Reflecting on 6 years of our research—which began on musical.ly and transitioned into TikTok—we argue that TikTok is a vital space to study social movements due to its centrality in youth lives and its ability to give voice to youth political expression in richly creative ways. We see the political expression happening on TikTok as a harbinger of the changing nature of this phenomenon, and a necessary impetus to broaden our understandings of activism and political expression today. At the same time, we must also consider the implications of TikTok becoming such a valuable space for youth politics and activism, in terms of the kinds of expression it affords or constrains, and the power it gives the platform. In closing, we encourage scholars to maintain a balanced and constructive approach in researching the platform, and embrace the messiness and complexity inherent in this endeavor—which mirrors the messiness and complexity of the platform itself.

As more computational communication researchers turn to supervised machine learning methods for text classification, we note the challenge in implementing such techniques within an imbalanced dataset. Such issues are critical in our domain, where, in many cases, researchers attempt to identify and study theoretically interesting categories that can be rare in a target corpus. Specifically, imbalanced distributions, with a skewed distribution of texts among the categories, can lead to a lengthy and expensive annotation stage, forcing practitioners to sample and label large numbers of texts to train a classification model. In this paper, we provide an overview of the issue, and describe existing strategies for mitigating such challenges. Noting the pitfalls of previous solutions, we then provide a semi-supervised method – Expert Initiated Latent Space Sampling – that complements researcher domain expertise with a systematic, unsupervised exploration of the latent semantic space to overcome such limitations. Utilizing simulations to systematically evaluate our method and compare it to existing approaches, we show that our procedure offers significant advantages in terms of efficiency and accuracy in many classification tasks.

This study adopts a contrastive pragmatic approach to examine the meanings and functions of public regret in two linguacultures. We located questions of regret realized by news interviewers in Israel and the United States between the years 2010 and 2020 using keyword searches in databases of diverse radio and television broadcast news media. Contrastive analysis of realizations and uptakes of questions of regret reveals similar discursive, functional and thematic patterns across the two cultures: questions of regret are predominantly used to demand accountability or to elicit emotion and narrative evaluation, and are discursively constructed as either challenging or supportive. We also found a delicate cross-cultural difference, with interviewees’ tendency to avoid regret greater in the U.S. In the Discussion we suggest possible explanations for the overall resemblance of discursive patterns in news interviews in Israel and the U.S., and their theoretical and methodological implications for contrastive pragmatics in institutional settings.

Citizens turn increasingly to social media to get their political information. However, it is currently unclear whether using these platforms actually makes them more politically knowledgeable. While some researchers claim that social media play a critical role in the learning of political information within the modern media environment, others posit that the great potential for learning about politics on social media is rarely fulfilled. The current study tests which of these conflicting theoretical claims is supported by the existing empirical literature. A preregistered meta-analysis of 76 studies (N = 442,136) reveals no evidence of any political learning on social media in observational studies, and statistically significant but substantively small increases in knowledge in experiments. These small-to-nonexistent knowledge gains are observed across social media platforms, types of knowledge, countries, and periods. Our findings suggest that the contribution of social media toward a more politically informed citizenry is minimal.

Iconic photographs are symbolically dense images characterized by broad circulation over time and recognition by large publics. Following this definition, we track the republication and reframing, over nearly 70 years, of 15 news photographs previously identified as most recognized by the Israeli public. Distinguishing between “discrete icons” (singular photographs of particular scenes) and “aggregate icons” (where several variants of the same event are continually reproduced), our quantitative and qualitative analyses show that iconic images are both resistant to the passing of time and kept in motion through renewed media use. We identify four “iconic modalities,” corresponding to different ways in which iconic status and meanings are achieved, transformed, or denied through republishing and reframing. This concept improves our understanding of iconicity as a fluctuating material and symbolic process, whereby the circulation of images not only produces shifts in meaning, but constructs powerful aggregative frameworks of collective visual memory.

