Emiliano Treré
Biographic Data
| ID | 172087 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Emiliano Treré |
| GIVEN NAMES | Emiliano |
| FAMILY NAME | Treré |
| SIGNATURE | TRERÉ E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2496-4571 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 274 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 46 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 9 |
Local voices, lasting strategies
Recently, the issue of community media sustainability has attracted an increasing amount of attention among media scholars worldwide. The ways in which media sustainability is being discussed in this context have changed markedly, widening the debate to encompass aspects such as participation, diversity, organizational structures, respect for the environment, technological innovation and community service. However, in the United Kingdom the evolu…
Cartographies of Negotiation
The Covid-19 pandemic spurred social movements to prioritise solidarity and collective responses. In this context, counter-maps emerged as a form of data activism aimed at illuminating aspects of the crisis often overlooked in dominant representations. This article investigates the Frena la Curva initiative, which used an online forum and a collaborative map to visualise needs and offers of assistance across Ibero-American countries during the pa…
Collectivity in data governance and data justice
With this special issue, we seek to critically reflect on contemporary debates on data governance and data justice by foregrounding the question of collectivity from different perspectives. The issue brings together scholars from across the globe to consider how the collective features within ideas of data governance and justice, and what responses to concerns about datafication might look like beyond the individualist paradigm. It builds on the …
Ecologias das mídias, movimentos sociais e ativismo
Media ecology theory offers a vital lens for understanding the complex relationships between media, social movements, and activism. This article examines how different levels of engagement—from superficial references to deep theoretical applications—have shaped MovAct studies. It explores four ecological traditions: medium theory, information ecology, communicative ecologies, and approaches inspired by Guattari and Fuller, all emphasizing technol…
A media ecology of ecological media? Conceptualizing environment-oriented communication and its digital footprint in climate change activism
Recognizing the role-played by mainstream social media (i.e. Instagram, Facebook, etc.) in climate activism, this article focuses on how FridaysForFuture (FFF) Rome’s activists navigate and negotiate with digital platforms, unveiling strategies and beliefs related to platform-sustainability. Through multimethod qualitative research, we account for online and offline activist practices across multiple media platforms and explore the criteria guidi…
Fire as an aesthetic resource in climate change communication
This article uses the case study of the California wildfires of 2020/2021 to examine the visual discourse on fires on social media and investigate how it was harnessed by environmental activists to shape narratives and meanings regarding climate change. The article draws on two datasets scraped from Twitter/X (350 images), i.e. the visual discourse of the California wildfires (250 images) and the visual data of environmental NGOs (100 images). Ou…
Cooperative affordances
This paper aims to understand the practices and meanings associated with the creation and use of private chat groups on instant messaging services such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Messenger and WeChat that are accessible only to platform workers of online food delivery services. We draw on participant observation in five countries (Italy, Spain, Mexico, China, and India), in-depth interviews with 68 food delivery couriers and digital ethnography ( Pin…
When digital inequalities meet digital disconnection
Digital inequalities research has lacked a focus on voluntary non-use and its consequences, whereas digital disconnection studies have focused on non-use but neglected the material implications of digital inequalities. Located at the intersection between these two approaches, this article relies on twelve semi-structured interviews, observations and informal dialogues to examine digital media uses, inequalities and the meanings of disconnection i…
The Politics of Disconnective Media
The commodification of disconnection has attracted growing scholarly attention. Previous research highlighted the instrumentalisation of disconnection for productivity, self-governance, and healthy life. Researchers have also explored the politics of the “products” used for disconnecting, such as smartphone applications and offline commodities. Yet, current studies generally neglect to connect digital disconnection’s symbolic and material dimensi…
Dreaming of seamless interfaces
In human–computer interaction, the notion of ‘seamless interface’ describes a smooth interactive system that eliminates any possibility of friction between users and digital devices or platforms. Although interface designers have developed sophisticated technologies and strategies to pursue this aspiration, a frictionless user experience remains an ideal but ultimately impossible goal. Relying on the critical exploration of a series of historical…
Algorithms of Resistance
How global workers, influencers, and activists develop tactics of algorithmic resistance by appropriating and repurposing the same algorithms that control our lives. Algorithms are all around us, permeating more and more aspects of our daily lives. While accounts of platform power tend to come across as bleak and monolithic, Algorithms of Resistance shows how people can resist algorithms across a variety of domains. Drawing from rich ethnographic…
Amplification, evasion, hijacking
While scholars of activism have begun to unfold the dynamics of the ‘contentious politics of data’, less explored are the forms of appropriation of algorithms to pursue political objectives by social movements. This article fills this gap by offering a novel theoretical framework, a conceptual vocabulary, and a typology to foreground and articulate algorithmic activism as a subset of algorithmic politics. It starts discussing why an excessive foc…
Against decolonial reductionism
This essay argues that Latin American scholarship and movement practice are key to understanding the dynamics of the datafied society and countering its inequities. Examining the sources of inspiration of a frontrunner seeking to decolonize the datafied society - the Big Data from the South Initiative ( BigDataSur) - we review Martín-Barbero's ontological shift from media to mediations, Freire's methodology centring individual agency and empowerm…
The rise of a new media ecosystem
This article explores the influence that the educommunicative dimension of the 15M Movement has had on the creation and consolidation of a new ecosystem of independent media. To this end, we rely on a document analysis of the movement’s minutes and manifestos and on the review of the editorial principles and educational activities of a sample of independent media. We also draw on ten in-depth interviews with key journalists and activists who acti…
