New Media & Society

This editorial investigates the epistemic and media-theoretical significance of digital twinning as a decision-making practice. Digital twins purport to calculate futures based on sensor data in conjunction with generative AI, cloud computing, and Internet-of-things architectures; they shape institutional decisions and are used to make such decisions accountable. To illustrate this, examples from the logistics, transportation, and military sectors are contrasted to earlier simulations and described as “phenomenotechniques.” We argue that digital twins are recent expressions of a technocratic paradigm characterized by the imperative to make everything worldly “count,” datafying and modeling it within digital environments in real time for future predictions. Digital twins are thus performative agents in a network of feedback loops between humans, machines, environments, and algorithms. This article concludes with an overview of the special issue, placing digital twins in the phenomenological context of media that are seamlessly and simultaneously logistical, spatial, and transformative.

Urban digital twins (UDTs) represent a growing trend in urban governance, offering the promise of enhanced prediction, decision-making, and public participation. Adopting a constructivist perspective toward UDTs, this article contributes to the emerging literature on “twinning”: the making of UDTs, which produces an interrelation between tangible reality and its digital representation in order to enable new forms of knowledge and urban governance. Through a comparative analysis of UDT projects in Boston, Namur, and Munich, we explore how digital representations of cities are co-produced with ideas about desirable governance. Our locally situated perspective highlights the interrelations of twinning in three dimensions: representation, epistemic promise, and ideas of desirable urban governance. The analysis provides crucial insights into the role of digital technologies in shaping urban futures, offering a critical reading of the current trend of UDTs in urban governance, and is attentive to its social and political implications.

Originating in the field of manufacturing, the Digital Twin (DT) concept is now being applied across a range of application domains, from personal healthcare to whole Earth observation. Despite enthusiasm for DTs, uncertainties have arisen concerning their lack of definition and technical specificity. This paper reassesses the concept with particular consideration for its application to cities in the form of Urban Digital Twins (UDTs). Rather than identifying DTs with a particular set of technologies, we instead understand them as embodying a core ‘conceptual model’ describing a mechanism for control based on the generation and feedback of information, elsewhere characterised as a ‘steering representation’. By aligning their use with more participatory forms of governance involving the ‘commoning’ of city information, we argue that UDTs might then provide powerful new means for participation in urban planning and governance through the support they provide for communication, collective sensemaking and shared oversight.

Within the context of three-dimensional simulations of urban space and their variables within, digital twin technologies (DTs) are touted as making urban governance and planning effective, calculable, evidence-based while reducing costs and complexity. We conducted 3 years of in-depth fieldwork on the application of DTs for urban governance in the Netherlands. Our empirical and critical analysis shows that DTs are not characterized by a novel quality of technological promise, but rather conform to prevalent narratives wherein technologies are marketed and advertised through specific imaginaries. Deconstructing the sociotechnical imaginaries through empirical evidence of real uses cases highlights the gap between the promise of the digital twin narratives and the emerging responses and practices in government. Therefore, through deconstruction, we call for practical, realistic, and responsible uses of DTs for urban governance and provide preliminary regulatory steps.

Digital twins—virtual representations tied to material objects, processes, or environments via two-way flows of information—are hyped as the backbone of a new industrial revolution. We argue that digital twins propose and pursue a logistical mode of prediction that seeks to operationalize simulated futures and in doing so subordinate human labor, decision-making, and governance to computational systems tied to material environments. Even when digital twins fail to work or maintain frictions in underlying systems, their value is tightly bound to the question of who can own, control, coordinate, and capitalize on the logistical architectures of data and computation that anticipate as-yet unrealized returns from future probabilities. Following a genealogical examination of twinning techniques, the article examines Alibaba’s City Brain platform in Xiong’an, China, and the predictive capabilities of Palantir’s Foundry platform to show how digital twins seek the preemptive capture of futures in the present.

