Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies

In 2017, Brazil launched the Geostationary Defense and Strategic Communications Satellite (SGDC-1), fulfilling the state’s long-held ambition to manufacture and operate a national communication satellite. This article investigates the main frictions surrounding the establishment, articulation, and representation of this large-scale infrastructural system, particularly regarding the federal government’s alleged commitment to deploying it to deliver broadband to public rural schools. Through open-source investigation and satellite footprint analysis, the study explores the political economy and governance dilemmas surrounding the SGDC-1 as a state-led project, revealing how its operations are framed and mediated through underserved publics and bolstered by televisual tactics under a populist logic. A critical analysis of disclosed documents, news stories, footprint maps, congressional hearings, and visual media uncovers the satellite’s dual complexity: it serves both as a flagship of publicly funded connectivity and as a discursive artifact that shapes public perceptions of inclusion through paternalistic space-telecom narratives. Considering the challenges related to public-private partnerships, militarization, and potential outages, the article calls for increased civic scrutiny and suggests the need for new policy strategies to ensure the project’s viability and long-term success.

This study explores Fursan al-Aqsa: The Knights of the Al-Aqsa Mosque (developed by Nidal Nijm Games in 2022) highlighting its role in the portrayal of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a paradigm between propaganda and entertainment. By examining the game’s discourse, and its impact on player perceptions, this research sheds light on how video games can shape understanding and engagement with geopolitical issues. The research utilises Albert Bandura’s concept of moral disengagement to analyse the game’s content and its reception on platforms like Twitch and YouTube. By assessing how the game frames moral considerations through its narrative and gameplay, this study reveals the potential of digital games to affect player perceptions and contribute to the broader media landscape surrounding political issues. The analysis also explores the reception and re-interpretation of the game by players and content creators, thus offering insights into the complex interplay between video game content, ideological influence, and audience engagement.

This article presents a detailed overview of podcast production in New Zealand. This is the first broad survey of podcasting in New Zealand, and seemingly the first of its kind globally. It tracks the development and growth of podcasting in New Zealand from a medium pioneered by independent producers to a growing sector of the local media market. Drawing from the New Zealand Podcast Directory – an extensive database of podcasts produced from 2005 onwards – this article categorises and assesses the 722 podcasts listed, before more broadly discussing key characteristics of New Zealand’s podcast sphere. The titles are coded across 12 categories, providing just under 10,000 data points for analysis. Producer typologies are discussed, before the publishing status of shows is explored. The number, length, and frequency of episodes are surveyed, followed by a breakdown of podcasts by format. Podcast subject matter is then considered, before the global reach of New Zealand’s most successful podcasts is evaluated. Undertaking this research project revealed inconsistencies with podcast terminology and issues with conventional podcast categories. There is no ubiquitous list of podcast formats, and accompanying definitions of each. When discussing podcasts, genre and topic are often used interchangeably. Aside from True Crime, podcast genres in the main lack definition. Conventional podcast categories lack the specificity needed to adequately identify many shows. Consequently, this article presents and tests a new podcast classification system designed to provide greater flexibility and specificity.

Public service media (PSM) in Australia operate with an unusual absence of articulated expectations, including enforceable minimum levels of Australian content. The ABC and SBS have legislated charters that codify broad purposes and protect editorial independence, yet there is no structured mechanism to review remit, performance, or resourcing. This article argues that the resulting ‘independence’ is double-edged: it limits direct ministerial direction while enabling policy neglect and episodic politicised intervention in digital conditions. Using national drama as a lens, we trace how the dismantling of commercial broadcasters’ content obligations, the fragility of advertiser-funded mainstream media, and the rise of global streaming platforms have shifted cultural responsibility toward the ABC and SBS without commensurate funding or clear obligations. A comparative framework shows how Australia diverges from systems such as the United Kingdom, where Charter renewal and regulator-led reviews create recurring opportunities to justify public value and recalibrate scope. Placing SBS alongside the ABC, we show how divergent histories and funding models produce uneven adaptations to digitisation and internationalisation yet share the same structural exposure to drift. We conclude by advocating deliberative reform: formal review cycles, clearer public value expectations (including around high-cost forms of Australian content), and resourcing aligned to expanded civic responsibilities in platform-dominated conditions.

