"Information, Communication and Society"

Zeng, Jing; Chan, Chung-hong; Schäfer, Mike S.

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1776372pmid: N/A

Artificial intelligence (AI) has become a prominent public issue, particularly in China, where the government has announced plans to turn the country into a global AI power. This study analyses public discourse about AI in China through the conceptual lens of public spheres theory and counter-public spheres. It compares the official AI narrative on People’s Daily Online with public discussion about AI on the social medium WeChat, where we assumed that official views would be challenged. Using a combination of qualitative and computational methods, 140,000 AI-related articles published between 2015 and 2018 were studied. Findings reveal that AI-related discourse on WeChat is surprisingly similar to that on People’s Daily Online. That is, it is dominated by industry and political actors, such as government agencies and technology companies, and is mostly characterised by discussions about the economic potential of the technology, with strongly positive evaluations, and little critical debate.

Leder Mackley, Kerstin; Jewitt, Carey; Price, Sara

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1791215pmid: N/A

This article investigates the remediating effect of bio-sensing technology on touch practices in the context of parent-infant interaction. We examine how the entry of a biosensing technology into the social, sensory and technological ecology of family homes interacts with the ways in which parents and babies know each other and communicate through touch. The paper centres on an exploratory case study of the Owlet Smart Sock (OSS), a bio-sensing baby monitoring device. We bring the social critical and experiential lenses of multimodality and sensory ethnography to studying the OSS as a socio-technological probe across a range of research encounters, including focus groups, home visits and video re-enactments with parents. In doing so, we provide an account of the ways in which the technology affects how babies and parents’ bodies are (re)imagined, assessed, controlled, interrelated, experienced, and cared for and move beyond generic social debate around the quantified-objectified baby and fears of touch deprivation in contemporary digital culture.

Zhao, Luolin; John, Nicholas

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1791216pmid: N/A

In this article we present an analysis of the concepts of fenxiang and gongxiang – the Mandarin words for ‘sharing’– in the context of Chinese social media. We do so through an interrogation of the words fenxiang and gongxiang as used by Chinese social media companies. Using the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, we created screenshots of 32 Chinese social network sites between 2000 and 2018 and tracked changes in the usage of fenxiang and gongxiang over time. The Mandarin translations in some ways operate like the English word, ‘sharing’. Fenxiang has the meaning of participating in social media, and gongxiang refers to technological aspects of sharing, while also conveying a sense of harmony. However, the interpersonal relations implied by fenxiang, and the political order implied by gongxiang, are quite different from those conveyed by ‘sharing’. Together, fenxiang and gongxiang construct a convergence of micro-level interpersonal harmony and macro-level social harmony. Thus, the language of sharing becomes the lens through which to observe the subtlety, complexity and idiosyncrasies of the Chinese internet. This article offers a new heuristic for understanding Chinese social media, while also pointing to an important facet of the discursive construction of Chinese social media. This implies a continuing need to de-westernize research into the internet and to identify cultural-specific meanings of social media.

Liu, Tingting; Lai, Zishan

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1791217pmid: N/A

Globally, mainstream digital gaming has long been marked by compulsory (hetero)sexuality and hypermasculine gender norms, making it an ideal arena for exploring gendered power relations. This article critically examines how the participation of Chinese women digital gamers has taken on a distinctive shape in the context of newly emerging local online games that serve as an extension of the market mechanism. We examine the players’ experience of two games: namely, a multiplayer online battle arena (MOBA) game, King of Glory (wangzhe rongyao), and an otome love simulation game, Evol LoveR (lian yu zhizuoren). Results of 31 in-depth qualitative interviews with Chinese women gamers show that Chinese women's gaming experience has been profoundly shaped by both changes and continuities in the norms governing Chinese women's participation in play, romance and sex. We conclude that Chinese MOBA and otome games are not isolated new media products, but actually part and parcel of a broader digital media economy which provides audiences and players with information and cues that reinforce the dominant view that women and men have fundamentally different characteristics.

Eichhorn, Thomas; Jürss, Sebastian; Hoffmann, Christian P.

