Information technology & media sociology in a (still) pandemic world

ABSTRACT

The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issue in ICS showcasing select works presented at the previous year’s American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. Papers in the 2022 CITAMS Special Issue reflect a social context defined by a prolonged global pandemic and wrought by democratic uncertainty. Across these social circumstances, technology and media loom large. Simultaneously, everyday life continues and classic CITAMS scholarship sustains relevance for the ways people interact, construct identity, consume, and mobilize. All of this and more are contained in the pages of this year’s Special Issue, from which readers can get a sense of what CITAMS has to offer and consider how their own work may fit within the broad CITAMS umbrella.

KEYWORDS:

• CITAMS
• American Sociological Association
• sociology
• media studies
• Communication studies
• technology studies

Introduction

Each year the Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS)¹ publishes select works in a special issue of Information, Communication & Society, drawing from presentations at the previous year’s American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. In last year’s Special Issue, the editorial team pointed towards an increasing relevance of ICT and media studies in a ‘pandemic society,’ while acknowledging that the lagged pace of scholarship left many pressing and emergent topics yet unaddressed (Lindner et al., 2021). This year, the scholarship has caught up. In the 2022 Special Issue, COVID-19, misinformation, and democracy in crisis weave throughout. These matters are at the core of many pieces in this issue and for others, inform the context in which data were collected and analyzed. At the same time, fundamental issues of interest to the CITAMS section maintain their hold, such as digital inequality, claims-making, media frames, social movements, popular culture, and social networks.

Living through times of significant change can be both unsettling and sociologically rich. Indeed, it is this destabilization that brings forth new forms, modes, means, and lines of social inquiry. Such have been the conditions of work for sociologists across the globe since the rise of COVID-19 just before 2020, and the intersection of the pandemic with mounting currents of political unrest. Over this period, CITAMS has grown, adjusted, and gained increased significance in a world marked by physical separation, data saturation, and torrential information flows.

Featured Articles

This year’s Special Issue opens with an invited paper by Deana Rohlinger, who was selected for the esteemed Ogburn Career Achievement Award by the CITAMS section. This award recognizes substantial and enduring contributions to the field. In what we hope to be the start of a new tradition, we invited the award winner to write a short piece encapsulating her research and distilling a clear message for scholars of ICT and media studies to consider. In Dysfunctional Movement-Party Dynamics and the Threat to Democracy, Rohlinger delivers a sharp thesis on the interplay between social movements, political party actors and infrastructures, and their combined diminishment of democratic processes. Readers should take this as both an opportunity to learn from a renowned scholar and a call to action for understanding the layered and multifaceted dynamics of imbricated digital and political systems.

Following Rohlinger’s lead-in are two short papers ideal for classroom teaching and lay consumption, bridging the worlds of academic research and communities of learning. These pieces use clear prose to convey rigorous analyses about topics of public interest. In Cloaked Science: The Yan Reports, Nilsen, Donovan, and Faris trace a series of preprint articles with unsubstantiated claims about COVID-19’s origins. Here they draw attention to preprint repositories as exploitable sites for mis- and dis-information, even as these repositories serve the goals of open science. In Mediated Political Consumerism in Four Countries, Shelley Boulianne uncovers patterns of boycotts and ‘buycotts,’ revealing the ways that market consumption and media communication operate together as individual and collective acts of political practice.

Moving to our full-length articles, we begin with Chen, Huang, and Hu’s Yellow, Green or Golden: The Post-Pandemic Future of China’s Health Code App. In this piece, the authors use attitudinal surveys to understand how people living in China conceive of a future in which COVID-19 tracking technologies are repurposed for broader forms of surveillance. This timely analysis sheds light on an immediately relevant question while speaking to technological trajectories that often exceed their original usage and thus harbor unknowable social effects.

Staying on the topic of pandemic conditions, Agrawal, Schuster, Britt, Liberman, and Cotten’s Expendable to Essential? Changing Perceptions of Gig Workers on Twitter in the Onset of COVID-19 delineates public sentiment towards gig economy workers in the weeks surrounding the US declaration of a national emergency. Quantitative and qualitative analyses of Twitter data show a warming effect, such that sentiments towards gig economy workers came to reflect a sense of community and solidarity. This piece offers a reminder that amid deep divisions and uncertainty, social support is still alive and well–even expanding–as the world navigates difficult and precarious circumstances.

