@article{weinbrand_search_2026,

title = {A search changer: auditing Google’s AI overviews interface in political and news search},

author = {Shir Weinbrand},

url = {https://linkinghub.elsevier.com/retrieve/pii/S0736585326000535},

doi = {10.1016/j.tele.2026.102417},

issn = {07365853},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-06-01},

urldate = {2026-05-22},

journal = {Telematics and Informatics},

volume = {107},

pages = {102417},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{lupton_you_2026,

title = {‘You can’t put the cat back in the bag once it's out’: Australians’ understandings, practices and imaginaries concerning generative AI},

author = {Deborah Lupton and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris},

url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/20539517261442430},

doi = {10.1177/20539517261442430},

issn = {2053-9517, 2053-9517},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-06-01},

urldate = {2026-04-20},

journal = {Big Data \& Society},

volume = {13},

number = {2},

pages = {20539517261442430},

abstract = {Since their introduction in late 2022, generative AI applications have proliferated as Big Tech companies seek to encourage widespread adoption from the public. This article reports on the findings from exploratory qualitative research conducted in mid-2025 with Australian adults about their knowledge, everyday practices and imaginaries related to generative AI. Nearly all participants, regardless of their age, gender, ethnicity or geographical location, had experimented with generative AI applications, and many had incorporated them into their quotidian routines. However, far from being enchanted by these technologies, these Australians saw them as little more than mundane software that was now pervasive and therefore unavoidable. Generative AI was described as offering useful tools or helpers for achieving better efficiency, time-saving, and productivity in accomplishing routine tasks at home and work. Most participants were aware that the tools frequently generated incorrect information, and therefore required checking, but seemed largely untroubled about this. They expressed concerns about the impacts of possibilities of fake information, scams and data privacy issues, and the loss of learning or critical thinking that generative AI use could cause. However, participants also expressed feelings of powerlessness over what they could do to avoid using generative AI in the face of the determination by Big Tech \textendash and in some cases, employers and educational institutions \textendash to promote its use. More profound negative impacts were mostly recounted as abstract or as potential problems in a future world if generative AI development by Big Tech was allowed to progress unchecked.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{lupton_revisiting_2026,

title = {Revisiting critical digital health studies in the age of generative AI: Research in textitHealth and beyond},

author = {Deborah Lupton},

url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13634593261451272},

doi = {10.1177/13634593261451272},

issn = {1363-4593, 1461-7196},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-05-01},

urldate = {2026-06-04},

journal = {Health: An Interdisciplinary Journal for the Social Study of Health, Illness and Medicine},

pages = {13634593261451272},

abstract = {This review article for 

 Health 

 ’s 30th anniversary special issue provides an update on an article I contributed for the 20th anniversary of 

 Health 

 in 2016 which outlined how the sub-field of critical digital health studies has been explored in the journal. The current review article is in two parts. It begins with an overview of digital health research published in 

 Health 

 in the decade since the first review was published, reflecting on the methods and conceptual approaches that have been used over the past 10 years to engage with this topic. The second part goes on to consider how critical digital health studies might address the latest ‘big thing’ in digital health: generative AI applications. Some bold claims have been made about the benefits that generative AI models are supposed to offer patients and healthcare providers, but their impacts have not yet been fully evaluated from a critical digital health perspective. The article ends by emphasising the importance of acknowledging and identifying how the introduction of generative AI applications into medicine and health care can harm humans and the ecosystems of which they are part. Critical digital health studies should therefore expand its focus beyond its current human-centric preoccupations. As an interdisciplinary social research journal from its inception, 

 Health 

 is well-placed to offer a home for such critical analyses.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{lupton_generative_2026,

title = {Generative AI's Impacts on the Environment: What Can Critical Humanities Scholarship Offer Sociological Inquiry?},

author = {Deborah Lupton},

url = {https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.70195},

doi = {10.1111/soc4.70195},

issn = {1751-9020, 1751-9020},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-05-01},

