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Online calendar services (OCS) are primarily used for temporal orientation and reminding. Nonetheless, calendar work may also entail generic activities such as scheduling, tracking, archive and recall and retrieval which are not adequately supported by available systems. The purpose of the paper is to explore how online calendaring may be re-configured and re-aligned to alleviate these shortcomings, thus servicing accountability in team work and flexibility in organizational routines.

Following a design science research methodology, the authors review “justifiable failures” or deliberate non-use of OCS and establish the rationale for, design and evaluate a digital service that configures calendaring as an ecology of separate digital materials supporting file-, photo- and video-sharing services, online argumentation, project/task management and social bookmarking. The new service is a digital composite of materials that incrementally co-adapt and co-evolve to serve primary and secondary work-oriented activities. The authors assess the value of the digital composite in two empirical settings and discuss intrinsic features that create new possibilities for action.

The authors present the rationale, design, implementation and evaluation of a new digital composite calendaring service which is deployed in two empirical settings, namely group vacation planning and collective information management. Each case features different re-configurations of calendaring to serve human intentions. In vacation planning, the digital composite of the calendar operates as a mashup allowing peers to negotiate, schedule and track vacation options and archive, recall or retrieve digital memories of vacations. In the case of collective information management, the digital composite is further augmented so as to re-align performative and ostensive aspects of routines in a regional organic farming partnership.

Digital composites rely on the interdependent operation of different bounded systems and services to establish configured ecologies of (previously) separate digital artifacts. The practical implications of digital composites are that they can appropriate performative capacities which are already established and embedded across different settings. As a result, they enact complex digital assemblages which can re-align not only daily activities but also organizational routines. On the other hand, digital composites remain in flux, since their state, at any moment in time, is partly determined (even temporarily) by the state of their constituent parts.

Calendaring as presented in this paper defines a genre of digital artifacts that promote flexible and accountable collaborative work while exploiting material agency and resources distributed across digital settings. As such, it establishes a kind of meta-material that invokes collective social agency, thus re-aligning performative and ostensive aspects of organizational routines.

Past research has shown that wellness culture projects identities that are predominantly middle-class, white, thin, able-bodied women. Wellness cultures are amplified through digital media, namely highly visual social media platforms such as Instagram and TikTok, that promote a feminine ideal that women can (and should) achieve through rigorous commitment and investment. However, discourses surrounding wellness culture are a cause for concern when consumption, choice, and responsibility are positioned as a mode to constantly improve oneself until an idealised appearance is achieved.

In this chapter, the author explores the experiences of five Asian-Australian women aged 18–35 living in Australia as they navigate ideals of femininity. The author draws on perspectives from feminist new materialism to understand the material-discursive practices that form norms and ideals of the female body. Findings are presented in the form of vignettes to help trace affective encounters with objects, digital media, discourses, and other bodies that produce different affective relations as they seek to understand Asian-Australian femininity. The author argues that digital media and wellness culture prompt individual understanding and practices to adhere to transnational ideals of the feminine body rather than dismantling social and cultural norms that limit individual choice, an issue that has thus far received limited scholarly attention for Asian-Australians. This chapter builds on previous studies that position wellness culture within an established white female neoliberal rhetoric.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the construction of Sweden as a racialised spatial imaginary in the emerging transnational networks of far-right media production. Departing from President Donald Trump’s widely reported remarks, in 2017, as to “what happened last night in Sweden”, it examines the racializing discourses through which Sweden is constructed as a dark future to be averted; a failed social experiment in immigration and multiculturalism symbolised by the “no-go zones” held to be dotted, yet denied, in its major cities. While the symbolic production of “problem areas” is a familiar dimension of the politics of immigration, the paper explores why Sweden-as-nation is so insistently and intimately associated with its putative no-go zones in what are termed the “revenge fantasies” of the far-right. Further, it argues that these modes of representation cannot be understood without examining the value of Sweden as a news commodity in the expansive far-right media environment.

The analysis offers the idea of “taboo news” to conceptualise putatively “alternative” news about Sweden which is confirmed through its denial in the mainstream.

It argues that examining the increasing importance of “taboo news” as a commodity form must be integrated into a reading of how these racializing narratives are produced and circulated.