The EU’s Digital Twin of the Ocean (DTO) is presented as a coherent, high-resolution, multi-dimensional, multi-variable and near real-time representation of the ocean that integrates new data sources with advanced modeling, artificial intelligence and high-performance computing. The two-way exchange of information between marine ecosystems and the digital twin is intended to create a feedback loop between the digital and physical realms that is emblematic of environing media. The EU’s vision is that the DTO will empower citizens, inform politicians, support a blue economy, and improve protection of the marine environment. The sociotechnical imaginary of the DTO presents a narrative that a balance between sustainable exploitation and conservation can be had through the use of sophisticated digital technology. But what is at stake in this technocratic control over the world ocean, and where does it come from? Whose interest will digital twins ultimately serve? Understood in its historical and environmental context, the DTO caters to the aims of sustainable development, but risks veiling continued unsustainable development and growth under the guise of new digital technologies. We use the theoretical lens of environing media and sociotechnical imaginaries to critically unpack this narrative and its historical contingencies, and show how difficult goal conflicts are systematically glossed over through a veil of datafication and technological development.

This article focuses on the role of computational fluid dynamics (CFDs) in architectural and design software. Among other uses, CFDs concern the modeling and simulation of wind that this article approaches as an example of elemental media and as a computationally managed entity implemented into design of environments including different kinds of digital twin platforms. Thus, the article argues that wind and other fluids are moved as software and data in the logistical circuit that underpins design and digital twinning. However, this take on logistics of wind emerges at the back of a longer history of visual cultures of wind—including such takes as Harun Farocki’s Parallel video essay on computer graphics and software modeling of elemental media—while focusing more on the past decades of software plug-ins as well as game engines. Digital twinning is contextualized in broader software cultures and logistics of environmental data.

The threat of climate change to nation-states like Tuvalu has led to a novel attempt at digital preservation through virtual reproduction. Tuvalu’s Future Now Project aims to create a ‘digital nation’ in the metaverse. This article critically analyses this state-scale digital twinning from two theoretical lenses. First, drawing on deep ecology, it argues the virtual reproduction substitutes the intrinsic value of Tuvalu’s landscape and culture with instrumental value optimised for digital capitalism’s extractive logic. Second, building on concepts from Benjamin and Baudrillard, it contends that digital twinning subverts the cultural symbolic order through semiotic transformation, rendering the ‘digital nation’ a hyperreal imitation stripped of aura. Rather than preserving sovereignty over disappeared territory, the metaverse reproduction reimagines the state itself as a simulation. While responding to the severe threat of global warming, the project raises critical questions about the politics and value of virtual reproduction.

This article formulates digital twins as planetary media—an assemblage of human and nonhuman elements that emerges from planetary-scale computation to observe and predict changes in the Earth’s human, geophysical, and socioeconomic spheres. It aims to revise Gabrys’ original concept of planetary media by revealing the collapse of the globe (as capitalist and human-centered) and planet (as geological and ecological) in digital twins applied to both Earth System Science and socioeconomic domains. Their collapse is also evident in scientific papers related to EU’s Destination Earth and China’s Digital Earth, policy reports on EU’s green/digital transition and China’s Sustainable Development Goals (SDG), and documents on the smart cities in both regions. All of these share optimization and resilience as not only digital twins’ technical requirements but also key values for establishing them as sociotechnical imaginaries of transforming the Earth’s human activities and natural environments in the service of its sustainable future.

NASA scientists have claimed that the rescue of the stricken Apollo 13 spacecraft in 1970 created the first digital twin system. In this article, I examine NASA’s narrative, which is gathering consensus as the origin story of digital twin technologies, with two main points of focus. First, through an examination of the dynamics of control and error, I scrutinise the ways in which the NASA ethos and worldview may be embedded within contemporary uses of digital twin technologies. Second, through an analysis of two subsequent NASA missions and the 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey, I frame digital twin technologies as ‘space media’ which, Gál et al. claim, can ‘reorient our view [. . .] to “off-Earth” perspectives’. This approach reveals the potential of digital twins to propagate imaginaries beyond the managerial systems of control that constitute their dominant contemporary usages.

