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Information, Communication & Society

的最新目錄及摘要

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About ICS

Drawing together leading work upon the social, political, economic, and cultural impact of evolving information and communication technologies (ICTs), this journal positions itself at the centre of contemporary debates about the information age.Information, Communication & Society (ICS)transcends cultural and geographical boundaries as it explores a diverse range of issues relating to the development and application of these technologies, asking such questions as:

• How are existing and developing forms of communication combining individual, social and machine inputs and what are the consequences of their intersections for culture, politics, the economy or society? What direction will these forms take?

• As ICT usage is scaling rapidly and widely, underlying technologies operate predominately under a logic of segmentation and specialisation for the advancement of commercial aims. How might this development affect conceptions of identity, belonging, culture or society?

• How are ICTs, and processes in which they are implicated such as the automation of routine tasks, affecting daily life and social structures such as the family, friendships, work and organization, commerce and business, education, health care, and leisure activities?

• To what extent are ICTs enabling an age of electronic surveillance and social control? What are the implications for citizen privacy, social equity, public expression, economic and political participation or policing criminal activity?

• What are the consequences of using ICTs for material objects, spaces, and entities with which people interact and on which they rely?

ICS analyses these questions from a global, interdisciplinary perspective in contributions of the very highest quality from scholars and practitioners in the social sciences, gender and cultural studies, communication and media studies, as well as in the information and computer sciences.

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Journal metrics

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Current Issue

Information, Communication & Society 每年發(fā)布16期，最新一期(Volume 28, Issue 12, 2025) 設(shè)置"Articles""Book Review"兩個欄目，共計9篇文章，詳情如下。

原版目錄

原文摘要

Articles

The thousand faces of images in AI news: psychological distance, dialectical relationships and sensationalism

Yujia Zhai, Nanshan Guo, Jinwen Zhang, Hezhao Zhang, Shaojing Sun & Ying Ding

Existing research on media coverage of AI has mostly focused on textual analysis with a lack of attention to visual factors presented in news. Moreover, studies of visual framing often rely on a small sample of manually labeled images and thus suffer from a low ecological validity. To address these issues, we used image data obtained from AItopics to cluster the images through the Resnet50 deep learning model and Kmeans++. Three major visual frames based on 10 clustering results were identified via open coding: psychological distance, dialectical relationships, and sensationalism. Specifically, by displaying a more lifelike and materialistic image of AI, news may shorten the psychological distance between readers and AI; by juxtaposing two opposite entities, news may reinforce a dialectical relationship between humans and AI; through the use of colors and symbols, news may become sensationalized and elicit affective reactions from readers. Our findings provide a new framework for analyzing media visuals about AI, and highlight the need that media reporting be more comprehensive, balanced, and objective in their selection of images to communicate topics of the like.

Online monitoring activism: civic surveillance practices as a reaction to the rise of the far-right in the COVID-19 pandemic

Florian Primig & Julia Lück-Benz

The rise of far-right movements during the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted a new form of individual digital activism: online monitoring activism (OMA). During the pandemic, online monitoring activists systematically collected, processed and published information from far-right Telegram channels and groups. Against the theoretical background of concepts like the monitory democracy and surveillance culture, we conducted eight semi-structured interviews with German online monitoring activists, investigating their motivations, roles, and the intricacies of their monitoring practices. Our findings reveal that online monitoring activists are driven by a sense of duty to counteract anti-democratic tendencies, which they perceive as inadequately addressed by institutional power. They gain localized and thematically specialized expertise that they share within loose networks of like-minded others. We highlight the activists’ liminal identity oscillating between virtuous citizenship and vigilantism, as well as the broader societal implications of their actions. On the one hand, they fulfill the role of active citizenship in monitory democracy; on the other, they also reinforce the transparency imperative and the wish for far-reaching security and control inherent to surveillance culture. The transparency potential afforded by their adversaries’ online connective action and mobilizing efforts legitimizes their surveillance and demands surveillance. Further normative work is needed to critically examine the extent and desirability of increased social control introduced to liberal democracy by online monitoring activism.

