The integration of digital technologies into museums has redefined public engagement, offering innovative virtual experiences that transcend physical access. Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome theory, this paper positions virtual museum visiting as recontextualized experience and examines the phenomenon through a case study of the Palace Museum on WeChat. Drawing on collaborative autoethnography with walkthrough elements, we found that these visits construct a new knowledge system that invites self-referential, spontaneous and heterogeneous connections. We therefore argue that the visiting experience drives the virtual museum rhizormorphous thanks to its performance of unpredicted and heterogeneous mapping. By addressing the various mediators involved in virtual museum visiting, this paper calls for a reconceptualization of (dis)connections in the audience’s engagement with virtual museums. It offers a novel framework for understanding virtual museum visiting as a lived experience.

As ethnographers, we plan our fieldwork thoroughly in advance, but circumstances on the ground sometimes force us to abandon our plans. Especially in conflict(-affected) settings, access to the field is not always guaranteed and circumstances can rapidly change. In this paper, we discuss how digital ethnography can be integrated into ethnographic projects, when researchers find themselves unable to travel or return to the field. We argue that embracing the digital, both as a tool and as a space, is a viable avenue to continue ethnographic fieldwork under such circumstances. We discuss the opportunities and challenges that such an approach offers, by discussing existing research and by drawing from our own experiences in Lebanon, Kosovo and Medellín (Colombia). The discussion encompasses the two focal components of ethnography: participant observation and interviews. In the part on participant observation, we make a distinction between two different approaches of using the digital for ethnography. The first is approach is grounded in digital ethnographic work, where the digital spaces are considered as field sites. The second approach uses digital tools for collecting data from physical spaces. The objective of the paper is to provide methodological tools to ethnographers who are not trained in digital methods, and to offer practical yet sound and rigorous tools. Our focus is on ethnography in conflict(-affected) settings, which presents rather specific challenges.

Automated hiring platforms offer critical Artificial Intelligence (AI) researchers a privileged site for the study of technological controversies and their unfolding as they often end up entangled in scandals. In 2019, an official complaint filed with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) outlines the main controversy created by such systems, directly targeting HireVue’s platform. According to the FTC, these systems “evaluate a job applicant’s qualifications based upon their appearance by means of an opaque, proprietary algorithm” (FTC, 2019, p.1). Existing critical literature outlines how Basic Emotions theory (Ekman, 1999) and its deployment through an AI-powered system fuel ventures such as automated hiring platforms (Stark, 2018). Therein lies a form of opportunism where the use of available audiovisual data and the revalorization of heavily criticized and simplistic theories about the human mind create discriminatory automated decision-making grounded in bogus science (Crawford, 2021). Even if HireVue slightly modified its product by removing the video analysis component in reaction to the critiques formulated by regulatory bodies, the company kept AI-powered voice analysis, its one-sided video interview technique and the multitude of gaming assignments designed to evaluate candidates. Going beyond scandals and hype, this article aims to tackle the inevitable political economy generated by automated hiring systems. Indeed, job seekers are confronted with a system that disrupts a well-established, sociologically stable technique, the interview, and its technical object counterpart, the resume. We assert that the gaps of nonknowledge (Beer, 2023) created by the one-sided interviews break the commonly accepted interactionist framework that originally informed the hiring process. Using HireVue as a case study, we lay bare the political economy of AI-powered automated hiring platforms, highlighting how individuals assess their capacity to acquire agency in the face of opaque technologies.

Introduced in 2016 as a watershed moment in AI development, the announcement of AlphaGo – the first AI system to beat a human professional in the board game of go – garnered a range of mass publicity, and this media coverage often forms the core of scholarly analysis, too. Drawing on a novel dataset of online discussions by professional and amateur players from 2016-2020 which covers the introduction and retirement of AlphaGo, as well as the construction of alternative systems, I outline a new perspective of the impact of the system on the playing community. Moving beyond recognition of audience-centric responses of enchantment/disenchantment by these players, I articulate a process of engagement through which meaning-making and reconstruction occurred within the go community. These findings emphasize the importance of including multiple perspectives in analysis and draws attention to the influence of impacted constituencies in AI construction.