This essay explores the changing form of the digital twin as a political technology in the age of deep learning and generative artificial intelligence (AI). It situates the digital twin as a distinctive contemporary form of simulation and examines how it is making up people, things, scenes and their interactions in novel ways: the drawing in of unstructured datastreams and their experimental recombining and modification. Although the digital twin is often represented as a digital copy or replica of the physical world, it actually departs radically from a mimetic copy; advancing a mode of twinning that classifies, extracts and divides. The essay addresses digital twinning as an emerging form of knowledge and action in the world. It proposes three distinctive logics of the contemporary politics of digital twins: intervention, prediction and action. Each of these aspects is discussed through the situated digital twin domains of the factory, the clinic and the battlefield.

This article considers digital twins and digital twinning practices in relation to the spaces of the factory, city, and the “metaverse.” We draw on the work of urban and new media theorists to argue that digital twins are part of a long history of urban media and computation. Expanding on Walter Benjamin’s notion of phantasmagoria, we argue that the logics of the factory inherent in early digital twins are intensified and expanded in the more recent translation to urban digital twins and spatial media architectures. We identify three frames that articulate the relation of digital twins to cities, the factory, and media-driven phantasmagoria: the topological structuring of the city as a future site of commodification; the production logic that expands from the factory into the urban digital twin; and the phantasmagoric construction of the spaces of the metaverse, which hides complex relations through interactive media spectacles.

Today, few terms are more central to policy, planning, or economics than the term “resilience.” From urban planning to twining the earth systems, we have come to understand systems as constantly in a state of crisis that needs perpetual management. This article traces the rise of resilience as a dominant epistemology and practice in environmental management, logistics, demography, and energy. I will argue that resilience has become the dominant discourse by which time and uncertainty are currently being managed in the wake of post-World War II decolonization, generating new techniques such as digital twinning and generative artificial intelligence (AI). Moreover, resilience has become a new logic making the planet, and its living populations, computationally measurable and representable, and amenable to new forms of technical manipulation and action.

This article examines digital twinning as a media technology and performative practice, focusing on its post-digital ambiguities. To show why and to what extent the concept of spectrality is particularly well suited for discussing the post-digital mediality of twinning, this article proceeds in two steps. First, it reviews research on twin metaphors and the uncanny in cybernetics and digital media. This provides a contextualization of digital twinning within a media theoretical tradition. Second, the figure of the specter is revisited in an interpretation of Derrida’s Specters of Marx that focuses on the aspects of its corporeality, temporality, immateriality, and performativity. As a result, digital twinning is reconceptualized as a performative practice that enables the spectral materialization of many potential behaviors. As such, it destabilizes traditional notions of temporality, participates in the process of commodification and bears responsibility for a democracy to come.

Algorithmic media proliferates. Alongside such proliferation, the familiar doubles of pre-digital daily life – the specters, phantoms, and apparitions found in folklore, novels, film, and music – are maturing into new kinds of fluid and apparently agentic Others. Such Others – data-driven doppelgangers, literally “double-goers” – increasingly co-constitute their primaries across space and time, entangling erstwhile human users into a more-than-human assemblage. Yet such an assemblage is contentious: the promise of double-goers is mired in surveillance capitalism. Despite being so mired, double-goers emerge as aspirational co-inheritors of yesterday’s tomorrows. As such, they are part of the affective conditions into which we – artists formerly known as human – are now thrown. We are tasked with learning to live with our double-goers. By reassembling the doppelganger in relation to algorithmic media, we provide foundations for a playful choreography: a dance with the new double-goer that moves beyond critical and affective revulsion.

