This volume contains adaptions of three excellent master theses that were written and defended within the international master’s programme media, communication, and cultural analysis at Södertörn University in 2024. Running since 2009, the programme has more than 100 alumni who are employed in the media, academia and education. In 2020, the programme coordinator together with the programme and the department councils, chose to distinguish the best theses in a printed volume. This is the fifth in the series. 

The contributions cover three different topics: how gender influences the representation of influential people in AI; how Ukrainian women from the European diaspora interact with ChatGPT about the Russian–Ukrainian war; and the anti-fandom culture surrounding Taylor Swift on social media. Although stretch-ing across three such different topics, the chapters share an interest in on how media can be understood in relation to gender. In two of the chapters, gendering is explicitly made visible as an ongoing process, while in the study on women interacting with ChatGPT it is done indirectly. However, common for the three chapters is that they fruitfully re-center our attention on how gender frames our everyday digital practices and discourses.

This Crosscurrent contribution presents programmable politics as an emerging keyword for understanding the complex interplay between technology, society and politics in the 21st century. Programmable politics has gained heightened importance in the aftermath of the pandemic that has sped up digitalisation processes that are the preconditions for programmable politics to emerge. Turning increasingly to engagement online, the pandemic constitutes a catalyst for programmable politics. The concept highlights both the potential for enhancing democratic engagement, and the risks of undermining it through the centralisation of control and manipulation of information flows. We discuss the transition from digital politics, characterised by the integration of the internet and social media into political discourse and action, to programmable politics, a concept that highlights the impact of platform architectures, algorithms, artificial intelligence (AI) and non-human agency on the political landscape. In doing so, we call for a critical examination of how current digital technology reshapes the dynamics of power, control and resistance within the political domain.

Chatbots have become a mundane experience for Internet users. Public sector institutions have recently been introducing more advanced chatbots. In this article, we consider two cases of public sector chatbots, one in Estonia and one in Sweden, seeking to challenge the seemingly coherent understanding of artificial intelligence (AI) in the public sector. The aim is to both question the "thingness" of AI and show AI chatbots can be very different things. The material in this article is based on in-depth interviews and observations at public sector institutions that have relatively recently implemented chatbots. We employ the notion of AI frictions as a sensitizing concept to engage with the material and the diverging character of the public sector chatbots in the two countries. In the analysis, we identify AI frictions related to expectations of AI, organizational logics, as well as values connected with the digitalization of the public sector.

Automation has sparked dreams of overcoming human boundaries since at least the 1950s, and recent decades have seen an upswing in imagining a bright technological future in which artificial intelligence (AI) will solve social, economic, and political challenges and improve public administration and welfare provision. However, the introduction of algorithmic automation can cause friction. On the one hand, enthusiasm for algorithmic automation in the industrial and public sectors is increasing, and widespread digitalization and automation projects are revolutionizing public administration and welfare. On the other hand, public discourse is increasingly painting a dystopian picture of the digitally automated welfare state, critiquing biases and raising issues of accountability and autonomy. In this article, I take the frictions, conflicts, and contradictions that emerge from technological change as a starting point for considering the temporalities of algorithmic automation, particularly focusing on the Swedish context. Considering three temporal layers of welfare automation-timing, belatedness, and perpetual emergence-I outline the contours of the contemporary Swedish digital welfare state and discuss the critical implications of delegating decisions to algorithmic systems and their mediating features. Drawing on a diverse set of empirical data drawn from in-depth interviews with civil servants and software developers and observations of Swedish public agencies, I engage with the unfulfilled promises of the fully automated welfare state.

Automation is a reality of the modern world, yet it is fraught with contradictions. On the surface it appears sleek, efficient and seamlessly integrated, and yet it is also changing, uncertain, troubling. This book delves into that frictional interface, exploring themes like welfare automation experiments, citizen resistance, and the invisible technology woven into our lives. 

In this book you will encounter:

- An international perspective, with examples drawn from Germany, Sweden and Estonia- Diverse viewpoints, from welfare professionals to citizens who rely on welfare services- A bold vision and urgent call to action, advocating for the reorganization of the data welfare state

Fascinating and timely, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in data welfare.

