The special issue on Authortarianism in the Digital Age is now live (eds. @kylzjarrett.bsky.social @robkitchin.bsky.social @steelecat717.bsky.social and Jing Hiah). It is comprised of 48 commentaries from around the world exploring how the digital is implicated in creeping authoritarianism.
I'm hiring! PhD position available at @everydaymedialab.bsky.social , starting in October and focusing on knowledge-related social media use. If you're at #ica25, feel free to talk to me at the opening reception or later. Or share the info with your master students www.psychjob.eu/de/job/resea...
This paper examines a rapidly expanding human–nonhuman digital intimacy. We explore how women players form deep affective attachments with virtual male characters in women-oriented otome games in their everyday life💫 A core contribution is our proposal of the concept “digital intimacy literacies.”
We often dismiss AI hallucinations as mere technical failures or epistemic risks. In this article,I propose a different perspective: these generative anomalies act as hermeneutic knots: sites where algorithmic noise and human agency entangle to produce new modes of meaning-making
🔹I argue for sympoietic creativity:a collaborative practice where humans curate machine stochasticity rather than simply commanding a tool
This work challenges us to harness AI's disruptive potential for posthuman futures while maintaining strict ethical vigilance.
🆕Publication Arrived!!! Are AI hallucinations bugs to be fixed, or the start of a new kind of creativity? My new paper, "Spectral imaginings and sympoietic creativity," explores how we might move beyond binary framings of AI errors. Check it out here: doi.org/10.1177/2053...
🔹 The Fluency Trade-off: I analyze why models like DeepSeek-R1 (with a higher hallucination rate) differ from factual optimizers like ChatGPT-o1. The paper examines how "Chain-of-Thought" reasoning enhances creativity but inherently amplifies "spectral" outputs.
In "A plea for promiscuous creativity", Jeroen de Kloet employs the notion of promiscuity to emphasise creativity’s collaborative relationality and move beyond its anthropocentric underpinnings. Read it here: journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10....
📚 Book Announcement
Our edited volume Global South Creator Cultures is coming soon from @routledgebooks.bsky.social - pre-order on 24 November, out on 15 December 2025! 🎉 @mediaindustries.bsky.social
We use the term “digital intimacy literacies” to describe the set of socio-technical, affective, sensory, and narrative competencies through which women players learn to interpret, negotiate, and cultivate intimate relationships in digital environments.
✨Thrilled to share our new article published in Information, Communication & Society: “Digital literacies of intimacy: women’s engagement and learning in otome video games”！！！ 🥳 💥 🎉
Open access link: doi.org/10.1080/1369...
🌏 Join the Transcultural Digital Intimacies Research Network (TransDI)!
How is intimacy changing in our hyper-connected world?
From AI companions and digital platforms to gaming and embodied technologies, digital media are reshaping how we connect, care, and desire across cultures.
The TransDI critically explores how technologies blur boundaries between online/offline lives and human/non-human connections.We bring together global researchers to examine the shifting landscapes of connection, affect, and sociality in digital cultures.🥳🥳🥳
Chaired by Dr Liang Ge (University of Manchester) and Dr Tingting Hu (University of Liverpool), TransDI is expanding its community of scholars, artists, and practitioners interested in digital intimacies, transcultural communication, and mediated relationships. We now have over 90 members worldwide❤️
The TransDI critically explores how technologies blur boundaries between online/offline lives and human/non-human connections.We bring together global researchers to examine the shifting landscapes of connection, affect, and sociality in digital cultures.🥳🥳🥳
🌏 Join the Transcultural Digital Intimacies Research Network (TransDI)!
How is intimacy changing in our hyper-connected world?
From AI companions and digital platforms to gaming and embodied technologies, digital media are reshaping how we connect, care, and desire across cultures.
💌 Join and Subscribe to our newsletter to stay updated on upcoming events, collaborations, and opportunities:
👉 www.liangge.blog/transdi-subs...
Let’s explore together how intimacy, technology, and culture intersect in today’s digital world.
Folks, please check out Liang's new mini documentary with the ARD German Media: In Love with An AI youtu.be/tIgXRkEPlZ8?...
Big congrats! Folks! Do check this out for the fascinating documentary on falling in love with AI and women video game players! 🥳🥰🤩!!!
It's Open Access! Please do have a look if you are interested in women and (women-oriented) video games and the very datafication process of digital intimacies!
Check out Tingting and Liang's New Pub from their Posthuman Digital Intimacies project! This time, it's about otome games and the datafication of digital intimacies: Datafication of Digital Intimacy: The Dual Logic of Empowerment and Commodification. Games and Culture. doi.org/10.1177/1555...
We argue for examining how media technologies and transnational cultural flows across diverse Asian contexts shape, circulate and contest queernesses and Asian-nesses, offering rich ground for epistemological and methodological innovation❤️
✨New Pub Day! Since our Queer Asia as Method roundtable in 2021, our special issue Queer Asia as Method has now been published online first by Media Culture & Society!
Our editorial piece is here: doi.org/10.1177/0163...
❤️Our Queer Asia as Method framework challenges the Euro-American dominance often found within queer studies by centring the intricate, fluid intersections of ‘queernesses’ and ‘Asias’
I'll make a thread about danmei censorship in China, shall I? Because I've been dropping articles about this on-and-off for months now, so I might as well repeat or consolidate some of that here.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
I have been interviewed by BBC News concerning the recent Haitang Incident: after last year’s detention of over 50 women danmei writers who produce explicit male-male romances and erotica in China, more women writers have been summoned this spring for www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...
"Communicative #AI" @politybooks.bsky.social
My copy of the book that was recently co-authored with @coeckelbergh.bsky.social finally showed up in today's post.
www.politybooks.com/bookdetail?b...
🎉 Announcing a new #ArtsBasedResearch toolkit!
Co-created by researchers @ucl.ac.uk & Wits University, it explores how creativity & the arts empower underserved communities.
A practical guide for researchers & practitioners.
📅 Coming 26 Jun.
@humeraiqbal.bsky.social @uclpophealthsci.bsky.social
The Haitang Incident of 2024 exposed the precariousness of danmei (boys’ love) culture and its creators in China under the dual pressures of state surveillance and platform capitalism. I critically interrogate the Chinese danmei cultural ecology through ugliness – not as a state-imposed stigma but as a critical lens and a generative conceptual tool. Departing from previous scholarship’s binary framings of danmei as either resistance or escapism, ugliness reveals danmei as a site of struggles, where censorship, commercialisation and danmei creators and fans as affective communities entangle in unstable yet persistent ways. I interrogate the precarious position of Haitang Literature City authors, and reveal the ugly convergence of digital governance and economic exploitation. Furthermore, I explore the fragmentation of trust within the danmei community, where fear, survival and mistrust complicate solidarity. Centring ugliness as a productive analytic can move beyond the limitations of binary resistance narratives to better account for danmei culture’s messiness, contradictions and ambivalences.
(if you want to know more about the 2024 arrests, the rather brilliant scholar @liangge11.bsky.social, who teaches at UCL, published an article in March in EJCS: "The Haitang Incident 2024 and the ugliness of danmei culture/industry"—it's open access and they are VERY astute) doi.org/10.1177/1367...
