Media Ecology Research Articles

TikTok and active audiences in processes for political and structural change. An exploratory study based on the Scottish referendum

Plebiscites, secession consultations, and referendums are electoral processes that are different from conventional voting. Conversations before these types of elections tend to focus on very different aspects than those generated during the election of an authority or public office, with a focus on the future impacts that each decision may have on a country, generally taking one side or the other. In the current media ecosystem, this conversation takes place largely on social platforms and networks, where users consume content and interact with it, becoming active prosumer audiences. The aim of this research is to determine what elements determine this type of discourse on TikTok –as a social network that is trending among digital communities–, what type of profiles promote them, and what narrative code is used. To this end, based on the case of the referendum planned in Scotland for 2023, an exploratory quantitative and qualitative study is proposed based on the publications discriminated by hashtags related to the topic through an analysis carried out in an application called PyCharm (Python) TikTok Research. The results suggest that on TikTok this type of content has a large reach, but it is not possible to determine precisely whether it has a specific effect or impact. However, the rate of user engagement and interaction with this content opens the possibility of eventually greater influence than on other platforms.

Social Media in the Context of the Personal Social Media Ecosystem Framework—Advancing a Flexible and Systematic Basis for Observing Health Correlates Over Time

This Viewpoint reviews the central contributions of the Personal Social Media Ecosystem Framework and outlines how the framework can help advance understanding of social media effects among youths as an ongoing public health challenge.

Eventocracy, Affective Supremacy and Resistance in Turkey’s Captured Media Ecology

Abstract The Turkish government has captured media to build ‘eventocracy’, a regime of ‘ruling by event’ to manage public attention and disrupt politics. Eventocracy strives for affective supremacy, a mode of political-emotional domination where the ruling AKP positions itself as the self-righteous national power. Through a chain of events, it casts the opposition’s grievances as national threats. Two specific events, the Roboski Massacre and the Kabataş Incident, demonstrate how the government has mobilized bitter arguments and sensational narratives with often sexist and ethnicist undertones of supremacy to affectively deplete the opposition. In response, narratives produced by citizens in low-budget street interviews and rap artists in songs contest this affective supremacy, revealing that institutional media capture remains fragile at best. Reframing media capture through affect helps us rethink the state as a key media producer and performer of political crises while questioning fact-checking as an oppositional style across authoritarian contexts.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A NEW INSTITUTIONAL STRUCTURE FOR COMMUNICATION

The role of social media in modern communications is difficult to underestimate: from interpersonal correspondence, user-generated content quickly spilled over into a sociocultural phenomenon. On the one hand, we can talk about expanding the possibilities of using the global network, and on the other hand, and this is fundamental, social media have become an independent means of mass communication, with much more multifunctional tools for “getting” into the core of the target audience. The purpose of the article is to reveal the phenomenon of computer-mediated communication of young people through the use of social media and identify their functions. Based on the results of the questionnaire survey "Internet communication as a factor in the formation of the information culture of a new generation of young people", a hypothesis was put forward that social media claim the position of a universal ecosystem. The institutionalization of social networks provides for the structuring of social practices, while the criterion for institutionalization is their structural variability (a global service system in which it is possible to satisfy scientific, educational, sociocultural, consumer and other needs). The closed ecosystem of social media, developing a targeted approach to the demonstration of user content, largely controls the mind, shaping both creative and conformist behavior, giving birth to a new generation of people – generation social young. Modern youth, based on survey data, has prioritized all mediated communication in social networks, linking the online space with everyday life. The new - "digital" generation has moved the usual social practices to social networks, institutionalizing them. In addition to informal communication, social networks have become one of the main channels of interaction between a teacher and a student, despite the fact that correspondence through personal pages is not welcomed by the administration of educational institutions for several reasons. Formally, such communication remains outside the system of corporate communications and can be easily removed or become destructive. On the other hand, chatting creates a feeling of friendly communication, which often contributes to the development of trusting relationships and has a positive effect on the learning process. The article attempts to scientifically comprehend social media from the point of view of the usual practices of youth communication in social networks and their new institutional structure. The identified and described functions of social media ("Communication", "Consolidation", "Replication of content", "State", "Finding", "Establishing contacts", "Image") probably contribute to the development of theoretical sociological foundations for studying the phenomenon of institutionalization of social media.