This chapter charts the response of Jewish groups to encounters with digital networks. It outlines the development of Jewish communities online, surveying their characteristics and varieties. Highlighting the divides between Jewish denominations, as well as between Israel and the Diaspora, the chapter traces the evolution of online Jewish communities diachronically, from the emergence of the World Wide Web to the dominance of social media in the digital environment. First, it maps contemporary Jews and Judaism in their quest for community, and in their attitudes toward the use of digital technologies as a way of achieving this goal. Then it surveys aspects of the theoretical study of both online religion and religion online, as they relate to the Jewish case. It continues with a review of the literature on digital Judaism, dividing it into two research phases corresponding to the following platforms: (a) internet sites and forums, and (b) social media, maintaining in both phases a dominant emphasis on ultra-Orthodox (Haredi) groups. A secondary emphasis is on the role of women and their online presence, in Haredi and other communities.

In the past few decades, the notion of “communication skills” has become increasingly dominant in cultural discourse, as such skills are deemed crucial for success in seemingly various professional occupations and in diverse aspects of an individual’s life. This study traces the development of the notion of communication as skills that emerged from the theoretical and experimental work of the Palo Alto group in the 1950s and 1960s. It analyzes the shift from the cybernetic, system-oriented, and technology-inspired conceptualization of communication by the group to the current widespread perception of communication as a self-centered, emotions-directed, reflexive and conscious set of skills. The study argues that, more than a misrepresentation of the group’s ideas, this shift reflects a tension already embedded in the work of the Palo Alto group between theorizing and practicing communication.

This article explores the relationship between psychotherapy and sound reproduction technologies from the early 20th century to the present. Subscribing to a media genealogy approach, it traces the changing status of the recorded voice in therapy as set against broader transformations in the field of mental health. Delving into the recorded voice’s diverse applications across psychotherapeutic approaches, it demonstrates how technology worked to unravel the temporal and spatial formations of the therapeutic setting, thereby unsettling established hierarchies, terminologies, and techniques while at the same time supporting the integrity of the therapeutic situation. The article points to sound media’s capacity to bifurcate the voice into somatic and expressive elements and reassemble them in various configurations, thereby producing the ‘psyche’ through alternative access points. The story of the recorded voice in therapy provides a glimpse into the way technological affordances inform therapeutic concepts and practices, which in turn implement technology in study, training, and treatment.

Data suggests that the majority of citizens in various countries came across ‘fake news’ during the COVID-19 pandemic. We test the relationship between perceived prevalence of misinformation and people’s worries about COVID-19. In Study 1, analyses of a survey across 17 countries indicate a positive association: perceptions of high prevalence of misinformation are correlated with high worries about COVID-19. However, the relationship is weaker in countries with higher levels of case-fatality ratios, and independent from the actual amount of misinformation per country. Study 2 replicates the relationship using experimental data. Furthermore, Study 2 demonstrates the underlying mechanism, that is, perceived prevalence of misinformation fosters the belief that COVID-19 is spiralling out of control, which in turn, increases worries. Our findings suggest that perceived prevalence of misinformation can have significant psychological effects, even though audience members reject the information as being false.

This article explores body–voice entanglements in TikTok through the prism of ventriloquism. It suggests that TikTok is an app of network ventriloquism, that is, an audiovisual technology–based web of dissociations and reconfigurations of users’ bodies and voices. Yiddish serves as a case study for how TikTok’s features build an infrastructure for language, heritage, and cultural activism. We analyze YiddishToks as an instantiation of the ways TikTokers embody actual technolinguistic and ventriloquistic interconnections as well as bond with past generations. YiddishTokers interlace times and spaces and recontextualize Yiddish media history. TikTok’s algorithm participates in this reanimation of Yiddish’s past; it is a transparent, audible director that prompts the network off-stage. TikTok is an algorithmic network ventriloquism app that mediates between human and non-human voices.