We argue that algorithms are an outcome rather than a replacement of media logics, and ultimately, we advance this argument by connecting human agency to media logics. This theoretical contribution builds on the notion that technology, particularly algorithms are non-neutral, arguing for a stronger focus on the agency that goes into designing and programming them. We reflect on the limits of algorithmic agency and lay out the role of algorithms and agency for the dimensions and elements of network media logic. The article concludes with addressing questions of power, discussing algorithmic agency from both meso and macro perspectives.

Most research on gender and digital communication centers on how women use digital media, how they participate online, or how they are treated in online forums and social media. This article, in contrast, approaches gender from a behind the screen perspective. How algorithms and platforms are created, designed, and maintained, the affordances they provide for users and how they govern the ways users communicate with each other, has a major impact on digital communication. However, it is mostly men who create these technologies. Our study approaches technologies as socio-cultural, departing from the concept of network media logic. Empirically, it is based on (1) the review of a diverse body of literature from the history of programming, professional sociology, and computer science and documents such as the diversity reports from tech giants, as well as on (2) 64 semi-structured expert interviews conducted with male and female programmers in seven countries over a time-period of four years. Results show that the gender gap continues to run deep. We report results in four dimensions: professional culture, pervasive stereotypes, lack of role models and typical career paths.

This chapter departs from the dichotomy between techno-optimism and normalization and asks the questions how participation online has been – and can be – studied beyond this. The chapter focuses on the theory of media logics, how it has been and can be used when studying online participation. The chapter will end with a discussion of media logics locating it within the field of media and communication – increasingly a popular strand of mediatization.

This anthology contributes to creating awareness on how digital ageism operates in relation to the widely spread symbolic representations of old and young age around digital technologies, the (lack of) representation of diverse older individuals in the design, development, and marketing of digital technologies and in the actual algorithms and datasets that constitute them. It also shows how individuals and institutions deal with digital ageism in everyday life.

In the past decades, digital technologies permeated most aspects of everyday life. With a focus on how age is represented and experienced in relation to digital technologies leading to digital ageism, digitalisation’s reinforcement of spirals of exclusion and loss of autonomy of some collectives is explored, when it could be natural for a great part of society and represent a sort of improvement.

The book addresses social science students and scholars interested in everyday digital technologies, society and the power struggles about it, providing insights from different parts of the globe. By using different methods and touching upon different aspects of digital ageism and how it plays out in contemporary connected data societies, this volume will raise awareness, challenge power, initiate discussions and spur further research into this field.

Hay muchos desafíos con la dataficación de las sociedades contemporáneas. Uno de ellos son los sesgos de diseño de los algoritmos que usan las plataformas digitales. Otro desafío se refiere a los sesgos de los datos que los algoritmos usan para tomar decisiones automatizadas y cómo se usan estas. Tanto el diseño algorítmico como los datos refuerzan la discriminación de los colectivos menos favorecidos, y particularmente de las personas mayores.

This article attends to age stereotypes and ageism in contemporary tech. In academia, little attention has been devoted to this topic. Therefore, we intend to initiate a discussion around ageism in tech by studying perceptions of age in the tech industry. Our study is based on interviews with 18 tech workers around the world of varying age. According to our interviewees, tech workers over 35 are considered old in the tech industry. Older tech workers are expected to become managers, thought to become less interested in new technology, and expected to have more challenges when learning new software. We also look at how tech workers of different age groups experience entrepreneurial values of the company as a playground, staying hungry, and changing the future with technology, and how these values influence their professional careers. We conclude that ageism is reinforced in contemporary tech through several stereotypes related to age.

