This article argues for an expansion of existing studies on the meaning of metrics in digital environments by evaluating a methodology tested in a pilot study to analyse audience responses to metrics of social media profiles. The pilot study used the software tool Facebook Demetricator by artist Ben Grosser in combination with follow-up interviews. In line with Grosser’s intentions, the software indeed provoked reflection among the users. In this article, we reflect on three kinds of disorientations that users expressed, linked to temporality, sociality and value. Relating these to the history of audience measurement in mass media, we argue that there is merit in using this methodology for further analysis of continuities in audience responses to metrics, in order to better understand the ways in which metrics work to create the ‘audience commodity’.

In the formation of the modern nation state and the social imaginary of nationalism in the nineteenth century, the media and representational practices have, among most scholars, been ascribed a prominent position. The question is, however, how have changes in media technologies, from mass media to digital and interactive personal media, impacted on the national imaginaries over the past few decades? This article discusses what happens with the social imaginaries when national(ist) symbols are reproduced through the medium of PowerPoint, as one of the main tools for constructing images of the nation in nation-branding campaigns, i.e. promotional campaigns initiated by governments in conjunction with corporate actors with the aim of producing an attractive image of a country for foreign investors and tourists. It is concluded that the representational technology of PowerPoint produces a nation as an imagined commodity rather than an imagined community.

In his theory of generations Ortega y Gassett suggested what others have come to call the "pulserate" hypothesis, where he argued that generational exchanges occurred in thirty-year cycles. His student Julién Marías later qualified this to fifteen years. This mechanistic theory has, of course, met with criticism - for being too mechanistic, and for being insensitive to different types of temporalities. Nonetheless, the self-perception of generations is not only guided by the relation to coevals, but also to, what Ricoeur calls "contemporaries, predecessors, and successors", that is, the generations that came before, those with whom one shares experiences as coevals, and those who will succeed oneself. In this paper will be discussed the relations between the - often nostalgic - memories that communify coevals, and the experiences of generation as kinship that impact on a person's perception of their place in the generational succession order, and how this can be developed into a generational rhythm analysis. It is argued that the rhythm of collective social life, which is arrhythmic along diversities in the combination of life-course and generational features seems to prevent the increase in "generational turnover" that could be expected through the increased speed of the "technological turnover" that follow from digitisation. 

A classic epistemological problem in the social sciences is how to analyse and understand social change. In media and communication studies, for example, the concept of mediatisation has sparked off such a debate, since one of the main criticisms against the approach is that researchers rather take change for granted without being able to empirically establish if and how change has occurred. In this article is suggested a model for analysing social change through an analysis of how generational identity as “we-sense” is produced in narratives about media use. The empirical basis for the discussion is picked from a recently finished project on media generations in Sweden and Estonia, building on foremost qualitative material. The article concludes with accounting for the merits of using a generational perspective for analysing social change.

Developments in digital technologies over the last 30 years have expanded massively human beings' capacity to communicate and connect. Media infrastructures have acquired huge complexity as a result of rapid technological change and the uneven spread of access. This is a good time to think critically about 'connection' and its potential contribution to social progress. We first explore key developments in media infrastructures and communication flows across the world, bringing out salient differences in the local evolution of, and inequalities in media access. Second, we examine how media – as infrastructures of connection – contribute to public knowledge and enable new types of encounter between people on various scales, while also enabling counter-movements for social progress. Third, we examine the changing governance of media infrastructures, the issues of social justice that such infrastructures raise and the counter-movements to which they give rise. Fourth, we consider media as a specific site of struggle for social progress, arguing that measures of social progress themselves need to be expanded to take account of the human needs (such as voice) that media serve. Overall the chapter reflects on how media and communications flows and infrastructures both maintain and challenge asymmetries of power, with complex implications for social progress.

This article discusses the role of media and communications in contributing to social progress, as elaborated in a landmark international project – the International Panel on Social Progress. First, it analyses how media and digital platforms have contributed to global inequality by examining media access and infrastructure across world regions. Second, it looks at media governance and the different mechanisms of corporatized control over media platforms, algorithms and content. Third, the article examines how the democratization of media is a key element in the struggle for social justice. It argues that effective media access – in terms of distribution of media resources, even relations between spaces of connection and the design and operation of spaces that foster dialogue, free speech and respectful cultural exchange – is a core component of social progress.

In the chapter Bolin argues that in the world of digital, interactive media, media users become involved in two kinds of valorisation processes: one in which they produce social, aesthetic and cultural value within the framework of a cultural economy – which then becomes appropriated by the media industries and transformed into economic value. Furthermore, the nature of the business models of social networking media makes the labour activities at their bottom easily misrecognized by the media users. The result of this process is an increased commodification of social realms that have previously been outside of the economic markets.