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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]

Networked information technologies have brought about extensive changes in the production and distribution of creative cultural work. Inspired by the widespread success of Free-Libre/Open Source Software (FLOSS), many proponents of open access advocate reconceptualisation of existing legal protection frameworks in creative works. This paper traces the attempted appropriation of Creative Commons (CC) licences by filmmakers and the consequent formation of an Open Content Filmmaking (OCF) movement. OCF proponents articulated notions of technology-enabled transformation in content creation and distribution, similar to those that inspire the visions of FLOSS and CC advocates. It examines how these creators attempted to address the relevance of openness to their own activities and develop practical open models for filmmaking. Difficulties experienced in establishing viable livelihoods with OCF (as FLOSS developers had done), created tensions between those with a pragmatic or more ideological orientation. The initial vision of a consistent OCF movement, enabled by CC, thus became fragmented. In contrast to FLOSS, where many actors were able to find ways to develop sustainable careers within the industry while contributing to Open Source Software, such generic strategies have not readily emerged for OCF. Drawing insights from Sørensen's (1996) Social Learning framework (Learning technology, constructing culture. Sociotechnical change as social learning: University of Trondheim, STS working paper 18/96) in this paper we untangle the elaborate but often messy strategies deployed by Open Content Filmmakers (OCFs) and trace the multiple and often partial ways they have worked out to utilise CC elements and tools in producing, monetising and distributing their films. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how marginalized youth in Morocco use YouTube to contest hegemonic discourses of state power and institutional practices of social exclusion. The paper analyses a user-generated, YouTube web-series,Tales of Bouzebal, as a performance of marginality and a social critique of state bureaucracies and institutions in the context of post-Arab Spring Morocco. Using a combined method of textual and discourse analyses, the paper argues that the new media practices of producing and consuming user-generated video are best understood as practices of cultural citizenship that contribute to social change through the production of counter-discursive political subjectivities among youth in MENA. The paper posits that the concept of citizenship needs to be expanded to account for citizen participatory media practices that contest the conditions of marginality and inequality sustained by normative definitions of citizenship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grievances and an urgent awareness of the need for social change are necessary but insufficient catalysts for the formation of powerful and robust social movements. While this realization has led observers of social movements to attend to a wide variety of structural and subjective factors, in the alchemy of radical social change and the grassroots collective action that fuels it one of the most important yet under considered elements is the radical imagination. In this paper, I map the concept of the radical imagination and the methods necessary to study it in action. A collective activity produced through dialogic encounters rather than an individual possession or faculty, the radical imagination is our capacity to conceive of the world as it might be otherwise, and it animates successful movements for social change. Since the radical imagination is something people do together it is also a profoundly social phenomenon bearing the marks of the activist culture and political context in which it is enmeshed, and the forms used to mediate and circulate it. This, in turn, has profound consequences for the way activists sustain themselves, organize for social change, and connect with others beyond their ranks. Drawing on research conducted since 2010 with radical activists in Halifax, Canada seeking to 'convoke' – collectively summon into being – the radical imagination, I reflect on the relationship between the radical imagination, activist culture and context, and movement building in the age of austerity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins from the basic premise that in considering digital media and its multifarious relations with forms of protest and political mobilization, we are interested in social change. Yet, too often, the key ingredient of protest and political mobilization – the radical politics itself – is left out of our analyses. How can we begin to tackle the challenges posed to democratic politics if we do not talk about actual politics as part of our research? This problem is both conceptual and practical. A politics requires a practice. We cannot understand the nature of the practice without understanding its politics; we cannot understand the politics without appreciating its processes and organization. Yet, so many studies do just this. This paper argues that a fugitive politics limits our abilities to take progressive thought and action forward. By ignoring the actual politics, we end up depoliticizing counter politics because we offer precious few suggestions as to how we can do democratic politics better. Without an understanding of the conditions under which a Left progressive politics could develop then the politics itself threatens to remain ill defined. What might it mean then to put the development of a counter politics at the heart of our analyses? What are the conditions required (including the communicative conditions) for radical political organizations/collectives to endure, build capacity and effect social change? [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Social movements often seek news media attention as a means to garner public attention to social problems; social movements may also attempt to circumvent traditional media channels through the use of social networks. The role of social media in cultivating political and social change is an area of increasing interest to scholars studying the politics of social movements, yet there exist few systematic studies on how social media attention interacts with traditional forms of media to produce public attention to social issues. Using the 2016–2017 protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and allies, we examine how social media (Facebook, YouTube, Twitter) influenced public attention to the NoDAPL protests, demonstrating that engagement with social media has effects independent of traditional forms of media coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article puts forward a theory of the role of digital media in social change. It begins by criticizing three theories that currently dominate our understanding of digital media and of media generally: network theory, mediatization theory and actor-network theory. It also identifies a gap in current communication theory, namely, that digital media mostly do not fit the divide into mass and interpersonal communication. A further problem is that insufficient attention is given to the difference between political communication and popular culture or everyday life. The article develops an alternative, focusing on four countries that provide a range of relationships between media and society; the U.S., Sweden, India and China. In all four countries, despite their differences, digital media, in contrast to traditional broadcast and interpersonal media, have led to a more differentiated media landscape. Greater complexity in political communication nevertheless runs up against the continuing dominance of elite agenda-setting. In terms of popular culture, all four countries have experienced a proliferation of media offerings and greater tetheredness between people. Hence, new divides are emerging between more active and variegated as against more passive and restricted media uses. The article concludes with implications of digital media for understanding media generally: with new digital media, there is now a need to rethink media theory in terms of fundamental debates about how media transform or preserve the social order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much has been written in recent years about Chinese online activism. Although in China Internet use is officially regulated and censored, China nevertheless has the world's largest number of Internet users, with blogs being the largest communication platform. However, most of the research on Chinese use of social media to date has focused specifically on Chinese language Internet sources, with little attention paid to online activity among any of China's 55 officially recognized ethnic minority groups, such as the Uyghurs. Uyghurs are an ethnic group native to China's northwest Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. They speak Uyghur language natively, a Turkic language that utilizes an Arabic script, and most are Moslems. As the largest ethnic group within a region of China noted as among China's most politically sensitive, the Uyghurs provide a rich source for study of the use of the Internet by a potentially contentious group. This research thus seeks to fill a gap in the literature by addressing the question: In what ways do Uyghurs utilize social media as a form of online activism? The findings show that in Uyghur blogs, comments are often posted using veiled language such as metaphors, sarcasm, and humor, or references to traditional Uyghur sayings and culture practices as a means of expressing subversive political communication, in an indirect way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]