Over a decade has passed since Eliot Bates examined ‘what studios do’. In the meantime, discussions surrounding decline and transformation in music production often depict a grim outlook for the future of large-format recording studios confluent with a burgeoning lower-cost, DAW-based DIY recording sector. This paper conducts a census of commercial recording studios along the east coast of Australia by gathering data from their websites. This approach offers a methodology to study recording studio cultures and explore what studios think they do. It offers insights into how studios present, communicate and promote themselves to prospective clients. The language used, promoted equipment and services offered all convey a particular position in the recording domain, with the goal of future business and stability for the studio. Beyond functional goals a recording studio purports to achieve, this article contends that studios don’t share a standard format of practice, they rely equally on the personnel that own and operate the facility and the technology within, they do not adequately acknowledge structural diversity issues in the sector, they assume that potential clients understand the value of specific technology, and they are diversifying beyond standard modes of practice to remain a viable business.

This study compares Netflix Korean original films with top-grossing Korean theatrical films using Napoli’s diversity taxonomy. Drawing on a cross-sectional sample (2021–2024) with a historical benchmark (2006–2020), it assesses differences in source diversity (production-company concentration), content diversity (genres, creative roles, and expressive intensity via age ratings), and the narrative articulation of Korean locality. The results reveal that while Netflix functions as a new type of investor creating opportunities for some filmmakers, it operates within entrenched patterns of capital concentration while exhibiting selective diversification across content dimensions. These findings suggest that Netflix’s promotional rhetoric of global diversity functions less as straightforward cultural inclusion than as a market expansion strategy that reinforces broader patterns of capital accumulation, revealing the complex entanglement of diversity discourse with platform capitalism.

This study explores the characteristics of PLLI, the fandom of the Korean virtual idol group PLAVE, through an interpretivist lens. Rooted in ethnographic fieldwork, this study examines the rapid emergence of large virtual idol fandoms in Korea between 2023 and 2024. Data were collected through a year-long participant observation and in-depth one-on-one interviews, focussing on digital content accumulated within online fan communities. This approach enabled detailed tracking of how virtual idol fandoms engage in fan activities and interact within their communities. The findings reveal that the unique platform characteristics of virtual idols—communicating with fans through a screen—give rise to paradoxical storytelling. Differences in merchandise consumption patterns among PLLIs were shaped by their prior fan experiences, reflecting PLAVE’s paradoxical narrative that blurs the boundaries between fictional characters and real idols. When fans encountered overlaps or dissonances between virtual and physical bodies, they often embraced these gaps as part of the unique charm exclusive to virtual idols, indicating an awareness that PLAVE is distinct from conventional K-pop idols. Nevertheless, fans also wish for PLAVE to be recognized as K-pop artists like other idol groups, actively engaging in fan labour toward this goal. Such practices foster a novel form of parasocial intimacy with virtual idols who remain physically unreachable. By functioning simultaneously as fictional characters and real performers, PLAVE induces a unique ontological experience through a paradoxical strategy. This interaction suggests a sustainable revenue model while offering pathways to transcend systemic structural issues within the K-pop industry. Ultimately, this research emphasizes the necessity of integrating macro-cultural frameworks with micro-level fan interactions, providing a nuanced perspective on this burgeoning virtual idol phenomenon.

