To date, porn literacy research has mostly focused on school-based porn literacy education. This education commonly seeks to warn young people about pornography, and to inoculate them against its ...perceived harms. This approach fails to consider porn literacies in the context of a current media literacy framework, and rarely explores young people's digital cultures that are central to their porn engagements. This article proposes a need to centre young people's digital cultures, and in doing so, considering their porn literacy practices that fall outside school-based education. For example, social media offer much evidence of porn literacy education and practice, as found on TikTok and other platforms.
Over the past decade, a growing body of scholarship in media studies and other cognate disciplines has focused our attention on the social, material, cultural, and political dimensions of the ...infrastructures that undergird and sustain media and communication networks and cultures across the world. This infrastructural turn assumes greater significance in relation to digital media and in particular, the influence that digital platforms have come to wield. Having ‘disrupted’ many sectors of social, political, and economic life, many of the most widely used digital platforms now seem to operate as infrastructures themselves. This special issue explores how an infrastructural perspective reframes the study of digital platforms and allows us to pose questions of scale, labor, industry logics, policy and regulation, state power, cultural practices, and citizenship in relation to the routine, everyday uses of digital platforms. In this opening article, we offer a critical overview of media infrastructure studies and situate the study of digital infrastructures and platforms within broader scholarly and public debates on the history and political economy of media infrastructures. We also draw on the study of media industries and production cultures to make the case for an inter-medial and inter-sectoral approach to understanding the entanglements of digital platforms and infrastructures.
Although it hosts silent films, Calimero episodes and MTV music videos, YouTube is often described as a “generational medium”. This is essentially due to the importance covered by the figure of the ...“YouTuber”, the person capable of inhabiting the semantic field constructed by the dispositif with the greatest relevance and ease. But what are his/her true generational traits? Have they to do with age, with a posture, with the objects of his/ her videos? In this article I want to study the problematic crucial nodes of this relation between YouTube as apparatus and the concept of generation.
The digital marketing discipline is facing growing fragmentation; the proliferation of different subareas of research impedes the accumulation of knowledge. This fragmentation seems logically tied to ...the inherent complexity of the Internet, itself resulting from 50 years of evolution. Thus, our aim is to provide an integrative framework for research in digital marketing derived from the historical analysis of the Internet. Using practice theory and institutional theory, we outline a new type of institutional work: imprinting work. We apply this framework to the analysis of historical secondary sources. We find four cultural repertoires on the Internet (collaborative systems, traditional market systems, co-creation systems, and prosumption market systems) and describe the dynamics of imprinting work leading to their creation, showing how new systems are created by appropriating and assimilating existing cultural repertoires. We contribute to the digital marketing literature by providing a cultural framework and a theory explaining the dynamics of the creation of four cultural repertoires. Moreover, we outline three paths of potential evolution of the digital landscape. Our framework may help managers make sense of their digital strategy and navigate the various Internet systems.
•Internet evolution was caused by actors undertaking two types of institutional work: appropriation and assimilation.•Four cultural repertoires have emerged: collaborative, traditional market, co-creation and prosumption market systems.•The systems are ordered along two axes: centralization of the management decisions structure and behavioral diversity.•Evolutions are caused by a change in the mental models of managers leading to the recognition of business opportunities.•Three paths of potential evolutions are discussed: decentralized market, democratic market and collaborative market system.
Platforms have recently come under scrutiny, both in policy and in scholarship. Yet, there is little attention paid to the notion and materiality of gendered practices. Although gender is present on ...these platforms, it is not necessarily endemic or critical to the analysis of these platformed practices. Platform Promises is a way by which we look at platformisation of gender, focusing on how gender politics are coded into the logic and infrastructure of these platforms. I propose that we stop thinking about platforms as technological engineering artefacts upon which conditions of gender are operationalised. This framing makes us believe that gendered and sexual violence online are a state of exception which can be fixed through better regulation and governance. I propose that we use gender as both a discursive and an analytic category by which to rewrite the discourse on platforms, to see the platform promises that are taken for granted and are not questioned in the dominant narratives.
The Instagram content of Nigerian digital creator Olalekan Olaleye illustrates how cultural netizenship stresses the centrality of platformization to the articulation of new genres of African popular ...representations. This article develops the argument by examining how platform aesthetics shape the trajectories and performative acts of cultural producers, something Olaleye's Nigerian context also modulates. By lingering on the digital and aesthetic labors of the cultural netizen, the article pinpoints the interactions between creative adaptations and social media texts. Olaleye's Instagram content demonstrates the way digital platforms have become integral to the production and circulation of popular forms and genres and the artistic responses everyday digital subjects make to institutions of the state.
Thomas Pynchon’s style has dazzled and bewildered readers and critics since the 1960s, and this book employs computational methods from the digital humanities to reveal heretofore unknown stylistic ...trends over the course of Pynchon’s career, as well as challenge critical assumptions regarding foregrounded and supposedly “Pynchonesque” stylistic features: ambiguity/vagueness, acronyms, ellipsis marks, profanity, and archaic stylistics in Mason & Dixon. As the first book-length stylistic or computational stylistic examination of Pynchon’s oeuvre, Thomas Pynchon and the Digital Humanities provides a groundwork of stylistic experiments and interpretations, with over 60 graphs and tables, presented in a manner in which both technical and non-technical audiences may follow.
Fortnite is a massively multiplayer online “battle royale” game that rapidly grew in 2018 to become one of the most popular digital games in the world, with a reported peak of 10.8 million concurrent ...players and 250 million registered players in March 2019. Based on 24 interviews with young people aged 9–14 (17 boys and 7 girls), this article sets out to provide an account of the appeal and experience of Fortnite. While it is impossible to pinpoint exactly why Fortnite has been such a phenomenal, global success, in this article, we argue that its appeal can be better explained by its intersections with YouTube and game livestreaming, the way the game acts as a vehicle for social capital and the performance of identity, and the rich sociality of play.
Technological changes have dramatically transformed the ways in which contemporary sport mega-events are produced and consumed worldwide. As the production and consumption of these global spectacles ...have moved beyond the traditional television and radio broadcast, this article examines and reflects on the hyper-digitalisation of sport mega-events. More specifically, we explore how one emerging platform presents a window for examining questions of power and inequality; social integration and identity; social change and development, and finally, the experience of time and space related to sport mega-events in the present-day. By employing video-sharing platform YouTube as a paradigmatic case study of the Olympic Games' digital shift, the paper contributes towards an enhanced understanding of mega-events, technologies and digital platforms. We argue that systematic efforts to understand the digital manifestations of mega-events in a 'platform society' remain extremely crucial when situated against the emerging but overlapping fields of digital sociology, digital leisure studies and digital football studies in which mega-events feature.
It is argued that social media has the potential to bridge formal and informal learning through participatory digital cultures. Exemplars of sophisticated use by young people support this claim, ...although the majority of young people adopt the role of consumers rather than full participants. Scholars have suggested the potential of social media for integrating formal and informal learning, yet this work is commonly under-theorized. We propose a model theorizing social media as a space for learning with varying attributes of formality and informality. Through two contrasting case studies, we apply our model together with social constructivism and connectivism as theoretical lenses through which to tease out the complexities of learning in various settings. We conclude that our model could reveal new understandings of social media in education, and outline future research directions.
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