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1791218pmid: N/A

Sharing economy platforms have grown to offer various commercial opportunities to a growing but still limited user base. We conceptualize engagement in the sharing economy as a form of online participation, and apply a digital inequalities perspective to examine the social stratification of commercial sharing. Based on the Internet access model established by Van Dijk, we analyze the effects of social structural antecedents on various access stages. Initial studies indicate that the sharing economy is characterized by second-order consumption, addressing user wants more than needs. Therefore, we draw on Bourdieu to complement Van Dijk’s model through a habitual perspective. Analyzing data collected in a survey of more than 6000 individuals from 12 European countries, we find that while social structural antecedents are critical in explaining initial usage of sharing services, their effect on repeat usage is less evident. Some indicators, such as education and social capital, even negatively relate to usage intensity. In turn, we find that a habitus of innovativeness and community-orientation significantly bolsters initial usage, but materialism, rather than material requirements, characterizes higher levels of engagement in the sharing economy.

Sánchez-Monedero, Javier; Dencik, Lina

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1792530pmid: N/A

This paper critically examines a recently developed proposal for a border control system called iBorderCtrl, designed to detect deception based on facial recognition technology and the measurement of micro-expressions, termed ‘biomarkers of deceit’. Funded under the European Commission’s Horizon 2020 programme, the system is analysed in relation to the wider political economy of ‘emotional AI’ and the history of deception detection technologies. We then move on to interrogate the design of iBorderCtrl using publicly available documents and assess the assumptions and scientific validation underpinning the project design. Finally, drawing on a Bayesian analysis we outline statistical fallacies in the foundational premise of mass screening and argue that it is very unlikely that the model that iBorderCtrl provides for deception detection would work in practice. By interrogating actual systems in this way, we argue that we can begin to question the very premise of the development of data-driven systems, and emotional AI and deception detection in particular, pushing back on the assumption that these systems are fulfilling the tasks they claim to be attending to and instead ask what function such projects carry out in the creation of subjects and management of populations. This function is not merely technical but, rather, we argue, distinctly political and forms part of a mode of governance increasingly shaping life opportunities and fundamental rights.

Miner, Joshua D.

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1797851pmid: N/A

The impact of crowdsourced data visualization in the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (#MMIW) movement over the last decade reveals how institutional systems of organizing and representing space present a key obstacle to the cause. Activists’ digital crowdmaps express an ethos of Indigenous data sovereignty, or self-determination in data collection and application, that interrogates settler data procedures relative to gender violence. These tactical maps resonate with the circulation of location-tagged photographs via social media campaigns like #ImNotNext and #RedDressProject to similarly critique the datasets of government agencies. This article conceptualizes both media forms as informatic images that intervene in settler cartographic practice as part of an ongoing decolonization of digital mapping tools. Informatic images precondition the ways that users interact with data through hypermediated visual systems. Here, digital mapping and locative media practices focalize a relationship between violence, biased data and space, through various methods of layering, compositing and linking. Settler computational structures undergird these affordances, yet in a tactical context mapped images are reconstituted by user interaction with an oppositional dataset to intervene in that framework. Users’ emergent data of presence and absence plot a distributed landscape of settler violence in accordance, instead, with relational Indigenous knowledges.

Ledbetter, Andrew M.; Herbert, Corley B.

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2020.1803945pmid: N/A

This manuscript reports the results of an empirical study that used the impression management model (IMM) to examine likelihood of channel use (among face-to-face, phone, and texting) in parent–child relationships. Drawing from face-negotiation theory, we recast the model in terms of face concern. Results of a survey of 715 participants indicated that mutual-face concern served as a particularly potent predictor of channel preferences. Channel net benefits mediated the association between the IMM predictors (i.e., face concern and valence) and likelihood of channel use, with communication competence serving as a weak moderator of several IMM predictors (specifically, other-face concern, mutual-face concern, and valence). These results highlight the importance of mutual-face concern in evaluating channel options, and also suggest that channel choice may have more to do with the avoidance of the risk of synchronous communication than a draw to the control of mediated channels.

Melo, Juan Pablo

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1912139pmid: N/A

He, Guanqin

doi: 10.1080/1369118X.2021.1912140pmid: N/A