The term ‘coffee map’ refers to the digital mapping of coffee houses within urban environments, collaboratively produced and circulated on digital platforms. Drawing the concept of the right to the city and recent theories in geomedia studies, this article critically examines how coffee maps mediate spatial power dynamics, visibility, and entrepreneurial subjectivity among independent coffee houses in urban China. Based on fieldwork conducted in Guangzhou, it argues that independent coffee businesses occupy a liminal position shaped simultaneously by opportunities for urban autonomy and constraints from algorithmic visibility regimes imposed by digital infrastructures such as Dianping, Meituan and Xiaohongshu. On one hand, geomedia affordances enable these businesses to craft their own urban narratives and assert agency in reshaping residential neighborhoods, exemplifying a grassroots form of gentrification. On the other hand, these platforms also impose significant constraints through data-driven governance, competitive rankings, and rapidly shifting policies, contributing to a condition of precarity and digital resignation. This dual role positions independent coffee houses in a constant negotiation of spatial agency, platform dependence, and structural marginalization. Under such context, rather than escaping digital constraints, it is also found that independent coffee houses strategically engage in recursive narratives of instability and performative liminality to remain relevant. Thus, the coffee map, as both a representation and an instrument of spatial governance, reveals the complex interplay between entrepreneurial aspirations, neoliberal urbanization, and platform-mediated urban participation, highlighting critical implications for contemporary understandings of geomedia and the right to the city.

This paper examines the formation and suppression of a digital feminist counterpublic through the case of Wang Huiling, a rare and outspoken content creator whose critiques of patriarchal marriage norms foreground the experiences of rural and working-class women in China. While digital feminist activism has gained increased visibility in recent years, it continues to prioritize urban, educated, and middle-class perspectives – leaving women from marginalized socio-economic backgrounds largely excluded from feminist discourses and representations. Focusing on Bilibili.com, this study analyzes how Wang challenges the dominant ‘leftover women’ discourse from a subaltern perspective, and how the platform’s distinctive bullet comment (弹幕) feature facilitates networked engagement that amplifies this counterpublic’s voice. Yet, the same technological infrastructure that enables feminist expression also facilitates a distributed network of control, where platform governance, state censorship, and participatory surveillance converge. Wang’s intersectional feminist critique experiences intensified scrutiny and precarity under Billibili’s logic of bidirectional governance, culminating in the total erasure of this counterpublic.

Seeking to understand how racist content circulates on Twitter, we identified several repeated phrases, or memes – ‘diversity is a code’, ‘diversity means chasing down’, ‘antiwhites deny white genocide’, ‘genocide in South Africa’, ‘woke go broke’, and ‘woke mind virus’ – that use social justice terminology and span from general conservatism to white nationalism. Despite apparently disparate rhetoric in the memes, they had shared users and topics of discussion, leading us to investigate how ideas and people circulate across both ideological and social media networks. In this article, we analyze the network structure of who tweeted these memes and whether they were widespread or concentrated, conduct a content analysis of their shared topics, and use discourse analysis to unpack the ideologies they represent. We argue that these tweets that package conservative ideology into memes using progressive terminology provide a window into how users and ideas travel across right-wing networks, gaining traction and visibility by reusing and remixing these phrases.

Chronic conditions are often described as long-term bodily disorders that lead to functional limitations and the need for ongoing medical and social care. This steers some people with such disorders towards supportive interactions with peers on social media. Through a theoretical framework focused on different types of ‘publics’, the article investigates the communication of illness and patienthood in two selected social media publics, by asking: How is chronic illness and the role of the ‘peer-patient’ constructed in these different media publics? The analysis is based on empirical material dealing with two different and large Danish publics for people with chronic conditions, one on Instagram and one on Facebook, consisting of a manual coding of ‘posts’ in the two publics and interviews with 21 members/followers. The article argues that the two social media publics enable very different ways of making sense of illness, integrating illness into daily and public life, and creating bonds between peers. The article thus identifies two types of chronic publics and ‘peer-patienthood’ – the ‘activist peer-patient’ and the ‘supportive peer-patient’. Through this analysis, the article contributes to existing research by focussing on the nuances of how experiences of chronic illness can be communicated through and shaped by social media publics in fundamentally different ways.