Experts trace a congruent trend, pinpointed as originating around the 2010s (Grose, 2020) and only accelerating in the pandemic and its aftermaths: the rise of social media activity relating to parents’ performances of their substance abuse – what this paper defines as “#winemom culture” – with a broader social tendency, a general increase in “rates of high-risk drinking” that lead to such outcomes as “long-term health damage” and “dangers to family” (Macarthur, n.d.). I interrogate the ethics of moralizing against #winemom culture under COVID-19 culture and its aftermaths through exclusively quantitative metrics or surface-level analysis. As with anything coded according to the “momification of the Internet” (Dewey, 2015), such cultures are often disregarded, seen as superficial or in receipt of unchecked judgments. I trace the following question: What can #winemom culture reveal about how parents are processing and communicating within this moment? And begin from the premise that there are as-yet undetermined drivers motivating what appears to be a “zoning out” (Heyes, 2020) in the mediation of #winemom culture production. This project then opens into an analysis of how to actually study digital feminist practices in this current moment, one that is defined by methodological crises surrounding the increasing complexities of enacting justice in social media research. This paper thus serves as a methodological disquisition for feminist researchers attempting to perform ethically just social media research.

The present study was aimed at identifying key topics in online discussions about the use of ChatGPT by examining a large dataset extracted from Reddit social media using natural language processing. A corpus of 159,971 posts about ChatGPT were extracted from a custom-made python-coded Reddit content scraper for posts in the r/ChatGPT subreddit discussions. After cleaning the data, the sample was reduced to 119,853 posts which was subjected to cluster analysis using the open-source IRaMuTeQ software to identify main topics based on the cooccurrence of texts. These clusters were named by a panel of social psychology experts (n=3) by reading typical text segments within each cluster. Four thematic clusters emerged, categorized into two main topics: “Society and AI Integration”, focusing on ethical concerns (32.1%), and “Operational Aspects and Applications”, which delves into technical and practical facets (67.9%). The latter includes clusters like “AI Technical Framework”, “Casual AI Interactions”, and “Human-AI Etiquette”. The Reddit discourse provides a comprehensive understanding of ChatGPT, revealing user priorities like system capabilities and ethical considerations. Notably, the “Human-AI Etiquette” cluster is a new topic less covered in existing literature. The findings underscore the importance of effective prompting for meaningful user engagement with ChatGPT.

This article proposes and delineates “digital dwelling” as one method of grappling with a central methodological challenge that we, as feminist researchers, face of how researchers might account for the multiple entanglements of affect, history, culture, politics, and resistance within feminist digital media artifacts. Using our method of digital dwelling, we analyze three sets of carousel posts on Instagram from three different accounts: Intersectional Environmentalist Collective, For the Wild, and Richa Kaul Padte. We explore how the inter, para, and meta-textual arguments curated through these carousel posts change the ways audiences relate to one another and to the current political moment, and how audiences, including individual researchers, are situated in affective and embodied ways within the research scene. By demarcating small, embodied data curation as a key space of method and analysis, we suggest that the personal relationships we develop in community as researchers with located acts of transgression, like these posts, are significant to consider more fully through their emergent intertextualities, especially for those invested in contemporary social media, protest, and visual cultures.

Over the last fifteen years, the development of blockchain technologies has attracted a large volume of professional expertise, capital investment and media attention. This burgeoning sector of technology practices has coalesced around a few major initiatives (Bitcoin, Ethereum), but it is still moving at a fast pace and its configuration is evolving. If this sector is marked by a variety of technological protocols, financial arrangements and organizational forms, it is also, we would argue, a site of social effervescence. Parties, meet-ups, and the sorts of informal socializing which gather around events and networks of all kinds function to endow the blockchain sector with the characteristics of what, in cultural analysis, are often called “scenes”. The aim of this special issue is to examine the interest of the notion of scene for the analysis of blockchain practices. We argue that the notion of scene may be mobilized as a useful analytical framework not only for the study of blockchain practices, but for that of technology practices more generally. In this introductory article, we ask the following questions: how can the notion of scene contribute to the understanding of blockchain practices? And what sort of research agenda does the notion point to? In the following sections we first identify some “scenic” components in blockchain phenomena. Then we review how media discourses and academic scholarship have framed these phenomena to show that the scene perspective is undertheorized in the context of technology-related social groupings. Finally, we propose a framework to analyse the main dimensions of blockchain scenes, before presenting the contributions to the special issue. With this special issue, we aim to establish a research agenda around technology scenes at the junction of STS and cultural analysis.