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This study explores the role of humour in shaping digital death discourses on TikTok. examining how users engage with mortality, the afterlife, and dying in playful yet profound ways. Through an analysis of three content strands--#celebritydeathprank, Heaven Receptionist skits, and mourning-dedicated accounts--it investigates how TikTok's participatory culture enables users to navigate and reframe death through creative and often comedic means. Rather than centering grief, this study highlights how humour serves as a mechanism for engaging with existential themes, fostering communal rememberence, and reimagining collective imaginaries of death. By leveraging TikTok's affordances--such as remixing, commenting, and algorithmic visibility--users produce content that blurs the boundaries between adversity and the absurd, intimacy and spectacle. This study contributes to research on digital death by demonstrating how social media platforms cultivate new vernaculars and ephemeralities of death discourse, where humour becomes the central mode of engagement with mortality.

Content creators in war zones are critical in shaping global perceptions of conflict. Through social media, they document real-time events and reach audiences beyond the traditional news frameworks. Based on an ethnographic study of Czech and Ukrainian TikTok creators sharing war-related content from Ukraine, we introduce the concept of ambivalent visibility – a condition shaped by the conflicting demands creators face in balancing algorithmic amplification, audience engagement and ethical responsibility. In conflict zones, ambivalent visibility emerges as creators integrate war-related content into platform vernaculars, such as native templates and viral formats, while negotiating the risks of trivialization and misinterpretation. We identify three forms of ambivalence: (1) tension between raw immediacy and platform-friendly visibility, where creators balance the urgency of documenting war with the need to remain legible to the algorithm; (2) blurred boundaries between digital storytelling and journalism, as creators navigate dual roles as informal correspondents and narrative influencers; and (3) a virality paradox, in which tragedy becomes a driver of engagement, propelling content not despite its emotional gravity, but because of it. We conclude by positioning these creators as contemporary war communicators, bridging journalism and personal stories to reframe how conflicts are witnessed and understood in the platform age.

Since February 2022, the war in Ukraine has ushered in a new era of war documentation, with TikTok emerging as a central platform for showcasing daily life in conflict zones. This shift has given rise to “war influencers,” a distinct group of content creators who transform war zones into consumable units of content by using platform-specific vernaculars to convey their lived experiences. We present a typology of war influencers: (1) Celebrity-War Influencers, who leverage their well-established mechanisms of fame to transition into wartime advocacy; (2) User-War Influencers, who harness the powerful dissemination capabilities of platforms to spotlight their sites of trauma, thus rising from anonymity to online fame. Utilizing digital ethnography, we analyze 97 videos from Ukrainian TikTok creators, examining User-War Influencers from the onset of the war. We identify three primary styles employed by these influencers: (1) POV storytelling, using point-of-view templates to connect audiences with personal war testimonies; (2) memetic content, juxtaposing war sights with trending memes to enhance engagement and shareability; and (3) playful politainment, combining entertainment and political commentary through features like LIVE to fundraise and mobilize global audiences. Bridging war photography, citizen journalism, and influencer culture, we argue that war influencers leverage platform affordances and user interactions to amplify war zone visibility, foster civic engagement, and shape global perceptions of conflicts. In doing so, they contribute to the construction of social epistemology, redefining the collective processes through which knowledge about war zones is mediated and understood online.

In recent years, digital platforms like Instagram, Twitter, and TikTok have transformed the way we experience and engage with global crises, especially wars. Social media has become central to how information spreads during conflicts like the ongoing war in Ukraine. Platforms such as Twitter and TikTok allow individuals to quickly reach millions with updates and analyses, challenging traditional news outlets. A key difference, however, is that social media algorithms prioritize engaging content, often favoring sensational or emotionally charged material. In this context, memes and viral posts become powerful tools to quickly capture attention and generate awareness around a particular issue or version of a story. 