When news is entertainment: explaining the persistence of misinformation through the information environment

Sakshi Bhalla, Rik Ray & Harsh Taneja

Why does misinformation persist despite its corrections? To address this issue, we propose the ‘news as entertainment’ framework, explaining how commercial considerations of the media industry shape news consumption. Using a strategic case study, we examine India's information environment through this paradigm. Guided by industry metrics, we reveal the interplay of competing social and economic interests in a context marked by high choice and political polarization. Within this framework, we examine misinformation correction in practice, highlighting its contextual underpinnings and the potent role of mainstream media. Finally, we discursively analyze how audience responses underscore their ties to specific news environments. The ‘news as entertainment’ framework exposes the disjunction between contextually shaped misinformation and correction methods, emphasizing how media contexts influence audience receptivity to facts or falsehoods. This insight informs our understanding of misinformation mechanisms, correction, and persistence with implications for addressing these challenges.

The supply chain capitalism of AI: a call to (re)think algorithmic harms and resistance through environmental lens

Ana Valdivia

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is woven into a supply chain of capital, commodities and human labour that has been neglected in critical debates. Given the current surge in generative AI – which is estimated to drive up the extraction of natural resources such as minerals, fossil fuels or water – it is vital to investigate its entire production line from a critical infrastructural perspective. Drawing on the supply chain capitalism, a concept coined by Anna L. Tsing in 2009, this paper contributes to critical AI studies by investigating the structure of AI supply chains, taking into account the mining, electronics, digital and e-waste industry. This paper illustrates how the supply chain capitalism of AI is precipitating geographical asymmetries connected to contested struggles in México by focusing on a key element of these chains: data centres. In times of climate emergency, this paper calls to reconsider algorithmic harms and resistance by investigating the entire capitalist production line of the AI industry from critical and environmental lens.

Imgur, image macros, and algorithms: memes as imaginary issue spaces of users’ encounters with algorithmic recommendations

Natalia Stanusch

This paper analyzes memes collected from Imgur that concern users’ encounters with algorithmic recommendations. Such encounters, mobilized, performed, and circulated via memes, can reveal algorithmic ‘imaginaries,’ expectations that may be realistic or unrealistic, technically informed or uninformed, but that in any case shape the way people interact with platforms. These imaginaries reflect and influence users’ attempts to comply or resist pressures exerted by algorithmic recommendation systems, as is the focus of this paper. Working inductively, this paper extrapolates from memes the imaginaries users have about the algorithmic systems. First, this paper uses a qualitative analysis and coding scheme to analyze a meme ‘collection’ scraped from Imgur. Second, it localizes and discusses the imaginaries performed in these memes, which are termed as follows: algorithmic recommendation systems vs nostalgic antagonism; algorithms as dysfunctional and flawed; algorithms as making magic; and humanity vs AI. In the analyzed data sample, memes that concern algorithms appear primarily in the context of users’ encounters with the algorithmic outputs, which are either glitches, failures, or happy accidents. Third, the practice of ‘memeing’ algorithmic imaginaries is discussed in the context of ‘memetic issue spaces,’ spaces for memetic evocations that can ignite algorithmic counter-imaginaries.

Web archives after platformization: reading social media collections along the archival grain

Kieran Hegarty

This article draws on ethnographic and historical research at two Australian libraries to explore how the platformization of the web has altered the content, character, and potential future utility of web archives. I argue that, in attempting to collect social media, these libraries face a double bind: while web crawling undertaken at the National Library of Australia allows for immediate but often incomplete or inconsistent access, the API-based approach taken by the State Library of New South Wales constrains both the data collected and how it can be made accessible due to a shifting set of rules that are established and enforced by platforms. By examining the constraints of current strategies to collect, preserve, and make available social media content, I illustrate how changes to platform design and policies significantly influence what is included in web archives and how they are made available. As the ruptures and inconsistencies of collections of social media in web archives are often opaque to both creators of web archives and those using them, I argue that web archives can be read ‘a(chǎn)long the archival grain’ for evidence of the platformization of the web. This approach, which draws on anthropologist Ann Stoler’s critical readings on the form and placement of colonial archives (rather than just their contents), allows an assessment of how the gaps, silences, densities, and distributions of web archives are shaped by the shifting power dynamics between different actors involved in the production, circulation, distribution, and use of information on the web.

