of US-based English-language CJ sites, this study examines the risk of site mortality through an event history framework. Findings indicate that the strongest predictor of a site’s mortality is the age of the site, consistent with organizational population theory’s ‘liability of newness.’ We also find that for-profit and community-based sites have lower rates of site mortality, indicating that adopting legitimate conventions of journalism may serve as a protective buffer to site death. The results offer mixed evidence on whether CJ has become more professionalized via attrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) are changing the ways in which activists communicate, collaborate and demonstrate. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines, among them sociology, political science and communication, are working to understand these changes. The diversity of perspectives represented enriches the literature, providing an abundant repertoire of tools for examining these phenomena, but it is also an obstacle to understanding. Few works are commonly cited across the field, and most are known only within the confines of their discipline. The absence of a common set of organizing theoretical principles can make it difficult to find connections between these disparate works beyond their common subject matter. This paper responds by locating existing scholarship within a common framework for explaining the emergence, development and outcomes of social movement activity. This provides a logical structure that facilitates conversations across the field around common issues of concern, highlighting connections between scholars and research agendas that might otherwise be difficult to discern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses crowd-based dynamics of value creation in participatory culture. Based on a corpus of 114,931 tweets associated with One Direction and similar boy bands, we draw on recent theories of crowd-based organization in digital media as well as classical crowd theory to build a theoretical model of collective value creation. In our model, the achievement of value in the form of trending and individual microcelebrity is based on affectively driven processes of imitation, rather than on rational evaluation and deliberation. We contrast this model with established accounts of microcelebrity and draw out implications for theories of crowd-based organization in digital media and for theories of participatory culture and collaborative value creation in general. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Radio audiences are today a mix of traditional radio broadcasting audiences and networked publics (boyd, d. [2007]. Why youth (heart) social network sites: The role of networked publics in teenage social life. In D. Buckingha (Ed.),MacArthur foundation series on digital learning–youth, identity, and digital media volume(pp. 119–142). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Ito, M. [2008]. Introduction. In K. Varnelis (Ed.),Networked publics(pp. 1–14). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Varnelis, K. (Ed.). [2008].Networked publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; Varnelis, K. (Ed.). [2008].Networked publics. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; boyd, d. [2011]. Social network sites as networked publics: Affordances, dynamics, and implications. In Z. Papacharissi (Ed.),A networked self identity, community, and culture on social network sites(pp. 39–58). London: Routledge). This not only means that new media is changing the nature of listeners/viewers, transforming them into interactive users, but also that radio publics, once organized into networks, may have different properties, different behaviours and different values. In this paper, we have employed Digital Methods (DM) (Rogers, R. [2009].The end of the virtual. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press) and social network analysis to understand the Twitter activity and the communicative dynamics of the audiences of two Italian national radio stations: Radio3 Rai (public service station) and Radio Deejay (private commercial station). This work also aims to respond to a question asked by Rogers when defining DM: ‘Could the information contained in profiles on social networking sites provide different insights into the composition and characteristics of publics?’ (Rogers, R. [2009].The end of the virtual. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press). Based on the results that have emerged from this study, we believe that the answer can be affirmative: the analysis of the social connections and the interaction models of the networked listeners highlights new features of these audiences, and allows us to reevaluate and understand them from new points of view. This work shows that the digital audiences related to the two radio stations clearly distinguish themselves for their distinctive online behaviour and a different display of social networks, cultural capital and affect. We therefore hypothesize the presence of three different types of capital within the two different audiences analysed: social, cultural and affective capital. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Although there is a growing consensus that Internet communication technology (ICT) affects collective action in the twenty-first century, we know very little about what keeps individuals involved in ICT-based organizations over time. Our paper addresses this lacuna by examining whether individuals stay involved in two organizations that use ICT to structure interaction differently over a two-year period. We draw on interview and participant observation data with 38 supporters of MoveOn.org, which structures interaction hierarchically, and the Florida Tea Party Movement, which structures interaction horizontally, to assess how individuals think about each organization's use of ICT and how this shapes individual efficacy and voice – two factors that we find critical to keeping individuals engaged in organizations over time. We show that how a group uses ICT to structure interaction affects the kinds of efficacy and voice individuals are likely to experience. Organizations that use ICT to hierarchically structure interactions are effective at mobilizing people or money quickly and at achieving short-term goals, but very ineffective at creating a community of activists on the ground. The opposite is true of groups that use ICT horizontally. They are effective at creating a political community, but the conflicts that arise among supporters narrow group membership, hinder mobilization, and undercut organizational political clout over time. We conclude with a discussion of our results for understanding ICT and activism in the digital age. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The public/private distinction is one of the fundamental categories of modern social life. Historically, the two functioned as a dichotomous pair both theoretically and practically. During the height of the separation of public and private, 'private' was code for the home, personal, and non-professional contexts; 'public', on the other hand, stood for the professional world outside the home. This dichotomous treatment of public and private informed many aspects of social life ranging from gender relations and the division of household labor to the development of suburbs as purely residential (private) areas geographically separate from the public sphere of work. Recently, however, this dichotomous vision of the public/private divide has become outdated. It no longer accurately describes the ways in which public and private operate in contemporary social life; where the two spheres were once separate, there is now significant overlap and interaction. This breakdown in the public and private divide has occurred at many levels and has a strong relationship with the development and ubiquity of information and communications technologies such as mobile telephones and the Internet. This paper describes the ways in which public and private are changing and proposes a new way of theorizing the public/private distinction, as a continuum rather than as a dichotomy. This way of thinking about public and private reflects contemporary social life much more accurately than does the dichotomous conception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Non-use of the Internet has often been researched within the topic of digital divides. The focus of these studies lay mainly on differences in socio-economic backgrounds and resources. This paper goes one step further by attempting to describe various groups of non-users in two highly developed European countries: Great Britain and Sweden. Results from descriptive analyses, multivariate regressions, and principal components analysis with two waves of comparable data from 2007 and 2009 show a more heterogeneous non-user population in Great Britain and a slightly more homogeneous one in Sweden. Socio-economic factors play a bigger role in influencing who is going online in Britain than in Sweden. Education, occupational status, and household income are significant determinants in both countries. The most important determinants of Internet adoption are age and occupational status. The analysis of a 25-55-year-old sub-sample shows that non-users from this age group feature different socio-economic characteristics from older age groups. Middle-aged British non-users share two specific socio-economic characteristics: low income and unemployment; 25-55-year-old Swedish non-users tend to have low incomes, be unemployed, and be single. Non-users' self-assessment of reasons for non-use do not seem to be consistent with the 'raw data'. Non-users mainly state that they are not interested in the Internet. Many non-users share sceptical attitudes about the Internet, which influences interest in them. There needs to be more detailed research to know exactly which people are not using the Internet and why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we apply theory and research from sociology and social psychology to the problem of collective information sharing and exchange on the internet. We investigate the relationships between pre-existing dispositions to be cautious towards others, the propensity to exert more or less effort as a function of group affiliation, and contribution towards a collective goal. We find that individuals with average or lower levels of general caution are more likely to contribute to a collective pool of information, providing support for Yamagishi's (2001) argument that less cautious individuals exhibit a type of social intelligence by engaging in risky but potentially rewarding social interactions. Consistent with the literature on social loafing, we find that abstract group affiliations have a negative effect on information sharing behaviour. However, the effect of group affiliation is mediated by one's level of general caution. We argue that pre-dispositions to engage in socially risky situations are a critical element of individuals' decisions to contribute to online information sharing systems or not. [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]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses articles in the issue on topics including focus on media sociology; dispute over air quality between the U.S. and Chinese governments; and social support networks through the use of digital media technologies like Skype and Facebook.

