Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Traditional media’s convergence with online media platforms intensifies the already unpaid and unrecognized affective, immaterial and emotional labor expected of women of color and other historically marginalized media workers. This article uses the example of Bon Appetit (BA) and the downfall of their popular YouTube channel to argue that understanding this intensification is critical to envisioning possibilities for media workers to address exploitative working conditions. In the wake of Black Lives Matter uprisings in the summer of 2020, Black and Brown women food writers took to social media to point out that while BA profited from portraying a diverse workforce on their YouTube channel, the reality was very different. At the time, popular press and social media discourse largely attributed these issues to entrenched histories of racialized and gendered discrimination in legacy media. However, recent research on online platforms has engaged feminist studies, Black studies, and critical STS epistemologies to demonstrate that intersectional oppressions based on race, gender, class, and sexuality are reinscribed in the labor and technical infrastructures of platforms. Together, theorizations of the racialized and gendered aspects of unpaid and unrecognized labor alongside research on the biases reinscribed into algorithmic and internet platform infrastructures inform my analysis of a variety of texts related to the BA YouTube channel: BA YouTube channel metadata and videos, advertising trades coverage of Conde Nast’s digital media efforts, popular press coverage of the racial reckoning at Conde Nast and BA, and disclosures about BA and Conde Nast workplace cultures shared in public interviews by BA workers. By analyzing these texts together, I argue that the downfall of the BA YouTube channel demonstrates how media convergence and the platformization of legacy media intensifies racialized and gendered inequalities for media workers, but opportunities to publicly disclose these discriminatory workplace dynamics also galvanize worker organizing.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
With the popularisation of intelligent personal assistants (IPAs) like Amazon’s Alexa and the Google Assistant, natural language-based interaction with machines is increasingly becoming a part of everyday life. The conceptualisation of these tools as agentive assistants who help with a variety of tasks in both the household and at work is guided by their marketing: When Apple introduced the Siri-technology at their keynote event in 2011, the system responded to the question ‘Siri, who are you?’ with ‘I am a humble personal assistant’. This claim to a speaking subject position while at the same time locating this subject firmly in a servile social role has become a defining feature of the social place of IPAs: Designed to postulate agency, they do so not in equality with humans but as their servants. This paper offers an interdisciplinary analysis of video advertisements for IPAs, combining sociological and linguistic approaches. We treat agency and actors not as something given but as something that becomes visible through communicative acts, suggesting an understanding of these advertisements as socio-technical visions in which the negotiation of agency in human–machine interaction serves two functions: Firstly, the asymmetrical relationship between the human and the machine promises a symmetrisation of human–human relationships. In an imagined diversified world of equal human rights and relationships, social inequality is reconfigured in the relationship between human and non-human entities. Secondly, the negotiation of agency between humans and machines deflects from questions regarding the increasing agency and power of the companies behind these IPAs and their growing access to and influence on people’s private lives. Our paper will thus provide insights into how agency is ascribed in human–human and human–machine interaction considering social practices of symmetrisation and hierarchisation as well as a critical investigation into the triangular relationships between humans’, machines’, and companies’ agency.

Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1243-1261, October 2023.
This research delves into the digital reproductions of a specific monument in locative media employing Walter Benjamin’s conceptual framework presented in ‘The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility’. The monument in question, namely, the recently reconstructed and rescaled Atatürk, His Mother and Women’s Right Monument in İzmir, Turkey serves as an exemplary case for examining the reproducibility of monuments within both physical and digital environments. Its significance lies not only in the ongoing political and scholarly debate revolving around the decision of local municipality to undertake its reconstruction, but also in its growing popularity in social media as a consequence of this debate. The analyses of digital reproductions of the monument in the paper are twofold: The first gives insights into the effects of digital reproductions on the aura and authenticity of the monument in locative media. The second focuses on how the local municipality and individual users instrumentalize these productions to perform official and mundane rituals and aestheticize not only their own political agendas but also their everyday life.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
There are at least two perspectives concerning the role of digital and connected media systems in relation to individual agency. One suggests that individuals have a gain in agency while using digital devices and services while other approaches see that users become dependent on tech companies that use data flows to analyse and manipulate user behaviour. In our paper, we want to examine empirically how those two descriptions of agency work out and relate to each other. We use conversation analysis of face-to-interface interactions with smart speakers and intelligent personal assistants to examine the agency in front of the device and we rely on interviews with smart-speaker users to understand the users’ strategies to curtail the potentially unwanted effects of smart and connected devices and services. With reference to concepts of ‘co-operative work’ and ‘cooperation without consensus’ and a discussion of media and data practices, this paper elucidates how the two agencies of users and of device and service providers are intertwined and distributed.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
This paper focuses on the under-studied and complex aspect of toxic fan practices by analysing the discourse surrounding the Twitter hashtags #CrookedHillary and #LockHerUp as used throughout the 2016 Presidential Election in the United States. Based on the analysis of these hashtags, the previously ‘normal’ and ‘acceptable’ type of discourse has been co-opted into what can, arguably, be termed as toxic rhetoric and fan behaviour on Twitter. The results of this paper point to an acceptance by fans of being immersed in toxic practices despite a paradigmatic relocation of what is ‘normal’ towards more unchecked, unethical, and toxic behaviour.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
How do we interpret the extraordinary visibility and ordinariness of social media as delivery workers resist their precarious working lives? Drawing on fieldwork, interviews, photo elicitation, and digital data collection in Turkey with a focus on delivery workers’ strikes in early 2022, we argue that understanding the delivery workers’ movement requires not only considering spectacular strikes and social media protests but also workers’ everyday forms of resistance and their ordinary uses of social media as part of what we call weapons of the gig. Although not as visible as spectacular street action and social media campaigns, these weapons (motorcycle drivers’ solidarity, algorithmic resistance, and social media use for information sharing, as well as production of humor and resentment) enable the subtle formation of a movement. Our contribution lies in reframing social media use as both an ordinary and extraordinary weapon of delivery workers and approaching workers’ solidarity as a question of continuum. Enabling us to look beyond the antagonisms in the labor process and locate affective tensions in the everyday, this approach allows for seeing workers not only as economic but also as political and affective subjects demanding freedom and searching for meaningful connection in their lives.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Virtual reality (VR) technology is an emerging medium of experience in many different public-facing entertainment and cultural contexts, such as immersive theatre, live performance, VR film festivals, gaming arcades, escape rooms, and museum exhibitions. The processes of ushering audience members or users into the virtual experience and out again, to which I refer here as ‘onboarding’ and ‘offboarding’, have been considered within some specific contexts, or on a case-by-case basis, but to date no systematised consideration of VR onboarding and offboarding has been produced. One reason for this is that ambiguities in disciplinary and practical definitions of immersion have obscured the relationship between VR technology and users. Clarification of this relationship results in clear evidence of a need for attention to onboarding and offboarding processes in public-facing contexts. In this paper, I define onboarding and offboarding, and present a framework for considering the onboarding and offboarding experiences of virtual reality audiences that helps stakeholders identify both their responsibilities to audiences and the best way to facilitate the immersive experience. This framework is based upon identifying experience goals, centred on the affordances of virtual reality and principles of immersion and presence, and utilises the Immersive Audience Framework developed by StoryFutures in its interdisciplinary research with immersive audiences since 2019.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Online spaces offer fan communities and content creators many outlets for expressing their interests, but they also tend to place users in positions where they encounter hostility, toxicity, and gatekeeping. In the case of online streaming on Twitch, users frequently encounter hostility based on identity and seek assistance from fellow users via social media. In this project, I highlight the ways that social media is used to try to organize against discriminatory cultures toward marginalized streamers. Ultimately, I find that much of the onus is placed directly on streamers themselves to circumvent, address, and keep themselves safe despite harassment. In this paper, I will argue that this feeds into the structures and cultures that allow racist and sexist hostilities in online and gaming spaces by placing responsibility – and blame – on individual users from marginalized backgrounds. Although the community is frequently supportive of users who seek advice for addressing hostility and there are attempts at raising awareness through collective online action, the lack of apparent resolution leaves many feeling that these experiences are inevitable, immutable, and within the realm of individual responsibility.

Convergence, Volume 29, Issue 5, Page 1283-1307, October 2023.
This text concerns conflict between users of 4chan and Tumblr, two groups said to have formed a vanguard to the ‘online culture wars’ of the last decade. Specifically, I focus on a 2014 clash known as the ‘Tumblr-4chan raids’. Predating the more infamous Gamergate controversy, I see this event as a useful alternative microcosm to study polarisation among online subcultures in the mid-2010s. Drawing from subculture studies, I first theorise cross-site clashes as puncturing a sense of ‘subcultural territoriality’ whereby an online platform is appropriated as a secluded refuge. Through a quali-quantitative archival study, I find that the raids were initiated and exacerbated by trolling 4channers rather than a clash between equal sides. I ultimately argue that the feud partially arose out of 4channers’ reactionary ‘media ideologies’ on the Internet, wherein sensitivity, empathy, and care were seen as incongruous with ideas on the online as brutal and unforgiving. Next to better-known political clashes between feminists and anti-feminists, the paper thus highlights the polarising role of media ideologies at the onset of the ‘online culture wars’ in the mid-2010s.

Convergence, Ahead of Print.
Blogs and social media sharing platforms like YouTube and Instagram have become increasingly popular in recent years, and they also have become an outlet for income generation. In this paper, we focus on what stories content creators share about their professional activities on social media and what self-image and narratives they draw about their work as content creators. Based on a content analysis of blog and video posts as well as semi-structured interviews conducted with content creators in Germany, we identified a specific ‘professional creator narrative’ that serves the purpose of reconciling contradictory demands from their audience, sponsors and platforms. Our findings indicate that constructing those narratives helps to justify their activities and thus is an essential part of working as a content creator.