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This paper focuses on patterns of film consumption within cultural consumption more broadly to assess trends in consumerism such as eclectic consumption, individualised consumption and omnivorous/univorous consumption and whether economic background and status feature in shaping cultural consumption. We focus on film because it is widely consumed, online and offline, and has many genres that vary in terms of perceived artistic and entertainment value. In broad terms, film is differentiated between mainstream commercially driven film such as Hollywood blockbusters, middlebrow “feel good” movies and independent arthouse and foreign language film. Our empirical statistical analysis shows that film consumers watch a wide range of genres. However, films deemed to hold artistic value such as arthouse and foreign language feature as part of broad and wide-ranging pattern of consumption of film that attracts its own dedicated consumers. Though we found that social and economic factors remain predictors of cultural consumption the overall picture is more complex than a simple direct correspondence and perceptions of other cultural forms also play a role. Those likely to consume arthouse and foreign language film consume other film genres and other cultural forms genres and those who “prefer” arthouse and foreign language film have slightly more constrained socio-economic characteristics. Overall, we find that economic and cultural factors such income, education, and wider consumption of culture are significant in patterns of film consumption.

This paper aims to center the experiences of three cohorts (n = 40) of Black high school students who participated in a critical race technology course that exposed anti-blackness as the organizing logic and default setting of digital and artificially intelligent technology. This paper centers the voices, experiences and technological innovations of the students, and in doing so, introduces a new type of digital literacy: critical race algorithmic literacy.

Data for this study include student interviews (called “talk backs”), journal reflections and final technology presentations.

Broadly, the data suggests that critical race algorithmic literacies prepare Black students to critically read the algorithmic word (e.g. data, code, machine learning models, etc.) so that they can not only resist and survive, but also rebuild and reimagine the algorithmic world.

While critical race media literacy draws upon critical race theory in education – a theorization of race, and a critique of white supremacy and multiculturalism in schools – critical race algorithmic literacy is rooted in critical race technology theory, which is a theorization of blackness as a technology and a critique of algorithmic anti-blackness as the organizing logic of schools and AI systems.

This paper aims to introduce how sociological traditions can provide a complementary, conceptual lens needed to better understand a country’s orientation in its digital transformation policies. While historically sociology has been used to study technological effects, introducing a sociological lens that considers broader macro digital policies can better complement a country’s national innovation system framework by highlighting where forms of acceleration and inertia in digital diffusion may or may not occur.

To formulate this lens, iterative literature reviews were conducted and four major sociological traditions (i.e. Durkheim, Functional-Utilitarian, Marxist and Micro-interactionist) were identified and integrated into one structure. The integrated structure was then applied to the French case of Minitel as a sample application. The French Minitel was selected because it is well-known and due to one of the author’s familiarity with the French culture. The description was based upon secondary data.

Through the use and application of this lens, the findings reveal that understanding a country’s specific orientation within a sociological tradition can help academics and practitioners determine what accelerates or provides inertia in the diffusion of new digital technologies within a country’s sociological frame. For the French Minitel, two dominant views seem to exist in France, the Durkheim and the Functional-Utilitarian view, which both affected the country’s path dependency in continued investments in Minitel.

While policymakers are tasked with the development and implementation of digital transformation policies, a key consideration for both scholars and practitioners on digital policy and governance is to understand the broader macro ramifications of sociological frameworks on the evolving effects of digital transformation. While the authors provide a sample illustration, future research is needed to operationalize this lens and to apply it across various regions and countries in the development of new digital transformation policies.

As countries face considerable pressure to digitize their economies, policymakers require a better framework to advance the sociological aspects of digitization and its effects upon local institutions and actors in society. The paper provides a complementary lens that can better help them in this regard.

To date, policymakers and governments lack an integrated framework to understand the sociological effects of digital technologies and their diffusions along with their implications on societies such as on the framework of national innovation. The authors provide a sample integrated structure and sample application.