In this article, I examine how ‘old’ media organizations develop ‘new’ media technologies by analyzing processes of technological innovation in two Danish newspaper companies that integrated blogs into their websites in very different ways in 2007. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies and sociology and building on previous research on blogging by news media organizations, I analyze how the three different communities involved in the development process – journalists and managers, but also the often-overlooked community of technologists – articulated different versions of what blogging ought to be in each organization and tried to shape the technology and pull the development work in different directions. On the basis of interviews with key participants, I show how the two newspaper organizations (equally ‘old’ media) came to develop nominally the same ‘new’ medium (blogs) for nominally the same purpose (journalism) in quite different ways through tension-filled and often contentious collaborative processes. I argue that researchers interested in understanding technological innovation in the media industry need to consider the important and active role played by the community of technologists (project managers, computer programers, information architects, etc.) that are increasingly integral to how legacy media organizations operate in a new and ever more convergent media environment under circumstances of great economic uncertainty, and discuss the wider implications for how we understand processes of technological development in the news media and the realization of the democratic potentials of new media technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

Each year the Communication, Information Technologies, and Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association curates a special issue highlighting sociological contributions to technology and media studies. That tradition continued in 2020, even as everything else changed. The articles included in this year's special issue were mostly written pre-Pandemic, yet their implications seem amplified by the current historical moment. With a globe gone remote, mediated communication rose from a specialist academic subject to an acute social consideration, intersecting with and illuminating basic sociological concerns about inequality, the nature of work, family life, and the compounding effects of race, class, gender, and sexuality as they interplay with social and material conditions. These topics are all reflected in the articles from this year's issue, now inflected with a post-Pandemic reality that shows insights from CITAMS are needed now, more than ever. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article applies sociological theories of ‘craft’ to computer gaming practices to conceptualise the relationship between play, games, and labour. Using the example of the game Dota 2, as both a competitive esport title and a complex game based around a shared practice, this article examines the conditions under which the play of a computer game can be considered a ‘craft’. In particular, through the concept of ‘prehension’, we dissect the gameplay activity of Dota 2, identifying similarities with how the hand practices craft labour. We identify these practices as ‘contact’, ‘apprehension’, ‘language acquisition’ and ‘reflection’. We argue that players develop these practices of the hand to make sense of the game’s rules and controls. From this perspective, it is the hand that initiates experiences of craft within computer gameplay, and we offer examples of player creativity and experimentation to evidence its labour. The article concludes with a discussion on the need for future research to examine the quality of gaming labour in the context of esports. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surveillance technologies may be capable of monitoring a domain, but they need a sufficiently orderly domain to monitor. This article examines the secretive effort to institute artificial-intelligence-based ‘smart surveillance’ in the New York subway, using object- and pattern-recognition algorithms to identify dangerous activities in video feeds, such as a person abandoning a package. By considering the necessary preconditions for computer vision systems to recognize patterns and objects, I show how smart surveillance was challenged by the lack of visual and social uniformities necessary for smart surveillance systems to make its fine-toothed distinctions. In spite of vast resources and involvement of a major military contractor, the project was eventually deemed a failure. Although problems in computer vision are being incrementally solved, those improvements do not yet add up to a holistic technology capable of parsing the real-world ambiguity of open-ended settings which do not meet the assumptions of the detection algorithms. In the absence of technologies that can handle the actual mess, the world itself must cooperate, but it often does not. The article demonstrates the importance of looking beyond the claims of technical efficacy in the study of security and surveillance to discover how technologies of inspection and control actually work, as a means to cut through the heavy rhetorical packaging in which they are sold to their publics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that the conventional conceptualization in political science of politics is problematic, that it is overly narrow and constrained. This is because it excludes a range of actions like satire and humour which have come to play an increasing role in inspiring and provoking powerful political emotions and in informing the political agenda. Drawing on the work of critical scholars, it is argued that emotion, ethics and art can be deeply political. Moreover, new forms of media have encouraged new–old forms of political action often at the hands of young people who hitherto have been marginalized from the public sphere. Digital technology enables the production of user-generated content, opening new spaces for information, the exchange of ideas and mobilization. This article highlights the work of the young German satirist Jan Böhmermann to demonstrate how expressive art is playing a major role in shaping public opinion, in contesting power elites and informing political debate. In short, I use Böhmermann’s 2015 satire depicting Greco-German relations in the midst of a financial crisis and fears of loan defaults to argue for a broader understanding of politics that is inclusive of activities conventionally deemed non-rational. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The aim of this article is to argue that privacy, rather than serving only as a countermeasure against surveillance, can also be seen as its ‘partner-in-crime’. Normative statements made by governments and companies on privacy can be regarded as a tool of governance in service of informational capitalism. Initially defined as a fundamental freedom, privacy has become a precondition for a blossoming economy in the context of the information society. The notion of privacy, as a critique of information society, has been assimilated and reshaped by and in favour of informational capitalism, notably by being over-individualized through the self-determination principle. To develop this idea, this article builds on the results of a study on the loyalty programmes run by the four biggest retailers of Switzerland and on the Foucauldian concept of biopower. Indeed, sexual liberation and the development of scientific knowledge on sexuality, the democratization of privacy, and the emergence of scientific discourses about privacy are processes that show intriguing similarities. Like sexuality, privacy has become a ‘power-knowledge’ related to moral standards defining what privacy should be. It produces ‘subjects of privacy’ who are supposed to take care of it according to the official conception of privacy advocates and of the legislature. Finally, we suggest understanding the conception of privacy as a terrain of power struggle between the promoters of an informational capitalism based on surveillance of citizens and consumers, and those who would prefer to promote privacy as a common good leading society to more democracy and freedom. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

While there is growing research on online politics in China some political uses of the Internet have tended to be overlooked. The focus of this article is on an emerging phenomenon in Chinese cyberspace, the human flesh search engine (HFSE), a term first used by the Chinese media to refer to the practice of online searching for people or ‘human hunting’. While existing examinations have focused on breaches of individual privacy by these so-called online ‘vigilantes’ this study focuses on the ability of HFSE to reveal norm transgressions by public officials and lead to their removal. In order to give readers a comprehensive overview of what an HFSE is, the first section of this article provides basic information about it. In the second part, 20 well-documented HFSE examples are listed to show their varying aims and then HFSEs which focus on local governments and officials are shown to highlight the political dimensions of HFSE. In the third section, four case studies of government/official-focused HFSE are explored in detail to show political HFSEs' internal processes and underlying mechanisms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapsing of social contexts together has emerged as an important topic with the rise of social media that so often blurs the public and private, professional and personal, and the many different selves and situations in which individuals find themselves. Academic literature is starting to address how the meshing of social contexts online has many potentially beneficial as well as problematic consequences. In an effort to further theorize context collapse, we draw on this literature to consider the conditions under which context collapse occurs, offering key conceptual tools with which to address these conditions. Specifically, we distinguish two different types of context collapse, splitting collapse intocontext collusionsandcontext collisions. The former is an intentional collapsing of contexts, while the latter is unintentional. We further examine the ways in which both technological architectures and agentic user practices combine to facilitate and mitigate the various effects of collapsing contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to map discourses and counter-discourses through which online piracy has been framed and constructed in Swedish blogs and online news. It has been common in previous analyses of moral public debates about new forms of media consumption to focus on conservative top-down hegemonic processes of reinstating order. The classic moral panic literature overemphasizes control, power and hegemony while overlooking counter-discourses. This study, on the other hand, takes such forms of symbolic resistance into account. It relies on a comparative discursive network analysis of texts produced by corporate news organizations and of blogs representing pro-piracy perspectives. It is concluded that with the blurring of the boundaries between producers and consumers of content, more and more localized moral panics that are not necessarily hegemonic are likely to be seen. Panic reactions can run not only from the top down but also from the bottom up as niche and micro media instigate their own moral panics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing upon the concept of capital and its uneven distribution, as outlined by Bourdieu, the article highlights the importance of social class, occupational status and place in understanding how individuals and communities make use of and benefit from technology in their everyday lives. Based upon quantitative and qualitative research conducted in the city of Sunderland, England, the article addresses the extent and manner to which those in ‘socially excluded’ areas of the city engage with technology, specifically personal computers and the internet and the impact of such engagement upon quality of life and social inclusion. The research indicates that the manner in which technology is experienced by marginalized social groups in this place, does not fit neatly with a dominant discourse of digital inclusion which emphasizes technology as a means for social inclusion, particularly in the realms of civic participation, educational achievement and employment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to investigate the way in which the relationship between journalism and business management has been framed in newspaper organizations over the last 20 years. Departing from the wide literature in media studies on the opposition between journalism and management in newspapers, I examine here how newspaper industry leaders construct their organizational framing of the relationship between journalism and business management. Drawing on interviews with industry association leaders and conference documents between 1986 and 1998 and between 2008 and 2009, three ways of framing this relationship are identified: business management supporting journalism, journalism supporting business management and mutual support. The article analyses the way in which each of these frames works, by leveraging on broader cultural beliefs, affording calculations for appropriate actions and producing overflows. The analysis suggests three main conclusions: firstly, different organizational framings coexist in time and space; secondly, they represent different times (i.e. past, present and future) quite consistently; thirdly, technology has an important role in understanding and narrating the interplay between their representations of different times. