Syftet med denna uppsats är att undersöka ett antal unga mäns attityder och förhållningssätt gentemot digital influencers och reklam som förmedlas via dessa i sociala medier. Detta har studerats genom tre frågeställningar; Hur bemöter de unga männen marknadsföringsmetoden DI i allmänhet? Hur förhåller sig de unga männen till DI genom den egna praktiken (innehåll de själva konsumerar)? Hur ser det upplevda inflytandet av DI ut, gällande deras egna opinioner och handlingar? De teoretiska ramverk som utgör den huvudsakliga grunden för denna studie är Katz och Lazarsfeldt (1955) tvåstegshypotes och dess vidareutveckling av Bennet och Mannheim’s (2006) one-step flow of communication, Uzunoglu & Misci Kip ’s (2014) multi-step flow of communication samt Stuart Halls (2009) teori Encoding/decoding, som handlar om hur publik tolkar medierade budskap. Den metod som tillämpats i uppsatsen är fokusgruppintervjuer. Två fokusgruppintervjuer genomfördes där respondenterna var män mellan 22-26 år. Resultaten av min studie visade att respondenterna överlag hade en kritisk attityd gentemot DI och den reklam som framförs via dessa i sociala medier. De försökte i största möjliga mån att undvika den reklam som genom denna marknadsföringsstrategi förekommer. Dock uppenbarades en viss motsägelsefullhet i detta förhållningssätt och det gällde de DI respondenterna själva valt att följa i sina sociala medier. Trots att de i de flesta fall även hade ett kritiskt förhållningssätt gentemot dessa, så tycktes de i vissa sammanhang vara långt mer accepterande mot exempelvis den reklam som framfördes av dessa DIs.

This study explores the use of online music as a resource among young Afghan newcomers in Swedish schools in relation to social interaction and sense of belonging. The methodology consists of qualitative interviews, conducting semi- structured interviews with 16 pupils and 4 teachers in different primary and high schools based in Stockholm.  A theoretical frame is developed that highlights music as a resource for ‘the transformation of the experience of place’, creating a ‘sense of belonging’, shaping ‘social ordering’, and how all this can be related to the distinction between ‘private and collective’.

The main results demonstrate that newcomers use music to create a friendly environment in Sweden and through listening to home country music feel secure and at home. Music is used as a tool to enhance pupils’ concentration and to decrease their pressure and stress of studying in Swedish education system. The results also indicate that music is an effective communication tool between teachers and pupils, and further, that the teachers utilize music widely in their teaching to improve pupils’ attention and concentration. Although the teachers usually control the usage of music in the class, there are circumstances when the teachers change their decision regarding pupils’ music listening or ignore pupils’ disobedience in the class.

This work investigates internet censorship in Nigeria, describing experiences and citizens’ led circumvention practices following the ban of Twitter by the Nigerian government. Based on a quantitative survey and qualitative interview of active Twitter users in Lagos and Abuja Nigeria, the research realizes and categorizes circumvention practices embraced within the period of effecting the ban into technology, self-censorship, and platform jumping. This study further investigates how circumvention culture has become a form of digital activism and how the social media environment in democracies has experienced censorship within the last few decades.  Citizenry experiences and the complexities of the fight against platform lockdown and the role of digital activism prior to censorship are also analyzed. Internet censorship is new in Nigeria and has bred uncertainties among user practices and government censorship perseverance. This study contributes to a broader understanding of how circumvention practices have become cultural practices and experiences that emerge as embodied internet war against censorship and the preemptive and predictive conditions of the inefficiency of internet censorship policies in established democracies. 

The article proposes that social media platforms enable large volumes of user-driven circulation of media content, and argues for a combination of qualitative and quantitative considerations when analysing data from such platforms. Issues of context are vital; context must be understood both qualitatively (cultural setting) and quantitatively (statistical reference points for comparison). The authors emphasise that the possibilities of ‘big data’ should not tilt analyses so that sensitivities to subtler meanings are lost. By examining a recent research project of our own, examples are given of how topological network analysis can be successfully combined with close readings of strategically selected parts of the data and how, by doing so, context shifts can be identified that increase the reliability of the analysis. Consequently, it is recommended that mere number crunching is not enough, and that questions of ‘how,’ ‘why,’ and ‘whether’ are required in order to understand the phenomena in their societal settings. 

