{"title":"Noise in sonic social media: Memetic soundscapes of Deep TikTok","authors":"Elena Pilipets, Jason Chao","doi":"10.1177/14614448251358752","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251358752","url":null,"abstract":"This article contends that the attention economy of social media reflects a shift toward soundscapes where networked sound objects – whether popular music or ambient sound, remixed speech or glitched audio – play a central role in amplifying user engagement. The analysis centers on audiovisual communities that operate as contra points to common TikTok trends, with particular attention to the Alt genre and niche phenomenon of Deep TikTok or DeepTok. Sound-linking and hashtagging practices within DeepTok reveal a dual dynamic: To survive the algorithmic visibility contest, DeepTokers creatively repurpose TikToknative sharing features, playing by the platform’s communicative rules. Meanwhile, glitch techniques deployed in the service of attention capture constitute engaging spaces that simultaneously incorporate and reject mainstream content. We inquire into these relations by exploring video and platform metadata attached to a curated collection of 497 #deeptiktok posts, arguing for a contextual understanding of memetic soundscapes that reenact noise.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144899000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Nathaniel Tkacz, Carlos Cámara-Menoyo, Fangzhou Zhang
{"title":"Eventful migration: Rethinking social media migration with help from Elon Musk’s sink","authors":"Nathaniel Tkacz, Carlos Cámara-Menoyo, Fangzhou Zhang","doi":"10.1177/14614448251358846","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251358846","url":null,"abstract":"Using the 2022 Twitter to Mastodon migration as a case study, this article contributes a new understanding of social media migration (SMM). It begins with a review of existing studies of SMM, showing how migration is often understood as a combination of ‘push and pull factors’. We suggest a need to widen the conceptual scope for how we approach SMM in ways that more directly tie such movements to specific questions of power, agency and events that ripple through digital cultures. Drawing on social media account analysis, a survey of recently migrated Mastodon users, content from high-profile Twitter users and other media commentaries, we re-present the migration in order to detail our ‘eventful’ theory of migration. Eventful social media migration is comprised of five elements: an initial X factor; the emergence of a critical voice; a collective platform consciousness; an observable migration; and a wider terrain transformation.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144898998","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A speculative political economy of virtual/augmented reality: Synchronization and immanentization","authors":"James Steinhoff","doi":"10.1177/14614448251348898","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251348898","url":null,"abstract":"Virtual and augmented reality are, alongside AI, some of the most feted technologies of the 2020s. However, unlike AI it remains unclear whether there is a distinct political economy of VR/AR. This article argues—in a speculative mode—that there is by drawing together political economy and medium theory. I contend that the economic significance of VR/AR is an operation of real-time <jats:italic>synchronization</jats:italic> , in which the body, the real world, and virtual space are brought into spatial-temporal coordination. I show this via an analysis of the operation of simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM). Synchronization enables a novel form of immanentization: the rendering of the body immanent to the digital. Immanentization enables a stacking of spatialities: the layering of virtual worlds—which can be interacted with in the same way as the real world—on top of the real world, without obscuring it. This presents novel possibilities for accelerating production and circulation processes.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"70 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144899006","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Fast and furious: Temporal patterns of incivility in online comments","authors":"Ben Clarke, William Hedley Thompson","doi":"10.1177/14614448251359624","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251359624","url":null,"abstract":"Incivility in online comment sections is pervasive and has significant societal implications, including impacting mental well-being and increasing polarisation. This study investigates the relationship between speed of commenting and incivility, using a dataset of 38 million comments from The Guardian Online. We hypothesise that quicker responses are more likely to be uncivil and that incivility propagates through a contagion effect. Our analysis reveals that blocked comments, used as a proxy for incivility, are posted significantly faster than visible comments, for both parent and child comments. In addition, we find that the presence of blocked comments increases the likelihood of subsequent blocked comments, with decreasing time intervals between them. These findings suggest that incivility is associated with impulsive, fast thinking, while civil discourse will sometimes require slower, more deliberate practices. Our results have implications for designing online platforms to foster healthier and more productive discussions by encouraging deliberative time before readers post.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"12 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144899070","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christine Lohmeier, Lisa Schulze, Johannes Schöning, Gian-Luca Savino
{"title":"Navigating beyond places: The significance of navigation tools in everyday media use","authors":"Christine Lohmeier, Lisa Schulze, Johannes Schöning, Gian-Luca Savino","doi":"10.1177/14614448251359632","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251359632","url":null,"abstract":"This study examines navigation tools as key mediators of spatial perception, mobility, and digital infrastructures, contributing to scholarship on mediatization, geomedia, and surveillance studies. Navigation apps like Google Maps do not merely facilitate wayfinding; they actively shape spatial experiences, decision-making, and social interactions. Using a mixed-methods approach, we combined real-time activity tracking via the “MapRecorder” tool with qualitative interviews to analyze how users engage with Google Maps. Our findings reveal that navigation tools function as interfaces of spatial production, social connection, and data extraction, embedding themselves in everyday media repertoires. We identify four key usage patterns—search, place, directions, and map view manipulation—demonstrating that navigation is increasingly entangled with broader digital habits. In addition, the data suggested a paradoxical relationship between user convenience and concerns over dataveillance, contributing to debates on privacy resignation and the platformization of spatial control. By foregrounding these tensions, our study extends discussions on the deep mediatization of space, the role of geomedia in shaping mobility, and the sociotechnical power of digital navigation infrastructures.