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Journalism's transition from an industrial age to an information age and the unstable economics of profit-driven newsmaking have allowed for an unprecedented level of citizen input and involvement in the making of news. Here, new relationships between legacy and innovative newsmaking are forged and new models of newsmaking emerge. In this article, we discuss the case of The New Orleans Eye, an attempt at innovative newsmaking rooted in an individual citizen who started blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans Eye is a largely foundation-funded, non-profit online news organization composed of bloggers and former ink reporters, and has a unique relationship with the local Fox television station. We treat The New Orleans Eye as an example of a mixed-media system and discuss the tensions that emerge over innovative newsmaking within a context of a profit-driven legacy news industry and a neoliberal state. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article focuses on innovative methods for protecting privacy in research of Internet-mediated social contexts. Traditional methods for protecting privacy by hiding or anonymizing data no longer suffice in situations where social researchers need to design studies, manage data, and build research reports in increasingly public, archivable, searchable, and traceable spaces. In such research environments, there are few means of adequately disguising details about the venue and the persons being studied. One practical method of data representation in contexts in which privacy protection is unstable is fabrication, involving creative, bricolage-style transfiguration of original data into composite accounts or representational interactions. This article traces some of the historical trends that have restricted such creative ethical solutions; emphasizes a researcher's obligation to protect research participants' privacy in mediated research contexts; and offers an introductory framework for reconsidering how to make case-based decisions to better protect the interests of participants in situations where vulnerability or potential harm is not easily determined. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sarah Ford's recent article, ‘Reconceptualizing the Public/Private Distinction in the Age of Information Technology’ demonstrates how social media shifts our understanding of privacy and publicity and proposes a continuum model instead of a simple dichotomy. In this commentary, we argue that Ford's proposed model does not go far enough to break down the problematic dichotomous thinking and propose a further reconceptualization of privacy and publicity as a dialectic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The potential for information technologies (ITs) to contribute to a struggle against social inequalities in health is discussed in contemporary policy and research. Expectations are on IT to facilitate access to health expertise and knowledge, and hence result in improved health practices and outcomes for individuals. In this article, the authors argue that this currently dominant understanding of the relation between IT and social inequalities in health is constraining as well as insufficient to explain the persistence of health inequalities in digitalized western societies. Human action is reduced to be about rational choice, and technology is expected to be a passive tool to be employed by implementers and policy-makers. Drawing on case studies from two telemedicine projects in Norway, this analysis combines perspectives from sociology concerned with structural inequalities on the one hand, with science technology studies on the other. It reveals how the practice and performance of IT is tied to the practice and performance of local differences, and this might be important to a discussion of the social distribution of health. Combining these two perspectives allows for an alternative understanding of how IT and social inequalities in health interact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study draws on survey data collected in 2001/2002 from two distinct regional samples of employees (N = 1667 and 547) and uses multivariate analytical techniques to assess ICT user versus non-user perceptions about the role technology plays in enhancing work effectiveness, increasing workloads, and accelerating the pace of life. I also investigate whether different devices or applications, used in different contexts (for work, for personal needs, or both), influence worker assessments of productivity and demands in different ways. I find that: (1) the frequency of computer, email, and cell phone use positively influences assessments that ICT use is connected to greater workplace effectiveness, an increased work load, and an accelerated pace of life; (2) computer and email use is linked more reliably to assessments regarding workplace effectiveness and work load than cell phone use; and (3) while both personal and work-related forms of ICT use influence productivity and pace-of-life assessments, work-related use only appears linked to assessments of increasing work demands. Overall, the findings indicate that perceptions about the social consequences of ICT use depend both on what device or application is used (computers versus cell phones), as well as the context (work versus personal) of this use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Considerable effort has been invested in telemedicine and e-health, but relatively few applications have endured beyond the research and development phase. Research within different academic disciplines points to the significance of established working and organizational relations within healthcare in shaping the outcome of particular projects, whether successful or otherwise. Even so, the findings appear as disparate and discrete observations which make it difficult for those involved in the field to get an overview of ICT in healthcare work and organization or to interpret the implications of the studies. The aim of our article is to demonstrate the importance and value of situating ICT initiatives within a sociological framework of healthcare work and organization and to show how this enables us to carry out systematic analysis across a range of ICT initiatives in different clinical