Research on news sharing has focused on the societal relevance of news as the core value of traditional journalism or the informational characteristics of viral news on social media. In contrast, this study reinterprets news-sharing behaviors as interpersonal communication of news sharers presenting themselves to their personal networks beyond the distribution of societally important information. Through analyzing survey responses from 463 news sharers and the actual news they shared on social media, results suggest that news sharers consider their relationship with their audience and the personal and audience relevance of news to present their ideal selves and please their audience. By expanding the traditional emphasis on the societal relevance and informational characteristics of news, this study develops a theoretical framework to understand news sharing as interpersonal communication. It also provides future directions to conceptualize issue relevance at different levels and capture changed news-sharing behaviors in the era of networked individualism.

Following the notion that a greater variety of actors can engage in practices of memory work, the aim of our study is to understand how the polyphony of memory evolves in social media networks. We thus conducted an explorative study of accounts for historical figures on Instagram. The accounts were analysed regarding their thematic accentuations, the kind of material employed and presented, the level of professionalism and the social media authenticity they exuded. The result of the study is a typology of accounts for historical personalities on Instagram. We can distinguish between the following six types: virtual exhibition, social media autobiography, artist’s portfolio, inspirational quotes, iconic figure and meme.

Drawing on theories of identity politics and partisan polarization, we explored the politicization of Google Play’s news app reviews—an explicitly non-political domain. Using a mixed-methods approach, Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMNs), combining topic modeling, network analysis, community detection, and theory-driven qualitative reading, we analyzed 759,143 reviews from 2009 to 2022 across 46 news apps. Three themes emerged: Technical, Content Quality, and Political. The political discourse in reviews has intensified over the years, with notable spikes around election periods. Accusations of bias were found to correlate most strongly with lower app ratings. The findings provide alarming empirical evidence for the politicization of non-political spaces, such as the app reviews section on app stores. With identity politics on the rise, this study sheds light on the importance of considering non-political online spaces for the study of political discourse.

Portable laptops, cell phones, touchscreen equipment and other mobile devices are changing the way commercial airplane pilots are handling information used for flying aircraft. Pilot expertise and skill are being transformed by a new approach in which fingertips are replacing traditional hands-on methods of controlling airplanes. Drawing on participatory and interview methods at a UK airbase, this article draws on ethnographic research with commercial pilots and pilot cadets, to trace the refashioning of cell phone media in an aviation context where touch-based computer screens replace traditional airplane technology. Drawing on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology, this article examines how the knowing, sensing and intuition through the hands allows for a particular sort of la prise (grip) which accustoms itself to the emergence of new tactile and human–computer interfaces.

Urban legends form an important part of socio-cultural narratives of shared fears and anxieties, and their presence online has developed similarly. This contribution explores the online urban legend the backrooms and examines its narrative construction offering possible reasons for the popularity and participatory aspect of the backrooms. Appearing on 4chan in May 2019, the backrooms represent an endless liminality. A diegetic analysis of 16 videos produced by Kane Parsons provides a sequential deconstruction of narrative elements within the backrooms, particularly the elements that exist within the fictional world of the narrative. A concurrent semiotic analysis examines the backrooms videos seen as an interrelated narrative. Narrative construction in the backrooms necessitates liminality alongside notions like video games, nostalgia, postmodern thought, and the vaporwave art/music aesthetic to reveal the backrooms as a digital chronotope. Findings reveal a clearer understanding of liminal spaces in the backrooms and relate how games and play address the narrative construction of the backrooms.

The underlying mechanisms of online political discussions which may involve power dynamics have seldom been explored through a dynamic network approach, even though discussions themselves are inherently relational and dynamic processes. It remains unclear how discussions are shaped over time between egos/alters with different political/sociopsychological/linguistic attributes as well as by the existing discussion ties surrounding them. Based on a stochastic actor-oriented modeling constructed from pre-survey/virtual discussion/post-survey data, we found some evidence that, in the politically heterogeneous context, shared political ideology, alter’s political tolerance level, and the extent of negative/strong/assertive language used by alter are associated with the likelihood of discussion tie creation/maintenance. In the homogeneous context, the extent to which ego perceives alter as politically knowledgeable and personally likable was clearly associated with ego’s tendency to create or maintain discussion ties with alter over time. This study uncovers alter/dyad-centered variables that are critical, but have been overlooked, for communication research.

