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.

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.