settings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I shall examine the way in which information was central to the development of cybernetics. I particularly contrast the different uses of the concept by two key participants in that development - Norbert Wiener, who argued that information was a quasi-physical concept related to the degree of organization in a system; and Gregory Bateson, who considered information to be a process of human meaning formation. I suggest that these two authors exemplify a hard and a soft strand of cybernetics, present from the start of the field. I trace through these two different interpretations of information as they developed in the cybernetics movement, and on the way they have fed into more recent understandings of information within cybernetics and related fields, especially in family therapy and sociology. I also relate these ideas to the cyborg theory of Donna Haraway and others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, I examine free and open source software as a unique terrain of struggle over the politics of globalization, focusing on the Brazilian government's software strategy under the Lula administration. First, I locate this strategy in the historical context of the Brazilian government struggles for technological development and autonomy. I highlight how the Brazilian government used its power as a hierarchical organization to take advantage of the distinctive, networked political economy of free and open source software. I employ a post-structural political economy perspective to analyze the key role of discourse within the Brazilian software strategy. Second, I explore two ways that the Lula administration pursued its strategy of digital inclusion through an innovative approach to the politics of consumption. It used the power of government purchases to shift to free and open source systems, as well as pursuing a more ambitious project to democratize consumption of computers, free software and the Internet among Brazil's poor. I conclude by examining the implications of this software strategy for understanding and developing a political economy of digital inclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid expansion of computer use and Internet connection has the potential to change patterns of family interaction, with conflicts arising over adolescents' autonomy, parental authority and control of the computer. This study applied a conceptual framework derived from family development and human ecology theory to investigate family characteristics related to the likelihood of such conflicts. A secondary analysis was conducted of a special survey of 754 children aged 12 to 17 who used the Internet, and of their parents, performed by Pew Internet and the American Life project. Adolescent–parent conflicts over Internet use proved strongly related to the perception that the adolescent was a computer expert. Families in which adolescents were considered experts in new technologies were more likely to experience conflicts. Parents' attempt to reduce adolescent autonomy by regulating the time of Internet use increased the likelihood of family arguments over the Internet. Intergenerational conflicts over the Internet were higher in families in which parents expressed concern over the potentially negative consequences of Internet use. The implications of the findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores affinities between postindustrialism and modes of thinking characteristic of the Fabian Society, especially in the first half of the twentieth century. In the hands of Daniel Bell and others, the information society thesis postulates the coming of a postindustrial society marked by the centrality of information and knowledge. While caveats abound in Bell's version, the thesis has been generally optimistic in outlook, portraying postindustrial society as an advanced level of social development. Interestingly, the Fabian Society, a British-based organization highly influential in the twentieth-century project of social democracy, also emphasized information in its advocacy of social progress: ‘laying a foundation of fact’, according to one commentator, was a key ingredient of the Fabian approach. Texts by thinkers such as Sidney Webb and H.G. Wells suggest that ‘informationalism’, a commitment to information in an original sense of hard facts and figures, must indeed be construed as the essence of Fabianism, as that which distinguishes the Fabians from more metaphysical or emotional expressions of socialism. The article traces the link between information-powered politics and the largely successful practice of social engineering in Britain. However, social engineering can, and in the case of some Fabians did, degenerate into a technocratic and even totalitarian mindset. Critiques of Fabianism are therefore also acknowledged here, including those claiming that the Fabian preoccupation with data-gathering and filing, its ‘proceduralism’, actually constituted a major weakness. However, given its noble informational ideal, Fabianism can, the article concludes, illuminate contemporary information society problems. The Fabian tradition contains suggestive materials on such topical themes as fair access to information, the role of facts in progressive politics, and the prospects for an international institutional order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the US, community technology centers (CTC) are a policy response to facilitate the diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICT) to citizens who might otherwise lack access to these resources. The implicit assumption guiding CTC initiatives is that access to ICT will improve the life chances of the individuals who become involved in these centers. It is, however, prudent to empirically examine this assumption because the case for community technology interventions is somewhat weakened if the benefits of ICT use fail to accrue to those who are disadvantaged. Informed by Bourdieu's theory of reproduction, this study of a CTC initiative in an inner-city community explores the role of culture in reproducing digital inequality. Digital inequality reflects not only disparities in the structure of access to and use of ICT; it also reflects the ways in which longstanding social inequities shape beliefs and expectations regarding ICT and its impacts on life chances. While this initiative is considered successful in the sense that it provided access and basic computer literacy to residents lacking these resources, it represents a technology-centric fix to a problem that is deeply rooted in systemic patterns of spatial, political and economic disadvantage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]