{"title":"Alternative Credibility, Phenomenological Empathy, and the Plandemic","authors":"Tarun Kattumana","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.146","url":null,"abstract":"Plandemic: The Hidden Agenda behind COVID-19\u0000 is a twenty-six-minute film that went viral during the spring of 2020. The film invited controversy for sowing doubt in the official account of the COVID-19 pandemic by presenting an alternate perspective on several key issues such as masking, vaccines, and COVID-19 control measures. The film also vilified public health institutions and officials like Antony Fauci, among others. This paper aims to evaluate how conspiracy theories like the Plandemic find fertile ground during moments of crisis like the COVID-19 pandemic. To accomplish this the paper has two aims: (i) highlight the crucial role played by ‘alternative credibility’ and ‘empathy’ in garnering trust; (ii) identify how both concepts operate in the opening segment of the Plandemic, when the film’s protagonist Judy Mikovits is introduced in a manner that commentators claim played a crucial role in gaining the audience’s trust.","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"49 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114973527","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Meme-ifying Data","authors":"Shana MacDonald, Wiens Brianna","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.151","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.151","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article argues for the importance of the memetic tactic of bricolage within contemporary social media science communication for its capacity to curate and distill approachable, accessible, and shareable Covid-19 content. We suggest that the social media communication practices of what we call ‘public health influencers’ (PHIs) on Instagram, Tik Tok, and Twitter make use of memetic bricolage techniques of stop motion, collage, infographics, and placarding, coupled with an ethos of ‘micro-celebrity,’ in order to advance stalled public conversations and to reorient the spread of disinformation back to evidence-based facts. To make this argument, we analyze the cross-platform social media work of three key PHIs during the pediatric vaccination campaigns of late 2021 within our local context of Ontario, Canada to reflect on the effectiveness of social media presence, communication, and advocacy. Through memetic tactics, we argue that PHIs’ efforts to engage the public are driven by a larger impulse to combat health inequities that are exacerbated by the different forms of disinformation circulating on social media. Ultimately, this article illustrates how the concerted effort against disinformation by PHIs on social media via memes contributes to advocacy for more accessible, just, and equitable health care for Ontarians.\u0000","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"128148552","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Carlos Frederico de Brito D'andréa, Verônica Soares da Costa
{"title":"One biologist, one million deaths","authors":"Carlos Frederico de Brito D'andréa, Verônica Soares da Costa","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.125","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000The article discusses the multiple forms of expertise articulated by a specific kind of digital influencer - online science communicators - during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Our case study focuses on the performance of Atila Iamarino, a PhD in Microbiology that achieved an unprecedented public recognition after predicting, in a YouTube live transmission, that more than a million people could die in the country due to the coronavirus. Assuming the relational and networked dimension of expertise, the article discusses how Atila combined and interchanged academic, affective, and sociotechnical abilities in his performances on social media and on other (media) institutions during a public health crisis marked by the lack of coordination and the political instrumentalization of science by the Brazilian federal government. The case study is based on a systematic observation of Atila’s accounts on YouTube and Twitter, and on additional material published from March to August 2020. In the conclusions, based on how the Brazilian science influencer managed his visibility, alliances, and scientific background during the radical uncertainty period, we highlight how the expertise was built based on conditions of possibility that emerged in Brazil during the pandemic, which reveals contemporary tensions between science, politics, media, and other epistemic institutions.\u0000\u0000\u0000","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"42 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"133309243","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Distrusting Consensus","authors":"Jaron Harambam","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.143","url":null,"abstract":"Although the institutional model of science communication operated well during the corona-pandemic, and relevant public institutions (media, science, politics) garnered higher levels of trust following “rally-around-the-flag” dynamics, other people would develop distrusts towards those institutions and the emerging orthodox corona narrative. Their ideas are often framed as conspiracy theories, and today’s globalized media eco-system enables their proliferation. This looming “infodemic” became a prime object of concern. In this article I agnostically study those distrusts from a cultural sociological perspective to better understand how and why people (came to) disbelieve official knowledge and their producers. To do so, I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork in the off- and online worlds of people labeled as conspiracy theorists in the Netherlands, which includes the media they consume, share and produce. Based on an inductive analysis of people’s own sense-making, I present three dominant reasons: media’s panicky narrative of fear and mayhem; governments sole focus on \u0000lockdowns and vaccines; and the exclusion of heterodox scientific perspectives in the public sphere. \u0000Each of these reasons problematize a perceived orthodoxy in media, politics and science, and this uniformity \u0000bred suspicion about possible conspiracies between these public institutions. Too much consensus gets distrusted.