In data societies, as everyday activities are mediated by digital technologies, individuals are thrown into a digital existence, even if they are not aware of their digital interactions. Digital technologies are not value-free or unbiased. Contemporary discourses about digital natives and late adopters contribute to reinforcing negative stereotypes about older users of digital technologies and influence the design, development, marketing and usage of digital technologies. Such discourses disregard how digital trajectories and personal circumstances influence media use in all stages of everyday life. Hence, occasional digital technology users, and older adults in particular, stand a higher risk of exclusion and loss of autonomy. In this chapter, we briefly introduce ageism and digital ageism in data societies, definitions and previous research as a background and introduction to the following chapters. Our aim is to underline how socio-technical and cultural analyses may contribute to raising awareness about digital ageism in data societies. Only by initiating a discussion may existing power relationships be challenged and contemporary inequalities understood.

This article directs attention to the use of Instagram by political parties in the Swedish national elections in 2014. It investigates how political parties used Instagram – a platform that is centered around images – when engaging in interaction with their followers on the platform. Therefore, the article analyses Instagram images including their captions and comments (posts) that Swedish parties published four weeks prior to Election Day. A particular focus is on the deliberative potential of Instagram. The results suggest that not much changes on Instagram compared to other social media platforms: Political parties hardly used Instagram to interact with their followers and the few interactions taking place on parties Instagram accounts did not contribute to the exchange of relevant and substantive information about politics (i.e., deliberation). Interaction and deliberation is also not enhanced by the images.

This thematic issue of Media and Communication focuses attention on the shift towards visual images on social media as well as the transformation of visual communication which has occurred within the online ecology of social media platforms. The sharing of images is becoming an integral part of the social media experience today, and given that social media platforms are the prime locus for sociability—at least among young people in the West—this shift towards visuals arguably transforms how we relate to each other and the world around us, as well as how we perceive and construct our sense of self. For researchers, this raises conceptual, theoretical and methodological challenges. This thematic issue presents six articles as well as a book review on visual communication in social media focusing on developing a conceptual apparatus and precise definitions of objects and practices of study as well as contributions that address and discuss the methodological challenges as well as their potential solutions. The idea was to synergize research from a wide variety of communication-related disciplines on this rather new topic.

This chapter addresses a neglected issue within the field of social media and political communication. It focuses on interaction processes on Instagram asking how political parties used Instagram – a platform that is centered around images – when engaging in interaction with their followers on the platform. The focuses is on political parties’ use of Instagram in the 2014 Swedish national election campaign. This gives an impression of the first attempts of political parties’ use of this communication platform. The quantitative content analysis focuses on Instagram images including their captions and comments (posts) that Swedish parties published four weeks prior to Election Day. The results suggest that not much changes on Instagram compared to other social media platforms: Swedish political parties hardly used Instagram to interact with their followers and the very few interactions taking place did not contribute to the exchange of relevant and substantive information about politics. Interaction and deliberation is also not enhanced by the images.

This chapter addresses a neglected issue within the field of social media and political communication. It focuses on interaction processes on Instagram asking how political parties used Instagram—a platform that is centered around images—when engaging in interaction with their followers on the platform. The focus is on political parties' use of Instagram in the 2014 Swedish national election campaign. This gives an impression of the first attempts of political parties' use of this communication platform. The quantitative content analysis focuses on Instagram images including their captions and comments (posts) that Swedish parties published four weeks prior to Election Day. The results suggest that not much changes on Instagram compared to other social media platforms: Swedish political parties hardly used Instagram to interact with their followers, and the very few interactions taking place did not contribute to the exchange of relevant and substantive information about politics. Interaction and deliberation are also not enhanced by the images.

How do political parties use Instagram – a platform that is centred around images – when engaging in interaction with their followers on the platform during election campaigns? To find answers to this question, Uta Russmann and Jakob Svensson examined Swedish political parties Instagram accounts during the 2014 national elections. A particular focus is on the deliberative potential (in a Habermasian understanding of the term) of Instagram. The results are similar to findings from other social media platforms: Political parties hardly used Instagram to interact with their followers, and the few interactions taking place did not contribute to deliberation. Interaction and deliberation is thus not enhanced by the images on Instagram.