Far from operating in a vacuum, the onset and spread of Covid-19 has intersected with global political unrest and a United States context defined heavily by the reign and wake of Donald Trump. Our next two articles speak directly to a post-Trump America. In Why Should Facebook (not) Ban Trump?: Connecting Divides in Reasoning and Morality in Public Deliberation, Luo analyzes publicly available comments about deplatforming the former president, showing how opposing positions on this issue align with distinct moral principles. Luo’s findings indicate that what differs between people is more than just opinions, but also fundamental moral commitments. These moral commitments (and the opinions they seed and support) are fed by communications from powerful sources, including the White House itself. In You’ve Got Mail: How the Trump Administration Used Legislative Communication to Frame his Last Year in Office, Tripodi and Ma systematically study the email communications distributed by the Trump administration, focusing on which issues they highlight, how those issues are framed, what is omitted, and how information is obscured. This deep dive into the administration’s narrative strategies reveals a nuanced interplay between mainstream media, alt-right media, political spin, and the contested state of information legitimacy.

Continuing with the classic media studies interest in framing, our next article analyzes conflicting messages following the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In Framing Dynamics and Claimsmaking after the Parkland Shooting, Rohlinger, Allen, and DeLucchi distill two framing dynamics that differentially affected the visibility of opposed positions. Amplification, which was used most widely by gun control advocates, converges on a shared message and spreads that message through multiple social and broadcast media outlets. In contrast, in-fighting by gun rights activists led to competitive framing dynamics, which undercut and fractured the visibility of their cause. In this robust analysis, the authors show that how frames are deployed matters as much or more than the substantive messages those frames convey.

Finally, we close with a paper about the link between music, taste, inequality, and culture. In Sounds like Meritocracy to my Ears: Exploring the Link between Inequality in Popular Music and Personal Culture, Carbone and Mijs use computational tools to analyze music tastes across 23 European countries. In countries that are less equal, the authors find a preference for songs that address collective struggle as opposed to meritocratic-themed lyrics. In this creative approach to personal and public culture, the authors demonstrate the fundamental sociological truths that individual taste is structurally situated, that ‘popularity’ is political, and that consumption habits entangle with attitudes and beliefs.

Conclusion

The papers in this Special Issue reflect a growing and changing sphere of scholarship, one that increasingly welcomes newcomers to the field while nourishing foundational concerns that continue to hold deep relevance. They begin to grapple with a shifting social landscape, addressing the interrelated technological, informational, interpersonal, and political transformations that have been so challenging to piece together. The coming years promise a period of continued intellectual growth, as we peek out from the weight of disruptive social change and use the range of theories and methods at our disposal to make sense of what is, and what can be, on the other side.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank ICS Editor in Chief Brian D. Loader, Pre-Production Editor Sarah Shrive-Morrison, and everyone affiliated with the CITAMS section who make this community and its scholarship possible.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jenny L. Davis

Jenny L. Davis is a sociologist at the Australian National University, a Chief Investigator on the Humanising Machine Intelligence Project, author of How Artifacts Afford: The Power and Politics of Everyday Things (MIT Press), and 2021-2022 Chair of CITAMS.

Dustin Kidd

Dustin Kidd is the chair of the sociology department at Temple University and the author of Legislating Creativity, Pop Culture Freaks, and Social Media Freaks (all with Routledge). His current work examines the intersections of disability and morality.

Muyang Li

Muyang Li is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at York University. Her research interests include digital authoritarianism, algorithms, public sphere, and gender.

Rachel Aalders

Rachel Aalders is a PhD candidate in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University. Her research explores digital money and fintech.

Tyler Burgese

Tyler Burgese is a sociology PhD student at Temple University who studies social media and sexuality. He also works as a researcher of sex education and HIV prevention at the University of Pennsylvania's School of Nursing.

Notes

1 CITAMS is a section of the American Sociological Association (ASA). Although you do need to be a member of the ASA to join CITAMS, ASA membership is open to all. We also encourage you to visit citams.org to learn more about CITAMS events and resources, and to sign up for the CITAMS newsletter. There is even an essay about the special relationship between CITAMS and ICS.