\u0000While we can discard those ideas as irrational conspiracy theories, I conclude that these findings have important implications for the way we deal with and communicate about complex societal problems. Next to keeping\u0000 things simple and clear, as crisis/risk/science communication holds, we need to allow for uncertainty, critique and epistemic diversity as well.","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"30 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"132098215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Trust, media, and science in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic","authors":"D. Alinejad, A. Habed, Jaron Harambam","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.195","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i3.195","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000The first global pandemic of the information age has revealed how the coordinated spread of accurate information and the communication of relevant expert knowledge rely on functioning media channels, platforms, and institutions. As such, the coronavirus pandemic has exposed, and sometimes even catalyzed, longer-running societal processes through which traditional gatekeepers of scientific truth and expertise have been challenged or side-stepped, as alternative actors and institutions have taken the media stage and influenced policymaking spheres. To what extent has the changing media landscape contributed to (dis)trust in expertise? How do different political contexts shape the dynamics between science, policy, and diverse media publics? And in which ways does the contemporary spread of (mis/dis)information take shape? The articles in this collection address these questions by presenting original empirical analyses from a range of geographic and disciplinary vantage points.\u0000\u0000\u0000\u0000","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"11 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116799931","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"‘Life World’ on Ledger: A ‘Scenic’ View","authors":"V. Lemieux, N. Dodd","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.145","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.145","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the sociological and cultural implications of blockchain technology, specifically focusing on three prominent blockchain ecosystems: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Algorand. The study utilizes the concept of the lifeworld, which encompasses collective human perceptions and everyday communicative social interaction, to analyze the formation and perpetuation of lifeworlds within these ecosystems. By employing scene theory as an analytical framework, the research identifies structural and thematic aspects of the lifeworlds represented in the discourse on Reddit and Twitter. The analysis reveals how these virtual spaces shape the unique social orderings, normative politics, and cultural identities associated with each blockchain. The study emphasizes the role of identity expression, cultural attitudes towards money, and the dynamics of boundary work within these scenes. Overall, the paper provides insights into the distinct lifeworlds and dynamics of Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Algorand, showcasing the significance of sociocultural factors in blockchain ecosystems and illustrating how a scenes lens offers insights into dynamics at the ecosystem level that may not be visible in an exploration of blockchain technology at the level of technological category.","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"23 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130004613","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Women on the Block","authors":"Julie Frizzo-Barker","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.138","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.138","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000In response to the stark gender disparity that plagued blockchain in its early days, a range of 'women in blockchain' initiatives emerged, some more effective than others. Blockchain scenes including 'meetups,' conferences, and hackathons, present ideal sites to observe these tensions. This study is a technofeminist discourse analysis based on participant observations at blockchain events and interviews with women who work in the industry. It demonstrates how women’s participation in various blockchain scenes can be enabling or constraining depending on the gender power relations of the event. I propose three discursive frames for analyzing these scenes: (1) gender-blind meritocracy, (2) lean into blockchain, and (3) intersectional inclusion.\u0000","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"71 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126207726","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Barondeau, Axel Guitton, S. Masoumi, Pablo Aceiton Campos
