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The internet is an increasingly influential actor and arena for debating emerging sustainability controversies, but studies often overlook the role of visualisations in online spreading of information. This paper offers a way to better understand this role: what images do competing online actors use, are there differences between opponents and proponents, differences between internet regions, and are there shifts in their online visualisations over time? Adopting a controversy studies perspective and the digital methods approach, we studied the online spread of visual information. We compared the use of visualisation about shale gas on top-ranked pages in the internet regions of South Africa, Mexico and the United Kingdom in 2018 and 2019. The results indicate a connection between the actor's standpoints in the controversy and the type of image used. In Mexico, proponents and neutrals used, most of all, photographs of people (officials). Opponents posted more data visuals. South African and British neutral actors used more data visuals, while proponents posted landscapes and opponents photographs of people (protesters). Also, we noticed that changes in the actor's position in the controversy between 2018 and 2019 coincided with changes in the use of type and content of visualisations. Context-specifics of each country offered possible explanations for these shifts in standpoint and visualisation of the controversy. Our study indicates that visuals are highly relevant digital objects in public debate and the decision-making process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Beginning in 2014, Chinese Internet-users can purchase care and concern online. Customers can hire both male and female virtual lovers (xuni lianren) to talk to them while the lovers perform character roles of their choice. By examining why female customers consume virtual loving services, we argue that women hire male virtual lovers to assuage the frustrations that they accrue in their daily lives, and not to look for offline romantic partners. Inspired by the concept of 'emergent masculinity' (Inhorn & Wentzell, 2011. Embodying emergent masculinities: Men engaging with reproductive and sexual health technologies in the Middle East and Mexico. American Ethnologist, 38(4), 801–815), we coin the term emergent femininity. This term describes how, after a century-long process where the individual breaks free from familial and societal strictures, present-day young and urban Chinese women now exhibit a novel mode of womanhood characterized by historically unprecedented self-confidence, a willingness to openly articulate and purchase what they want, and a high degree of mediatization. Hence, this paper illuminates the appearance of 'new women' in China. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Patterns of news consumption are changing drastically. Citizens increasingly rely on social media such as Facebook to read and share political news. With the power of these platforms to expose citizens to political information, the implications for democracy are profound, making understanding what is shared during elections a priority on the research agenda. Nevertheless, to the best of our knowledge, no study has yet explicitly explored how elections transform news sharing behaviour on Facebook. This study begins to remedy this by (a) investigating changes in news coverage and news sharing behaviour on Facebook by comparing election and routine periods, and by (b) addressing the 'news gap' between preferences of journalists and news consumers on social media. Employing a novel data set of news articles (N = 83,054) in Mexico, findings show that during periods of heightened political activity, both the publication and dissemination of political news increases, the gap between the news choices of journalists and consumers narrows, and that news sharing resembles a zero-sum game, with increased political news sharing leading to a decrease in the sharing of other news. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]