Through a mixed-methods approach consisting of a directed content analysis of five established LGBT+ organizations' use of Twitter and Facebook during a month in 2022, and semi-structured qualitative interviews with social media content producers, the study attempts to understand the role of self-controlled social media spaces in challenging the Uganda society's logics of oppression. The results indicate that self-controlled spaces are not used for disrupting the basis for repression - the local logic of oppression - or its cocoon of collective post-colonial amnesia. Nor were spaces used for re-constructive engaging with transnational and development partners' unwitting impact on global south actors' agency and legitimacy. Instead, with a few exceptions, spaces displayed a conspicuous uniform human rights advocacy rhetoric, and Western identity labels summarized in the LGBT+ acronym. The interviews with social media content producers suggest that the LGBT+ community's dependency on international support may sway actors into what we call performative visibility, in self-controlled spaces. The study concludes that future analysis of Global South based activist's use of social media spaces' affordances including its potential for supporting de-colonialization efforts, must approach use as relational to actors' dependency on key resources such as funding and protection through affiliation.

For sexual minorities in Africa, fake news is nothing new. However, with the arrival of self-controlled digital platforms, sexual minorities are presented with new ways to counter coverage that misrepresents the community. Inspired by affordance theory and agenda-setting theory, this study explores whether self-controlled digital platforms are used to challenge false media reports on sexual minorities in Uganda, and if so, to what extent. Through a cross-media research design, the largest English-language daily newspaper, the government-owned New Vision, is analysed and positioned against the main sexual minority network's (SMUG’s) public Facebook and Twitter accounts at two points in time in 2013/2014 and in 2018. The study finds that, although social media channels afford direct engagement with false media reports, the platforms are under-utilised as spaces regarding countering false reporting on LGBTQIs. Furthermore, this lack of engagement with the media was found to be stable over time.

With ample evidence that foreign state actors and non-state norm entrepreneurs are engaged in misinformation and disinformation campaigns challenging the European Union’s human rights framework on LGBT+, this study analyses the narratives that these actors disseminate. Based on two methods – a standard literature review of academic and “grey” literature, as well as complementary analysis of entries in the EUvsDisinfo database – the study identifies four main narratives that can be attributed to or are actively sponsored by non-European actors: 1) Opposing gender ideology and protecting God’s order, 2) Heteroactivism and the protection of the rights of the “natural” family, 3) LGBT+ rights as Western colonialism, and 4) LGBT+ rights as a threat to the rights of children. Even though EU’s strong protection of freedom of speech makes it challenging to address misinformation and disinformation that falls outside hate-speech legislation, this paper argues that exploring the following counter measures could be worthwhile: 1) harmonization of European legal frameworks, 2) financial scrutiny and 3) strengthened automatic detection, editorial policies, and community flagging, as well as the capacity to systematically deal with misinformation and disinformation campaign targeting LGBT+ across digital spaces in Europe.

This study maps Uganda LGBT+ experiences of online hate crime and analyzes how preexisting vulnerability morph in digital spaces. Based on field notes, workshop material, and interviews with 13 LGBT+ individuals, the study finds that digital presences in contexts where users are vulnerable due to state-sanctioned discrimination and social exclusion, digital arenas exacerbate users' vulnerability to hate crimes through their digital footprints. The longing for community and intimacy, together with in some cases an unfamiliarity with how digital media can be misused, appear to facilitate both the ideologically driven perpetrators hunting LGBT+, and Crime passionnel, where an (ex)partner miscalculates the implications of publishing private material. This study thus illustrates how digital spaces are not safe(r) spaces, where LGBT+ are free to playfully explore sexual orientation and gender non-conformity, away from society's abhorring gaze. Furthermore, contrary to what could be expected, LGBT+ individuals' vulnerability was most often not the result of an outside intruder hunting LGBT+ online. The article reiterates the importance of a situated approach, acknowledging the environmental influences when studying and addressing LGBT+ vulnerabilities in digital spaces.

