Announcements

Current Issue

Volume 31, Number 3 - 2 March 2026
Published: 2026-02-27
View All Issues
Netherlands
 This month: March 2026
Infrastructural anxiety and digital sovereignty: The perceived loss of control in Dutch communication networks
This paper examines how Dutch citizens and civil servants experience and respond to perceived loss of control over communication infrastructures. Combining a representative survey, semi-structured interviews with participants gathered around an art intervention, and interviews with civil servants, a concept of infrastructural anxiety was developed: a situated, anticipatory unease about infrastructural governance that encourages actors to externalize responsibility upward (from citizens to the state) and outward (from the state to market and standards fora). Data safety and security dominated public concerns; citizens employed limited privacy tactics but felt unable to affect systemic change. Civil servants viewed governance pathways as constrained by global standards and market concentration.
Ferrer
 Also this month
Cyborgs in the chat: Technological objects and sociotechnical interaction on Twitch.tv
This paper introduces the concept of cyborgification, derived from the metaphor cyborg of Donna Haraway, to analyze how technological objects, such as emotes, bots, and third-party extensions, co-construct social life on Twitch.tv. Drawing on digital ethnography and interviews, it examines how viewers and streamers interact not just with each other but with the platform’s technical features in the production of humor, identity, and belonging. Through three scenes, a media-triggered emote ritual, a bot glitch turned joke, and an outsider’s exclusion due to missing plug-ins, this work shows how technological entanglement shapes participation. Cyborgification offers a sociotechnical lens that moves beyond affordance theory to understand how meaning and affect are generated through human–technology interaction. Livestreaming emerges not merely as content delivery, but as infrastructure for digitally mediated sociality.