Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1183-1198, October 2023.
BeReal has become a popular app among younger social media users, with a premise that privileges a brief, random, and unvarnished look into one’s life once a day. Hailed as the ‘anti-Instagram’ or ‘anti-TikTok’, the app eschews filters, performance, influencers, and sponsored content in favor of authenticity. While curated authenticity has long been a hallmark of internet culture, BeReal seems to employ authenticity not as a performance strategy but as a value, tapping into criticisms of the inauthentic. Through the walkthrough method of social media app analysis, I employ ethnographic research tenets to analyze how BeReal forwards a different type of authenticity to its users from its discourse, design, interface, and features. The findings are two-fold: First, BeReal privileges authenticity-as-realness instead of authenticity-as-performance, using spontaneity and timed posting windows to severely limit the time one can craft a post. Second, BeReal acts as a panopticon, because the omnipresent possibility of posting means users are always already aware of the potential. Authenticity-as-realness is not uncomplicated; it relies much more heavily on neoliberal self-monitoring and panopticism to be ready for anything, as opposed to a finely tuned and intricately crafted performance with lighting, makeup, and editing. This indicates considerations of authenticity are changing on social media platforms, putting performance at odds with panopticism.

Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1226-1242, October 2023.
The main goal of this paper is to account for the ‘algorithmization’ of microstock imagery. By this term, the authors refer to a material process implying the chronic use of graphic editors, semi-automatic keywording allowing complex and dynamic proto-classifications, and access to the images via search engines. The algorithmization of microstock imagery also goes along with the exploitation of producers’ labour, so that the authors recognize in it a form of digital labour. Moreover, the term ‘algorithmization’ is meant to underline that this material process has symbolic effects on the image contents as well as on people’s expectations and imaginaries of these contents. The paper analyses, in particular, the case study of microstock images depicting artificial intelligence (AI). By producing hundreds of thousands of visual representations of AI that spread via the Web and beyond it, algorithmized microstock imagery also produces its own symbolic conditions of possibility, that is, the expectations and imaginaries that contribute to the success of AI beyond its concrete effectiveness. The paper is structured into three sections. In the first section, the authors account for the existing literature on stock imagery. They contend that this literature focuses too much on the symbolic message, and too little on the material processes of production of these images. In the second section, the authors describe an empirical analysis they conducted on Shutterstock images depicting AI. In the third section, they distinguish three forms of digital labour and show that microstock imagery entertains resemblances to and differences from each form. They contend that despite its peculiarities, microstock image production is a paradigmatic form of digital labour due to its convergence towards algorithmization. In the conclusion, the authors show how, for microstock images depicting AI, the algorithmic loop of microstock imagery is complete.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
What happens if your favorite artist gets canceled? Can you remain a fan after such a controversy? This study explores how fans – those with a strong affective bond toward their fan object – negotiate their fannish position and practices after the cancellation of their idol. Fans are asked to re-evaluate their fandom, and potentially their participation in it: a political turning point in their fannish career. To better understand this phenomenon, this study examines the fandom of the canceled Dutch singer and The Voice coach Marco Borsato. Doing so, it highlights how fans negotiate, give meaning to and understand the cancellation of their ‘problematic fave’ by drawing on an interview study with twelve Dutch fans of Marco Borsato complemented with an analysis of online fan comments. A thematic analysis of this data shows the complexity of being a fan of a canceled artist. Further, it reveals how fans navigate the everyday political and cultural consequences of being a(n ex-)fan in this situation. Findings illustrate how some fans steadfastly commit to their fandom and dismiss the allegations, while others are more careful in publicly expressing their affection and wish to first learn more about the situation. They feel conflicted about the situation and turn their fandom into something more /private. Based on these findings, this article unfolds what motivates some to step away from this cancel case and Borsato, while others defend him at all costs. Through this lens, we can argue that this might resonate with and help us better understand for example polarized views in society at large. So, seemingly innocent fannish play offers a first look and step toward an understanding of how such processes play out on a macro-level.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This production study utilizes postfeminist theory as a lens for seeing ‘beauty work’ on YouTube via the multi-channel network (MCN) ICON Network, a collaboration between the production company Endemol Shine and beauty YouTuber Michelle Phan. By bringing to focus the unique year of 2015–2016 when YouTube beauty production was largely produced within MCNs, the study sets the stage for the proceeding professionalization of YouTube content creation under legacy production and distribution companies in the 2020s. In-depth producer interviews with ICON management and YouTubers illuminated MCN business practices and producer perceptions of YouTube beauty production. Interview data was analyzed for its articulation within ICON as a postfeminist media culture (Gill, 2007) through (a) work conditions of beauty video production and (b) best practices of beauty video production. Results indicate that ICON is a site where the markers of feminism, postfeminism, and transnational feminism intersect and collide. These intersections contextualize today’s beauty influencing landscape which pushes for independence from MCNs, transparency, and authenticity.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Access controls are an inescapable and deceptively mundane requirement for accessing digital applications and platforms. These systems enable and enforce practices related to access, ownership, privacy, and surveillance. Companies use access controls to dictate and enforce terms of use for digital media, platforms, and technologies. The technical implementation of these systems is well understood. However, this paper instead uses digital game software and platforms as a case study to analyze the broader socio-technical, and often inequitable, interactions these elements regulate across software systems. Our sample includes 200 digital games and seven major digital gaming platforms. We combine close reading and content analysis to examine the processes of authentication and authorization within our samples. While the ubiquity of these systems is a given in much academic and popular discourse, our data help empirically ground this understanding and examine how these systems support user legibility and surveillance, and police identities in under-examined ways. We suggest changes to the policies and practices that shape these systems to drive more transparent and equitable design.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Political social media influencers are taking increasingly central and agenda-setting roles within contemporary media ecologies; however, little in-depth research has been conducted with regard to their agency and the practices of the specific agents involved. This article examines Scandinavian Instagram feminists’ practices and experiences in light of the #MeToo campaigns. Building on observations and interviews with feminist influencers whose followers exceed 10,000 each, the article seeks to contribute new insights about social media user agency, concentrating on some of the most powerful voices in digital activism. By regarding #MeToo an assemblage of various homogenous and shifting elements, the article highlights how feminist influencers in the Scandinavian context have taken positions as defining agents of feminism through employing Instagram’s user options for performing affective acts of labor. Though they do not utilize Instagram as a means for making money through advertising the way mainstream influencers do, nonprofit influencers such as microcelebrity feminists have large social media followings and are still arguably important players in the platform economy because of their significant reach and ability to influence political agendas.

Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1352-1368, October 2023.
Digital marketplaces are standard and pervasive sites to trade and exchange material consumer goods worldwide. Yet the media characteristics of different, situated marketplaces have received relatively sporadic attention from the field of media and communication studies, despite the otherwise prominent disciplinary interest in digital technologies, platforms and processes of mediatisation. This paper coalesces perspectives from social, geography and retail studies with mediatisation approaches to extend a theorisation of digital marketplaces as ‘mediatised marketplaces’, focusing on the discussion of interactions between digital media and place involved in the distribution of material goods. We use illustrative examples of two different local marketplaces – the Swedish Tradera and Facebook Marketplace – to demonstrate how mediatised marketplaces challenge a range of distinctions, including between offline and online, material and immaterial, local and global. Mediatised marketplaces such as Tradera and Facebook Marketplace are grounded in place and local market identities, even as they operate on or are owned by global platforms; they rely on communicative as much as logistical functionalities of media; and are transformative of media and consumption practices. The paper contributes to studies of mediatisation and its impacts.

Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1136-1150, October 2023.
By going through a history of electronic visuality, from fluorescence glows in European laboratories in the nineteenth century to the computer screen in the twentieth century, this paper discusses technical image operations in the interaction between media machines and media people. Examining this set of apparatus from the evolution of a neglected technical object – the vacuum tube, it traces the history of the screen and the temporal-spatial composition of electronic graphics in television, radar, and early computer systems. In doing so, it outlines the entangled history of analog and digital displays and demonstrates the impossibility of neglecting the role of the human observer in the technical invention of visuality.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
A growing body of academic work on internet governance focuses on the ‘deplatforming of sex’, or the removal and suppression of sexual expression from the internet. Often, this is linked to the 2018 passing of FOSTA/SESTA – much-criticized twin bills that make internet intermediaries liable for content that promotes or facilitates prostitution or sex trafficking. We suggest analyzing both internet governance and the deplatforming of sex in conjunction with long-term agendas of conservative lobbying groups. Specifically, we combine media historiography, policy analysis, and thematic and discourse analysis of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation’s (NCOSE, formerly Morality in Media) press releases and media texts to show how conservative moral entrepreneurs weaponize ideas of morality, obscenity, and harm in internet governance. We illustrate how NCOSE has, directly and indirectly, interfered in internet governance, first by lobbying for rigorous enforcement of obscenity laws and then for creating internet-specific obscenity laws (which we argue CDA, COPA, and FOSTA/SESTA all were for NCOSE). We show how NCOSE adjusted their rhetoric to first link pornography to addiction and pedophilia and later to trafficking and exploitation; how they took advantage of the #metoo momentum; mastered legal language, and incorporated an explicit anti-internet stance.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Theatre is increasingly exploring the potential of interactivity, especially as the growing experience economy reveals that people actively seek activities that offer new ways to engage with stories. The inclusion of interactive elements akin to game mechanics, which I call ergodic mechanics, shifts these performances into an intermedial sphere between digital games and conventional theatre. I use the term ergodic theatre to classify this specific subgenre of immersive theatre where the traveller works to form their path through the storyworld. Ergodic mechanics are the systems through which the traveller works or interacts. But what impact does the inclusion of ergodic mechanics have on storytelling? This question is critical to producing meaningful ergodic theatre performances and preventing interactive elements from becoming gimmicks, as some theatre reviewers have labelled them (Gardner, 2014). I interrogate the relationship between and impact of ergodic mechanics on the creation of story and meaning by examining narrative moments from The Under Presents, a VR ergodic theatre experience, and What Remains of Edith Finch and Dream, both digital ergodic theatre experiences. Analysing these case studies helps demonstrate the value of weaving ergodic mechanics with the story. When there is harmony between the interactive and story elements, the included ergodic mechanics heighten the traveller’s narrative engagement and emotional connection to the play’s characters or themes. I argue that ludonarrative harmony loops are a powerful tool that can enrich the traveller’s theatrical experience. I present an interdisciplinary approach by applying digital game theory parsed through dramaturgy to address the nuances of telling meaningful and engaging stories in ergodic theatre. Analysing the incorporation and dramaturgical function of interactivity highlights the potential of ergodic mechanics in intermedial ergodic performances. Furthermore, creating ludonarrative harmony is central to ergodic theatre’s continued success and growth as a storytelling medium.