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Social media platforms are increasingly looked at as means to investigate social phenomena like collective events, issues or causes. Digital methods – techniques exclusively focused on online data and shaped by the environment hosting these data – have become part and parcel of these investigations, often approaching platforms as hybrid assemblages of users, infrastructures, and algorithms. In its 'online groundness', this type of digital methods research, however, often tends to skim over the socio-cultural, contextual dimension of both wider social phenomena and social media uses and practices. In this paper, we advance a threefold contribution aimed at both sparking future efforts to address this limitation and aligning digital methods inquiry with contemporary epistemological debates that counter universalistic views of platforms and data. First, we question the degree to which digital methods can inform social investigations of collective events, issues or causes. Second, we advance a digital methods paradigm that addresses platforms as socio-cultural artifacts rather than hybrid assemblages. Finally, by reflecting on how we accessed, handled, and explored 9,000 Instagram visuals and around 400,000 Facebook comments to understand influences on middle class understandings of food consumption in Brazil and South Africa, we illustrate a way to design culturally sensitive digital methods research built on 'quanti-quali' practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the interplay of digital media and space in the creation of a low-skilled informational workforce in urban settings. Based on ethnographic research among cell phone SIM card street vendors in Belo Horizonte city in Brazil, I argue that these workers constitute a fraction of a precarious digital workforce fundamental for the reproduction of informational/communicational markets in the peripheries of digital capitalism. The emergence of these low-skilled informational workers does not rely solely on their technological abilities or the specific spatialities in which they perform simple informational labor. Instead, I argue that their emergence as digital workers arises from the intersection of space, labor and digital media. In particular, I show how the conformation of this precarious Brazilian cybertariat enables us to grasp the role that subordinated digitization plays in contemporary capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How can we explain the multiple uses that media organizations make of media technologies across the world? This paper proposes a hybrid conceptual framework that synthesizes ideas from the sociology of knowledge approach to discourse with science & technology studies concepts (i.e., script and technological frame) in order to emphasize the importance of policy and organizational discourses in shaping multiple uses of media technologies by media organizations. We apply the conceptual framework to study the case of Mídia NINJA, a Brazilian alternative media that gained popularity due to its innovative coverage of the 2013 riots in the country through collaborative practices and digital media technologies. Based on interviews and participant observation, we found that policy discourses to change the media structure influenced in time the discourse and practices of this alternative media in Brazil, leading to new uses of digital media technologies unintended by its designers. Thereby illustrating the importance of discourses to shape within certain boundaries the multiple uses of media technologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses some of the difficulties involved in using the concepts of 'communities of practice' and 'networks of practice' when understanding the exchange of knowledge among globally dispersed communities of professionals. It proposes rethinking 'networks of practice' as heterogeneous networks in the sense used by the actor-network theory. The revised concept is illustrated with examples from the author's study of software developers in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, and their ties to global technology. [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]