This anthology explores the current evolution of interactive storytelling across digital as well as physical spaces by examining how games, digital narratives, and participatory art can reshape creative expression and learning at fundamental levels.



The contributors propose that interactive fiction is best examined by combining social, literary, and technical analyses together. Used independently, each modality provides an insufficient picture of the deeply merged social, technical, and artistic media environments we currently inhabit. We focus instead on the nature of the social interactions involved when engaging in digital storytelling, emphasizing that an interactive narrative is perpetually constructed and reconstructed each time it is experienced.



The collection provides in depth analysis, organized into three distinct sections, the first two based on the key modalities of alternate realities and digital interactive fiction. The third section then provides an important political critique of gaming ideologies. Contributors with expertise and experience in each section topic provide diverse and timely analyses on how interactive narratives function in educational contexts, community engagement, and human-machine collaboration. The authors also investigate both theoretical frameworks and practical applications, from live-action role-playing to AI-assisted writing, while considering the significant social and political implications of gaming culture in general.



The collection's strength remains on its unique bringing together diverse perspectives from game designers, educators, artists, and theorists to examine how new forms of storytelling emerge at the intersection of analog and digital realms, with particular attention to the role of play and interactivity in contemporary learning environments.

There is a mental health crisis among media professionals around the world - in journalism, advertising/marketing/PR, film and television, digital games, music (recording and performance), and online content creation. The crisis consists of mental issues – with extraordinarily high instances of anxiety, trauma, burnout, and depression; physical ailments - prevalent substance abuse, unhealthy living, sleep problems, and exhaustion; and spiritual problems – including people becoming disenchanted with the promise of a creative career.

At the same time, most professionals claim to love doing what they do, suggesting that what makes people happy also makes them sick.

This book documents what is particular about well-being in creative careers in the media, offers an analysis of systemic issues throughout the media industries that explain why so many practitioners get sick on the job and shows what can be done. What ends up causing work-related stress disorders is a combination of a lack of reciprocity between what people bring to the job and what the industry offers in return, organizational injustice as people perceive policies and decisions at work to be discriminatory and unfair, and persistent high workloads.

In conclusion, Deuze suggests that the labor-of-love work ethic that is so typical of the way people 'make it work' can be a problem as much as it provides a way forward.

This article explores Generation Z’s understanding of entertainment through the connection between video streaming service use and fun. The proliferation of media entertainment tools designed for personal consumption has multifaceted implications, alienating entertainment from its social aspect. The rising popularity of video streaming services largely reshapes entertainment by disconnecting it from the conventional viewing experience. Through semi-structured in-depth interviews with samples from Generation Z, this study examines the traces of this transformation. Research findings reveal that Generation Z participants have developed three ways to have fun through video streaming services. These are simultaneous viewing together, watching together by downloading add-ons from different screens and solo viewing that later becomes a topic of discussion during friends’ gatherings. This research interprets the use of video streaming services for fun as direct experience, indirect experience and postponed experience, and it holds potential for contributing to communication studies.

In the wake of the 7 October Uprising, there has been a considerable online discourse surrounding the Palestine–Israel conflict. Drawing on qualitative content analysis, this research focuses on how the story of Palestine is conveyed on Instagram. Instagram has emerged as one of the biggest social media channels where advocacy and social activism occur in the current digital era. This study will focus on 75 Instagram posts (photos, reels and carousels) related to the Palestinian issue, from October 2023 to June 2024. The objectives of this research are to understand how digital storytelling on Instagram has projected the Palestinian issue and to examine the content, tone, visuals, themes and underlying messages of Instagram activism regarding the Palestinian story. The findings of this study revealed that the use of precise visual and textual elements that distinguish the recurrence of themes such as suffering, solidarity, violation of human rights and resistance, act as stand-ins for strategic framing within digital activism to raise awareness and garner support for collective action. The study reveals how Instagram users have helped boost Palestinian perspectives. The major themes that emerged are those of suffering and solidarity with a tinge of emotion and humanitarian elements of the Palestinian struggle. This research, thus, underlines the potential capacity of Instagram to reshape conflict narratives to emerge from historical marginalization, contributing to a change in global discourse.