This article investigates how blind and visually impaired (BVI) YouTubers construct and perform their social identities through strategic self-representation. Drawing on Social Identity Theory and Erving Goffman’s performance model, it analyses 60 YouTube channels to examine how disability is negotiated within broader identity constellations, including gender, profession and interest groups. The study finds that BVI identity is thematically foregrounded in most channels, yet rarely in isolation: creators who explicitly centre blindness also display a greater number of salient identity categories and produce more diverse content. Analyses further show significant associations between BVI salience and certain genres, with central-BVI channels more likely to feature lifestyle and entertainment content, thereby ‘normalising’ blindness within mainstream formats. At the same time, vloggers mobilise identity enhancement strategies, such as portraying competence in highly visual domains (beauty, cooking, filmmaking and technology), to challenge ableist expectations and reduce social distance with sighted viewers. These performances are accompanied by selective omissions, with politically charged, socio-economic and intimate topics, indicating careful management of vulnerability and audience appeal. The findings demonstrate that BVI vlogging constitutes a performative, intersectional and inherently advocacy-oriented practice, even when activism is not explicit. The article contributes a nuanced understanding of online disability (self-) representation and offers an analytical framework for future research on identity performance, stigma and digital media practice.

In this paper, we analyze the very short and yet very rich story of a TikTok meme: the rise and fall of the dabloon fictive currency. We examine this story as an example of self-exciting trendiness: a common internet dynamic in which trendiness and cultural vibrancy become inextricably intertwined. In the case of the dabloons and of many other memetic phenomena in TikTok and other platforms, this connection creates a spiraling cycle of popularity that is as potent as it is cursory. TikTokers understood all too well that the dabloon currency was going to be a fad, but, rather than being discouraged by this ephemerality, they pushed it to its extremes. Like many online communities, they doubled down on the transience of their subculture, and did so in the most literal way, using the inflation of their currency to first escalate and then implode the trend. The rise and fall of the dabloon trend offers a cautionary tale about the accelerated cycles of online cultures and internet memes: an illustration of how online communities can create culture not despite but by means of their ephemerality.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, TikTok quickly became an important source for connection and entertainment, as people made creative videos and participated in TikTok challenges. The app’s affordances contributed to the emergence of sub-communities, including BookTok, which connected readers across a sociotechnical landscape, and launched backlist titles onto best-seller lists. Using interviews with publishers and booksellers in Denmark and the United States, observations of booksellers’ in-store BookTok displays, and analysis of content created by publishers and online influencers on BookTok, this study examines how BookTok disrupts Darnton’s (1982) Communications Circuit and its subsequent revisions. It explores the impact of BookTok on the landscape of book production and dissemination, the creation of new genres like romantasy within, and how publishers and booksellers are leveraging the organic landscape of BookTok to authentically market to readers.

Taking breaks from digital connectivity has become a common practice but we still have limited knowledge of which approaches are used and who uses them. This article explores how technological measures are used to take temporary breaks from smartphones and digital media. Technological measures include silent and airplane mode, turning off notifications, deleting and setting time limits on apps, downloading disconnection apps, and using a simpler phone. Based on two representative surveys from Norway (2018, N = 1046; 2023, N = 1142), the study shows a preference for simple measures – silencing, removing, and deleting – over complex tools like disconnection apps. Regarding socio-demographic differences, the article shows that younger, highly educated, and left-leaning people ‘use tech to beat tech’ to a higher degree. Furthermore, the study explores how the use of technological measures corresponds with how respondents assess their smartphone (over)use. The article adds to the body of nationally representative surveys in digital disconnection research and contributes to understanding how technological measures for disconnection have evolved and their popularity and use.

The Web opens possibilities for democratic engagement in collecting. Previously closed groups available only to aficionados/cognoscenti are now open to wider networks of collector. This paper argues that a typology of Web collecting is possible to chart. Although not disconnected to offline modes of collecting, or collecting practices that occurred pre-Web, it remains that certain ways of collecting are mediated by Web 2.0 technologies. We see that the Web enables a broader network of collectors to readily access the requisite knowledge surrounding artefacts, provenance and collectability, whilst also provisioning connections with distributed communities of collectors, sellers and brokers in a manner never before available. We suggest that Web 2.0 applications enable capacity for undertaking reconnaissance, the gaining of knowledge, and facilitation of exchange for collectables , as well as furnishing the curation and display of subsequent ownership . These platforms enable the mediated demonstration of one’s identity as a ‘collector’ and point to hallmark features of ‘connected collecting’. Taking these elements of collecting practice as foundational to the connected collector’s persona, we condense a tripartite conceptualisation that includes acquisition-maintenance-curation as an organising typology for considering Web 2.0 facilitation of collecting practice.