Uganda gained international notoriety in 2009 for introducing one of the world’s harshest bills proposing the death penalty for homosexuality. Against the backdrop that the Ugandan LGBT+ community has enjoyed moral and financial support from international partners for more than a decade, this chapter examines and discusses the potential unintentional consequences of external and prolonged support of LGBT+ activism. Furthermore, unintended and unintentional consequences are likely to have fluctuated over time depending on domestic politics and international priorities. Through historical sources, the first part of the chapter traces the emergence of organized resistance against state-sanctioned homophobia in Uganda, as well as the entrance of international support to the community. The gala provided examples of how international funding has unintended consequences and potentially distorts intra-community relations. It is, however, also important to highlight that despite prolonged and pronounced donor dependency, Pride 2022 signaled a significant degree of community agency.

This chapter zooms in on the Silicon Valley, the US centre for innovative technology and home to 2000 technology companies. Inspired by the terminology of Sassen (2014), this chapter will describe how the technology industry has created a system of multiple modes of expulsions of “older” workers – from work relations, workspaces, ideologies and values, as well as digital products and services. The main purpose is to propose a theoretical framework guiding future empirical and critical research into the phenomenon of ageism, as well as other systems of oppression and discrimination in the technology industry. In this chapter, we propose a concept of “Silicon Valley Ageism” which is understood as negative attitudes, beliefs and behaviours towards adults perceived as “older” and manifested in interpersonal relations and institutional practices, as well as their narratives. This type of ageism can affect people already in their 30s. The aim of the chapter is to explore (1) what narratives of “older” age are constructed in Silicon Valley, (2) how this relates to workplace practices in the Valley and (3) how this has a bearing on the products and services coming out of Silicon Valley.

This study attends to the emotional framing of interactions between politics and traditional broadcast news media in an online space of social networking. Today we live in a hybrid media system in which the online and the offline intersect and feed off each other in intriguing manners (Chadwick, 2013). For example, studying campaigning Parliamentarians on Twitter during the 2014 elections in Sweden, broadcast news media and their online presence represented a form of authority (Svensson & Larsson, 2016). These interactions were often also charged with emotions. Displaying emotion in general could be considered as a way to negotiate status and group belonging (Elliot, 1959), something that is particularly important for campaigning politicians in a party-based democracy like Sweden (Svensson, 2013). By studying Parliamentarians emotion displays when interacting with broadcast news media I find that Parliamentarians were expected to be angry and upset with political opponents. These emotion displays were largely directed towards the in-group of their own party comrades. What does this say about the media logics in this hybrid settting? In the presentation I will discuss this in terms of the mass media logic of conflict (Asp, 1986) being transferred online and intersecting with network media logic favouring attention maximising witty one-liners (Klinger & Svensson, 2015). The result is that polarisation and dissent becomes foregrounded in this hybrid media setting at the expense of reason discussion and debate. But before becoming too pessimistic about the state of political communication today, it is important to remember that Twitter is just one arena in the communication ecology of a national election. And while Twitter is not geared towards dialogue and reasoned debate and we should perhaps not expect it to be in the future either, there might be other arenas for more deliberative style of communication.

This chapter attends to the interactions between campaigning politicians and traditional news media in an online space of social networking. Studying campaigning Parliamentarians on Twitter during the 2014 Swedish election, traditional news media and their online presences represented a form of authority. The interactions were often charged with emotions and could be understood as a way to negotiate status and group (party) belonging, something that is particularly important for campaigning politicians in a party-based democracy like Sweden. By studying the interactions between Parliamentarians and traditional news media, the study concludes that Parliamentarians were expected to be angry and upset with political opponents in front of their party comrades. Hence the mass media logic of conflict is transferred online and also with network media logic, favouring attention-maximising, witty one-liners. This foregrounds polarisation and dissent at the expense of discussion and debate.