Disturbing the Balance? How Team Media Position Themselves in the Digital Communication Ecology of Sports

As journalism has suffered financial and institutional setbacks globally, this has given rise to so-called peripheral actors in numerous subfields of journalism. In sports journalism, this is reflected by team media. Professionals in this arena would seem to be doing very similar work to that of journalists, thereby shifting long-established power structures in the sports/media complex. However, while team media may pose an existential threat to traditional sports reporting there is also reason to believe that they still depend on healthy sports journalism. Through the lens of communication ecology and based on interviews with team media reporters ( n = 28) in Austria and the United States, this study explores how team media actually view their relation to traditional sports journalism. We found that team media reporters rejected the implication that they were somehow to blame for sports journalism’s weakened state in the sports media ecosystem. Instead, they perceived their roles as complementary and were deeply troubled by sports journalism’s weakened standing within the ecology.

(Digital) Campaigning in Dissonant Public Spheres

ABSTRACTWith the advent of digital media and social media platforms, the speed of innovation and technology adoption in campaigns have increased tremendously. At the same time, the campaign environment and its rules are in constant flow, as platform logics, party operations, and voter alignments both reflect and create instability in many political systems. Additionally, disinformation, foreign interference in campaigns, hyper-partisan media ecologies, and hyperactive users have all created changes in opinion climates. In light of these developments, and building on the theoretical concept of increasingly disrupted and dissonant public spheres (developed by Barbara Pfetsch and Lance Bennett), this special issue seeks to expand research on campaigning beyond assumptions of well-functioning political systems, to better understand the erosion of institutional legitimacy and trust, and their effects on communication processes. The special issue is organized within two conceptual approaches. The first cluster of manuscripts observes how political candidates, organizations, and parties optimize their behaviour within the dissonant political environment. The second part examines responses, perceptions, and consequences of the disrupted environment on the public. Finally, four integrated forum essays look into how dissonant public spheres may disturb democratic processes, discuss the role of data-driven campaigning, and address how limited access to platform data affects our understanding of dissonant public spheres.

A Lost Decade: Policymakers Fiddled as Newsrooms Burned

Journalists can be averse to media policy, but the stakes today are too high for practitioners to sit these debates out. The years that followed the 2011 Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Report were a lost decade in media policy, in which policymakers dithered as an information apocalypse loomed. It is essential to acknowledge that the media ecosystem has always been affected by public policy and to broaden our vision of how policymakers can help local news survive and innovate. I argue for urgent, renewed investments from government, philanthropy, and consumers to create a new media ecosystem in which all kinds of news media—public, nonprofit, and commercial—can be revived and can thrive.

Repairing Journalism’s History of Anti-Black Harm

This article addresses current debates about the future of journalism by arguing that efforts to “save” local journalism will not succeed unless they reckon with the historical role that journalism has played in undermining democracy for Black people and Black communities. The authors are cofounders of a project that calls for media reparations to reconcile and repair the history of anti-Black racism in the U.S. media system. We describe the media industry’s history of racist harms, the structural racism that enabled those harms, and the role that government policy can play in creating a media ecosystem where Black media outlets and voices control the creation and distribution of their own narratives. We then discuss prospects for a reparative approach to the reform of media practice and media policy that focuses on acknowledging and reconciling the media system’s racial harms.

News Nationalization in a Digital Age: An Examination of How Local Protests Are Covered and Curated Online

News outlets are increasingly nationalizing their presentation of news stories, framing and presenting local news in a broad national context. We investigate how supply-side and curation-side factors of the news cycle contribute to the nationalization of news coverage. Through the computational analysis of 1.05 million Google news results on four days in July–August 2020, that corresponded to 1,581 news stories published on the George Floyd protests in Portland, Oregon, and Kenosha, Wisconsin, we examine the relationship between the nationalization of news coverage, stories’ search rank in Google News, and the geographic distance between the news event and the stories’ reading audience. Further, we explore the role of Google News in curating locally focused news. Our findings help to map the media ecosystem in a digital age, highlighting the influence of algorithmic power in politics and showing that excessive circulation of national news may have a profound negative impact on news diversity and social justice.