The purpose of this chapter is to make some general conclusions from recently conducted fieldwork on one of the world’s most comprehen- sive, but also selective, communities for film swapping; I have chosen to omit the name of this community out of concern for its members. Specialist torrent sites like these are unregulated in that they are not sanctioned by the copyright industry – yet, internally, they remain highly regulated. The chapter provides an overview and a discussion of these sites, and the way these are integrated in a wider economy of film circulation, user agency, knowledge and affects. In theorizing my findings, I mainly draw on theories of culture and sociality outlined by Pierre Bourdieu. 

Drawing on Herta Herzog’s most famous text, ‘On Borrowed Experience’ (1941), this chapter highlights Herzog’s choice of methods, challenges the alleged rift between so-called ‘critical’ and ‘administrative’ mass-communication research, and tracks Herzog’s work as an important complement to Lazarsfeld’s and Merton’s famous efforts during the same era. In comparison with these two communication researchers, Herzog had a more cognitive and behavioural approach, influencing not only academic research but also commercial, applied research - not least in the service of advertising and PR agencies. In addition, Herzog contributed a gender perspective, as her studies explicitly focused on the everyday lives of women and their respective media habits. Finally, this chapter broadly summarises the foundations of the so-called ‘uses and gratifications’ model, of which Herzog can be said to have been one of the crucial inventors. Important challenges and shortcomings of this research approach are also highlighted.

Digital media infrastructures give rise to texts that are socially interconnected in various forms of complex networks. These mediated phenomena can be analyzed through methods that trace relational data. Social network analysis (SNA) traces interconnections between social nodes, while natural language processing (NLP) traces intralinguistic properties of the text. These methods can be bracketed under the header “social big data.” Empirical and theoretical rigor begs a constructionist understanding of such data. Analysis is inherently perspective-bound; it is rarely a purely objective statistical exercise. Some kind of selection is always made, primarily out of practical necessity. Moreover, the agents observed (network participants producing the texts in question) all tend to make their own encodings, based on observational inferences, situated in the network topology. Recent developments in such methods have, for example, provided social scientific scholars with innovative means to address inconsistencies in comparative surveys in different languages, addressing issues of comparability and measurement equivalence. NLP provides novel, inductive ways of understanding word meanings as a function of their relational placement in syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations, thereby identifying biases in the relative meanings of words. Reflecting on current research projects, the chapter addresses key epistemological challenges in order to improve contextual understanding.

This book summarizes the role that The Pirate Bay has played during the last decade, but also connects the history of this infamous site with the emergence of legal services such as Spotify. The book also serves as an up-to-date summary of various strands of research on file sharing—particularly, user motivation and justification.

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It is apparent that file sharing on the Internet has become an emerging norm of media consumption—especially among young people. This book provides a critical perspective on this phenomenon, exploring issues related to file sharing, downloading, peer-to-peer networks, "piracy," and (not least) policy issues regarding these practices. Andersson Schwartz critically engages with the justificatory discourses of the actual file-sharers, taking Sweden as a geographic focus. By focusing on the example of Sweden—home to both The Pirate Bay and Spotify—he provides a unique insight into a mentality that drives both innovation and deviance and accommodates sharing in both its unadulterated and its compliant, business-friendly forms.

