Magdalena Kania-Lundholm

Dalarna University · School of Culture and Society

Older ICT non-users are often considered vulnerable and potentially socially and digitally excluded group. More recently age-based digital divides have been questioned by scholars aiming to provide a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between old age and technology non-use. Following this path, this article takes the experiences of bein...

When people distrust media systems, one response is to disconnect. This emergent theme within internet research encompasses technologies, practices, discourses, and politics of disconnection. Furthering these discussions, this panel draws together four investigations into technologies and practices of digital disconnection. Each paper interrogates...

In this article, we examine how media policy changes aid de-democratisation in Poland. Unfolding the logic underpinning the new politics of media regulations, this article argues that media policy paints a nuanced picture of democratic backsliding. Our Foucault-inspired discourse analysis of media policy archive focuses on the rise of illiberal tre...

The goal of this chapter is to examine the phenomenon of celebrity death and mourning as performed in the context of social media. It focuses on how commercial actors such as global brands make use of famous persons’ deaths in what becomes commodification of death through the process of digital mourning labor. This chapter discusses how often mutua...

Critical Internet and media scholarship has primarily focused on contributing to theoretical debates within the field of media and communications but few empirical studies have applied this theoretical approach. This article uses data on older active ICT users’ understandings of digitisation. It draws inspiration from Boltanski’s pragmatist sociolo...

The international relations concept of soft power has been adopted in political and marketing communication studies to bridge the ties between foreign policy and its communicative resources (Potter, 2008; Surowiec, 2012). This chapter unfolds the links between statecraft in Poland and a relatively new resource of soft power, namely nation branding....

Research on older people’s ICT usage tends to focus on either the ways in which they go about learning to use these technologies or the impact that ICTs have on their lives. This research seems, in other words, to take for granted that older people are ‘digital immigrants’ as the digital divide debate proposed. Research that specifically looks at t...

This article analyses the debate on ‘new patriotism’ in a Polish online discussion forum. We study the ways in which national identity is constructed in this setting. Digital communication contributes further to expanding discourse on national identities beyond nation-state borders. We analyse close to 6000 posts from a large Polish Internet discus...

Although research into older people's internet usage patterns is rapidly growing, their understandings of digital technologies, particularly in relation to how these are informed by their understandings of aging and old age, remain unexplored. This is the case because research on older active ICT users tends to regard old age as an empirically inte...

In order to describe today’s socioeconomic condition, particularly in the West, scholars often refer to formulations such as ‘the neoliberal era’ (Hall & Lamont, 2013) or the ‘market times’ (Hochschild, 2012). The concepts of neoliberalism or neoliberal globalization are employed to point out the new logics of social life, where the language of the...

One among the most prominent current debates regarding digitalization and social inequality is the one pertaining to the “digital divide”. Research shows that this divide is a social rather than technologically driven phenomenon since socio-economic inequalities are the main determinants of it. Since the internet and new technologies are increasing...

This article provides an overview of the growing body of research pertaining to different forms of mediated nationhood. In particular, it focuses on the relatively recent trend toward increasing articulations of national identity with the language of consumerism and neoliberal market ideology. It argues that the process is twofold; on the one hand...