Bridging digital divides in Wisconsin: an examination of policy efforts and effectiveness over the past five years

Ashley Cate, Steven Moen & Kaiping Chen

The digital divide, generally characterized by unequal Internet access, represents the gap between individuals who benefit from the use of digital technologies and those who do not. Many social inequalities are associated with the prevalence of the digital divide, particularly across the rural-urban divide. This research seeks to characterize the status of the digital divide, and related sociodemographic variables, within the context of the US state of Wisconsin. In addition, this research investigates the effectiveness of broadband expansion grants, within the state of Wisconsin, on bridging the digital divide. The findings indicate that, at the county level, variations in education, household income, age, and location on a rural-urban continuum are all associated with variations in county broadband adoption rates. Also, despite increasing broadband funding, the amount of money sent to a county is not associated with the need of that county or the change in county level broadband adoption rates from the year 2017–2021. The findings of this study have theoretical implications as they add to our understanding of how broadband adoption is related to social aspects of life. In addition, there are political implications in terms of how grant funding allocation is determined.

Perceived political incivility and trust in government: the moderating roles of election news exposure and favorability of election outcomes

Ozan Kuru & Taberez Ahmed Neyazi

While extensive research has shown that political incivility can lead to unfavorable democratic outcomes, our understanding of the dynamics in election campaigns is limited. The current study investigates the effects of perceived political incivility on trust in government by taking into account both informational and motivational factors during elections: the distinct channels through which individuals receive election news (institutional, social media, and messaging applications) and whether the election outcome is (un)favorable to the individual. Drawing from the literatures on online incivility and motivated reasoning, we argue that both election news exposure and favorability of election outcomes could moderate the effects of perceived incivility. We conducted a two-wave panel survey (pre- and post-election) during the 2022 Malaysian General Election (Wave-1 N?=?1800; Wave-2 N?=?901). We found that increased incivility perceptions over time and unfavorable election results diminished trust in government, and there was evidence that increased exposure to election news from institutional news sources increased trust in government from pre- to post-election. For those who found the election outcome unfavorable, increased social media exposure resulted in a greater loss of trust in the government in response to increased perceptions of incivility during the campaign. These results underscore the importance of both informational (news media) and motivational (favorability of election outcome) factors, as well as their combined effects on individuals’ responses to political incivility during elections.

Book Review

Personal but not private: queer women, sexuality, and identity modulation on digital platforms

by S. Duguay, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2022, 192 pp., ￡24.49 (paperback), ISBN:9780190076191

Wei-Ping Chen

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JCS

《中國社會學學刊》(The Journal of Chinese Sociology)于2014年10月由中國社會科學院社會學研究所創(chuàng)辦。作為中國大陸第一本英文社會學學術(shù)期刊，JCS 致力于為中國社會學者與國外同行的學術(shù)交流和合作打造國際一流的學術(shù)平臺。JCS 由全球最大科技期刊出版集團施普林格·自然(Springer Nature)出版發(fā)行，由國內(nèi)外頂尖社會學家組成強大編委會隊伍，采用雙向匿名評審方式和“開放獲取”(open access)出版模式。JCS 已于2021年5月被ESCI收錄。 2022年，JCS的CiteScore分值為2.0，在社科類別的262種期刊中排名第94位，位列同類期刊前36%。2023年，JCS在科睿唯安發(fā)布的2023年度《期刊引證報告》（JCR）中首次獲得影響因子并達到1.5（Q3）。2025年JCS最新影響因子1.3，位列社會學領(lǐng)域期刊全球前53%（Q3）。

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