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Online file sharing does not only entail music files but movies, software, and e-books alike. The phenomenon has been an integral part of online life for more than a decade. From my own and other researchers' findings it is apparent that unregulated file sharing is an emergent norm—if not even a new condition to media consumption—especially among young people. In countries like the US, the UK, Sweden, and South Korea, access to high-speed broadband is commonplace; both file sharers who I have interviewed and those who speak out in online forums hold that file sharing is as natural an element online as trees would be in the forest. This original and thought-provoking book critically summarizes debates on this topic, on a level which is approachable to undergraduates, yet useful for postgraduates and senior scholars as well. The book is based on a novel approach that fuses close-range, micro observations of user behavior and reasoning with macro perspectives of political economy and infrastructural features of digitization. Through exploring the reflexive management of the self, found among media audiences, insights into more innovative modes of management in the media industries are elicited. Through merging an ontological inquiry (popularized by theorists such as Bruno Latour) with an economics of complexity and networks (popularized by theorists like Manuel Castells) new insights into both online sociality, media anthropology, and modes of accumulation can be sought. The continuity between Spotify and illegal file sharing is explored through a critical account that examines the discourses of both file sharers and industry stalwarts. Tendencies towards "information idealism" and "networked accumulation" are scrutinized; they are found to be endemic among actors striving to extract value from online, granular dissemination. In the first place, the book would suit undergraduates on courses in media and communications—especially undergrad courses in new media, and the sociology of the Internet. The book can be seen as a critical introduction, a historical overview, as well as a case study of file-sharing—explaining the infrastructures, the particular modes of media use involved; ultimately, sketching out a political economy of unregulated file-sharing, based on the current historical record, listing some observed economic repercussions, alongside potential future ones. A major secondary market would be postgraduate students, Ph.D. students, researchers, and lecturers. The great appeal with this book is that it would be of interest to several groups within academia. It would appeal both to scholars of my own subject, media and communications (especially, the history and sociology of new, digital media)—but it would appeal also to scholars of science and technology studies (STS), since the topic raises numerous interesting questions about the nature of technology, the complexity of agency and morality, while simultaneously offering a "case study," and thus some specificity in an otherwise broad, slippery subject.

Digital platforms are not just software-based media, they are governing systems that control, interact, and accumulate. They also solidify markets; that is, social networks of exchange that do not necessarily leave data traces, into infrastructure, that is, material arrangements of traceable activity. This article examines the forms of domination found in this digital platform model, and corrects some existing simplistic theoretical conclusions about digital platforms. It first provides a schematic overview of digital infrastructures of governance, and the attendant systemic mechanics they engender. It then argues that we need a more syncretic, interdisciplinary approach to the platform-based economy. The shifting emphases of different academic disciplines in relation to digital platforms are only partially grounded in their different normative biases; they can also be attributed to use of different disciplinary lenses. The field of information systems management and design studies is chiefly concerned with direct, technical interplatform affordances and connections, and with providing observations of certain systemic attributes of digital platforms. Critical political economy, by contrast, mainly considers the emerging transnational, geopolitical formations of platform capitalism. The interplay between these different systemic mechanics is summarized and presented here in the concept of "platform logic."

En handfull nätjättar, som Facebook och Google, har fått mycket stor makt. Denna plattformisering påverkar hela samhället och ekonomin, och är en förändring jämförbar med fordismen eller taylorismen, skriver medieforskaren Jonas Andersson Schwarz.

Plattformssamhället, del 1

Ett fåtal stora aktörer har blivit alltmer dominerande på internet och i människors vardag. SvD Kultur belyser hur utvecklingen påverkar samhället, ekonomin, kulturen och människan.

Through an interview-based study of Swedish public service broadcasting (PSB) companies, I explore the ways in which these institutions react to and interact with a set of normative conceptions of a contemporary digital media ecology characterized by social networking and personalization of the media experience. The respondents were engaged in negotiations of how to realistically maintain public values in a commercially configured online milieu. The nature of organizational adaptation within PSB is found to be complex. Several elements of the Nordic PSB model appear to counteract acquiescence to algorithmically aided personalization: its majoritarian heritage, its institutional caution toward data positivism, favoring more interpretive editorial audience knowledge, and the high costs and structural consequences of making individual users uniquely identifiable. These organizational ambitions and obstacles are embodied in recent innovations that act to mimic a personalized delivery, however, doing so without utilizing algorithmically aided prediction and instead favoring manual editorial selection.

By fusing Gilbert Simondon’s theory of technological being with Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotic concept of Umwelt, a more integrative, dynamic, vitalistic theory of media technology is sought in order to facilitate a scathing critique of the speculative, idealistic hyperbole around data and information that we see today. Simondon’s relational, evolutionary ontology is radically different from standard linear models of digital information, allowing us to understand embedded technological agency and the conceptual gap between that which is captured by surveillant data infrastructures and that which is lived phenomenological existence, without resorting to deterministic and philosophically untenable concepts. Likewise, as digital media platforms increasingly rely on algorithmically customized (i.e., personalized) modes of media dissemination, Umwelt theory offers a way to theorize these highly artificial “user experiences” fed back to users by the digital platform providers. Ultimately, by affirming technology as a symbiotic process, the chapter points towards a utopian potential for human co-habitation with digital infrastructure. This contrasts with much of the current, actual technocratic governance familiar to us (apps, platforms, interfaces), where the user is offered, at best, modes of co-creativity that are constrained and highly conditional and, at worst, only mere illusions of participation.