Departing from popular imaginations around artificial intelligence (AI), this presentation engages in the I in the AI acronym but from perspectives outside of mathematics, computer science and machine learning. When intelligence is attended to here, it most often refers to narrow calculating tasks. This connotation to calculation provides AI an image of scientificity and objectivity, particularly attractive in societies with a pervasive desire for numbers. However, as is increasingly apparent today, when employed in more general areas of our messy socio-cultural realities, AI- powered automated systems often fail or have unintended consequences. This article will contribute to this critique of AI by attending to Nicholas of Cusa and his treatment of intelligence. According to him, intelligence is equally dependent on an ability to handle the unknown as it unfolds in the present moment. This suggests that intelligence is organic which ties Cusa to more contemporary discussions in tech philosophy, neurology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive sciences in which it is argued that intelligence is dependent on having—and acting through—an organic body. Understanding intelligence as organic thus suggests an oxymoronic relationship to artificial

Departing from popular imaginations around artificial intelligence (AI), this article engages in the I in the AI acronym but from perspectives outside of mathematics, computer science and machine learning. When intelligence is attended to here, it most often refers to narrow calculating tasks. This connotation to calculation provides AI an image of scientificity and objectivity, particularly attractive in societies with a pervasive desire for numbers. However, as is increasingly apparent today, when employed in more general areas of our messy socio-cultural realities, AI- powered automated systems often fail or have unintended consequences. This article will contribute to this critique of AI by attending to Nicholas of Cusa and his treatment of intelligence. According to him, intelligence is equally dependent on an ability to handle the unknown as it unfolds in the present moment. This suggests that intelligence is organic which ties Cusa to more contemporary discussions in tech philosophy, neurology, evolutionary biology, and cognitive sciences in which it is argued that intelligence is dependent on having—and acting through—an organic body. Understanding intelligence as organic thus suggests an oxymoronic relationship to artificial.

In order to discuss, evaluate, and address social consequences of digitalization, we need to study and understand key people and events behind today’s digital innovations. This research contributes to an ongoing discussion within critical data studies by focusing on humans and meeting places shaping digital innovations that are/will be realized in this connected and data-saturated society we find ourselves in. The focus will be on angel investors and venture capitalist, pitching events and conferences where innovators and investors meet and intermingle. I will present conclusions from pilot studies conducted in Sweden (Malmö, at MINC-Malmö Incubator), South Africa (Stellenbosch, at the LaunchLab) and the US (Austin, at SXSW – South by southwest conference & Silicon Valley, at Facebook and Google headquarters). The overall research question is how key people and events contribute to, and shape, current and future digital innovations. With my expertise coming from the Social Sciences, the focus will be on culture (in an anthropological understanding of culture) which in this project operationalized through norms, values, rituals, and imaginaries surrounding humans and meeting places behind digital innovations. What consequences does these norms, values, rituals, and imaginaries have in our digitalized societies?  

The project departs from the importance attributed to digital innovations, the promise they bring with a more connected world where digital innovations are believed to solve most, if not all, problems that our society faces such as climate change, infection tracing, increased polarization, and intolerance. I am still conducting these pilot studies (the last will be in June) and by the time of the conference I will have results to present. 

This chapter seeks to make sense of automated decision-making and the role of humans in it by zooming in on imaginaries of algorithmic automation and the socio-institutional practices these were embedded in, in the everyday life of a news-ranking algorithm. The study is set in the newsroom of a Swedish daily. Algorithms are understood as culture, as unstable and developed through a variety of imaginaries and social practices that people in institutions employ and engage in when navigating algorithmic automation. One such practice was Algorithm Coffee; involving regular meetings to discuss the working and potential bettering of the algorithm. Imaginaries revolved around technological solutionism, how the algorithm could solve the newspaper’s problem with profitability by automating tasks previously undertaken manually by an editor. Nevertheless, the algorithm was labelled editor-led, allowing human editors to still oversee some of its parameters. Thus the algorithm did not interfere with journalisms’ imagined democratic purpose. By attending to everyday social dynamics around the news-ranking algorithm, the chapter underlines how algorithms are caught up within a set of relations through which the meaning and boundaries of algorithmic automation is negotiated. Therefore, the chapter argues that the everyday impacts automation as much as automation impacts the everyday.