This article examines the mediation of human rights in English-speaking media during the 2023/2024 Israeli war on Gaza, Palestine. It investigates the extent to which human rights are effectively or ineffectively represented, depending on how the media cover the death and suffering of civilians. A central focus is the media’s portrayal of civilian suffering as defined under International Humanitarian Law (IHL). The way media coverage addresses the deprivation of civilians’ rights can have significant ethical and practical implications, potentially either mitigating or exacerbating human loss. Using critical discourse analysis, this study explores the BBC’s coverage of the politics of de-civilianization in Palestine. Israeli settler colonialism in Palestine is seen an effort to stretch the boundaries of IHL, eroding the concept of civilians as protected persons under IHL. Understanding how media frame these acts of Israeli settler colonialism in their reporting is crucial, as the representation of events can either uphold or undermine the notion of justice, a fundamental human right. The media are expected to promote ‘hydraulic’ human rights, meaning they should contribute to the cumulative process of empowering the vulnerable and the weak until their rights are realized. The article questions the extent to which the BBC’s coverage of the 2023/2024 war on Gaza supports or undermines the human rights situation in Palestine. It argues that human rights can be compromised by biased media coverage and, paradoxically, by seemingly unbiased coverage that claims to be ‘objective’. The application of objectivity by major English-speaking media outlets, including the BBC, may inadvertently disadvantage the weak. Although objective media coverage aims to provide a balanced representation of all sides, subtle editorial practices, such as ‘transediting’ conducted by ‘journalators’, can marginalize certain voices, ultimately suppressing the human rights of vulnerable populations, particularly civilians.

As with many industries, artificial intelligence (AI) is playing a pivotal role in transforming the podcasting sector. However, like any technology, it is essential to strike a balance between opportunities and challenges. This study, conducted through semi-structured, in-depth interviews with seven podcast creators in the Sultanate of Oman, aims to explore the opportunities and challenges associated with integrating AI into the podcast industry. It also examines strategies for mitigating potential risks and considerations for ethical practices when incorporating AI technologies into podcasting. The key findings suggest that the opportunities arising from AI integration in the podcast industry encompass time, effort and cost savings, particularly in improving sound quality, eliminating noise, adjusting tone, expanding the reach through translation and transcription services and increasing accessibility for visually impaired and deaf audiences. Moreover, the results indicate that this integration can lead to certain challenges, including information bias, limited access, loss of human touch, potential lack of uniqueness, data accuracy and credibility, deep fakes, privacy and data security concerns, intellectual property issues, job displacement, accessibility issues for visually impaired individuals and financial costs associated with AI tools. Furthermore, the results emphasize the importance of ensuring the accuracy and credibility of information obtained through AI, respecting the intellectual property of others, maintaining authenticity and creativity, and considering the general ethical considerations in content creation when integrating AI technologies.

This article examines the transformative impact of Reliance Jio, an Indian telecommunications company, on the digital media landscape in India. By securing the digital rights for the immensely popular Indian Premier League (IPL), a cricket tournament known for its massive viewership and cultural significance, and streaming it for free on JioCinema, Jio disrupted the over-the-top (OTT) video platform market. This move highlights Jio’s strategy of leveraging vertical integration and regulatory leniency to dominate the market. The research delves into the historical context of India’s digital policies and the government’s role in fostering a liberalized market environment through ‘regulatory silence’. It also explores the implications of media convergence and platformization, where digital giants shape the production and distribution of media content. The article argues that Jio’s control over the internet infrastructure and its extensive content library position it as a formidable player in the Indian media industry, influencing both market dynamics and regulatory frameworks. By analysing Jio’s ascent and the broader media policy environment, this study provides insights into the evolving power structures and economic strategies within India’s digital media sector, offering a critical perspective on the interplay between telecommunications and media in a rapidly digitalizing economy.

Internet memes – images and GIFs – have become part of internet pop culture and are here to stay. Memes’ success as an online communication phenomenon is due, to some extent, to the fact that memes are self-explanatory. Indeed, messages conveyed in memes, however complex, are instantaneously grasped. The themes that memes cover can be casual or serious, but the humour and wit they radiate diffuse the tension of most sombre topics. However, it is unclear what makes a particular meme popular or, as they say, viral. Notably, when using the word viral to refer to a meme, internet users inadvertently uphold the take on memes as gene-like units of information that evolve as quasi-biological entities. In this article, the authors intend to move away from this approach and investigate memes from a semiotic and logical perspective. To do that, the authors deploy Peircean terminology that helps position memes in the sphere of signs and analyse meme structure using both ‘icon–index–symbol’ and ‘token-type’ classifications, as well as ‘the habit of inference’ concept. This analysis allows them to describe the mechanics of meme transformation and define the boundaries that memes do not cross.

The world has not been blind to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, thanks to the media. This research aims to unravel media management in the coverage of the war on Gaza and other Palestinian cities in the Latin American press, through the analysis of informative narratives that are rarely addressed in the international discussion and in the approaches of the editors of five journalistic platforms. The research combines content analysis and interviews in order to recognize the predominant frames, to verify the accuracy of the information against bias and misinformation and to identify the work routines in the output of the news. It concludes that the coverage has confronted two media frames: conflict and human interest; the former is evident in the journalistic narrative, in the prioritization of topics, actors and sources; the latter is found in the testimonies of the editors and their personal framings. The research found that journalists avoided the usual orientalisms in their news reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian situation but did not avoid contextual biases and misinformation. Despite the distance between the Middle East and Latin America, this war has altered the working and organizational routines of the media outlets hereby examined.