Blockchain-tokenised media is kitsch. We examined OpenSea’s top 50 collections of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as well as the first two NFTs acquired by New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). We concomitantly developed two concepts: oppositional kitsch, and historically informed kitsch. OpenSea’s profile picture collections exemplify oppositional kitsch: they are described by their creators as anti-normal, degenerate or animalistic. CryptoPunks and Bored Apes are the best-known examples. Historically informed kitsch is, by contrast, pleasant and reassuring. MoMA’s first two NFTs exemplify historically informed kitsch: they are produced by artificial intelligence (AI) models that rely on historical data. For Unsupervised – Machine Hallucinations – MoMA, Refik Anadol trained an AI model with images from MoMA’s GitHub archive. The Unsupervised NFTs are mementos of individuals’ encounters with the work at MoMA. For 3FACE, Ian Cheng created an AI model that draws on blockchain transaction histories. The AI model generates tokenised portraits of individuals based on their transactions. Oppositional kitsch and historically informed kitsch both valorise the individual consumer. OpenSea’s oppositional kitsch lets consumers identify with cartoon figures like CryptoPunks and Bored Apes that are marketed as avatars (alter-egos) and profile pictures. MoMA’s historically informed kitsch sells mementos of individuals’ experiences and portraits that are based on individuals’ consumption choices. Our conception of blockchain-tokenised media as kitsch is primarily informed by the philosophers Alain Badiou and Thorsten Botz-Bornstein as well as the media theorist Jean Baudrillard. These three thinkers treat kitsch as a category of sophistic, liberal-cum-libertarian culture.

Modern society is characterized by technological and social acceleration. Digital devices and technologies have been integrated into nearly every aspect of our lives, from the public to the personal, transforming the material, social and mental worlds at an accelerating rate. To deal with the feeling of acceleration, carefully limiting the number of choices and features in the digital devices we use every day is central in order to facilitate and sustain creativity and focus. Under the umbrella term of post-digital artifacts, there are today several examples of ‘alternative’ products that offer limited functionality as a feature – and they seem to be growing in popularity. Using a qualitative analysis of online texts surrounding a selection of post-digital artifacts: two mobile phones (the Light Phone and the Punkt), a writing tablet (reMarkable), and a writing tool (Freewrite), the aim of this article is to understand the emergence of these post-digital artifacts and what the emergence says about a contemporary post-digital condition. The analysis results in an analytical framework identifying trajectories of opposing conceptual pairs of the digital and the post-digital. In addition, the article applies Rosa’s concept of ‘alienation’ and ‘resonance’ in order to further understand how and why these artifacts play a role in creating meaning and resonance in a digital society characterized by acceleration. Arguably, resonance (or a lack thereof) emerges as the key currency around what is at stake in the post-digital condition. Reclaiming control over knowledge, activities, spatiality and temporality emerges as essential to understanding what resonance means and what the case products produce.

The proliferating platformization and digital transformation require designing and deploying suitable research methods and approaches to address the hybrid nature of actors, relations, practices, and the growing importance of the context. This paper explores the design of such a tailored methodology for investigating the value-driven development of online public service media platforms in Germany. While qualitative methodologies are time- and resource-consuming and digital methods leave out less context to the field, this mixed methodology emphasizes the context and invests in collecting thick data. It encompasses multiple stages of recording and mapping that employ qualitative and quantitative approaches to bring together various vignettes, unveiling complementary context and contradictory accounts with the help of visualization. In each mapping and visualization stage, the paper investigates actors and relationships heuristically and emphasizes the work-in-progress nature of mapping regarding platforms.

