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The work connects classic theories of selfing to the COVID-19 pandemic to make fresh connections between pandemic-induced trauma to the self and digital resources. This research introduces the concept of the “traumatized self” emerging from the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to digital disadvantage and digital hyperconnectivity. From Cooley’s original “looking glass self” to Wellman’s “hyperconnected” individualist self, social theories of identity work, and production of the self have a long and interdisciplinary history. In documenting this history, the discussion outlines key foci in the theorizing of the digital self by mapping how digital selfing and identity work have been treated from the inception of the internet to the epoch of the pandemic. The work charts the evolution of the digital selfing project from key theoretical perspectives, including postmodernism, symbolic interactionism, and dramaturgy. Putting these approaches in dialogue with the traumatized self, this research makes a novel contribution by introducing the concept of digitally differentiated trauma, which scholars can employ to better understand selfing processes in such circumstances and times.

This chapter explores the development of social science visualizations as cultural objects within art worlds. The research examines artworks as social science visualizations to show the importance of conducting analysis within distinctive social, institutional, and cultural environments. To make these arguments, the chapter outlines some of the key features of art worlds as they have been analyzed by cultural sociologists and anthropologists. We point out how cultures of reception and institutional intermediaries, such as museums, have historically shaped the construction of artworks, which are never produced or interpreted in a vacuum. The chapter closes with a call to expand both the application of social science visualizations and our understanding of such visualizations as subject to similar art world dynamics. Such visualizations, it is argued, constitute key components of social research practice increasingly oriented toward a digitally connected public hungry for visual interpretations of contemporary social developments.

The production of news through artificial intelligence (AI) is a reality in many countries, including the United States, where two leading companies in this area are based. The purpose of this explanatory bibliographic research is to discuss who or what should bear the ethical responsibility for automated writing in a newsroom, considering that codes of ethics address only the conduct of people. This chapter compares the Code of Ethics of the National Federation of Brazilian Journalists with the code used in the United States and highlights examples of news released with incorrect information, produced by algorithms, and published by US news organizations. Facing the current informational scenario, the ethical responsibility of the automated news must be attributed to the media, represented in the figure of the editor. Such a conclusion is motivated by the fact that neither the algorithm nor the person who developed it takes part in the decision-making process of publishing an article or not.