This article revisits Robert T. Craig’s “Communication Theory as a Field” on its 25th anniversary to reassess its relevance for contemporary communication studies. It foregrounds mediation and communication technologies’ role in shaping how scholars think and write about communication. Focusing on the 1990s media environment, the analysis draws on Walter Ong’s insights into the sensory, technological, and historical conditions of knowledge production. “Communication Theory as a Field” is shown to echo the spatial-visualist logics of Web 1.0. A comparative reading with Peter Ramus highlights the unintended visualism of Craig’s project and challenges the ocular paradigm long dominant in communication theory. The article advances communication-as-constitutive perspectives by advocating a “sensory rapprochement” that restores auditory, embodied, and dialogic dimensions to theory while underscoring the need for reflexivity about how evolving technologies shape disciplinary frameworks and the conditions of theorizing.

The current study advances the communication interdependence perspective (CIP) using an intensive longitudinal design and recent refinements in the conceptualization of integration (i.e., how various channels are interconnected). U.S. adults in romantic relationships (N = 175) completed a baseline questionnaire, and then, provided daily diary data over 30 days (4,806 total observations), which we analyzed with dynamic structural equation modeling. Consistent with the CIP, for the typical person, constructive integration had a positive within-person effect (i.e., people felt closer on days that they had more constructive integration than usual) and a positive between-person association (i.e., people with more constructive integration reported more relational closeness on average across the month). Additionally, there was persistence in constructive integration, and persistence was stronger for people who reported more habitual patterns of integration earlier in the month. We discuss the implications for the CIP and for understanding how people mix media in daily life.

Wellness misinformation spreads widely on short-form video platforms, yet existing research often explains its credibility through individual cognitive deficits. This study advances a qualitative socio-technical account by articulating and applying the Algorithmic–Affective Misinformation Model (AAMM)—a mid-range framework refined through abductive analysis—to explain how credibility emerges through the interaction of aesthetics, affect, and algorithms. Drawing on qualitative interviews and cross-platform observations on TikTok and RED, the study identifies three mechanisms—aesthetic legitimization, affective vulnerability, and algorithmic reinforcement—that collectively construct wellness misinformation as visually authoritative, emotionally resonant, and structurally normalized. By demonstrating the cross-cultural relevance of these mechanisms, the study addresses the underrepresentation of Asian platforms in misinformation scholarship and offers a globally applicable explanation of how wellness misinformation circulates across divergent platform ecologies. The findings highlight the need for interventions that target visual, emotional, and algorithmic infrastructures, expanding theoretical, methodological, and policy approaches to the study of digital misinformation.

The digital mediatization of social life constitutes a pervasive process that extends – not unambiguously – to small, grassroots communities. On Faial Island, in the Portuguese archipelago of the Azores, an informal group of non-professional photographers and videographers have integrated Facebook into their documentation of the island’s most cherished cultural and spiritual capital: the Holy Spirit and the patronal festivals. This practice has evolved into a modern custodianship of cultural and religious symbolism and memory. Drawing upon field and digital ethnographies combined with eight semi-structured interviews, this article examines how their practice has been integrated into the cultural and religious repertoire of Faial’s peri-rural communities, mediatizing representation, communication, memorialization, and access. Findings seem to indicate that these hyperlocal media agents provide valuable services to their communities, both locally and among the diaspora, through: (1) promotion of the island’s religious and cultural heritage; (2) virtual access to celebrations for those unable to attend physically; and (3) creation of material testimonies for future memory. Simultaneously, their practice seems to raise questions regarding reliability and ownership, posing new challenges to communities’ symbolic agency. Results demonstrate how Facebook integration into religious communitarian practices simultaneously promotes cultural resistance and pervasive cultural de-singularization.

Afghanistan’s diaspora swelled after the Taliban took over the government in 2021 and initiated a nation-building project that marginalized some ethnic groups. Acts of discrimination were exposed online and discussed by users in the diaspora and in Afghanistan. Studies of non-mediated practices of Afghanistan’s diaspora show separation along ethnic lines. How the ethnic divisions play out in the digital space where users from the diaspora and Afghanistan debate the future of the nation and whether digital affordances facilitate interactions across divisions, and how, have not been addressed. We connect the literature on digital diaspora and firestorms to elucidate the role of affect in interactions between “here and there.” We conducted a netnography of X (Twitter) posts about events in Afghanistan between August 15, 2021, when the Taliban seized Kabul, and August 15, 2024. A thematic analysis of threads revealed three themes: essentialist displacement, the politics of labels, and language advocacy. The themes wove reciprocal defensive exclusionary discourses of place, group labels, and language erupting in affective surges animated by historical grievances and perceptions of marginalization evolved over centuries-long cohabitation in spaces that now constitute the state of Afghanistan. While heterogeneous and interacting across ethnic lines, the contributors spun essentialist discourses reflecting struggles over recognition, legitimacy, and ownership of the national narrative. The ethnic divisions were actively reshaped and expressed in digital spaces, producing fragmented encapsulation .