The outdoors offers widely understood health and wellbeing benefits and provides an unparalleled resource for the realization and projection of identity, from the personal to the national. Yet access to the outdoors in the countries of the global North is manifestly unequal, with BIPOC communities typically much less likely than their white counterparts to participate in outdoor leisure activities such as hiking, trail running, cycling, climbing, etc. This study revisits the hypothesis that outdoors media plays a central role in perpetuating what Martin (Citation2004) terms “apartheid in the Great Outdoors” by performing a content analysis of the Instagram posts of the top 10 outdoor brands in the US, Scandinavia and UK between the spring and summer seasons of 2020 – a period when the global pandemic restricted access to the outdoors at the same time as the Black Lives Matter movement raised awareness of systemic racial inequalities. The analysis reveals that whilst there is a purposeful response to calls to diversify the outdoors in the representational strategies of US outdoor brands, this is not the case in the UK and Scandinavia. In these locations the digital outdoors and its associated leisure identities remain overwhelmingly white, young, straight, and able-bodied.

Greenfluencers, also known as environmental influencers, intertwine environmental issues with personal lifestyle content. Their digital platforms provide spaces where social media users engage with and interpret sustainability issues. However, despite their advocacy for environmental action, greenfluencers operate in a realm marked by commercialisation. This chapter explores the representation of environmental action and agency within greenfluencer platforms. Specifically, we examine how greenfluencers urge followers to take specific actions, unravelling the reasons and motivations they articulate. Employing a rhetorical analysis on a select group of influencers from Norway and Sweden – countries where greenfluencers play a prominent role in the environmental discourse – we explore their efforts to raise awareness about environmental issues and advocate for sustainable lifestyles.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many governments discouraged citizens from travelling both within and outside the nation in an effort to mitigate the spread of the virus. Still, some Scandinavian influencers, whose livelihood often depends on producing aesthetic travel content, chose to go abroad, which led to criticism from both followers and others. While ethical debates over air travel have taken place in social media for a long time, the specific conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic travel restrictions, combined with the centrality of travel within influencer culture, created new controversies and discussions on several influencers’ Instagram accounts in Norway and Sweden. In this article, we use digital ethnography and multimodal discourse analysis to examine discursive negotiations of different moral positions in regards to long-haul travel, the political role and responsibility of influencers, as well as how appeals to solidarity and individualised responsibility were performed and contested in socially mediated spaces during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Amid the Russian invasion of Ukraine, TikTok has emerged as a pivotal platform, where creators utilize its compressed video formats to mediate the harsh realities of war zones. In this article, we examine 97 videos produced by 12 Ukrainian and Russian TikTok creators in response to the 2022 war in Ukraine. We focus on the playful embodiment of trauma using digital ethnography, analyzing creators’ practices and their interconnected memetic communication on TikTok. We identified the use of play through three dynamic practices where platforms, bodies, and trauma converge: (1) the utilization of POV (point-of-view) aesthetic in shareable templates to convey the realities of war from engaging first-person perspectives; (2) the incorporation of dance as a means of embodied creative expression and amplification of trauma; and (3) the harnessing of platform features to facilitate whimsical dialogues with followers about life under war. We argue that playfulness is entrenched in and enacted through platform vernacular modes, driving creators to forge communal ties during adversities and shape the ongoing representation of trauma and its accelerated visibility in digital spaces. We present the concept of playful trauma as a framework for understanding the structural dissonance that arises when creators utilize their bodies alongside platform-specific humorous, ironic, or subversive dialects to perform and amplify the gravity of trauma. This tension provides a unique space for creators to convert their shared experiences of grief and resilience into participatory coping mechanisms. In doing so, they subject and harness their playful platformed body as both the medium and the message, documenting injustices, bearing witness, and galvanizing crowds into action during times of war.

We live in an increasingly digitised society. In an age of digital identities, rapid developments in Artificial Intelligence and ever more sophisticated software available, our methods for researching digital media must be flexible and adaptable. This book will help you to understand why researchers in this field choose and use particular research methods, equipping you to put these methods into practice across the whole range of undergraduate media courses. This book shows you how research methods can help us to make sense of the myriad of information we encounter online every day, from Tiktok influencers to viral Twitter posts. Complete with case studies in each chapter, the book covers both well-established methods, such as network analysis, and cutting-edge ones, such as interface analysis. It provides a crucial foundation for research in digital media, demonstrating the scope and potential of these tools. The book adopts an easy-to-navigate structure, taking you through specific methods in a systematic way. It shows you examples of classic uses of each method, and directs you towards further resources after each chapter.