Vol. 3: No. 3: 2021

”I don’t know if I can share this.” : Agency and sociomateriality in digital text sharing of business communication

ABSTRACT

In modern business organizations, digital practices are enacted daily, often when sharing texts, which is crucial for knowledge management. How professionals experience digital text sharing is an issue that is often overlooked. In this paper, we focus on a relatively new aspect of business digital literacy: the literacy practice of digital text sharing in workplaces. Our analysis was conducted on ethnographic data from business organizations. The results show that sociomaterial aspects are enacted by professionals by discussing 1) the protection of borders of their own and other organizations, and 2) the status and digital location of texts. The analysis highlights two means of expressing agency that indicate conflicting norms: joking and showing strong emotions. The study places the hitherto backgrounded literacy practice of digital text sharing in workplaces in the foreground, proposes methods for studying this phenomenon, and highlights issues concerning digital text sharing that should be addressed by organizations.

"Within the hour" and "wherever you are": Exploring the promises of digital healthcare apps

ABSTRACT

The use of healthcare apps for medical advice is becoming increasingly common. This paper explores apps that offer interaction with medical experts. Working from the supposition that digital technologies are intimately entangled in their cultural context, we argue that the apps do more than just neutrally mediate contacts and offer medical and psychological advice. The article addresses the cultural dimensions of healthcare apps and answers questions about the ways in which such apps contribute to forming changing notions of what “healthcare” and being a “patient” entail. Three popular Swedish apps and their marketing material is studied using a discursive interface analysis of the apps’ affordances. The results show that the apps significantly contribute to producing a marketable narrative about app health care that includes accessibility, security/safety and personalisation, and which is partly produced as an alternative to what is offered by Swedish public health care. The results further show that this narrative primarily represents and addresses users who are young, busy, urban consumers of care – partly contrasting policy expectations and hopes.

What is digital activism anyway? Social constructions of the “digital” in contemporary activism

ABSTRACT

In recent decades, digital activism has received a lot of scholarly and journalistic attention. Even so, there remains no firm consensus on its precise definition and scope. This paper addresses this conceptual haziness and contends that there are analytical issues and conceptual implications in the openness of the term and its description as digital, as 'digitality' is neither the sole nor the primary feature along which activism has changed. Drawing on extant practices of digital activism and conceptual approaches to its scope, the paper aims to (1) critically discuss & highlight a range of conceptual obscurities in digital activism scholarship, (2) provide a glimpse into the concept’s evolution, and, through these (3) suggest that the term (incl. synonyms) suffers from myriad conceptual and epistemological fallacies: omissions of the concept’s complexity (e.g. hybridity, rhizomatism, multi- mediality), implications of digital dualism and therefore potentially technological determinism, and the invitation of stigma, luddite sentiment, and other social constructions of the technologies to which the term is attached.

Comparing the victimization impact of cybercrime and traditional crime: Literature review and future research directions

ABSTRACT

This paper addresses the importance of building knowledge on the impact of cybercrime victimization. Because the topic is understudied, it is unclear whether the impact of cybercrime differs from that of traditional crime. Our understanding of potential impact differences needs to be improved, considering that society and criminality are digitizing and, consequently, more people are likely to become victims of cybercrime. From a practical perspective, knowledge about the impact of different crimes is important to develop victim policies within law enforcement and other relevant agencies, and to treat victims appropriately. In this paper, a literature review is provided, as well as future research directions to address the current knowledge gap. The future research directions are divided in three topics: (1) distinguishing between cybercrime and traditional crime, (2) classifying cybercrime and traditional crime, and (3) measuring the victimization impact of cybercrime and traditional crime.

Review Essay: Unravelling Democracy’s Anti-Democratic Machine

ABSTRACT

This review of two recent books, with further discussion of a third, addresses questions of the direction of democracy and the impacts of media circulation and data extraction on democratic culture. The reviewed books are Selena Nemorin (2018); Biosurveillance in New Media Marketing: World, Discourse, Representation, and Dipankar Sinha (2018); The Information Game in Democracy, with discussion also of Peter Csigo (2016); The Neopopular Bubble: Speculating on “the People” in Late Modern Democracy.