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As a comprehensive and affordable environment, polymedia lays the groundwork for exploring platform-swinging and offers a theoretical framework for investigating its dynamics. Platform-swinging and its unique niche characteristics provide a novel lens to examine the interplay between media dependency and psychological well-being. Using a survey questionnaire, this study collected data from 1210 university students in the Yangtze River Delta, China’s most economically developed region, to examine the relationship between media dependency, platform-swinging, and psychological depression. Our findings suggest that the affordances of platform-swinging influence media dependency, whereas the nature of media dependency shapes psychological depression. This study contributes to a deeper understanding of how young adults navigate various media platforms and sheds light on the complex interrelations between media use and mental health. Focusing on platform-swinging in the environment of polymedia explores the relationship between media dependency, platform-swinging, and psychological depression. Moreover, it also compensates for the one-sided understanding caused by simply examining media dependency and psychological depression. This study has practical value and theoretical significance for the psychological health of college students and the research and development of the media dependency theory.

This article sheds light on how adults in Barcelona (ES), Groningen (NL), and Milan (IT) utilized WhatsApp to compensate for the lack of face-to-face interactions and to fight social isolation during the first 2 months of the COVID-19 lockdown. We argue that practices of WhatsApp usage have multiplied and diversified experiences of co-presence at distance and made group socialities even more important than before. Building on the concepts of “scalable socialities” and “polymedia,” the article formulates the concept of “scalable co-presence” to account for ways in which WhatsApp has enabled multiple experiences of proximity to others across different scales of sociality, from one-to-one to large groups interactions. In this article, we also argue that the concept of “scalable co-presence” is relevant to bring the study of mediated co-presence out of media and migration studies into the broader field of media and cultural studies. With reduction in mobility, increased social distancing, and ubiquitous connectivity, the role of communication technologies in mediating proximity at distance has become crucial for many more people around the world outside the context of transnational migration. The concept is also relevant to acknowledge the increased importance of mediated group interactions and communications in (post)-pandemic digital societies.

This study seeks to advance the scholarship on the phenomenon of social media platform-swinging in the context of the polymedia environment in China. Specifically, drawing on the theoretical frameworks of uses and gratifications and channel complementarity theory, we propose that the platform-swinging behavior is driven by users’ various complementary and supplementary needs. Drawing on 32 semi-structured interviews, we identify four distinct types of platform-swinging behavior: social connecting, impression managing, information seeking, and aimless swinging. We further reveal that, depending on various complementary and supplementary needs, each type of platform-swinging behavior has distinct media affordance preferences. By profiling the distinct platform-swinging behaviors and examining their preferred affordances, the study advances our theoretical understanding of the dynamics between the polymedia ecology and users’ gratifications.

Through the perspective of the concept of generations and generationally specific digital sociality, the paper analyses the transformation of reading as a practice and as an experience. Based on analysis of interviews with teenagers, it is argued that in today’s polymedia environment users are constantly shifting between platforms and live in constant anticipation of something new, being permanently occupied, and constant affective engagement represent a condition for an algorithmically produced regime of visibility that normalises the distracted multitasking they engage in. In the context of constant digital work, there remains little space for practices beyond social platforms. The authors argue that in the young interviewees’ perception book reading does not hold the status of a cultural authority and that the role played by reading in distributing cultural capital has been reshaped.

Abstract Live-streaming is now a popular form of new media as well as an important driver of E-Commerce. Nowhere is this seen more than in video-game streaming on Twitch. Streaming platforms like Twitch now provide specific affordances specifically designed to promote and facilitate videogame-streaming. Developers too provide their own game-based affordances to encourage the streaming of their games. However, despite the popularity of Twitch with viewers and game developers, this dichotomy of platform- and game-based streaming affordances has received little attention. This study helps to fill this gap in the literature by exploring the factors that drive streamers use of both platform and videogame affordances as they create streaming content. The study uses empirical data on 5,656 Twitch streamers (n = 5,656) to examine how platform affordances are combined with those available in games through a process we call “game-swinging”. Key results of the study show that platform-based affordances lend themselves well to game-swinging behaviours, while videogame-based affordances may be difficult for streamers to utilize without specific emphasis on streaming a single-game. These and other findings yield a deeper understanding of the processes that drive live-streaming content creation across a variety of e-Commerce platforms.