urldate = {2026-06-04},

journal = {Sociology Compass},

volume = {20},

number = {5},

pages = {e70195},

abstract = {ABSTRACT 

 In recent years, there has been a rapid and massive expansion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies and infrastructures. Big AI Tech corporations are vigorously marketing these services in the pursuit of profit, despite their devastating impacts on the environment. A body of sociological inquiry into generative AI technologies is beginning to develop, but most of this research is human‐centric, with few studies focusing specifically on their ecological costs. To meet this gap, this review's aims are threefold: (i) to advance a more‐than‐human theoretical perspective in sociological analyses of generative AI's impacts on the natural world; (ii) to introduce the body of literature in the humanities that has already adopted this critical approach; and (iii) to thereby demonstrate the importance of this scholarship in expanding and deepening sociological inquiry into this topic. Insights from more‐than‐human theory, the digital environmental humanities, critical AI, data and data centre studies, and creative arts‐based work are discussed. This scholarship emphasises the importance of continued interdisciplinary social critique and creative inquiry into the harms posed to the natural world\textemdashand by extension, to humans\textemdashby generative AI development and use.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{thomas_expecting_2026,

title = {Expecting Humans, Encountering Machines: An Expectancy Violations Theory Approach to Generative AI in Journalism},

author = {Ryan J. Thomas and T. J. Thomson and Hannes Cools and Rebecca Venema and Oscar Toohey and Caroline Gardam and Edina Strikovic and Michelle Riedlinger and Jean Burgess},

url = {https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1461670X.2026.2680642},

doi = {10.1080/1461670X.2026.2680642},

issn = {1461-670X, 1469-9699},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-05-01},

urldate = {2026-06-04},

journal = {Journalism Studies},

pages = {1\textendash20},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{obeid_mobile_2026,

title = {The Mobile Observation of Advertising Toolkit: A Tool for Understanding Ephemeral and Sequenced Social Media Data},

author = {Abdul Obeid and Daniel Angus and Dang Khuong Tran and Lauren Hayden and Nicholas Carah and Khanh Luong and Giselle Newton},

url = {https://www.aup-online.com/content/journals/10.5117/CCR2026.1.9.OBEI},

doi = {10.5117/CCR2026.1.9.OBEI},

issn = {2665-9085},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-05-01},

urldate = {2026-05-26},

journal = {Computational Communication Research},

volume = {9},

number = {1},

pages = {1\textendash15},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{lupton_just_2026-1,

title = {“Just One Prompt Is Enough to Kill a Tree”: Knowledge and Attitudes Concerning the Environmental Impacts of Generative AI Among Australians},

author = {Deborah Lupton and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris},

url = {https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17524032.2026.2673346},

doi = {10.1080/17524032.2026.2673346},

issn = {1752-4032, 1752-4040},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-05-01},

urldate = {2026-05-22},

journal = {Environmental Communication},

pages = {1\textendash17},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{lupton_just_2026,

title = {“Just One Prompt Is Enough to Kill a Tree”: Knowledge and Attitudes Concerning the Environmental Impacts of Generative AI Among Australians},

author = {Deborah Lupton and Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris},

url = {https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/17524032.2026.2673346},

doi = {10.1080/17524032.2026.2673346},

issn = {1752-4032, 1752-4040},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-05-01},

urldate = {2026-05-25},

journal = {Environmental Communication},

pages = {1\textendash17},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{weinbrand_framing_2026,

title = {Framing the future of search: A discourse analysis of Google’s AI Overviews},

author = {Shir Weinbrand and Ashwin Nagappa and Daniel Angus},

url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17504813261447684},

doi = {10.1177/17504813261447684},

issn = {1750-4813, 1750-4821},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-05-01},

urldate = {2026-05-20},

journal = {Discourse \& Communication},

pages = {17504813261447684},

abstract = {This study investigates how Google’s AI Overviews (AIOs) \textendash a major shift in the search engine landscape \textendash are discursively framed by three key actors: Google, tech journalists, and Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) marketers. Drawing on platform studies and discourse theory, we combine Leximancer concept mapping with Critical Discourse Analysis to examine how these stakeholders construct, legitimise, and contest the meaning of AIOs across a broad corpus of grey literature, media coverage, and corporate blogs. Our findings reveal four dominant thematic frames: Generative AI Technologies and AI-Platform Wars, Reconfiguring Search: Let Google Do the Searching for You, Commercial Implications of AIOs, and AI Overviews \textendash Utopia versus Dystopia. While Google frames AIOs as seamless innovations that enhance the user experience, journalists highlight issues of misinformation and epistemic opacity, and SEO marketers focus on the economic and strategic disruptions to visibility and discoverability. Crucially, our analysis underscores the absence of the user’s voice and a lack of attention to democratic, societal and environmental implications of AI-generated summaries. By analysing the discourse surrounding AIOs, this paper demonstrates that AIOs are not merely a new feature, but rather part of a broader shift in platform power and control over online knowledge. We argue that AIOs represent a key moment in the transformation of search, reshaping how trust, authority, and visibility are defined and challenged in the age of AI.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{dewi_vernacular_2026,

