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Digitization is transforming our world economically, culturally, and psychologically. The influx of new forms of communication, networking, and business opportunities, as well as new types of distraction, self-observation, and control into our societies represents an epochal challenge. Following Bernard Stiegler's concept of pharmacology, the authors propose to view these new forms as digital pharmaka. Properly dosed, they can enable new self-relationships and forms of sociality; in the case of overdose, however, there is a risk of intoxication. In this essay, the authors, and, in a detailed interview, Bernard Stiegler analyze this complex change in our world and develop new skills to use digital pharmaka.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface and Acknowledgments -- List of Figures and Tables -- Abbreviations and Acronyms -- 1. Introduction -- 2. Everyday Infrastructuring -- 3. Geopolitical Imaginaries -- 4. Critical Negotiations -- 5. Implications for Situating the Internet as Infrastructure: -- Bibliography

While crowdsourcing approaches in content moderation systems increase the governance capacity of social media, they also offer a loophole for malicious users to massively report and restrict disliked content. To fill the knowledge gap about large-scale, bottom-up attempts at restraining online expressions, we focus on a type of public and institutionalized mass reporting: anti-smear (反黑) campaigns within Chinese online fandom communities, where fans coordinate together and collectively report content they perceive as inappropriate. Based on detailed data of more than two hundred anti-smear groups collected from Weibo and interviews with active participants, our paper examines the motives and dynamics of anti-smear campaigns, the coordination strategies used to game the content moderation system, and the diffusion of anti-smear culture among fandom networks. We argue that anti-smear is essentially a practice of information control and reflects an intolerant mindset of social media users towards dissidents. This paper also points out the vulnerability of community-based content moderation systems to be weaponized in a polarized age, which brings great challenges to platform governance.

Der Beitrag beschreibt ein Referenzmodell zur Bestimmung der Usability digitaler Fachmagazine, das Verlage dabei unterstützt, Produkte zu evaluieren und/oder so zu gestalten, dass die digitalen Eigenschaften einen für Leser wahrnehmbaren Nutzen aufweisen. Das Modell beruht auf einer mehrdimensionalen Zielgruppenanalyse und dem 5-Planes-Model zur User Experience. Die Autoren stellen ein empirisches Mehrmethodendesign zur Bestimmung eines Usability-Scores oder Reifegrades vor, mit dem das Modell derzeit anhand von acht Fachmagazinen getestet wird und das neben halboffenen Experteninterviews zahlreiche Elemente aus der Usability-Forschung wie z.B. Heuristische Evaluation und Eyetracking umfasst. Erste Ergebnisse zeigen, dass die vom Leser gewünschten Inhalte dabei keineswegs "just ONE click away" sind und sowohl pragmatische wie auch hedonische Qualität noch Verbesserungsbedarf aufweisen.

The USA—Australia Free Trade Agreement was one of several bilateral free trade agreements signed in the early to mid-2000s that explicitly incorporated free trade in digital content. This article argues that Australian policymakers failed to recognize the consequences of the agreement for national culture industries such as film, television and popular music. The agreement introduced a complex range of policy considerations. These included the circumvention of multilateral cultural policymaking and the US assertion of Intellectual Property Rights which reduced Australia's ability to develop and enhance its culture industries in the face of the dominating power of US media, communications and entertainment industries.The result is digital determinism.The Free Trade Agreement negatively impacts national culture industries in the global networked context, reducing employment and creative opportunities for artists and producers, thereby challenging the human rights of workers in these sectors.

There are now over one and a half billion mobile phones used worldwide. Alongside phones, there are a range of other portable media devices widely used including analogue and digital radio receivers, portable music players (MP3 players and iPods), laptop computers, not to mention a wider field of mobile technologies, including wearable computers, positioning and sensing technologies, and Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) devices. "Global Mobile Media" sets out to integrate an understanding of the mobile media economy (political and cultural), with knowledge of mobile culture (new

"Social Media and Elections in Africa" published on by Oxford University Press.

Attention to online news is highly concentrated and increasingly shaped by platforms including search engines, social media, and aggregators that many use to find and access online news, potentially leaving some publishers highly reliant on platforms, raising the possibility of what has been called "platformization" or "infrastructural capture". We use passive tracking data from the UK to measure how concentrated attention to online news is across different types of access (direct, social media, search engines, aggregators) and to examine how reliant different individual news publishers are on platform referrals. We find that direct traffic to news sites is highly concentrated, whereas all the distributed forms of access analyzed have much lower levels of concentration. While we find that platform referrals are important for most publishers, we identify different profiles in terms of the volume of and reliance on referrals, suggesting that while some are very dependent on platforms, others are not. Overall, we find that while platforms themselves are part of the winner-takes-most concentration of attention overall on the internet, they simultaneously seem to contribute to less concentrated markets for attention to online news.

Abstract
This research investigates how the practices of sharing pictures with specific audiences on social media may be related to aesthetics and affordances. Based on fieldwork (interviews, picture analysis and digital ethnography) with a group of female teenagers in Vienna, Austria, how they visually curate their accounts is mapped and reconstructed. Regarding content and aesthetics, different kinds of pictures are shared using different apps. Snapchat, for example, (for this specific group at the time of the investigation) is the preferred medium for live communication with very close friends using fast, pixelated, "ugly" pictures, while Instagram serves to share polished, conventional, "beautiful" pictures with broader audiences. Based on this case study, three conceptual arguments can be made. First, visual communication is practised in relation to specific social settings or audiences. Social media is part of these practices, and users navigate differences between platforms to manage identities and relationships. Second, the analysis of practices embedded in specific software, therefore, has to be contextualised and related to the structures of these environments. Software co-constructs processes of editing, distribution, sharing and affirmation, and its affordances have to be related to the ways in which users exploit them. Third, as visual communication becomes an intrinsic part of online communication, the exploration of how distinctions between audiences and affordances play out stylistically appears to be of particular interest, which entails calibrated aesthetics; however, this visual layer is seldom investigated closely.