Though queer critics and queer theory tend to frame queer identities as marginal, this edited volume draws attention to a dynamic field in which a wide variety of queer identities can be put on display and consumed by audiences. Cementing a foundational understanding of queerness that is at odds with current shifts in media production, contributors present a broad variety of queer identities from across a range of televisual shows and genres to reconsider the marginalization of queerness in the twenty-first century. Doing so challenges preexisting notions that such “mainstreamification” necessitates being subsumed by the cisheteropatriarchy. This project argues the opposite, showing that heteronormative assumptions are outdated and that new queer representations lay the groundwork for filling gaps that queer criticism has left open.

Thomas Brassington is a researcher whose work explores intersections of queerness and the Gothic in contemporary popular culture. Debra Ferreday is a feminist cultural theorist whose research concerns gender, feminist theory, sexuality, critical race theory, queer theory, and embodiment. Dany Girard is a queer researcher whose work primarily explores representations of gender, asexualities, and queer theory in television and film.

This study employed a computational framing analysis to examine media representations of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict between 7 and 14 October 2023. This study integrated media framing, media bias and geopolitical framing literature to examine if these factors could explain how this global tragedy was framed and if variations exist between established news and social media. Based on the analysis of a corpus of 3864 articles, we found that the media’s political biases played a less explanatory and consistent role in reporting the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. Instead, we observed media ideologies interacting with proxy geopolitical framing influence from outside could have shaped how Taiwanese news and social media organizations represented the Palestinian–Israeli conflict. This study reported statistically significant and consistent variations in Taiwanese media representations of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict between pro-China/unification, pro-Kuomintang and conservative/right-leaning news organizations and pro-Taiwan independence, left-leaning, pro-incumbent Democratic Progressive Party The Liberty Times. Using a topic modelling technique, we found that pro-China/conservative news media sided with China to hold a more pro-Palestinian stance by framing the conflict as a result of Israel’s long suppression of people living in the Gaza Strip and the West Bank as the cause of the conflict and place much emphasis on Israel’s actions on humanitarian casualties. On the other hand, the pro-Taiwan news media aligned with the United States to focus more on pro-Israel news coverage, its attacks and counterattacks, and global responses. Additionally, social media netizens’ comments centre on the underlying causes of the Palestinian–Israeli conflict but do not align with the mainstream news media and are less affected by the proxy geopolitical framing effects.

As a social activity, the sciences are only possible through communication among scientists themselves and between scientists and society. The article analyses natural, biological, social and ideological prerequisites of scientific communication (SC) as an ensemble of interrelated acts of scientific information exchange. A taxonomy of professional networks as a medium for SC is proposed. The need for a permanent struggle for the preservation and development of the values of both a free society and science is emphasized.

Accelerationism offers a theoretical stance towards capitalism that takes shape in various rhetorical guises. In general, these writings attempt to push through the boundaries imposed by capital while speeding off into unknown possible futures. While some articulations of this philosophy rely on traditional scholarly argumentation, others proceed along more obscure paths to envision a post-capitalist (and usually post-human) future. In this article, I focus on the latter approach by examining how some accelerationist works embrace occult poetics and subsequently align with what Brad Baumgartner identifies as a communicative praxis of Weird Mysticism. In contrast to more pragmatic approaches, Weird Mysticism provides a worthwhile rhetorical perspective for contemplating accelerationist works that embrace a nihilistic inclination to imagine a world without us.

This article delves into two types of government-funded video productions within China’s Ecological Civilization movement: eco-documentaries produced at the highest level and eco-feature films produced at the provincial and sub-provincial levels. Both types of productions focus on environmental topics, but environmental awareness and behaviours are often not prioritized. This article aims to situate China’s green campaign in a centre-local relation and to demonstrate how this campaign is portrayed through government-funded moving images. The article concludes that moving images are utilized by different levels of government to promulgate new green terms, shift blame among different levels of authorities and individuals, and guide grassroots officials’ behaviours in the nation’s brand-new environmental vision.