title = {Vernacular infrastructuring: Rethinking linguistic agency of minority‐language speakers in multilingual digital environment},

author = {Udiana Puspa Dewi},

url = {https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jola.70038},

doi = {10.1111/jola.70038},

issn = {1055-1360, 1548-1395},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-05-01},

urldate = {2026-01-14},

journal = {Journal of Linguistic Anthropology},

volume = {36},

number = {1},

pages = {e70038},

abstract = {Abstract 

 This article introduces the concept of vernacular infrastructuring to examine how speakers of minoritized languages navigate multilingual digital environments. Building on notion of vernacular creativity and extending insights from linguistic anthropology, I conceptualize infrastructuring as the everyday negotiation of institutional norms, platform logics, and user practices that structure linguistic visibility. Drawing on the case of 

 Nanti Kita Sambat tentang Hari Ini 

 (NKSTHI), a popular Instagram and X account that reimagines the Javanese speech genre 

 sambat 

 (“to complain”), I show how users creatively mobilize Javanese to perform cultural intimacy while tactically responding to algorithmic imaginaries. I argue that vernacular infrastructuring operates through three entangled layers: institutional infrastructures (historical hierarchies of language policy and media), perceived platform infrastructures (folk theories and algorithmic imaginaries), and user practices (stylization, code‐mixing, and affective design). Through this layered analysis, the paper demonstrates that vernacular practices are not merely expressive but infrastructurally strategic forms of discursive value work, referring to the speakers' reflexivity to assign and contest linguistic value. By foregrounding the agentive tactics of minoritized users, vernacular infrastructuring contributes to ongoing debates in linguistic anthropology on language, media, and infrastructure, showing how digital platforms actively participate in the revaluation of linguistic diversity. 

 , 

 Abstrak 

 Artikel menika ngenalaken teori “praktik infrastruktur vernakular” kagem mahami cara penutur basa minoritas menavigasi lingkungan digital multibahasa. Kanthi dasar gagasan bab kreativitas vernakular lan nambah kawruh saking linguistik antropologi, kula njabaraken konsep “infrastruktur” minangka negosiasi norma kelembagaan, logika platform, lan praktik panganggenan platform digital ingkang mbentuk visibilitas linguistik. Sangking kasus Nanti Kita Sambat Tentang Hari Ini (NKSTHI), akun instagram lan X babagan “sambat”, kula nedahi pangangge kaliyan mobilisasi kreatif basa jawi kangge nampilaken keintiman budaya merespon imajinasi algoritmik. Kula nggadahi pemanggih menawi infrastruktur vernakular kedah nglangkungi tigang lapisan kekait: infrastruktur kelembagaan (hierarki historis kebijakan basa lan media), infrastruktur platform ingkang dipersepsikan (teori rakyat lan imajinasi algoritmik), lan praktik pangangge basa (stilisasi, campur kode, lan desain afektif). Liwat analisis berlapis puniki, kula nunjukaken menawi praktik vernakular sanes naming ekspresif, ananging bentuk‐bentuk strategis infrastruktural saking nilai sosial ingkang gadhah sipat diskursif, ingkang ngrujuk ing refleksivitas penutur lebet netepaken lan memperdebatkan nilai sosial basa. Kanthi ngutamaaken taktik agensi pengguna basa minoritas, teori infrastruktur vernakular gadhahi kontribusi ing perdebatan teori lebeting bidang linguistik antropologi bab basa, media, lan infrastruktur, nedahaken kados pundi platform digital tumut gadhahi peran lebet revaluasi karagaman basa ing jagad digital.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{kuai_generative_2026,

title = {Generative AI governance: from regulatory design to institutional reordering},

author = {Joanne Kuai and Fabian Ferrari},

url = {https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/1369118X.2026.2639565},

doi = {10.1080/1369118X.2026.2639565},

issn = {1369-118X, 1468-4462},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-04-01},

urldate = {2026-05-25},

journal = {Information, Communication \& Society},

volume = {29},

number = {6},

pages = {1803\textendash1812},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{matich_authenticity_2026,

title = {Authenticity controversies: Witness media and generative AI imagery},

author = {Phoebe Matich and Michael Richardson and Jean Burgess},

url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/01634437261442039},

doi = {10.1177/01634437261442039},

issn = {0163-4437, 1460-3675},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-04-01},