This paper develops contemporary theorizing of vernacular screenshots by positioning them as artifacts reflecting the technological design and individual choices that allow their content to be viewed. By situating them within metapicture theory, screenshots induce a multistable perception of static image content as visibly nested within an imaging process. Screenshots, then, infer causal reasoning over how and why they exist. Several examples of screenshots are given to exercise this contextually reflective reading. Analysis of each exemplifies the theoretical stance described and aids in two contributions for this paper to existing discourse on image ontology in New Media. First, the paper applies metapicture theory to increasingly contemporary cases of image remediation. Second, the paper provides a theoretical approach to assess screenshots as multistable metapictures where simultaneous content readings are possible. As a result, screenshots emerge to increasingly implicate a world of interaction behind the camera lens.

This paper reports on findings from semi-structured interviews with thirteen retroconversion artists. Navigating emerging and outdated technologies, retroconversion artists resituate contemporary media onto obsolete formats. Retroconversion artists often navigate murky legalistic territories with a keen awareness of the limitations of contemporary license-based digital media management. Focusing on the curatorial impetus for such work, the paper highlights how retroconversion artists engage in a series of curatorial acts that help reconsider questions of media consumption and ownership in an era of streaming-first media distribution. The paper explores how retroconversion artists curate media to foster brand building, ensure content preservation, and help respond to personal and communal nostalgic desires. The paper also contextualizes the work of these artists against an era in which the use of video and other analog medias contradicts is cultural notion of easy and immediate access and contends that the work of these artists intentionally demands slowing down with and utilizing media within the constraints of former media paradigms. The paper highlights the theoretical implications of taking retroconversion art seriously as an act of archival preservation and argues for embracing the curatorial practices of retroconversion artists in institutional media archeology settings.

The terms ‘Internet’ and ‘Web’ are often mistakenly used interchangeably in everyday discourse. This article investigates the communication strategies employed by CERN, the birthplace of the Web, and by Robert Cailliau, one of its “inventors”, to differentiate between the Web and the Internet during the early 1990s. Using the marketing concept of brand confusion, which occurs when consumers confuse one brand with another that is apparently similar, we analyze CERN’s approach to fight this misunderstanding. Using previously unpublished historical sources housed in the WWW collection at CERN and an interview with Robert Cailliau, the paper identifies three marketing strategies employed to mitigate the confusion: direct marketing, content marketing, and event marketing/public relations. These efforts began in the mid-1990s in response to widespread public confusion exacerbated by inaccurate media portrayals of the Web. CERN’s goal was to educate its employees, early users, and the general public on the nature of the Web by leveraging analogies with familiar concepts, making the technology more understandable. In addition, CERN sought to establish the Web’s distinct identity by emphasizing its European origins and its development inside CERN. This was reinforced through consistent branding elements, including logos, colors, and experiential marketing at public events. Despite these strategic efforts, the persistent conflation of ‘Web’ and ‘Internet’ underscores the inherent challenges in effectively communicating complex technological concepts to the public, suggesting that even well-aligned marketing strategies may be constrained by external factors and contextual influences.

Across a number of disciplines, hybridity is regularly invoked when two previously distinct elements – whether objects, concepts, frameworks, practices, models, mediums or institutions – are brought together. However, this is often done with a vague theoretical nod. Labeled a hybrid and left at the level of broad theory, scholarship has tended to ignore a critical issue: what happens when the disparate elements of a hybrid are introduced in practice? This conceptual paper takes the case of academic explanatory journalism, a nascent intentional collaborative practice between academic authors and journalist editors, in order to illustrate how the theoretical concept of hybridity plays out in practice. This particular case presents a number of opportunities and benefits within a Western democratic context. However, our examination highlights that without a more nuanced discussion of how hybridization plays out in real life, its potential benefits are compromised. We propose a five-step framework that can be applied to other examples of hybridity, across varied disciplines beyond media and communication studies. This five-step framework helps uncover the complications that might arise when disparate elements are hybridized, moving from theory into practice. The approach helps create the space and understanding needed to design solutions pre-emptively.