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144899003","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘He threw me to the lions’: Parasitic behaviour and surveillance in online hate against feminists in Spain","authors":"Malin Roiha","doi":"10.1177/14614448251365578","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251365578","url":null,"abstract":"This article explores the dynamics of large-scale online attacks against feminists, with a focus on the roles of surveillance and parasitic behaviour in these practices. Drawing on a broader study of online hate targeting feminists in Spain, the article focuses on cases where attacks originated from profiles with substantial social media followings. The analysis builds on ethnographic fieldwork, including 26 case studies of online violence against feminists and 10 in-depth interviews with targeted women. The article highlights the organized and persistent nature of online harassment, orchestrated through online forums or by influential anti-feminist social media profiles. These profiles attack targets to create viral content and attract followers, while monetizing the harassment. By generating continuous content, they perpetuate the abuse while avoiding direct incitement, allowing them to evade responsibility for the harm they cause. The lack of platform intervention exacerbates the issue, contributing to a sense of constant surveillance for targets.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"13 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144899010","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Douglas A Parry, Calvin Kuit, Ané Murray, Albert van der Westhuizen
{"title":"Connect to disconnect: What an online community for digital disconnection can tell us about digital well-being","authors":"Douglas A Parry, Calvin Kuit, Ané Murray, Albert van der Westhuizen","doi":"10.1177/14614448251362436","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251362436","url":null,"abstract":"Digital media profoundly shape modern life, offering benefits while also prompting concerns that lead many to seek disconnection. This study investigates <jats:italic>r/NoSurf</jats:italic> , a large online community paradoxically dedicated to digital disconnection. Through computational and qualitative analysis of discussions from over 26,000 active members, we study users’ complex and often ambivalent relationships with technology and their pursuit of digital well-being. The findings show that people see digital technology as both an escape and a source of distress. Motivated by desires to mitigate perceived negative impacts like distraction and diminished well-being, and faced with the difficulty of full withdrawal, members actively develop and share a sophisticated repertoire of strategies to manage their digital technology use. This research characterizes digital disconnection not as mere avoidance, but as a dynamic, skillful, and individually negotiated practice, or literacy, aimed at fostering well-being and intentionality in the face of pervasive connectivity.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"44 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144899007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Digital twins of the ocean: Wet environing media and marine futures","authors":"Adam Wickberg, Susanna Lidström","doi":"10.1177/14614448251338286","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251338286","url":null,"abstract":"The EU’s Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) is presented as a coherent, high-resolution, multi-dimensional, multi-variable and near real-time representation of the ocean that integrates new data sources with advanced modeling, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The two-way exchange of information between marine ecosystems and the digital twin is intended to create a feedback loop between the digital and physical realms that is emblematic of environing media. The EU’s vision is that the DTO will empower citizens, inform politicians, support a blue economy, and improve protection of the marine environment. The sociotechnical imaginary of the DTO presents a narrative that a balance between sustainable exploitation and conservation can be had through the use of sophisticated digital technology. But what is at stake in this technocratic control over the world ocean, and where does it come from? Whose interest will digital twins ultimately serve? Understood in its historical and environmental context, the DTO caters to the aims of sustainable development, but risks veiling continued unsustainable development and growth under the guise of new digital technologies. We use the theoretical lens of environing media and sociotechnical imaginaries to critically unpack this narrative and its historical contingencies, and show how difficult goal conflicts are systematically glossed over through a veil of datafication and technological development.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"11 1","pages":"4461-4477"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144766136","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Christoph Borbach, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Tristan Thielmann
{"title":"Making everything ac-count-able: The digital twinning paradigm","authors":"Christoph Borbach, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, Tristan Thielmann","doi":"10.1177/14614448251338289","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251338289","url":null,"abstract":"This editorial investigates the epistemic and media-theoretical significance of digital twinning as a decision-making practice. Digital twins purport to calculate futures based on sensor data in conjunction with generative AI, cloud computing, and Internet-of-things architectures; they shape institutional decisions and are used to make such decisions accountable. To illustrate this, examples from the logistics, transportation, and military sectors are contrasted to earlier simulations and described as “phenomenotechniques.” We argue that digital twins are recent expressions of a technocratic <jats:italic>paradigm</jats:italic> characterized by the imperative to make everything worldly “count,” datafying and modeling it within digital environments in real time for future predictions. Digital twins are thus performative agents in a network of feedback loops between humans, machines, environments, and algorithms. This article concludes with an overview of the special issue, placing digital twins in the phenomenological context of media that are seamlessly and simultaneously logistical, spatial, and transformative.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"26 1","pages":"4369-4384"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144766176","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Because the twin is not a copy: On the politics of digital twins","authors":"Louise Amoore","doi":"10.1177/14614448251338284","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448251338284","url":null,"abstract":"This essay explores the changing form of the digital twin as a political technology in the age of deep learning and generative artificial intelligence (AI). It situates the digital twin as a distinctive contemporary form of simulation and examines how it is making up people, things, scenes and their interactions in novel ways: the drawing in of unstructured datastreams and their experimental recombining and modification. Although the digital twin is often represented as a digital copy or replica of the physical world, it actually departs radically from a mimetic copy; advancing a mode of twinning that classifies, extracts and divides. The essay addresses digital twinning as an emerging form of knowledge and action in the world. It proposes three distinctive logics of the contemporary politics of digital twins: intervention, prediction and action. Each of these aspects is discussed through the situated digital twin domains of the factory, the clinic and the battlefield.","PeriodicalId":19149,"journal":{"name":"New Media & Society","volume":"23 1","pages":"4549-4564"},"PeriodicalIF":5.0,"publicationDate":"2025-08-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"144766132","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}