This post was written by Veronica Fanzio, Research Master student in Media Studies, New Media, and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. TikTok is arguably the most hectic and content-rich mainstream social media platform. We have all gotten lost in the paraphernalia of dance videos, cooking tutorials, kittens, and lip-synced songs. There are even…
This post was written by Luisa F. González Valencia, PhD candidate at the Centre for Documentation and Research on Latin America – CEDLA, as part of the Global Digital Cultures research project P(r)otestas. The tax reform project filed by Ivan Duque’s government in April 2021 provoked enormous popular backlash across Colombia, exacerbating growing discontent about…
This post was written by Laura Köpping. There has long been a pattern across social media and membership-based platforms. Initially, platforms profit from the engagement of sex workers and from sex-oriented content, only to turn around and deplatform sex workers and marginalised sexual communities, such as queer- and kink-oriented accounts. Tumblr, Patreon, and OnlyFans, historically…
This post was written by Shuaishuai Wang and Rachel Spronk as part of the GDC-funded project “From Performativity to Behavioral Data: The Algorithmic Configurations of Sexuality on Social Media in China”. Meet Loki, a short video creator on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok. Documenting daily life with his same-sex partner with short videos, Loki…
This post was written by Carolyn Birdsall, Wouter van Gent, Thijs Jeursen as part of the GDC-funded project “Gaming the Global City: Imagining and Experiencing Digital Urban Worlds” Digital gaming has become an increasingly important everyday pastime and a leading global cultural industry, with revenues for games now far surpassing that of films. Both the production…
This post by Lonneke van Kampen is part of our series “Global Digital Cultures in times of COVID-19”, written by students of the research master Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought attention to global health- and socio-economic vulnerabilities, as certain groups are found to be in a more precarious…
This post was written by Davide Beraldo, Letizia Chiappini and Giovanni Rossetti as part of the GDC-funded project “Global boss, local workers? How context influences food delivery riders’ relation to platforms (GLOBLOW)” The surreal staticity of semi-deserted streets interrupted by bicycles sporting a universally recognizable brand. In the context of lockdown and curfew measures, this has…
This post by Varvara Boboc is part of our series “Global Digital Cultures in times of COVID-19”, written by students of the research master Media Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Contact tracing apps seem to be a worldwide solution to tackle the pandemic. However, they also increase public institutions’ dependency on private infrastructures. Is…
This post was written by Julienne Weegels, Yatun Sastramidjaja and Luisa Gonzalez Valencia as part of the GDC-funded project “P(R)OTESTAS: The politics and aesthetics of digital authoritarianism and protest in the Global South” Although there are significant parallels to be found in digitally-mediated protests and digital authoritarianism across different regions in the Global South,…
This post was written by Tasniem Anwar and Nermin Elsherif as part of the GDC-funded project “Social Media after the Arab Uprisings”. A decade of social media platforms A decade ago, contentious and fluid conceptions of social media platforms dominated the discussions after the first wave of the Arab uprisings that emerged in Tunisia, Egypt,…