In so doing, it examines the shaping of this racialised imaginary as a digital assemblage taking shape as a commodity in a newly emerging and under-researched field of communicative and ideological action.

This chapter provides a study of how gambling companies use the cultural and social capital of Newcastle United Football Club, in the English Premier League, to establish a connection with the club's fans to promote gambling. Newcastle United had two gambling sponsors during the period of this study, from 2017 to 2020, including a front of shirt sponsor, FUN88, an online gambling brand with a large following in Asia. Data were gathered from a range of sources, including from the social media platform, Twitter, to identify the methods the company used to engage fans and to encourage betting on the outcome of matches. The data from the study were explored thematically to describe the relationship developed between the football club and its principal gambling sponsor in order to drive business for the latter with the club's followers. The findings showed how FUN88 evoked Newcastle United's cultural tradition to promote gambling and generate business globally whilst the club actively promoted their ‘primary partner’ through its media channels. The lure of free match tickets was used to encourage fan engagement. Corporate practices promote the consumption of unhealthy commodities through their marketing whilst consumers (fans) are responsibilised for any harms engendered by their gambling practices. The ubiquity of gambling brands has enabled gambling to become a normalised part of football culture. The findings from this study show how FUN88 has used all elements of the sponsorship assemblage to create an emotional connection whilst engaging with Newcastle United's fans to increase consumption of its products.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which early adolescent programmers embed meaning in their digital media created within an online programming community called Scratch.

The author completed an 18-month descriptive case study with 5 early adolescent participants. The research design included a multimodal analytic analysis of participant artifacts and inductive analysis of semi-structured interviews and transcription frames.

Participants embedded meaning to achieve four primary purposes, namely, to guide visitors through exhibits, to story, to engage in conversation and to game. To achieve each goal, the participants embedded unique semantic cues within specific Scratch structures.

Questions for how researchers in literacy and learning can further explore meaning-making within programming-as-writing are suggested.

Connections to the supportive structures within Scratch are discussed in the context of programming-as-writing. Considerations regarding the use of Scratch to promote programming-as-writing are provided for educators.

The findings in this study provide an introductory step toward an enhanced understanding of the ways in which youth embed meaning into digital media as they engage in programming-as-writing. Although coding has been researched within the context of computer science, the use of coding in multimodal composition should be explored as it relates to literacy practices.

This chapter critically evaluates the literature on digital consumer data and the ways in which it can be used in digital social research. The chapter illuminates how researchers have to conceptualise and negotiate digital data, focusing upon ethical and procedural challenges of employing digital methods.

The chapter draws upon and integrates a broad research literature from sociology, digital media studies, business and marketing, as these have opened up new directions for research design and method. It advocates interdisciplinary approaches to conceptualising what digital data is employing the concept of ‘marketing narratives’ to understand how the new visibilities of consumer data are shaped by related processes of branding and the interactivity of content.

The chapter shows how the capacities of digital technologies present significant challenges for researchers and organisations that have to be carefully negotiated if the potentials of digital consumer data are to be harnessed. In addition, researchers should pay attention to novel issues of ethical responsibility in the context of the longer-term presence of data records.

The chapter offers a set of guidelines for digital social researchers in negotiating the meanings of visible digital consumer data, the ethical and proprietary issues involved in utilising digital methods.

Over the coming decades, the widespread application of social distancing creates challenges for the urban planning and design profession. This article aims to address the phenomenon of boredom in public places, its main influences that generate change in repetition, monotony and everyday lifestyle, whether positive, negative or both – depending on the binding and governing rules of urban shape variations and daily lifestyles.

This viewpoint relied on literary narration to discuss the phenomenon of boredom vis-à-vis urban design and placemaking solutions in the face of social distancing. It builds its orientation by analyzing the works of nine scholars and five of their relevant theories.

Evidence from previous studies helped develop three-pillar guidelines that can produce better results for post-pandemic development in the face of boredom. These pillars include recommendations for the trinity of heterogeneity for metamorphosis in urban form, changes in public life and digital transformation in a time of uncertainty on how to confront (un)seen boredom in public spaces. Practitioners should develop new insights into the relationship between people and place by reviewing existing paradigms in urban studies to avoid repetition, monotony and change in everyday life after a pandemic.

