Volume 44 (2023): Edizione 1 (January 2023)

Common depictions of authentic self-presentation on social media are often interpreted through the lens of ambivalence, performance, or some kind of bind. Through the example of millennial women who call themselves girlbosses, this article explores how authenticity is articulated through three levels: productivity, ordinariness, and belonging. The study is part of a larger netnographic project in which 23 YouTube channels and related social media platforms have been observed for two years. Content analyses of observational and interview data suggest the authentic self is often represented and expressed through specific cultural repertoires (e.g., coffee) that articulate girlbosses as productive and ordinary entrepreneurs seeking belonging and meaning. Further, while digital media allows new kinds of entrepreneurship, at the same time, self-employed digital workers, influencers, and entrepreneurs are left alone to advance their careers in the midst of rising popular misogyny and lacking job security. I argue that participating in communicative practices of entrepreneurial femininity offers girlbosses a promise of happiness if they stay “authentic”; and yet, in a cruel way, this promise also prevents itself from actualising.

This article analyses how people use social media to make sense of climate change, exploring climate issues as part of everyday communication in media-saturated societies. Building on prominent themes in the environmental communication literature on social media, such as mobilisation and polarisation, we respond to calls for more qualitative and interpretative analysis. Our study therefore asks how people use social media in everyday life to make sense of climate issues, and it expands on previous findings in the field through a qualitative typology of everyday social media use. The empirical data stems from in-depth interviews with Norwegians who are engaged in climate issues, with informants ranging from activists to declared sceptics, although we find widespread ambivalence across group positions. Our findings contribute to disentangling contradictory findings in the field through a discussion of how climate change is part of everyday communication.

This article explores Swedish Police Authority strategies on creating a sense of safety through social media. Previous research has generally focused on proximity policing, practices of informing citizens, proactive police work, crime reduction, surveillance, and preservation of trust and less on the digital creation of a sense of safety. The study consists of semistructured interviews with 20 police officers, media strategists, and communicators from the Swedish Police Authority in a region associated with high crime rates. The results of this national case study indicate that a social media–driven creation of a sense of safety depends on how the intertwined strategies of transmediality, presence, and transparency are communicatively handled. This article adds to the literature by demonstrating how the Swedish Police in Police Region South (PRS) use and understand social media to create a sense of safety.

This article examines the professional values of self-employed photographers and other communication professionals who have worked for both journalism and humanitarian nongovernmental organisations (NGOs). These professionals face the current changes in the media work environment and expand their reach to different fields to find new work opportunities. The study focuses on the photographers’ motivations and professional values in addition to NGO–journalism relations. The findings show that pushing factors in the journalistic field, along with pulling factors in NGO work, motivate photographers to choose advocacy work. When photographers change from photojournalism to NGO photography, they must adhere to new professional values and ethics that mix with their existing values and which may occasionally contradict with photojournalistic working methods or the marketing and fundraising images at the NGOs, causing ethical dilemmas. Finally, photographers with a photojournalism background help NGOs gain news media publicity, yet they are rarely able to change the news agenda.

Drawing on survey and interview data from a pilot study undertaken online in Denmark (March–July 2020), this article provides exploratory insights about how young audiences in Denmark (aged 16–34, with a background in higher education) engage with British television and film as viewing shifts from broadcast television to online on-demand services. First, drawing on survey data, we concentrate on consumption habits and genre preferences regarding British content and compare it to Danish, Nordic, and American content. Second, drawing on interviews, we address the significance of cultural and particularly linguistic proximity in determining the consumption and reception of British content. Revealing that young Danes in the pilot study feel greater linguistic proximity to English than to other Scandinavian languages, the research suggests the need for more nuanced theorisations of cultural and linguistic proximity, along with the revision of cultural distance and geo-linguistic regions theory.

The trial of amateur submarine builder Peter Madsen for the murder of the Swedish journalist Kim Wall was one of the most publicised trials in recent Danish history. Through in-depth interviews with ten prominent Danish reporters who covered the trial, this study examines how court reporters negotiate and struggle with ethical dilemmas related to objectivity as both an institutional ideal and an ethical rule under the Media Liability Act. I demonstrate how reporters negotiate and strategise to maintain objectivity in relation to facts, relevance, the telling of both sides, and the avoidance of prejudging. I further highlight the dispute between fact-based reporters and a minor group endorsing interpretive and narrative reporting and advocating for a more pragmatic approach to objectivity. A core finding is how technological advancements and massive public interest have paved the way for new ethical practices, referred to here as “strategic ritual 2.0”.

Older adults have been found to conceive digital technologies as both helpful and problematic in their everyday lives. Based on a qualitative analysis of diaries and interviews with 40 older Finnish adults, this study identifies efforts they engage in to balance this ambivalence. I approach such balancing practices through the theoretical lens of domestication: the process of integrating technologies into everyday life. By combining the concept of media repertoire with the domestication approach, the findings illustrate how ageing individuals take advantage of their media repertoires in the process of making digitalised societies liveable. In order to include ageing individuals in societies that increasingly demand engagement with emerging technologies, then, means that services should be designed in ways that allow them to be integrated into older adults’ media repertoires that have been being formed for decades.