Musicians are believed to increasingly “optimize” their music to positively influence discoverability and engagement on music and social media platforms. Common examples of such optimization strategies are skipping intros, quickly moving to the chorus, or inserting danceable “hooks.” But to what extent are optimization strategies actively considered in the creative production process? And, if so, in what stage of production? In this article, we explore how professional musicians reflect on the opportunities and constraints that optimization strategies offer in the creative music production process. Based on 20 in-depth interviews with early to mid-career professional musicians and songwriters, we identify four different positions between “pure” artistic autonomy and “pure” commercialism that musicians typically take on in relation to these optimization strategies. We demonstrate that musicians are aware that sonically “working towards” platforms may bring economic success, while simultaneously maintaining a general reluctance towards outright commercial, “full optimization” ideologies.

Many of the world’s languages are endangered or vulnerable. For some of these languages, a presence in technological domains can illustrate vitality and demonstrate relevance to the lives of younger speakers. A presence on social media is often seen as particularly significant for younger speakers due to their high levels of social media use. This article explores the presence of Cymraeg (the Welsh language) on TikTok. Through the analysis of a corpus of 200 videos, the article reveals a complex and richly bilingual content space with considerable intermingling of Cymraeg and English. Commenting on videos and engaging in a text-based conversation with the content creator and other audience members is shown to be a significant activity. The corpus demonstrates that Cymraeg is being used, taught, discussed and promoted on TikTok. This article contributes to an ongoing assessment of the digital vitality of Cymraeg and extends our understanding of the role that social media can play in supporting the sustainability and vitality of minority languages.

Digital spaces such as LinkedIn, the world’s largest professional digital network, constitute central sites for self-promotion, where job seekers and the employed present their polished “best” professional selves. However, in recent years, LinkedIn members are increasingly publishing accounts that highlight their vulnerabilities and struggles. This article examines the emergence of vulnerability on LinkedIn by analyzing how vulnerability is articulated in a sample of 40 posts (2021–2023). It identifies three genres: (1) Triumph over tragedy: vulnerability as a vector for self-growth and resilience; (2) Snap: vulnerability as a breaking point; and (3) Subversive commentary on self-promotion. On one hand, posting vulnerability on LinkedIn is a strategic form of digital self-branding, which monetizes vulnerability and depoliticizes its meanings. At the same time, vulnerability posts have the potential to form a basis for resistance to digital and work cultures’ glorification of overwork, individualized resilience and self-sufficiency, and the constant pressure to self-promote.

Platform designers create and implement incentive systems to encourage users to contribute content to online communities. This article examines the effect of a multidimensional incentive hierarchy in motivating users to engage in competitive and prosocial activities. Utilizing an external change observed in the data science community, Kaggle, and applying a quasi-experimental design, we compared users’ engagement levels before and after introducing a multidimensional incentive hierarchy. We found that implementing a multidimensional incentive system directed users from submitting answers to Kaggle competitions to participating in Kaggle’s online forum discussions. However, our additional analyses suggest that the most and the least motivated users may be less likely to be impacted by such incentives.

This article assesses the effects of hate speech compared to positive and neutral content about refugees in search engines on trust and policy preferences through a survey experiment in Germany. The study uncovers that individuals with an extreme-right political ideology become more hostile toward refugees after being exposed to refugee-related hate speech in search queries. Moreover, politically biased search engines erode trust similarly to politicized sources like politicians, and positively and negatively biased content is trusted less than neutral content. However, individuals with a right political ideology trust more hate speech content than individuals with a left-wing ideology. Individuals with right-wing ideology are also almost three times as likely to intend to click on hate speech suggestions compared to left-wing counterparts.

