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Dynamic Perspectives on Media and Information Technologies

This year’s Communication, Information Technologies and Media Sociology (CITAMS) special issue of Information, Communication & Society received a record number of submissions. While a large number of high-quality submissions certainly made our jobs as editors difficult, it provided us an opportunity to spotlight the diversity of the work being done on ICTs as well as digital and mass media more generally. This, we believe, is particularly important to do in a quickly growing and changing area. The special issue includes theoretical papers, methodological papers, empirical papers, and research notes. Amidst these, we selected works with distinct theoretical orientations, a range of methodological approaches, and a myriad of empirical concerns. Theoretical contributions traverse science and technology studies (STS), social psychology, symbolic interaction, and broad debates about structure and agency. Methods represented in the issue include qualitative interviews, quantitative surveys, experimental design, and both ‘big data’ and ‘small data’ approaches to social media analysis. Authors use these methods to answer pressing research questions about artificial intelligence, education, digital inequality, media framing, and the interplay of racism and sexism online. We made a concerted effort to include work by scholars at different stages in their careers, doing research on different parts of the world and working inside as well as outside of academia. We open the issue with four papers presenting theoretical and methodological advances in ICT studies. The central theoretical and methodological concerns of these works feature in subsequent empirical papers and research notes within the issue, demonstrating their relevance to ongoing intellectual conversations. Attending to critical questions of theory and method is crucial for a rapidly changing field, as such work defines and refines the ways scholars approach dynamic objects of study. Locating agency remains an ongoing concern for sociologists and STS scholars theorizing human-technology relations. In the first theoretical paper, Maria Erofeeva reviews several approaches to agency, synthesizing them into a four-part model. Erofeeva draws on the ventriloqual perspective on communication, actor-network theory (ANT), and contemporary affordance theory. Distinguishing between inscription (built-in technological agencies) and attachment (human perceptions of technologies) the paper argues that the ventriloqual perspective is overly human-centred, ANT is overly object centered, and contemporary affordance theory strikes a human-technology balance but requires more explicit attention to how agency operates. Erofeeva uses existing empirical work