Det här kapitlet handlar om människor och medieteknik. I vår tids uppkopplade samhälle är det svårt att undvika digitala medieteknik eftersom vi kastas in ett digitalt mänskligt tillstånd som vi inte kan undkomma. Det påverkar dig, ditt liv och det samhälle som du lever i. Således är det viktigt att förstå - inte bara hur digitala medier påverkar oss som människor - utan även människorna bakom medietekniken, den kultur de kommer ifrån och i vilken de verkar. Jag har forskat på den roll som programmerare spelar för vilken medieteknik som utvecklas samt hur den utvecklas. Men hur skulle man kunna studera medieteknikens människor? I detta kapitel utgår jag ifrån teknikens mänskliga aspekter, hur teknik, samhälle och individ ömsesidigt påverkar varandra, samt ger ett verktyg för hur man kan studera medieteknikens människor utifrån en kulturell analysmodell. Med det här kapitlet som guide kommer du kvalitativt – genom intervjuer, observationer eller textanalys – kunna genomföra studier av medieteknikens människor, samt reflektera över hur teknik, människa och samhälle hör ihop och påverkar varandra. 

This chapter turns to the concept of “empowerment” as a result of disenchantment with the concept of “development” in the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social change in the global South. It is a certainty that the proliferation of ICTs (mobile phones in particular) has opened up a range of possibilities and new avenues for individuals, aid agencies, and NGOs. However, overviews of communication supposedly for development reveal a field based on economic understandings of development biased toward techno-determinism. Moreover, these understandings lack sufficient critique and do not take larger contextual factors into account. Therefore, it is argued that empowerment is a better concept to draw upon in the critical study of ICTs and social change. However, empowerment is not an easy concept to define, and no analytical outline of the concept has been found in the existing body of literature. Addressing this lack, this chapter will trace the roots of empowerment in community psychology and in feminist and black power movements as well as explore different understandings of the concept from various disciplines. From this overview, the chapter suggests that empowerment should be studied on a) an intersectional level, b) a contextual level, c) an agency level, and d) a technological level. It further argues that these four levels intersect and must be studied in tandem to understand whether processes of empowerment are taking place, and if so, in what ways? The chapter ends by shortly applying these levels to a study involving market women’s use of mobile phones in Kampala.

This chapter turns to the concept of “empowerment” as a result of disenchantment with the concept of “development” in the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) and social change in the global South. It is a certainty that the proliferation of ICTs (mobile phones in particular) has opened up a range of possibilities and new avenues for individuals, aid agencies, and NGOs. However, overviews of communication supposedly for development reveal a field based on economic understandings of development biased toward techno-determinism. Moreover, these understandings lack sufficient critique and do not take larger contextual factors into account. Therefore, it is argued that empowerment is a better concept to draw upon in the critical study of ICTs and social change. However, empowerment is not an easy concept to define, and no analytical outline of the concept has been found in the existing body of literature. Addressing this lack, this chapter will trace the roots of empowerment in community psychology and in feminist and black power movements as well as explore different understandings of the concept from various disciplines. From this overview, the chapter suggests that empowerment should be studied on a) an intersectional level, b) a contextual level, c) an agency level, and d) a technological level. It further argues that these four levels intersect and must be studied in tandem to understand whether processes of empowerment are taking place, and if so, in what ways? The chapter ends by shortly applying these levels to a study involving market women’s use of mobile phones in Kampala.

This article attends to how opponents of LGBT+ rights today frame themselves as pro human rights and pro the ‘natural’ family, something that has been highlighted in the recent scholarship of heteroactivism. But the role of digital media has not yet been given the attention it deserves. Since there is reason to suspect that heteroactivism is well adapted to the logics of digital media, we therefore exploratively study the International Organization for the Family (IOF)s Twitter feed June - August 2021. The study finds that contrary to expectations, the emotional tone of the tweets was more negative than positive. This suggests that the supposed shift from anti to pro is more cosmetical and directed to the outside, while the Twitter feed is directed towards supporters. To mobilize these, IOF combines a clear positive goal with a sense of urgency being under attack by outside adversaries. 