Natural Language Processing and Naïve Bayes Classifier Algorithm to Automate the Detection of Cyberbullying

Abstract: The impact of social media on contemporary culture has been unprecedented, making it the most significant medium of our times. While it has had a positive effect on people's worldview, social media has also been linked to a rise in undesirable phenomena such as cyberbullying, cyberstalking, and cybercrime. Cyberbullying, in particular, can have a negative impact on individuals' mental health and has even been identified as the root cause of mental health issues in some cases. The proliferation of sexually explicit comments and the spread of rumors by multiple individuals are some of the negative influences that have been observed in the social media ecosystem. In recent years, academics have been increasingly concerned about the indicators of online harassment. Our goal is to develop a system that can detect instances of online abuse using Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Naïve Bayes, among other techniques. The cultural norms have shifted dramatically due to the rapid transmission of the COVID-19 virus, resulting in a rise in cyberbullying, especially among adolescents. The younger generation is more likely to engage in this practice, which has become more widespread with the stratospheric rise in popularity of various online engagement-promoting platforms. The COVID-19 pandemic has changed the way people interact online and has contributed to an increase in cyberbullying. As more people began working from home, bullying became a more significant concern. Our proposed system includes modules for data cleansing, text mining, word embedding, and regression analysis, among others. We utilize the Lemmatization technique for text mining, which enhances the model's precision. We also utilize the Vader emotion for feature extraction, which generates word vectors that are scattered numerical representations of word attributes. Additionally, Naive Bayes is used for data categorization to prevent overfitting in the proposed model. This would help in creating vectors that connect words with similar meanings

Artificial Intelligence for Media Ecological Integration and Knowledge Management

Information Technology’s development increases day by day, making life easier in terms of work and progress. In these developments, knowledge management is becoming mandatory in all the developing sectors. However, the conventional model for growth analysis in organizations is tedious as data are maintained in ledgers, making the process time consuming. Media Ecology, a new trending technology, overcomes this drawback by being integrated with artificial intelligence. Various sectors implement this integrated technology. The marketing strategy of Huawei Technologies Co. Ltd. is analyzed in this research to examine the advantages of Media Ecology Technology in integration with artificial intelligence and a Knowledge Management Model. This combined model supports sensor technology by considering each medium, the data processing zone, and user location as nodes. A Q-R hybrid simulation methodology is implemented to analyze the data collected through Media Ecology. The proposed method is compared with the inventory model, and the results show that the proposed system provides increased profit to the organization. Paying complete attention to Artificial intelligence without the help of lightweight deep learning models is impossible. Thus, lightweight deep models have been introduced in most situations, such as healthcare management, maintenance systems, and controlling a few IoT devices. With the support of high-power consumption as computational energy, it adapts to lightweight devices such as mobile phones. One common expectation from the deep learning concept is to develop an optimal structure in case time management.

“My Little Influencer”

“My Little Influencer”

The adaptation of species in the fashion media ecosystem: the case of Vogue

ABSTRACT Digitalization has reconfigured the landscape in the fashion media ecosystem. New species have emerged within the environment. Today, fashion magazines compete with numerous fashion and lifestyle content providers, questioning their role as the sole authority when it comes to deciding “what is fashionable” and challenging their monopoly when it comes to prescribing aesthetic tastes. The purpose of this study is to analyze the case of Vogue to illustrate how species can adapt to the ecosystem. Vogue’s original response, as reflected in the different initiatives we have studied, enables us to draw up a map of players within the fashion industry, one in which the magazine serves as an institution and not only as a member of the media. In this respect, our conclusions highlight the importance of the public, as opposed to the medium itself, based on an understanding of communication as a social rather than a technological phenomenon.

Political Influencers on Social Media: An Introduction

Influencers are omnipresent on social media platforms. They occupy important digital real estate across a range of topical domains including beauty, fashion, and gaming. While researchers have contributed important work on the respective role that authenticity plays for influencers’ success and have described a burgeoning industry within the larger domain of social media entertainment, comparably little is known about what happens when influencers get involved in politics, when they harness their digital clout to promote political causes and social issues, and thereby become political influencers. This introduction to the special issue on political influencers provides a definition of what makes someone a political influencer. It theoretically locates political influencers within the larger field of media and communication scholarship, and delineates the term from other, related concepts such as that of opinion leader. Building on eight contributions focused across more than six countries and nine platforms, the article showcases important strands of current and future research. It provides the foundation for a more systemic understanding of political influencers on social media, situating them within a media ecology complicated by a diverse array of traditional and nontraditional actors, tactics, and dynamics. The article concludes with recommendations for future research.