In this study, both performance and polymedia serve as important conceptual lenses to examine how university students in the Global South handle the social media landscape in enacting cultural identity. Based on 17 focus groups with 105 students from Bolivian universities, we argue that in performing their multiplex identities, this group of Bolivian young people navigate social media as polymedia environments, taking advantage of its possibilities and testing its constraints. The research generated three key findings: (1) students mainly reported examples of cosmopolitan and national identity performances; (2) performances of national belonging showed an ambiguous mixture of self-glorification and self-reflexivity; (3) indigenous identities were rarely performed on the platforms used.

Based on the assumptions that digital media are used as integrated structures or “polymedia repertoires” and that media practices cannot be treated as unrelated practices performed on distinct platforms, the present study examined the digital sociability of young people and their media prosumption in a polymedia environment. Data were collected from group interviews of 67 12- to 19-year-olds and 59 personal visualised media sketches. The study focused on teenage engagement with news as part of their media repertoires and their understanding of what news is in the context of general platform sociability conditions, including a state of permanent connectedness and constant anticipation of something new. Their sociability based on permanent activity and affective engagement was enabled and framed by the algorithmically produced regime of visibility and the promise of liveness. The findings indicated that an important consequence of the increased fragmentation of activities is the naturalisation of the performance of multiple media practices at the same time. Although the complexity of such performance, even among teenagers, revealed socially distinctive categories, clear hierarchies between types of practices—such as watching news or pop culture, online shopping and doing homework—and the cultural differentiation of the dominant contexts for these practices—such as school and leisure—were eroded. The contexts of school, home, and leisure thus collapse, and the definition of important news journalism becomes highly unstable, with the distinction between pop and politics generally disintegrating.

This article investigates the intersection of digital and social inequality in the context of disaster recovery. In doing so, the article responds to the optimism present in recent claims about “humanitarian technology” which refers to the empowering uses and applications of interactive technologies by disaster-affected people. Drawing on a long-term ethnography with affected communities recovering from Typhoon Haiyan that hit the Philippines in 2013 triggering a massive humanitarian response, the article offers a grounded assessment of the role of social media in disaster recovery. In particular, the article focuses on whether any positive consequences associated with digital media use are equally spread among better off and socially marginalized participants. The analysis reveals sharp digital inequalities which map onto existing social inequalities. While some of our already better-off participants have access to a rich media landscape which they are able to navigate often reaping significant benefits, low-income participants are trapped in a delayed recovery with diminished social media opportunities. The fact that some participants are using social media to recover at a rapid pace while others are languishing behind represents a deepening of social inequalities. In this sense, digital inequality can amplify social inequalities leading to a potential “second-order disaster.” This refers to humanly perpetuated disasters that can even surpass the effects of the natural disaster.

The article explores how the mobile app Tinder complements dating practices and the wider app ecosystem gay men use in London. Within the local gay community discourse, Tinder is said to be a site where the gay “nice guys” go, rendering the platform as a socially constructed environment where gay men behave in a diametrically opposed way to the normative hyper-sexualized behavior of widespread gay hook-up apps. The research question, therefore, is whether Tinder is in fact a place where these “nice guys” go and where one would find them. Through an ethnographic methodology conducted both online and offline, a case is built on how initial conceptions about the app cannot be fully studied or interpreted without understanding the place it holds among other social networks. Evidence is presented to support the case that gay users of Tinder do, in fact, curate the portrayal of their digital identity to present a considerably less sexualized persona with the hopes of finding dates or a relationship. This, however, does not mean that users refrain from using other platforms in parallel as a way of exploring different subject positions and motivations. Behavior and normativity on Tinder are largely explained both by context and also by the design of the platform, which imports and displays personal data from other social networks. Findings should be limited to the population and location proposed as the fieldsite.

This study employed an interpretive phenomenological approach to interpret the lived experiences of five couples experiencing a 24-hour abstention from technology use in the home. It also examined their interpretation of the role of technology use in their homes before and after the experiment. This researcher conducted semi-structured interviews with marital partners focused on broad themes of technology and communication in the home, taking into account gender-based perspectives of husband and wife. A phenomenological perspective enabled the researcher to take a pragmatic approach to the meaning-making processes of participating millennial married couples’ lived experiences and how they established and employed digital device usage rituals and norms in the home. Findings from this study have implications for future family communication research studies and suggest an extension of Baxter and Montgomery’s relational dialectics theory.