The added value here is in underlining boredom as one of the consequences of social distancing and lockdown applications building on the phenomenon's theorizers. The key contribution of this work is the three-pillar recommendation for confronting the boredom in public spaces that happens because of social distancing and lockdown.

The purpose of this paper is twofold: first, to further develop Paul Edwards’ concept of “data friction” by examining the socio-material forces that are shaping data movements in the cases of research data and online communications data, second, to articulate a politics of data friction, identifying the interrelated infrastructural, socio-cultural and regulatory dynamics of data friction, and how these are contributing to the constitution of social relations.

The paper develops a hermeneutic review of the literature on socio-material factors influencing the movement of digital data between social actors in the cases of research data sharing and online communications data. Parallels between the two cases are identified and used to further develop understanding of the politics of “data friction” beyond the concept’s current usage within the Science Studies literature.

A number of overarching parallels are identified relating to the ways in which new data flows and the frictions that shape them bring social actors into new forms of relation with one another, the platformisation of infrastructures for data circulation, and state action to influence the dynamics of data movement. Moments and sites of “data friction” are identified as deeply political – resulting from the collective decisions of human actors who experience significantly different levels of empowerment with regard to shaping the overall outcome.

The paper further develops Paul Edwards’ concept of “data friction” beyond its current application in Science Studies. Analysis of the broader dynamics of data friction across different cases identifies a number of parallels that require further empirical examination and theorisation.

The observation that sites of data friction are deeply political has significant implications for all engaged in the practice and management of digital data production, circulation and use.

It is argued that the concept of “data friction” can help social actors identify, examine and act upon some of the complex socio-material dynamics shaping emergent data movements across a variety of domains, and inform deliberation at all levels – from everyday practice to international regulation – about how such frictions can be collectively shaped towards the creation of more equitable and just societies.

The paper makes an original contribution to the literature on friction in the dynamics of digital data movement, arguing that in many cases data friction may be something to enable and foster, rather than overcome. It also brings together literature from diverse disciplinary fields to examine these frictional dynamics within two cases that have not previously been examined in relation to one another.

To outline the current trajectories in digital social research and to highlight the roles of qualitative research in those trajectories.

A secondary analysis of the primary literature.

Qualitative research has shifted over time in relation to rapidly changing digital phenomena, but arguably finds itself in ‘crisis’ when faced with algorithms and ubiquitous digital data. However, there are many highly significant qualitative approaches that are being pursued and have the potential to contextualize, situate and critique narratives and practices of data.

To situate current debates around methods within longer trajectories of digital social research, recognizing their conceptual, disciplinary and empirical commitments.

This paper argues that this animal surveillance has the potential for considerable function creep going far outside the scheme's original objectives and acts as a conduit for more problematic surveillance of humans. This results in social sorting of people with subsequent unforeseen consequences leading to discrimination and curtailment of freedoms for both animals and their owners. Ultimately this opens people up to further intrusive targeting by commercial interests and, more alarmingly, scrutiny from law enforcement agencies.

An empirical study examining an initiative involving the collection of canine DNA sources data from publicly available Cabinet, Select Committee and Scrutiny Committee records from the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham (LBBD). It also draws on news media sources, publicity material from the company running the scheme and from this and other local authorities. Methods include analysis of documents, semiotic and discourse analysis.

This paper highlights the importance of animals to surveillance studies and examines the extent to which animals are a part of the surveillant assemblage in their own right. It also demonstrates how nonhuman animals extend the reach of the surveillant assemblage.

The scheme was called a badge of considerate dog ownership, yet it is one that can be franchised to tie up with diverse income streams being described as advantageous in the age of austerity. In 2017, it was reported that this scheme was to be rolled out in other areas and was moving from being voluntary to being mandatory with the enforcement of Public Space Protection Orders (PSPOs). These have been described as “geographically defined ASBOS” that have come into force under the Anti-social Behaviour and Policing Act (2014); they often work to criminalise activities that were not previously considered illegal.

In the theorising of surveillance, animals have been largely overlooked. Epidemiological studies proliferate, yet the role of animals in many aspects of everyday surveillance has been neglected.