Collegiate esports are a key contributor to the North American esports field’s fledgling talent pipeline, where varsity student-athletes identify the streaming platform Twitch as a major component. Exemplified by Twitch, this article theorizes the role of platform algorithms as border objects—an analytical concept which frames the shared use of classification systems when a powerful party’s practices naturalize their interpretation over others. Twitch’s platform recommendation and moderation algorithms are classifiers used by competitive game-content creators and platform owners. Its algorithms are fundamental to allocating visibility among users, which, as collegiate esports players suggest, informs professional progress. However, algorithms have proven to perpetuate and exacerbate the exclusion of marginalized persons from platforms. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, participant observation, and existing scholarship, this article argues that the inherent biases of platform architecture in esports’ talent pipeline upholds patriarchal structures and reinforces inequality—reducing opportunities for diversity and equality in esports.

Mothers are heavily engaged in social media, and mommy influencers have become key sources of information and targets for social comparison. This study investigates the psychological mechanisms by which mothers’ parental stress is affected by social comparison with mommy influencers. An online survey was conducted among South Korean millennial mothers (N = 237). The results revealed that mothers who frequently compare themselves to mommy influencers may experience both positive and negative effects depending on the envy type. While social comparison was positively associated with both benign and malicious envy, the relationships between these two forms of envy and parenting efficacy differed. Benign envy was positively and malicious envy was negatively associated with enhanced parenting efficacy, respectively. Both envy and parenting efficacy serially mediated the relationship between mothers’ social comparison experiences with mommy influencers and parental stress. The implications of these findings are discussed along with suggestions for future research.

This research investigates the strategic use of protest imagery on social media by movement parties, bridging the gap between protest and institutional politics. We apply a mixed-methods analysis of 9584 Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram image posts by seven movement parties between 2015 and 2021. We find that protest images frequently serve to amplify movement grievances. Yet, parties’ involvement with contentious protest forms undergoes temporal shifts, influenced mainly by their evolving positions within the polity. Moreover, parties’ engagement with protest images differs by country and ideological leaning. Movement parties on the Right express a conflictual position between supporting and delegitimizing different protests. Conversely, Left-leaning counterparts tend to support protest, yet veer toward deradicalization and emphasizing symbolism over disruptive tactics, once they become more institutionalized. This research highlights the intricate relationship between movement parties, protest, and visual narratives on social media, in light of the interplay between movements and institutional politics.

Outside of visible moments of mass mobilization, ongoing latent work, such as direct service and mutual aid, is a long-standing tradition in social movements. Yet, like all labor, personal digital devices have changed the norms and practices of direct service social movement work. In this article, as situated in the technology–media–movement complex (TMMC), I analyze qualitative interview data (N = 26) with volunteers from a yearlong ethnographic project at an abortion fund hotline in the reproductive justice movement in the US South. To name hotline volunteers’ digital care labor, I offer the term immaterial intimacy to describe its ubiquitous, ephemeral, and intimate nature. I argue immaterial intimate labor enabled the organization to provide a responsive service, but relied on individualized digital volunteer work, existing within gendered and neoliberal norms. I discuss and question the use of personal digital technologies for direct service volunteer work in contemporary social movements.

Scholars have studied the role of technology in humanitarian crises and have noted an increase in positive attitudes and behavior. Of interest to us is Virtual Reality (VR). We set out to understand the role of VR technology and its relationships with empathy, sympathy, and donation intention in case of the Syrian refugee crisis. We conducted two experimental studies to examine these relationships, where participants watched “Clouds Over Sidra” a VR film for the United Nations. The participants in the VR condition watched the documentary using VR, while in the non-VR condition, participants watched the documentary on a computer. Our results indicate a complex picture. It seems that VR technology can increase empathy and sympathy in participants, which can lead to a higher intention to donate. However, when we tested the relationship with political ideology as a moderator, empathy did not hold. In a moderated mediation model, we found that VR technology increased sympathy, which led to higher intention to donate. This relationship was moderated by political ideology, such that self-reported liberals scored high on donation intention in both the VR and non-VR groups. However, among conservatives, participants in the VR condition showed higher intention to donate.