"Our purpose with this Special Issue is to present and contribute to a body of research that critically explores the relationship between media innovation and social change. In doing so, we also outline the contours of a research agenda to further develop this emerging field. Our motivation arises f
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rom a review of research published in the nine previous editions of this journal, where we explored how research about media innovations engaged with the topic of social change. We find that research in the field of media innovations has tended to focus on business and economic imperatives for media innovation, following the paradigm of research on digitalisation introduced by von Hippel’s theories of ‘democratizing innovation’ (2005), Chesbrough’s ‘open innovation’ (2006), or Tapscott and Williams, ‘Wikinomics’ (2011). As a consequence, digitalisation and the introduction of new technologies is usually unquestioningly presented as a business imperative for media industry stakeholders." (Abstract)
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"Computational propaganda is an emergent form of political manipulation that occurs over the Internet. The term describes the assemblage of social media platforms, autonomous agents, algorithms, and big data tasked with the manipulation of public opinion. Our research shows that this new mode of int
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errupting and influencing communication is on the rise around the globe. Advances in computing technology, especially around social automation, machine learning, and artificial intelligence mean that computational propaganda is becoming more sophisticated and harder to track at an alarming rate. This introduction explores the foundations of computational propaganda. It describes the key role that automated manipulation of algorithms plays in recent efforts to control political communication worldwide. We discuss the social data science of political communication and build upon the argument that algorithms and other computational tools now play an important political role in areas like news consumption, issue awareness, and cultural understanding. We unpack the key findings of the nine country case studies that follow—exploring the role of computational propaganda during events from local and national elections in Brazil to the ongoing security crisis between Ukraine and Russia. Our methodology in this work has been purposefully mixed, we make use of quantitative analysis of data from several social media platforms and qualitative work that includes interviews with the people who design and deploy political bots and disinformation campaigns. Finally, we highlight original evidence about how this manipulation and amplification of disinformation is produced, managed, and circulated by political operatives and governments and describe paths for both democratic intervention and future research in this space." (Abstract)
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"Although conflict is a normal aspect of human life, mass media technologies are changing the dynamics of conflict and shaping strategies for deploying rituals. Rituals can provoke or escalate conflict; they can also mediate it. Media representations have long been instrumental in establishing, main
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taining, and challenging political and economic power, as well as in determining the nature of religious practice. This collection of chapters emerged from a two-year project based on collaboration between the Faculty of Religious Studies at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and the Ritual Dynamics Collaborative Research Center at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. Here, chapters locate, describe, and explore cases in which media-driven rituals or ritually saturated media instigate, disseminate, or escalate conflict. Each chapter, built around global and local examples of ritualized, mediatized conflict, is multiauthored. The book’s central question is: when ritual and media interact (either by the mediatizing of ritual or by the ritualizing of media), how do the patterns of conflict change?" (Publisher description)
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