Digital piracy cultures and peer-to-peer technologies combined to spark transformations in audio-visual distribution between the late 1990s and the mid-2000s. Digital piracy also inspired the creation of a global anti-piracy law and policy regime, and counter-movements such as the Swedish and German Pirate Parties. These trends provide starting points for a wide-ranging debate about the prospects for deep and lasting changes in social life enabled by piratical technology practices. This edited volume brings together contemporary scholarship in communication and media studies, addressing piracy as a recombinant feature of popular communication, technological innovation, and communication law and policy. An international collection of contributors highlights key debates about piracy, popular communication, and social change, and provides a lasting resource for global media studies.

This roundtable discussion draws together researchers with an interest of overcoming purely juridical treatment of piracy in their work. Christopher Kelty and Gabriella Coleman consider the aspects of cyberculture, which conflictually engage with intellectual property rights, through various communities of technology practice, including hackers. Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi’s work on fair use addresses the growing opportunities for creators in the United States to utilize the tradition in their creative fields. Jonas Andersson Schwarz and Patrick Burkart, co-editors of this special issue, have researched user motivations and political activism around copyright and software patent reforms, partially explaining the emergence of dozens of European Pirate Parties, beginning with the Swedish Pirates in 2006.

”Vad gör en politisk utsaga framgångsrik? Den användardrivna kommunikationens villkor” är ett ettårigt forskningsprojekt delfinansierat av Internetfonden, Riksbankens Jubileumsfond, Retriever AB, M-Brain AB samt Forsman & Bodenfors AB. Projektledare har varit Jonas Andersson Schwarz, som tillsammans med Johan Hammarlund, Stefan di Grado och Magnus Kjellberg har analyserat data från Twitter och rikspress i syfte att skapa ny kunskap om villkoren för politisk kommunikation i de sociala mediernas tidevarv. Huvudfokus har varit att undersöka vilka specifika faktorer som spelar in för delning av politiska tweets samt vilken typ av material från sociala medier som fångas upp av traditionella nyhetsmedier och vice versa. Samspelet mellan sociala medier och massmedier formar de bilder som görs av sociala medier i samhället, och omvänt: det formar de bilder som görs av massmedia likväl.

By employing a mix between qualitative and quantitative methods, we explored the ways in which file sharers themselves conceive of the future of “piracy.” A content analysis of a selection of open answers from the Research Bay study (a global file sharing survey conducted in collaboration with file-sharing site The Pirate Bay in April, 2011, with more than 75,000 respondents) revealed significant differences between active uploaders and the much larger group of respondents who regularly download files but never upload. Tropes of “community” were not particularly abundant in this corpus. The biggest singular tropes were those of unstoppability/technical resilience (“File-sharing won’t be stopped”); convenience/availability/supply; skepticism/hostility towards governmental intrusion; and—surprisingly—the trope that file sharing will eventually be integrated with the market. This latter trope was particularly common among the non-uploaders (representing the majority of Pirate Bay users) compared to the dedicated uploaders. The non-uploaders also appeared to be more disposed towards a generic belief in the progress, evolution, and a potential convergence/assimilation of technology.

Taking Sweden as a case study, the role of public service broadcasting (PSB) is explored, with a focus on issues of data retention and innovation that accompany web distribution. The issue of predicting audience preferences by means of data retention is investigated, and the related problem of organizational autonomy when interacting with commercial actors in the digital sphere. We hypothesize that previous tendencies towards paternalism might be equally supplemented by tendencies towards so-called “panspectric” surveillance and tracking, given a technological environment where such practices are increasingly common. We argue that the absence of advertising partially helps keep these broadcasters from panspectric temptation. Still, practices such as Facebook integration entail a panspectric element. We ask whether the potential increase in the efficacy of targeting audiences promised by panspectric practices might be offset by its negative impact on civic accountability. Is there a possibility for a “benign,” democratically accountable panspectrocism?