This presentation attends to tensions and negotiations surrounding the introduction and development of a news-ranking algorithm in a Swedish daily. Approaching algorithms as culture, being composed of collective human practices, the study emphasizes socio-institutional dynamics in the everyday life of the algorithm. The focus on tensions and negotiations is justified from an institutional perspective and operationalized through an analytical framework of logics. Empirically the study is based on interviewswith 14 different in-house workers at the daily, journalists as well as programmers andmarket actors. The study shows that logics connected to both journalism and programming co-developed the news-ranking algorithm. Tensions and their negotiations around these logics contributed to its very development.One example is labeling of the algorithm as editor-led, allowing journalists to oversee some of its parameters. Social practices in the newsroom, such as Algorithm-Coffee, was also important for its development. In other words, different actors, tensions between them and how these were negotiated, co-constituted by the algorithm itself.

This article attends to tensions and negotiations surrounding the introduction and development of a news-ranking algorithm in a Swedish daily. Approaching algorithms as culture, being composed of collective human practices, the study emphasizes socio-institutional dynamics in the everyday life of the algorithm. The focus on tensions and negotiations is justified from an institutional perspective and operationalized through an analytical framework of logics. Empirically the study is based on interviews with 14 different in-house workers at the daily, journalists as well as programmers and market actors. The study shows that logics connected to both journalism and programming co-developed the news-ranking algorithm. Tensions and their negotiations around these logics contributed to its very development. One example is labeling of the algorithm as editor-led, allowing journalists to oversee some of its parameters. Social practices in the newsroom, such as Algorithm-Coffee, was also important for its development. In other words, different actors, tensions between them and how these were negotiated, co-constituted by the algorithm itself.

This contribution revolves around political discussions in forum discussion threads on the Swedish online LGBTQ community platform, Qruiser. Political discussions in these online forum threads are studied as cultural participation in an online cultural public sphere. The specific question the chapter seeks to answer is what role so-called lurkers play for active participants’ meaning-making practices. Lurkers could be understood as a fantasy, an imagined audience willing to listen and be persuaded by active participants’ arguments. However, applying a Lacan inspired analytical framework, the chapter will conclude that the fantasy is not so much about the lurkers themselves (that may be imagined or just invisible), but the belief in persuasion. Hence, the answer to the question of why users participate in verbal battles with each other online would be because they are driven by a fantasy of persuasion as a way to cope with the lack of enjoyment in terms of them being split from a harmonious world of political unity.

This article departs from active participants and their relationship to lurkers in a particular setting of cultural participation: flaming political discussions in an LGBTQ dating community. The question the article seeks to answer is how active participants positioned themselves and others in these discussions. Active participants did not expect to convince or reason with their opponents; they were addressing an audience of undecided lurkers; users without their opinions formed who were expected to lurk and thus possible to impress with their arguments. The article thus reveals a struggle for recognition on two levels – to be recognized for your flaming capabilities as well as for your arguments and ability to persuade, a struggle in which both opponents and lurkers were of importance

This chapter revolves around political discussions in forum discussion threads on the Swedish online LGBTQ community Qruiser. Political discussions in online forum threads are studied as cultural participation in an online cultural public sphere. The specific question the paper seeks to answer is what role lurkers play for active participants’ meaning-making practices. Lurkers could be understood as a fantasy, an imagined audience willing to listen and be persuaded by active participants’ arguments. However, applying a Lacan inspired analytical framework, the paper concludes that the fantasy is not so much about the lurkers themselves, but the belief in persuasion. Hence, the answer to the question of why users participate in verbal battles with each other online would be because they are driven by a fantasy of persuasion as a way to cope with the lack of enjoyment in terms of them being split from a harmonious world of political unity.