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Building a Timeline for LGBTQ+ Global Cinemas (1910–2019): Movie Production Trends from a Collaborative Internet Cinema Database

Recommendations for a Healthy Digital Public Sphere

ABSTRACT As the multiple issues of the digital public sphere threaten our democracies and the cohesion of our societies, most attempts for a betterment of the digital networks and platforms revolve around a risk-response approach. This paper takes the opposite approach and develops a positive definition of the ideal ethical public sphere, combining normative features with original taxonomies. In view of defining common standards for a healthy digital public sphere, this paper offers an interdisciplinary literature review, and original recommendations, before discussing potential leverages for implementing these changes. The suggested ethical normative features derive from a positive approach to the digital public sphere, as ideal common standards. Sustained by the underlying assumption that the composite landscape of the media ecosystem and its different layers (networks, platforms, users) cannot be steered by government regulations alone, the normative (deontological) approach serves to understand and justify the need for a normative approach, to help envision new pathways for an ethical transformation.

The Social Media Interactivity in the Perspective of Media Ecology

This study looks at the media ecology theoretical framework to explore the impact of social media interactivity on users. This study argues that different age groups impact differently via social media interactions it's all depends on their demographics such as age, qualification, and socioeconomic status. The findings confirms that social media interactivity happened due to individual gratification but it creates an impact on the human environment as media ecology claimed.This study uses the qualitative technique of face-to-face in-depth interviews with a total of 16 participants to achieve its goals, and it presents its findings using inductive thematic analysis. The study came to the conclusion that both Digital Natives and Digital Immigrants' social behavior and self-concept are impacted by their frequent use of social media platforms.

Animating Eco-aesthetics: Multiplanar Images, Interspecies Government, and Eco-conscious Gaming in The Legend of Hei (2019) and Its TV Series (2011–Present)

Abstract This study on the animation feature The Legend of Hei (2019) and its TV animation series (2011 to the present) endeavors to explore nascent models of eco-aesthetics in Chinese animation through an intersectional framework bridging studies of eco-politics, eco-cinema, and contemporary animation and media studies. Through close analysis of multiplanar imaging and limited animation in the animation feature, I discuss how varied animation techniques in the film contribute to aesthetic effects of appearance and disappearance, diversified characterization, and representations of contesting models of ecological subjectivities, bio-politics, and environmental governance. Contrary to a radical ecologist’s approach that resorts to forceful undertakings to “rescue nature,” the animation projects an alternative ethico-political method that promotes co-existence, inter-species governance, tolerance, and the art of “letting be.” The latter half of the essay situates the TV animation series The Battle of Luo Xiaohei in the milieu of eco-cinema and media ecology. I argue that the TV animation’s transmedial presentation of ACG gaming, platformativity, and parasocial participation of gamers, human characters and elfin alike, offer new insights on videogaming as social and cultural responses to environmental crises, also drawing attention to the ethico-political potential of parasocial gameplay in promoting democratic ideals of ecosystem governance.