urldate = {2026-05-22},

journal = {Media, Culture \& Society},

pages = {01634437261442039},

abstract = {This article explores how AI-generated content reconfigures struggles over authenticity in witness media. Media witnessing is traditionally understood as a relational field of practice involving the performance through media of testimony to oppression and violence, where the testimony must both be genuine and carry democratic weight. As AI-generated content circulates in and around global conflicts, concern deepens about misinformation, given AIGC’s perceived lack of an “indexical” relationship to reality. This article acknowledges but goes beyond the misinformation frame, instead focusing on two recent cases to show how multimodal AI may represent human experiences of conflict in nuanced and ambivalent ways, unsettling contemporary assumptions about media witnessing and the mechanisms through which it happens. We present a comparative analysis of two controversies around AI-generated content that foreground authenticity debates, informed by STS, witnessing and journalism studies research. These controversies demonstrate that, by subordinating indexicality to iconic or analogical representation, AI-generated content resists established witnessing norms, yielding questions about media functions, ethics, and power relations.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{thomson_news_2026,

title = {News audiences’ acceptance of generative artificial intelligence in journalism: a use case study across three domains},

author = {T. J. Thomson and Ryan J. Thomas and Hannes Cools and Rachael Anderson and Rebecca Venema and Oscar Toohey and Caroline Gardam and Edina Strikovic and Michelle Riedlinger and Jean Burgess},

url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1329878X261441933},

doi = {10.1177/1329878X261441933},

issn = {1329-878X, 2200-467X},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-04-01},

urldate = {2026-04-27},

journal = {Media International Australia},

pages = {1329878X261441933},

abstract = {News audiences’ acceptance of generative AI (GenAI) in journalism is shaped by their knowledge of (or direct experience with) what AI is, what it can do, and what implications its use has. Acknowledging this, the present study draws on the technology acceptance model to first explore what a sample of news audiences in two countries knows about GenAI and what their experiences, if any, with it have been to date. Next, it explores this sample's acceptance of use cases that demonstrate how AI is \textendash or could be \textendash used in journalism. It does this by using in-depth interviews with 60 participants to introduce or re-introduce 23 use cases to them and ask them how accepting they are of journalists using each. Acceptance depended on how AI was used, how transparent the use was, whether the use impacted accuracy, and whether legal and other ethical considerations were appropriately attended to.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{giami_sexual_2026,

title = {Sexual Justice and the Future of Sexual Rights: A Call to Action},

author = {Alain Giami and Esther Corona and Lisa Welsh and Ricardo Hernandez Forcada and Zahra Stardust and Md. Sharful Islam Khan and Magaly Pirotte and Richard G. Parker and Shereen El Feki and Amaranta G\'{o}mez Regalado and Denise Medico and Agata Loewe Kurilla and Luis Perelman and Ren\'{e} De Klerk and Erick Janssen and Pedro Nobre and Elna Rudolph},

url = {https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/19317611.2026.2655809},

doi = {10.1080/19317611.2026.2655809},

issn = {1931-7611, 1931-762X},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-04-01},

urldate = {2026-04-28},

journal = {International Journal of Sexual Health},

pages = {1\textendash22},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{whelan-shamy_simulation_2026,

title = {Simulation and the epistemology of transformer models: operational similarity through sustained difference},

author = {Daniel Whelan-Shamy},

url = {https://link.springer.com/10.1007/s00146-026-03004-x},

doi = {10.1007/s00146-026-03004-x},

issn = {0951-5666, 1435-5655},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-04-01},

urldate = {2026-04-22},

journal = {AI \& SOCIETY},

abstract = {Abstract 

 Extending simulation beyond its usual semiotic application, this article steps through the process by which Large Language Models (LLMs) reproduce similarity, to argue that simulation produces a “doubling” effect: an operational similarity sustained through difference. Accordingly, this article draws on literary theory to “read” transformer models with the intent of understanding how they operate as an infrastructure for the production of linguistic similarity. It is argued that neural networks enact an epistemology of exchange in which tokenisation, vectorisation, and self-attention render language commensurable, thereby producing an operational similarity that manifests differently in each natural language response generated. The political and epistemic implications of doubling are thereafter discussed with reference to the relationship between simulation, models and subjectivity.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{floreani_platforming_2026,

title = {Platforming landlords: A critical trend analysis of rental housing technology in Australia and beyond},

author = {Samantha Floreani and Jathan Sadowski},

url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/02637758261441138},

doi = {10.1177/02637758261441138},

issn = {0263-7758, 1472-3433},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-04-01},