Media managers are facing a variety of profound and disruptive challenges generated by the impact of digitization and platformization on the production, distribution and consumption of media goods. Interestingly, platforms provide users with the opportunity to become providers of information (‘produsers’). The technological ecology requires publishing organizations to constantly rethink and adjust their competitive strategies and business models to achieve financial sustainability. Based on interviews with media industry players, this article intends to understand Portuguese newspaper companies’ funding models, business challenges in a pre-pandemic period, and how managers were reacting and adapting their practices. This study has found that the companies demonstrated the predominant implementation of management practices aimed at exploring mixed revenue sources – that is, through the traditional activity of selling advertising and newspapers and the support of paper and the sale of digital advertising content. Companies where the main source of revenue came from a mixed-model ended up, for the most part, investing more, or having more participation, in digital, with a few exceptions.

Digital screen cultures play a fundamental role in shaping ways of thinking about the environment. Yet, digital media are highly problematic not just for the massive footprint of technological development, server maintenance, e-waste and the reproduction of the colonial extractive relationship but also for an increasing web architecture monopolized by the big-tech platforms in content creation. Nonetheless, several scholarly and activist digital practices are creatively dealing with the urgency posed by the environmental crisis, showing massive potential in challenging anthropocentric global ecoculture. Through a discourse theoretical approach to digital communication, this article offers an interpretation of selected experiences of digital communication practices as counter-hegemonic tactical communication that dislocates anthropocentric ideologies shrouded in the web informational overload. Through a narrative of the construction of one of these digital experiences, the Environmental Ideologies Map (EIDmap) website, the article discusses and calls for the multiplication of creative art-based research practices able to dislocate dominant environmental ideologies circulating in the ‘extinction internet’.

Language and gender have a strong connection, especially in a social context. This study examines register in Arabic by looking at the language used by male and female teachers who utilize the YouTube media platform to provide basic Arabic tutorials. From these videos, the language characteristics of male and female Arabic language teachers can be observed, in terms of gender. In general, this study investigates the registers of male and female Arabic language teachers. Specifically, it elaborates on the significant differences between the language used by male and female Arabic language teachers based on a register analysis. The research question is thus divided into two: (1) what is the typical character of male teachers and female teachers of Arabic on YouTube channels; (2) how do male and female Arabic teachers use register on YouTube channels. The method used in this research can be divided into three stages. The first stage was the data collection, which was carried out by viewing and observing Arabic language learning videos uploaded onto YouTube channels by male and female teachers. The second stage was the data analysis, which used the model of Miles and Huberman, consisting of data reduction, data display and data conclusion. The final stage was the reporting of the results, using illustrative quotes in the form of descriptions and narratives related to the language registers of male and female teachers in terms of a sociolinguistic study. The gender-based language characteristics can be identified from aspects of gesture, word choice, greeting pronunciation and the mention of personal names. This research contributes to the development of the study of language learning in terms of gender based on an online social media platform.

This cross-national study draws from the GPDS framework to explore the outreach strategies of two environmental non-governmental organizations (ENGOs) – one in Ohio, United States, and the other in Paraná, Brazil. The study examined and compared ENGOs’ targeted communication practices and their efforts to engage with racial/ethnic and socio-economic minorities within charged political climates. Semi-structured qualitative interview results with ENGO employees and board members show similarities in public outreach strategies, challenges operating in politically charged environments and intentions to address the needs of low socio-economic and minority members of local communities. Many of the communication strategies described as being used by participants correspond to the social marketing theory (SMT) framework. However, ENGO employees reported low levels of confidence in effectively engaging their audience, mostly due to lack of strategic communication training and resources.

The twenty-first century saw the rapid rise of new media, increasing its share within the media mix and becoming a crucial platform for democratic debate and cultural consumption. Meanwhile, provisions related to the media in the European Charter for Regional or Minority languages merely refer to traditional forms of media. This article tries to answer the question whether the Charter with its unchanged provisions can continue to fulfil its function of protecting endangered languages, integrating the different forms of new media for the fulfilment member states’ obligations. Based on an analysis of the most recent monitoring reports of the Charter’s Committee of Experts, this research arrives at the conclusion that the Charter is indeed fit for the digital age, with both traditional and new media coming to play an important role in protecting and promoting minority and regional languages.

This article discusses the intersections between authorial and collaborative work in the scope of ethnographic documentary departing from three case studies: two research projects and one citizen collective of participatory media. All case studies were developed in Porto, Portugal, between 2013 and 2020, focusing on the city’s invisibilities and everyday experiences, searching for alternative narratives to the mainstream media when portraying its people and places. This article aims to reflect on how authorial documentary work, followed by self-criticism and self-reflection, can be incorporated into participatory media frameworks in productive ways. The challenges faced by the three cases are intrinsically related and have influenced each other throughout this period, addressing issues related to the representational crisis; the legitimation of subjectivity and the exploration of different styles within documentary; as well as the relationships between the filmmaker, the camera, the subject/character portrayed and the audience. These themes are explored through a series of first-person field reports and the study of authors and directors in the field of documentary filmmaking.