Jessica Maddox

In June 2026, researchers at the University of London and Oxford University hosted a symposium called ‘Internet Fame and the Future of Internets Everywhere: From Wanghong to AI Slop to Trashfutures...

The tech industry’s 2023–2024 mass layoffs represented a critical moment in which an infallible industry seemed to suddenly lay bare its weak spots. Historically, Big Tech and the American press have had a complementary relationship, journalism often reinforcing an industry long viewed as too big to fail. Through textual analysis of long-form coverage of the tech layoff crisis, we identify three themes. First, even amid layoffs, Big Tech is presented as too complex and important to regulate, with layoffs framed as necessary for long-term health—and as justification for subsequent layoffs by other firms. Second, AI is presented as both a positive and a negative factor in layoffs, yet remains largely unchallenged. Finally, coverage paid minimal attention to disproportionate impacts on women and racial minorities, upholding gender and racial imbalances in Big Tech. Taken together, the press did not simply explain layoffs—it acted as an active stakeholder.

The days of television have repeatedly been deemed over. Today, we are told, television is a dying medium replaced by viral and new digital platforms like TikTok where millions gather every day to consume content. This paper is an extended literature review of television and TikTok scholarship to highlight similarities and differences amongst key concepts in both fields. By focusing on political economy, textual analysis, and audience/reception studies, we unpack the connections and tensions between TikTok and the visual styles, aesthetic elements, cultural configurations, intertextual references, and genre formations that have established television as a recognizable technology and cultural form. We also draw on a case study of TikTok therapy content and television talk shows to further demonstrate how these entities occur. Moreover, the paper outlines the analytical benefits of considering digital platforms such as TikTok as a continuity of prior media developments, rather than being fundamental disruptions.

The term “side” has emerged to describe communities on the short-form video app TikTok. But what discursive work does the metaphor of side do to describe online communities? Through a case study with a textual analysis of the culture, technology, interface, and platform vernaculars present in reading fandom TikTok, BookTok, we explore how user practice and app features intertwine to establish sides of TikTok as relational, individualistically positioned, and exclusionary. In the process, we also present a cursory charting of the BookTok community. Unpacking the construction and implications of this metaphor matters because it shows the distinctive and exclusionary work done by the term side, not just across TikTok but within collectives as well. Who TikTok believes to be the typical member of a side has implications for discrimination and exclusion on the app, as it feeds into existing divisiveness in communities and the app’s tendency to suppress people of color, LGBTQ individuals, and disabled individuals.

BeReal has become a popular app among younger social media users, with a premise that privileges a brief, random, and unvarnished look into one’s life once a day. Hailed as the ‘anti-Instagram’ or ‘anti-TikTok’, the app eschews filters, performance, influencers, and sponsored content in favor of authenticity. While curated authenticity has long been a hallmark of internet culture, BeReal seems to employ authenticity not as a performance strategy but as a value, tapping into criticisms of the inauthentic. Through the walkthrough method of social media app analysis, I employ ethnographic research tenets to analyze how BeReal forwards a different type of authenticity to its users from its discourse, design, interface, and features. The findings are two-fold: First, BeReal privileges authenticity-as-realness instead of authenticity-as-performance, using spontaneity and timed posting windows to severely limit the time one can craft a post. Second, BeReal acts as a panopticon, because the omnipresent possibility of posting means users are always already aware of the potential. Authenticity-as-realness is not uncomplicated; it relies much more heavily on neoliberal self-monitoring and panopticism to be ready for anything, as opposed to a finely tuned and intricately crafted performance with lighting, makeup, and editing. This indicates considerations of authenticity are changing on social media platforms, putting performance at odds with panopticism.

As technology chief executive officers have become public figures, their personae operate as loci for journalistic discourse about the intersection of moral responsibilities, regulation, and political-economic power of the tech industry. They possess a power often construed as beyond the reach of politics or civil society to address. This study considers how the ubiquity of tech power has become a kind of common sense in journalistic discourse, specifically looking at news, commentary, and analysis that has circulated around Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg since 2016, arguing that even as critiques of Zuckerberg’s moral fitness and leadership capacity proliferate, they construct the epistemic bounds within which tech industry power over American public life is understood as legitimate, even as journalists and commentators question certain executives’ ability to wield the tech industry’s infrastructural and cultural power.

Influencers are a defining feature of the contemporary social media landscape, but little has interrogated how these individuals may privilege information sharing as essential to their brand. This article interrogates the role of the knowledge influencer, or those who perform micro-celebrity to convey information and expertise to lay audiences. Knowledge influencers can be doctors, lawyers, or anyone, regardless of class, who is an expert in their occupation. In doing so, knowledge influencers perform what I call calibrated expertise, or the curated performance strategy in which experts harness social media affordances, platform dynamics, and aspects of micro-celebrity to impart information. Through a case study analysis of social media veterinarians on Instagram, I show how calibrated expertise is discursively performed, and knowledge influencers emerge, at a cultural moment in which neoliberalism continues to blur the lines between work and play, and populist backlashes against experts are ubiquitous. By navigating micro-celebrity, authenticity, and relatability, knowledge influencers put a human face and contemporary cultural spin on expertise. Though, this does not mean the knowledge influencer is the answer to sweeping distrust, but rather, is an untapped resource for considering information sharing and power dynamics in neoliberal, populist times.