Although algorithms are increasingly used for enabling the automation of tasks in public administration of welfare states, the citizens’ knowledge of, experiences with and attitudes towards automated decision-making (ADM) in public administration are still less known. This article strives to reveal the perspectives of citizens who are increasingly exposed to ADM systems, relying on a comparative analysis of a representative survey conducted in Estonia, Germany, and Sweden. The findings show that there are important differences between the three countries when it comes to awareness, trust, and perceived suitability of ADM in public administration, which map onto historical differences in welfare provisions or so-called welfare regimes.

This article explores citizen attitudes towards automated decision-making (ADM) in the public sector, addressing concerns related to social justice and transparency. ADM, used in diverse public services, such as benefit application processing, welfare fraud detection and tax calculation, has sparked public interest and scepticism. To shed light on this complex issue and make ADM more accessible for citizens, we presented three domain-specific scenarios in a population-representative survey in Estonia (n = 1,500), Germany (n = 2,001) and Sweden (n = 1,000). These scenarios involved job seeker categorisation, child welfare risk assessment and predictive policing through facial recognition. Drawing from this survey and adopting an exploratory approach, we analyse attitudes across responses to these scenarios and conduct a regression analysis, integrating individual variables such as age, gender, education, awareness, enthusiasm and trust in ADM systems. Our findings reveal differences in citizens' attitudes based on welfare regimes and individual characteristics. This citizen-focused approach underscores the significance of involving citizens in the governance of ADM in the digital welfare state, transcending the traditional regulatory and stakeholder-centric perspectives.

Increasing attention is paid to ethical issues and values when designing and deploying artificial intelligence (AI). However, we do not know how those values are embedded in artificial artefacts or how relevant they are to the population exposed to and interacting with AI applications. Based on literature engaging with ethical principles and moral values in AI, we designed an original survey instrument, including 15 value components, to estimate the importance of these values to people in the general population. The article is based on representative surveys conducted in Estonia, Germany, and Sweden (n = 4501), which have varying experiences with implementing AI. The factor analysis showed four underlying dimensions of values embedded in the design and use of AI: (1) protection of personal interests to ensure social benefit, (2) general monitoring to ensure universal solidarity, (3) ensuring social diversity and social sustainability, and (4) efficiency. We found that value types can be ordered along the two dimensions of resources and change. The comparison between countries revealed that some dimensions, like social diversity and sustainability evaluations, are more universally valued among individuals, countries, and domains. Based on our analysis, we suggest a need and a framework for developing basic values in AI.

The integration of automated decision-making systems has transformed police work and our understanding of security and surveillance. Despite a growing theoretical literature on shifts in policing due to widespread analytical platform adoption, the public's understanding and perception of these changes are largely unexplored. This study aims to bridge this gap by empirically examining citizens’ perspectives on the new dynamics of police work in two societies with varying levels of experience with automation in the public sector: Estonia and Sweden. By combining data from a representative, scenario-based quantitative survey conducted among the general population (n = 2500) and qualitative storytelling techniques implemented in classroom settings with students (n = 23) who take classes with a focus on critical data studies, this research seeks to investigate people’s imaginaries, concerns, and expectations regarding predictive policing. The findings shed light on the observation that, in the era of data, the police are not solely perceived as an institution ensuring security or as a source of citizen apprehension related to surveillance. Rather, the transformations in police work are understood as ‘distant technologies’, wherein individuals, be they, citizens, or police officers, are increasingly removed from the direct application of these technologies. This article uncovers that when citizens possess low levels of trust in the police, the implementation of automation can further exacerbate the disconnect between citizens and the state. Furthermore, this research proposes an innovative approach to studying automated systems by combining scenario-based and storytelling methods, thereby making a valuable contribution to methodologies employed in the study of data.

Claims of becoming the first, the best, and the most digitized are standard rather than outstanding in most public-facing digitalization agendas and strategy documents of countries in the Global North. These grand narratives of digitalization need translation through concrete practices by sometimes unexpected actors-in this case, librarians. This article develops the notion of digital care work based on 18 book-chapter-length essays by active librarians based at Swedish public libraries. It illustrates that librarians are central to the process of translating digitalization into reality; they have become ambassadors of digitalization not only by fostering digital skills and competences in workshops and official training sessions but also, we argue, through a specific form of digital work, namely, digital care work. This kind of gendered work, which is typically carried out alongside the official tasks and assignments of librarians, is of low prestige and often involves affective aspects, such as emotions of shame and uncertainty.