THE TOXIC TURN? CONCEPTUAL AND METHODOLOGICAL ADVANCES ON PROBLEMATIC CONTENTS ON SOCIAL MEDIA

The ‘toxic turn’ in social media platforms continues unabated. Hate speech, mis- and disinformation, misogynistic and racist speech, images, memes and videos are all far too common on social media platforms and more broadly on the internet. While the diminishing popularity of populist politicians led to hopes for less social toxicity, the Covid-19 pandemic introduced new and more complex dimensions. Tensions have emerged around what constitutes problematic content and who gets to define it. Co-regulation models, such as for example the EC Code of Conduct against Illegal Hate Speech, focus on the legality of certain types of contents, while leaving other categories of problematic contents to be defined by platforms. In parallel, the social media ecosystem became more diverse, as new platforms with hands off moderation policies attracted users who felt too constrained by the policies of mainstream platforms. The proposed panel examines this complex and dynamic landscape by problematizing what is understood as toxic, deplatformed, removable and in general problematic content on platforms with the aim to probe the boundaries of what is constituted as acceptable discourse on platforms and to map its implications. In particular, this panel discusses the broad definition of ‘problematic content’ employed by social media platforms, a catch-all term that cuts across hate speech and propaganda, including more politically topical content such as mal-, mis-, and disinformation, hyperpartisan and polarising content, but also abusive, misogynistic, racist, and homophobic discourse. The term is also employed to refer to spam and content that infringes upon the Terms of Service or the Community Standards of social media platforms. As such, it is a broad category that resists a narrower classification given the operational scope of its use. Defining what constitutes problematic content is a key operation of platform content moderation policies but is also the subject of intense debates (de Gregorio, 2020; Gillespie, 2018; Gillespie et al., 2020; Gorwa et al., 2020). The panel interrogates the many definitions and applications of problematic content on social media platforms and applications through an empirically informed lens and focusing on deleted contents, complex mixed narratives, and grey areas, including hidden misinformation on voice applications. Problematic Content according to Twitter Compliance API presents ongoing work on the Twitter Compliance API and the Compliance Firehose, which allow researchers to identify content that has been deleted, deactivated, protected, or suspended from Twitter, a proxy for problematic content. In Multi-Part Narratives on Telegram Siapera presents ongoing research that probes the intersection between Covid-19 scepticism, far right and other political narratives in vaccine hesitant groups on Telegram. The third contribution, What if Bill Gates really is evil, people? Investigating the infodemic’s grey areas discusses the conceptual and methodological definitions of problematic content in relation to work on anti-vax and other conspiratorial narratives on Instagram and on Twitter. The fourth contribution, Misinformation and other Harmful Content in Third-Party Voice Applications focuses on problematic content that is yet to be identified on voice applications such as personal assistants. The article addresses the methodological challenges of identifying and defining such contents on applications that have currently no content moderation policies. All contributions foreground the difficulties and costs of identifying and dealing with problematic contents on social media. The panel fits with theme of decolonization in two ways: firstly, because it is concerned with the tensions around how toxic/problematic contents are defined and who gets to define them; and secondly, because of its focus on neo-colonial discourses or justifications for colonialism in both narratives hosted by platforms and in platforms’ attempts to regulate content. As some narratives are flagged for removal by social platforms, they also raise the question of who is deciding and what does problematic content mean, with far right discourses exploiting this tension and ironically denouncing any attempt to regulate the public discourse as ideological enforcement and justification for (neo)colonial practices performed by social media platforms. From this perspective, platforms' own claims about what constitutes acceptable content is uncomfortably close to colonial narratives of civilised discourse and brings to the fore the potential for neo-colonial narratives and practices in digital spaces.

LOST IN THE ETHER: THE IMPACT OF PLATFORM HEGEMONY ON SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING

In post-modern society, the pervasion of social media by business interests is immutable. From benign beginnings as peer-to-peer networking sites, social media has attracted the attention of commercial actors intent on exploiting the media’s propensity to reach large audiences quickly and cheaply. Organically based campaigns saw small firms gain access to large audiences on a previously unthinkable scale. However, the business model monetisation strategies of legacy platforms such as Facebook and Instagram have redefined the intrinsic role of these platforms beyond simple network carriage providers. Together with algorithmic changes designed to filter out unpaid content, a profound effect on equity of access to audiences has been felt by companies marketing via these channels. In particular, the communications efforts of small organisations with limited resources, have been substantially diminished, together with their visibility, under the user-pays regime. This paper examines the distribution of power in commercialised social media ecosystems. The research maps significant shifts in relational dynamics to reveal an increasingly dichotomous system of haves and have nots among companies operating in this environment. Using a resource and stakeholder theory lens, in-depth interviews were conducted with 17 social media marketing practitioners in the UK and Australia and analysed using a grounded theory approach. The findings reveal a form of neo-colonial gatekeeping based on increased platform hegemony. The new social media hierarchy was found to diminish diversity and perpetuate an increasingly unbalanced economic system. The research implications are discussed in the context of disenfranchised small enterprises.