As a result of the advancement of the online environment, several methodological proposals emerged to establish procedures for digital qualitative research. While the various online ethnography methods overlap, they are not equivalent in terms of their theoretical bases, procedures and goals. The purpose of this article is to add clarity to their main differences, depicting specificities, potentialities and limitations of each method.

This conceptual article results from an integrative literature review that brought together studies that proposed, debated or used qualitative research methods in the digital environment. The research focused on the primary indexed journals publishing cultural studies in the past 20 years.

The literature review highlights four methods – virtual ethnography, digital ethnography, netnography and the post-application programming interface ethnography. The integrative literature review adds clarity depicting the main premises and procedures of each method. The present analysis positions the different methods considering two dimensions: the focus on the boundaries of the group/culture investigated, and the focus on the platform agency, affordances and specific dynamics.

The article proposes a comparative framework outlining points of convergence and divergence to create a reference for researchers on topics of significance while designing and conducting a research study in a digital environment. This conceptual organization highlights and supports qualitative researchers on their methodological challenges.

In the face of the enormous rise in digital fraud and criminality, resulting in diverse afflictions to millions of user-victims, emanating from users’ horizontal interactive and transactive exchanges on the internet, but due significantly to internet’s deregulation and anonymity, this study aims to showcase the need for a socially grounded self-regulation. It holds, that this is feasible and that it can be achieved through large scale, comprehensive digital communication education (DCE) programs.

The composite methodology of the study comprises four types of components, namely, analytic, exploratory-discursive, constructionist and propositional. The construction-creation element consists of the design of an original combinational research tool: triangular relational pattern (TRP). Through TRPs, researchers can locate the types of relations involved between three implicated entities, namely, the affliction, the culprit and the victim and can study them in-depth. Subsequently, based on the TRP, DCE programs are composed, which are, also, proposed to be deployed by educational authorities and digital civil society associations.

The created, applied here and proposed TRPs can be used by other researchers aiming to locate, map and analyze the variants of internet criminality and victimhood and their implications across the global frontierless world and in the digital human condition, educational purposes but also to create social cohesion.

The study offers two original contributions. The TRP as a significant relational research tool-grid. The DCE programs that are linked to the repertories of digital relations and can be introduced in the general education programs.

This paper aims to unfold and emphasise the relevance of sustainability and time as research topics in media and communication research and discusses the relation of both phenomena with a focus on processes of media appropriation and media consumption.

The submission argues theoretically. Firstly, theories on sustainability and media and media and time are presented. Secondly, previous approaches from research on sustainable media use will be discussed. Finally, the authors call for a stronger accentuation of research on digital media, time, and sustainability.

The submission shows that previous research on sustainable media use does sufficiently take individual and social time experience into account. Moreover, research is too much focussed on the individual level. The authors therefore argue for three major conceptual changes in research on digital sustainability: time is a sustainable human resource; a shift of perspective from individual to relations is needed; and consideration of the cultural condition of capitalism is necessary.

This paper includes implications for the future research on digital media, time and sustainability.

According to the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first one that connects perspectives on time with digital sustainability.

The purpose of this paper is to report on the findings from the Digital Privacy Story Completion Project, which investigated Australian participants' understandings of and responses to digital privacy scenarios using a novel method and theoretical approach.

The story completion method was brought together with De Certeau's concept of tactics and more-than-human theoretical perspectives. Participants were presented with four story stems on an online platform. Each story stem introduced a fictional character confronted with a digital privacy dilemma. Participants were asked to complete the stories by typing in open text boxes, responding to the prompts “How does the character feel? What does she/he do? What happens next?”. A total of 29 participants completed the stories, resulting in a corpus of 116 narratives for a theory-driven thematic analysis.

The stories vividly demonstrate the ways in which tactics are entangled with relational connections and affective intensities. They highlight the micropolitical dimensions of human–nonhuman affordances when people are responding to third-party use of their personal information. The stories identified the tactics used and boundaries that are drawn in people's sense-making concerning how they define appropriate and inappropriate use of their data.