urldate = {2026-04-15},

journal = {Environment and Planning D: Society and Space},

pages = {02637758261441138},

abstract = {This article advances a critical analysis of digital technologies in rental housing by drawing out five trends in the Australian ‘RentTech’ market and placing them in direct relation with shared political-economic imperatives that transcend borders and underpins the development of rental technologies around the world. By situating Australian examples within a wider context, we draw connections across seemingly disparate dynamics. We show how service integration across the value chain (Trend 1) leverages rentier models to accumulate data rents (Trend 2), which facilitates value extraction from rental assets (Trend 3) and supports risk management imperatives through moral evaluation of renters (Trend 4), all of which are in service of consolidation in the private rental market (Trend 5). Together, these interlocking dynamics describe how RentTech is both 

 responding 

 to housing financialisation and shared logics of property and data assetisation, while also actively 

 shaping 

 its future direction. Our aim is to analyse patterns that exist within and across markets for RentTech to better understand how this sector is developing in different global and national contexts. We conclude by arguing that there are key points of convergence between international markets and shared imperatives that inform the current state and trajectory of technologies in rental housing.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{binns_media-materialist_2026,

title = {A media-materialist method for interpreting generative AI images},

author = {Daniel Binns},

url = {https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/13548565261441949},

doi = {10.1177/13548565261441949},

issn = {1354-8565, 1748-7382},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-04-01},

urldate = {2026-05-07},

journal = {Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies},

pages = {13548565261441949},

abstract = {This article proposes a four-layer media-materialist method for interpreting AI-generated images as cultural-computational artefacts that bear archaeologically readable traces of their production conditions. Drawing on media materialism’s focus on technological processes rather than content alone, the method analyses dataset (training materials), model (computational processing), interface (user mediation), and prompt (linguistic inscription) as interdependent layers that encode distinct biases and constraints into visual outputs. Through detailed analysis of two major training datasets \textendash the human-curated Wikipedia-based Image-Text Dataset and the algorithmically scored LAION-Aesthetics \textendash and sample image analyses, the method reveals how cultural assumptions become statistically compressed into archetypal arrangements. Abstract prompts like ‘intellectual rigor’ materialise through embedded echoes of academic masculinity, complete with books, globes, and contemplative poses, while platform interfaces create aesthetic path dependencies that systematically shape creative possibilities. The method works both diagnostically (with known metadata) and archaeologically (when original prompts are unknown), demonstrating how visual traces can be read backwards to understand the infrastructural pressures that shaped an image’s generation. This media-materialist approach treats AI images as both medium and artefact, revealing how centuries of visual culture become probabilistically recombined through computational inference. The framework exposes how training data biases, model architectures, interface designs, and prompt conventions collaborate to produce images that appear spontaneous but are actually shaped by layered technological and cultural constraints. Rather than dismissing AI outputs as meaningless ‘slop’ or celebrating them as creative breakthroughs, the method provides systematic tools for reading these synthetic images as cultural documents that encode the material conditions of algorithmic production, offering essential literacy for navigating an increasingly synthetic media landscape.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{horst_making_2026,

title = {The making of style: On the entanglement of algorithms and aesthetics},

author = {Heather A. Horst},

url = {https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/taja.70063},

doi = {10.1111/taja.70063},

issn = {1035-8811, 1757-6547},

year  = {2026},

date = {2026-03-01},

urldate = {2026-05-25},

journal = {The Australian Journal of Anthropology},

pages = {taja.70063},

abstract = {Abstract 

 The global fashion industry is changing with the integration of digital technologies. Designers now employ digital design software, tools and technology to develop innovative designs, purchase fabrics and materials and market their new designs. Digital media and technology have also contributed to the growth of influencers and personal stylists who use social media and apps to offer reviews and advice, including personal devices that leverage machine learning and algorithmic recommendation systems. This article brings together design anthropology and digital anthropology to understand the ways in which algorithms are increasingly entangled with notions of aesthetics and style. Comparing the ways in which style is created through ‘feeding’ and ‘reading’ the algorithm, the article draws upon Seaver’s notion of algorithmic cultures to explore two examples of the ways algorithms are made meaningful in people’s lives. The first example was carried out with professional women who experimented with a commercially available personal stylist device that provides algorithm‐based style recommendations. The second case study turns to the ways different fashion designers use and interpret social media algorithms to develop brands locally in Fiji and globally. By exploring the ways in which fashion and style‐oriented algorithms are used by different individuals and communities across the fashion value chain, the article examines how algorithmic technologies become enlivened as different people act, engage and interact with them and change over time.},

keywords = {},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}