{"title":"A First Glance at the NFT Quebec Gaming Scene","authors":"R. Barondeau, Axel Guitton, S. Masoumi, Pablo Aceiton Campos","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.134","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.134","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000This article examines the discourses surrounding non-fungible tokens (NFTs) in gaming and identifies companies involved in NFTs in the Quebec gaming scene. NFTs boomed in the gaming industry in 2021 and continued to grow in 2022, even as the value of gaming coins plummeted. If successful, some believe they could bring new opportunities to the gaming landscape. We conducted an online ethnography in early 2022 through an innovative web-scanning approach and curation process powered by a professional market intelligence platform. Data was collected from various sources and analyzed via statistical analysis software to understand the discourses of companies, gamers, researchers, and insiders. Findings show that the technical and economic discourse is at least ambivalent if not negative, while the gamer discourse is mostly negative. The burgeoning Quebec scene is currently very limited and divided into two groups: large gaming companies and startups. Despite the crypto-enthusiast craze, our analysis shows that early projects were often criticized by traditional gamers and that professionals in the sector remain skeptical.\u0000","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"20 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116245173","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blockchain Scenes: A Research Agenda","authors":"Nathalie Casemajor, W. Straw","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.186","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.186","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000Over the last fifteen years, the development of blockchain technologies has attracted a large volume of professional expertise, capital investment and media attention. This burgeoning sector of technology practices has coalesced around a few major initiatives (Bitcoin, Ethereum), but it is still moving at a fast pace and its configuration is evolving. If this sector is marked by a variety of technological protocols, financial arrangements and organizational forms, it is also, we would argue, a site of social effervescence. Parties, meet-ups, and the sorts of informal socializing which gather around events and networks of all kinds function to endow the blockchain sector with the characteristics of what, in cultural analysis, are often called “scenes”. The aim of this special issue is to examine the interest of the notion of scene for the analysis of blockchain practices. We argue that the notion of scene may be mobilized as a useful analytical framework not only for the study of blockchain practices, but for that of technology practices more generally. In this introductory article, we ask the following questions: how can the notion of scene contribute to the understanding of blockchain practices? And what sort of research agenda does the notion point to? In the following sections we first identify some “scenic” components in blockchain phenomena. Then we review how media discourses and academic scholarship have framed these phenomena to show that the scene perspective is undertheorized in the context of technology-related social groupings. Finally, we propose a framework to analyse the main dimensions of blockchain scenes, before presenting the contributions to the special issue. With this special issue, we aim to establish a research agenda around technology scenes at the junction of STS and cultural analysis.\u0000","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"140 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"127388831","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Making Ends Meet by Mining on Blockchain","authors":"Jiaxi Hou","doi":"10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.133","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.33621/jdsr.v5i2.133","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000While public narratives indicate that blockchain is widely used in developed societies among privileged elites, either from socio-economic, ethnic, or techno-cultural perspectives, this study examines how some disadvantaged marginal others, specifically the subaltern shehuiren in China, survive in the increasingly precarious post-socialist Chinese society by engaging with blockchain and cryptocurrencies. Literally translated as “society people”, shehuiren are the socio-economically and techno-culturally disadvantaged others who face marginality due to various post-socialist institutional inequalities. This study aims at unpacking how, on the one hand, the blockchain scene has been reconfigured by the disadvantaged in the local context, and on the other hand, how subalternity is actualized in post-socialist China, where blockchain-related technologies deeply intertwine with various forms of social inequalities. By tracing a group of shehuiren crypto miners through ethnography, I demonstrate that this subaltern scene of blockchain not just reshapes the shehuiren individuals’ notion of time, space, and value and the social relationship among themselves, but also profoundly impacts the power dynamics between the subalterns, the more privileged others, and the state authorities. Specifically, I underline that, despite being treated as losers, outsiders, and potential wrongdoers due to the existing social structures, shehuiren miners are neither victims nor rebels opposing either the authoritarian state or the global neoliberal order. Instead, they are actors who harvest limited profits through their unacknowledged creativity, adeptly making use of various resources within their reach and weaving their differential aspirations by attaching themselves to the larger technology-mediated networks in an unequal post-socialist society where a united subaltern hardly exists. \u0000","PeriodicalId":199704,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Digital Social Research","volume":"12 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-06-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115328008","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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