Anna’s Archive is a public index of illicit digital libraries that presents itself as a moral and technical infrastructure for global access to knowledge. Drawing on digital infrastructure ethnography, platform hermeneutics, and genealogical method, this article examines how the project negotiates legitimacy through metadata, discourse, and infrastructural design. I argue that Anna’s Archive transforms the logic of piracy into an infrastructure of visibility that mirrors and contests institutional archives, enacting a novel illicit politics of knowledge circulation. The study identifies four modes of legitimacy—pragmatic, moral, community, and cognitive—through which the archive sustains authority while remaining outside legal frameworks. By situating these practices within broader debates on platform accountability, data governance, and infrastructural justice, the article shows how shadow infrastructures expose the power relations and politics of access that underlie contemporary regimes of information extraction.

Amid growing concern about information quality and credibility in digital media environments, researchers and educators still lack a concise, comprehensive yet psychometrically sound instrument for tracking the various competencies that help people navigate this landscape. This article develops the Digital Media and Information Literacy Scale (DMILS)—a robust and multidimensional measure that distinguishes domain (digital vs information/news), competency type (knowledge vs skill), and is measured through both subjective and objective items. Through two empirical studies with three nationally matched samples in the United States and Singapore ( N = 1498), we developed an 18-item self-report battery and 16-item objective knowledge questions, showing strong structural, convergent, and predictive validity, along with a short form (eight self-report and eight objective items). By offering a parsimonious yet multidimensional yardstick, DMILS enables rigorous evaluation of media literacy interventions and supplies a common metric for cross-national research, critical for building an information ecosystem resilient to mis- and disinformation.

While brain rot has entered the popular lexicon as a marker of cultural-intellectual decline, this article theorizes it as a systemic condition of late-capitalist survival. Integrating world-systems analysis with the critique of the attention economy, I argue that cognition has emerged as the new frontier of intensive accumulation. As material expansion shifts toward cognitive extraction within the post-2008 conjuncture, platforms assetize attention to stabilize speculative valuation. This induces a biopolitical rewiring that functionally degrades the capacity for sustained thought. This systemic brain rot is analyzed through its class-stratified distribution and institutional collision within the university, where deep learning confronts the high-frequency logic of extraction. Ultimately, this mutagenic mode of accumulation consumes capitalism’s social and cognitive foundations, necessitating a shift from therapeutic self-management toward the political contestation of attentional regimes through structural alternatives like engagement metric caps and public digital infrastructures.

Drawing on Moral Foundations Theory and recent network diffusion studies, we examine the toxicity spread in US immigration-related discourse on X ( N = 305,878 tweets, January 2021 to April 2024). Using AI-assisted content analysis, this study examines how psychological predispositions (issue stance and moral foundations) and network positions predict users’ toxicity roles (i.e. amplifiers, copycats, and attenuators). Multinomial regression and random forest models reveal that amplifiers are typically centrally embedded users who score high on binding moral values, especially sanctity. Attenuators often hold pro-immigration stances and receive more inbound attention, suggesting reputational restraint and network moderation. Copycats, situated in dense, reciprocated ego networks, tend to reciprocate and mimic the tone of their peers. Contrary to expectations, amplification is not driven by bridge actors but by highly central users. This typology enhances our understanding of how moral convictions and network structures influence propagation, with implications for platform design and network intervention strategies.

Research on the social significance of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in journalism, communication, and organizational contexts is often organized around two emphases: one foregrounds disruption, framing standalone Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) tools as transformative; the other foregrounds invisibility, treating embedded AI as backgrounded. We bridge these emphases with interactional continuity , a user-centered frame that explains cross-modality incorporation at the level of task episodes: AI use stabilizes through sequential placement in ongoing activities, while interface packaging shapes whether it is perceived and named as AI. Grounded in infrastructure theory, platform studies, and digital meaning-making, we examine everyday AI use in the Global South through 28 semi-structured interviews in an Indian workplace. We used iterative AI-assisted and manual coding to identify patterns. Importantly, we found that respondents used AI as episode-level task support within familiar platform routines, illustrating how disruption and invisibility can emerge from task sequencing and interface cues.

Digital governance in transitional democracies promises enhanced participation but often produces new forms of exclusion. This study examines the “technopolitical paradox” in post‐Reformasi Indonesia, where algorithmic systems expand engagement while reinforcing elite control. Introducing a novel framework of algorithmic legitimacy, participation facades, and technocratic inclusion, the research analyzes how digital technologies reshape political authority. Based on mixed‐methods data, policy analysis, 45 interviews, digital ethnography, and a survey ( n = 1247), the findings reveal that data‐driven claims obscure political choices, participatory platforms simulate engagement without influence, and technical requirements systematically marginalize non‐expert citizens. The study concludes that digital governance risks reproducing inequality behind a meritocratic facade, challenging democratic values in the digital age.