This paper demonstrates the value and insights of creatively attending to personal data privacy issues in ways that decentre the autonomous tactical and agential individual and instead consider the more-than-human relationality of privacy.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-05-2020-0174

The first case of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) was documented in China, and the virus was soon to be introduced to its neighboring country – South Korea. South Korea, one of the earliest countries to initiate a national pandemic response to COVID-19 with fairly substantial measures at the individual, societal and governmental level, is an interesting example of a rapid response by the Global South. The current study examines contact tracing mobile applications (hereafter, contact tracing apps) for those who were subject to self-quarantine through the lenses of dataveillance and datafication. This paper analyzes online/digital data from those who were mandatorily self-quarantined by the Korean government largely due to returning from overseas travel.

This study uses an Internet ethnography approach to collect and analyze data. To extract data for this study, self-quarantined Korean individuals' blog entries were collected and verified with a combination of crawling and manual checking. Content analysis was performed with the codes and themes that emerged. In the COVID-19 pandemic era, this method is particularly useful to gain access to those who are affected by the situation. This approach advances the author’s understandings of COVID-19 contact tracing mobile apps and the experiences of self-quarantined people who use them.

The paper shows Korean citizens' understandings and views of using the COVID-19 self-tracing application in South Korea through examining their experiences. The research argues that the application functions as a datafication tool that collects the self-quarantined people's information and performs dataveillance on the self-quarantined people. This research further offers insights for various agreements/disagreements at different actors (i.e. the self-quarantined, their families, contact tracers/government officials) in the process of contact tracing for COVID-19.

This study also provides insights into the implications of information and technology as they affect datafication and dataveillance conducted on the public. This study investigates an ongoing debate of COVID-19's contact tracing method concerning privacy and builds upon an emerging body of literature on datafication, dataveillance, social control and digital sociology.

The peer review history for this article is available at: https://publons.com/publon/10.1108/OIR-08-2020-0377

Digital inequality studies claim that social inequalities tend to be replicated online. However, studies have not attempted so far to deeper understand such stratification in immigrant societies regarding the e-government use. This study aims to understand the role of immigration status, gender and country of origin in the e-government use, thereby reflecting what the literature on the sociology of migration refers to as immigrants’ “double” and “triple” disadvantage.

Israel was chosen as a case study because it is an immigration society in which immigrants’ socioeconomic status is usually inferior to that of the native population. The data were attained from the 2017 Israel Social Survey. The population of the study included internet users from the Jewish sector (N = 4,222). Logistic regression was used as the multivariate technique.

The results indicated that immigrant women are disadvantaged in terms of e-government use regardless of their year of immigration. Yet, when the data are segmented by country of origin, only female immigrants from the former Soviet Union show evidence of a triple disadvantage.

The conclusion is that immigrants’ disadvantages in the offline sphere also exist in the online sphere.

Particular categories, which use e-government to a small extent, were identified, serving a call for action for the public officials. They should develop plans to make e-government more accessible to individuals belonging to these categories.

This study incorporates digital and immigrant sociology for the explanation of immigrants’ (online) social inclusion.

This article aims to present current and potential uses of innovative social research methodologies which harness emergent technologies. This article also seeks to note ethical issues surrounding emergent technologies.

Specifically, the use of social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook as well as their applications will be explored. The use of iPhones as data gathering devices will also be explored as an example of the utility of ubiquitous technologies to ethnographic work.

This paper finds that emergent technologically‐mediated ethnographic methods are of potential value to organizational ethnographers and that methodological barriers can be overcome to best leverage new media technologies in organizational ethnography.

This article has not been designed as a comprehensive overview of these social research methods nor as a primer to implement them. Rather, the main purpose of it is to begin to explore their potential applications to organizational research and to raise awareness amongst organizational researchers.

This article is original in its review of emergent digital research methods for qualitative organizational research. It reviews newer technologies and presents cases from the literature to highlight the varied methodological approaches implemented by organizational and other researchers in the field.