Uganda's infamous state -sanctioned homo-hostility has resulted in intense international attention, development cooperation and Western funding to local lesbian, gay, bi- and transsexual (LGBT+) organisations. However, Western funders and allies in this context are becoming increasingly questioned. Researchers have highlighted the complexities, opportunities and constraints of an increasingly transnational LGBT+ movement, but how is this manifested on the ground in the Global South? Through an inductive and ethnographically inspired study, we set out to explore the Ugandan LGBT+ community and its intra-community relationships and relations with Western funders and allies in the unique setting of Uganda Pride 2022, to which we had rare first-hand access. The results reveal that security concerns, both from outside and within the community, shaped Uganda Pride 2022. The most salient finding is that competition for international funding distorts activists' relations, as it stratifies the LGBT+ community based on who has access to Western donors and international funders.

Ugandan urban same-sex desiring individuals frequently encounter and navigate competing understandings of sexuality and sexual identity. Western essentialist understanding of sexual identity introduced by international development partners and transnational LGBT+ (Lesbian, Gay, Bi- and Transsexual) activism, as well as media, offer an alternative to Ugandan non-essentialist and fluid subject positions. This article seeks to understand how young individuals with same-sex -desires in Kampala navigate tensions between Western and local understandings concerning sexuality. We have interviewed 24 young individuals with same-sex desires (unaffiliated and individuals working in LGBT+ organizations) and asked how they approach their sexuality and experiences living with same-sex desires in contemporary Kampala. The results reveal how interview participants engaged in a complex navigation between local community expectations, their own same-sex desires, and embeddedness in a global LGBT+ culture. Although the participants engaged in what Westerners would label as a "double life," the article problematizes the prescriptive norms of authenticity and "coming out." The conclusion is that the fluid vs essentialist dichotomy is too simplistic to be helpful when trying to understand the lives and aspirations of young people with same-sex desires.

This article unpacks different meanings of visibility and adds to a more complex and nuanced understanding of visibility and its role in LGBT + activism in Uganda, a widely discussed case of political homophobia. Public visibility has a central, although contested, role here. The study aims to explore how visibility is understood and navigated by local LGBT + activists, unaffiliated people with same-sex desires, as well as international development partners. Interviews conducted in Kampala from December 2021-January 2022 reveal different and complex narratives surrounding visibility. Local unaffiliated individuals and activists agreed on the importance of making the LGBT + rights struggle more visible. This, however, did not translate into a wish to "come out" themselves. International development actors expressed a need for caution regarding their own visibility, mindful that explicit and visual support may generate accusations of neo-imperialism.

An increase in international funding for LGBT+ rights advocacy in Uganda has resulted in not only a mushrooming of organizations but also intra-community competition for visibility, attention, and limited resources. Against this backdrop, we set out to study how organizations relate to each other in the Ugandan LGBT+ Twittersphere. Following an analytical framework around rationalities of mediated participation, we study with whom Ugandan LGBT+ organizations relate through mapping retweets and @mentions emanating from selected Twitter accounts. The resulting network maps reveal a dividing line between more well-funded and internationally connected organizations and lesser established organizations. By supplementing the network analysis with qualitative readings of key accounts and semi-structured interviews, we conclude that access to international funds and negotiating visibility explains the network structures. The article thus reveals interesting Twitter practices, showing LGBT+ organizations use the platform as a means for negotiating and claiming space inside the Ugandan LGBT+ community.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

How do professionals at the forefront of digital technologies perceive their own work? Conducting 39 interviews with programmers around the world I asked them to describe their workday and then reflect upon an ideal workday.  Ideals revolved around the pleasure of solving difficult problems, to disrupt and to innovate, but ultimately to make the world a better place through their work. Many talked about a pleasurable state of “flow” in which they almost merged with the computer (their work tool). The empirical material reveals two interesting differences; one is between freelance programmers and those employed in big tech. Freelance programmers, in general, valued a work-life balance, clearly separating home and office, while big tech employees, on the other hand, tended to be younger (without kids), spending time in offices that blurred boundaries between home and office, providing employees with everything from ice cream parlors to fitness centers. Second, while most programmers looked at their profession as a vocation, programmers growing up in Asia (India and China) approached their profession as a means to a comfortable and exciting life (in terms of salary and working outside of their home countries). From this study, I will suggest that sustainable socio-technical work futures will be shaped around the new, the innovative and the meaningful. Work will, also in the future, be understood as a means to earn a living, but a meaningful one, and meaningful while earning it, as well as flexible and individually adaptable.   

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 chapter focuses on how technology culture, from the beginning, has been geared towards the youth. Early hacking, for example, had a teenage rebellion to it, anti-authoritarian prankish boys in, first, the computer labs of established American universities and later in the garages in middle-class Silicon Valley suburbia. This resonates in the industry's more recent turn towards entrepreneurship. The chapter thus provides a backdrop to how ageism in digital technologies can be understood and made sense from a more historical and cultural perspective. The chapter also discusses how technology culture's many different roots and influences have made certain tensions apparent, for example, left-leaning hippies versus libertarian entrepreneurs. How such tensions are navigated also points towards a fundamentally youth-oriented culture. Empirically the chapter is based on an extensive interview study conducted between 2018 and 2020

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 presentation focuses on Uganda, a country infamous for its state-sanctioned homophobia. This international attention has steadily increased the number of LGBT+ organizations in the country. In this article, we set out to study what organizations are more central and more peripheral in the Ugandan LGBT+ Twittersphere. Following an analytical framework around rationalities of mediated participation, we have studied with whom Ugandan LGBT+ organizations relate through mapping retweets and @mentions. The network maps reveal a dividing line between more well-funded and internationally connected organizations and younger, more peripheral organizations. Complementing these maps with qualitative data, we conclude that access to funds and negotiating visibility are rationales behind the network structure. The article reveals an interesting use of Twitter, both as an instrument for advocacy work and for expressing and negotiating themselves as part of a larger LGBT+ community.

