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Previous research has identified a strong consumer demand for sensationalized and conflict-oriented news coverage. With the rise of social network services as central spaces for encountering news, there is a need to move beyond the notion of consumer demand (measured by attention to news stories) to a broader conception of user engagement (encompassing attention as well as social interactions online). This article seeks to remedy this by analyzing which parts of election coverage tend to become popular and go viral. It develops a concept of user agendas that include popularity (news stories that receive most clicks on news Web sites) and virality (stories that users share most intensively on social network sites). The article then applies the concepts in a case study of online news coverage during the 2015 Danish parliamentary election. Through an analysis of frames, sentiments, and actors, it is shown that game-strategic and personalized coverage tend to attract large-scale attention on news Web sites, whereas issue-oriented coverage fares better on social network sites. This suggests that what users demand depend on where they encounter news. Users tend to engage with one kind of news in private settings and another in the public settings on the social Internet.

A dominant way for digital platforms to generate revenue has been through the sale of audiences to advertisers encapsulated by the idea of the attention economy. This model has been challenged in recent years due to competitive and political pressures on platforms. In this paper, we use YouTube as a case to understand how processes of commodification are changing on digital platforms. We demonstrate that YouTube furthers the commodification of content, audiences and creative labour by cultivating commercial interactions, standardising exchange mechanisms and constructing systems of trust. The platform enables producers and retailers to sell digital and physical goods to users, advertisers to capture audiences' interest and brands to establish partnerships with producers. In sum, we show how YouTube not only monetises attention but commodifies all forms of engagement through its marketplaces with consequences for the precarity of users and producers on the platform.

In the article, we argue that the advent of data mining techniques and big data in media and communication studies present problems that involve fundamental methodological questions, requiring us to revisit existing ways in which the link between theory, operationalization and data are explained and justified. We note that the discourse of instrumental optimization that surrounds big data clouds epistemic debates about their appropriate integration in scholarly explanations, and argue that a discussion of these problems can usefully depart from a distinction between the two main types of data mining models (supervised and unsupervised). We argue that both types pose specific challenges and give examples of ways they have been productively overcome. In particular, we argue that while big data approaches have introduced novel opportunities for research, they have fundamentally been incorporated into media and communication studies in ways that comply with existing, prototypical explanatory schemes. Our examples link specific empirical studies to general strategies of scientific explanation, focusing on neo-positivist, critical realist and interpretivist explanations.

Log data from smartphones have primarily been used in large-scale research designs to draw statistical inferences from hundreds or even thousands of participants. In this article, we argue that more qualitatively oriented designs can also benefit greatly from integrating these rich data sources into studies of smartphones in everyday life. Through an illustrative study, we explore a more nuanced perspective on what can be considered "log data" and how these types of data can be collected and analysed. A qualitative approach to log data analysis offers researchers new opportunities to situate smartphone use within people's practices, norms, and routines. This is of relevance both to studies focusing on smartphones as cultural objects in everyday life and studies that use such devices as proxies for social behaviour more generally. We argue that log data, for instance in in-depth interviews, may serve as cues to instigate discussion and reflection as well as act as resources for contextualizing and organizing related empirical material. In the discussion, the advantages of a qualitative perspective for research designs are assessed in relation to issues of validity. Further perspectives on the promises of log data from various devices are proposed.

Global Internet use is circumscribed by local political and economic institutions and inscribed in distinctive cultural practices. This article presents a comparative study of Internet use in China, the United States, and five European countries. The empirical findings suggest a convergence of cultures, specifically regarding interpersonal communication, alongside characteristic national and sociodemographic configurations of different prototypes of human communication. Drawing on the classic understanding of communication as a cultural process producing, maintaining, repairing, and transforming a shared reality, we interpret such configurations as cultures of communication, which can be seen to differ, overlap, and converge across regions in distinctive ways. Looking beyond traditional media systems, we call for further cross-cultural research on the Internet as a generic communication system joining global and local forms of interaction.

This Special Section takes stock of a shift toward an integrated and global digital media environment with a set of articles comparing and contrasting the social uses of the Internet in China, Europe, and the United States. Departing from James Lull's typology of the social uses of television, the articles address both general media use patterns and the specific private and public uses to which the Internet is put in these different social and cultural contexts. A concluding commentary by Lull serves to place current communicative practices in historical perspective and to suggest implications for future research.

This interdisciplinary collection rethinks the political economy of the digital market by asking what came before platforms and suggesting what might come after them. Addressing themes like internet decolonisation, the book makes a timely assessment of the impact of evolving connections between technology, information, society and markets