This presentation focuses on Uganda, a country infamous for its state-sanctioned homophobia. This international attention has steadily increased the number of LGBT+ organizations in the country. In this article, we set out to study what organizations are more central and more peripheral in the Ugandan LGBT+ Twittersphere. Following an analytical framework around rationalities of mediated participation, we have studied with whom Ugandan LGBT+ organizations relate through mapping retweets and @mentions. The network maps reveal a dividing line between more well-funded and internationally connected organizations and younger, more peripheral organizations. Complementing these maps with qualitative data, we conclude that access to funds and negotiating visibility are rationales behind the network structure. The article reveals an interesting use of Twitter, both as an instrument for advocacy work and for expressing and negotiating themselves as part of a larger LGBT+ community.  

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.

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 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 chapter aims to understand tech culture, its values, and its biases. The chapter revolves around a mapping of the magic metaphor in tech, how it is used, and what its function is. It concludes that the magic metaphor signals the possibility of the impossible, of solving all kinds of problems: the physical so-called “real” world has shortcomings that can be addressed through programming languages on big sets of data, which can make our world a better place in the future. Manipulation, control, and progress are themes that resonate in modernity. Therefore, I argue that tech culture could be understood as modern mathemagics. I depart from the current disenchantment with tech, most passionately addressed in the field of critical data studies. I will connect this to 16th-century theologian and philosopher Bruno’s teachings on magic, in which he argued that mathematical magic risks becoming evil.

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.

With mis-and disinformation actively challenging the European human rights framework on LGBT+ and ample evidence of foreign actors’ norm entrepreneurship; this study analyses the narratives that can be tied to foreign actors. 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 sponsored by non-European actors: a) Opposing a ‘gender ideology’ and the attack on Gods order, b) Heteroactivism and the protection of the rights the ‘natural’ family  c) LGBT+ rights as colonialism by the West d) LGBT+ rights as a threat to child safety. Mis- and disinformation narratives appear to be carried out by a variety of constellations of heterogeneous actors, where international actors cooperate with European partners. Albeit the EU’s strong protection of freedom of speech, makes it challenging to address mis- and disinformation that falls outside hate-speech legislation; the following counter measures may be worthwhile exploring: 1) harmonization of European legal frameworks, 2) scrutiny of financial flows and 3) strengthened AI and human capacity to create detections systems for mis- and disinformation across digital spaces in Europe. 

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.

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.

In our connected data societies, the importance of algorithms and automated systems is obvious. They determine search engines’ rankings, what driverless cars do when a child appears on the road, and stock market changes. Today data-driven algorithms and automated systems are everywhere.

While algorithms and automated systems themselves are often a topic of controversy and debate, this book is about the people behind them; it is an account of the cultures, values, and imaginations that guide programmers in their work designing and engineering software and digital technology. Technology, it is argued, is not neutral and developed free of context. And since algorithms and automated systems exercise power in connected data societies, it is pivotal to understand their creators, who could be labelled, it is argued in the book, Wizards of the Web.

This book is the result of an ethnographically inspired study based on interviews with software engineers and programmers, observations made at tech head quarters and conferences in Denmark, Sweden, Brazil, Germany, India, and the US, and a case study of the introduction of algorithmic automation on the front page of a Scandinavian newspaper.

The author, Jakob Svensson, is professor of Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University. The book is part of the research project Behind the Algorithm (funded by the Swedish Research Council, 2018–2020). 

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.

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.

Inspired by Coleman's call for a more 'direct representation', we address two neglected issues within the field of social media and political communication. We study a nonelection period in Sweden (two randomly selected weeks in early 2016) and conduct a cross-platform comparison. The article is based on content analyses of the four prominent social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and Twitter. We seek to answer the following questions: do parties use social media platforms in-between elections? If so, for what purposes? Do parties use social media to interact in a direct manner with citizens? We focus on three different Swedish parties: the Social Democrats (incumbent), the Feminist Initiative (underdog) and the Sweden Democrats (populist right-wing). Our findings suggest a bleak direct representation in-between elections. Parties are more active on social media platforms during election campaigns. Twitter is the preferred platform, especially by the incumbent party for broadcasting achievements.

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 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.

In this article we describe the rise of a data orthodoxy that we suggest to label ‘data-essentialism’. We question this data-essentialism by problematizing its premises, and unveil its ideological indebtedness to deeper (previous) currents in Western thought and history. Data-essentialism is the assumption that data is the essence of basically everything, and thus provides the ideological underpinnings for the imagination of creating an Artificial Intelligence (AI) that would transform the human race and our existence. The imagination of data as an essence is in contrast to, while often conflated with, ideas of data as traces we leave behind existing in highly connected societies. This confusion over what data is, and can be used for, underlines the importance to engage in questions of the nature of data, whether everything in the universe can be described in terms of data and the implications of subscribing to such a data-essentialist worldview. We connect data-essentialism to a revival of positivism, critique a belief in the objectivity of data and that predictions based on data correlations can be fully accurate. We end the article with a discussion of how some aspects of AI rely on data-essentialist accounts and how these have a history and roots in Modernity.