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms: Resistance, reconfiguration, and renaissance for computational life
The emergence of algorithmic solidarity
This study explores how Chinese riders game the algorithm-mediated governing system of food delivery service platforms and how they mobilize WeChat to build solidarity networks to assist each other and better cope with the platform economy. We rely on 12 interviews with Chinese riders from 4 platforms (Meituan, Eleme, SF Express and Flash EX) in 5 cities, and draw on a 4-month online observation of 7 private WeChat groups. The article provides a …
Comunicación alternativa y comunitaria. La conformación del campo en Europa y el diálogo con América Latina
En el siguiente artículo se hace un balance de la historia y actualidad del campo de la comunicación alternativa y comunitaria en el contexto europeo y estadounidense y se compara dicha tradición con los desarrollos latinoamericanos con el fin de establecer semejanzas y discontinuidades. Apoyados en un marco de investigación comparada y revisión crítica documental, señalamos la necesidad de tender puentes entre dichas comunidades académicas de ca…
Intensification, discovery and abandonment
This article explores how people have reconfigured their dis/connective repertoires during COVID-19 pandemic-related lockdowns. Relying on a media ecology approach and on 45 interviews carried out in different parts of the world, it tackles two limitations of the digital disconnection literature, namely social media reductionism and universalism, advancing a theoretical and empirical contribution. Firstly, it explores and unfolds dis/connective p…
The Evolution and Power of Online Consumer Activism
Short videos and short-video-based social media (SVB) platforms have provided Chinese consumers with a new way to protest against businesses. However, they have received scant attention from scholars. This study aims to fill this gap in two ways. Firstly, it will contextualize this phenomenon within the literature on consumer activism, foregrounding three key phases in the evolution of online consumer activism in China. Secondly, it will analyze …
Latin American perspectives on datafication and artificial intelligence
This introductory essay illustrates the context, clarifies the relevance, and outlines the key themes of this Special Issue on “Latin American Perspectives on Datafication and Artificial intelligence”. It starts pointing out that so far, the engagement of Latin American scholarship in the exploration of data technologies and the rise of intelligent systems has been limited. However, it is argued, Latin American traditions in both research and pra…
Imaginarios activistas sobre Internet
Este artículo explora los mitos e imaginarios sociales sobre Internet compartidos y vehiculados por el discurso académico y por los activistas de los nuevos movimientos sociales que utilizan la tecnología de forma intensiva como base de sus estrategias de organización y acción colectiva. Se indagan los discursos, imaginarios y mitos sobre la Red mediante una metodología cualitativa basada en la observación participante y en la entrevista activa a…
Live democracy and its tensions
Drawing on one hundred interviews with activists, this article examines the relationship between livestreaming and the democratic cultures of the 15M and Occupy movements. The article investigates how the technical affordances of livestreaming – immediacy, rawness, liveness and embedded/embodied perspective – connect with the movements’ understandings of how democracy should be practiced, specifically in terms of political equality, participation…
The banality of WhatsApp
Drawing on interviews with social movements and organizations in Mexico and Spain, this paper sheds light on the dynamics of ‘backstage activism’ with a focus on WhatsApp. It illustrates how activists have integrated this app into their media ecologies to reinforce collective identity, cement internal solidarity and lower the pressure of protest. It shows that within WhatsApp groups, campaigners have countered the paranoia experienced in the fron…
Vinyl won’t save us
Disconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an increasing saturation with digital technologies. Yet, experiences with disconnection are often reduced to a form of disengagement that diminishes their political impact. Disconnective practices focused on health and well-being are easily appropriated by big tech corporations, defusing their transformative potential into the very dynamics of digital capital…
The limits and boundaries of digital disconnection
This editorial introduces a themed section aimed to spark further reflections on the limits and boundaries of disconnection as a form of critique, activism and response to the pervasiveness of digital devices, platforms, and infrastructures. We outline two key limits in current thinking about disconnection: first, the universalist discourse of disconnection, which contrasts with the reality of a profound inequality of access to both connection an…
Big Data from the South(s)
This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an epistemological, ontological, and ethical program and outlines five conceptual operations to shape thi…
Media Practices, Mediation Processes, and Mediatization in the Study of Social Movements
The aim of this article is to explore the use of 3 concepts of media studies—media practices, mediation, and mediatization—in order to build a conceptual framework to study social movements and the media. The article first provides a critical review of the literature about media and movements. Secondly, it offers an understanding of social movements as processes in which activists perform actions according to different temporalities and connect t…
Repression, resistance and lifestyle
Studying the nexus of media and social movements is a growing subfield in both media and social movement studies. Although there is an increasing number of studies that criticize the overemphasis of the importance of media technologies for social movements, questions of non-use, technology push-back and media refusal as explicit political practice have received comparatively little attention. The article charts a typology of digital disconnection…
Does Web 3.0 come after Web 2.0? Deconstructing theoretical assumptions through practice
Current internet research has been influenced by application developers and computer engineers who see the development of the Web as being divided into three different stages: Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. This article will argue that this understanding – although important when analysing the political economy of the Web – can have serious limitations when applied to everyday contexts and the lived experience of technologies. Drawing from the con…
The emergence of algorithmic solidarity
This study explores how Chinese riders game the algorithm-mediated governing system of food delivery service platforms and how they mobilize WeChat to build solidarity networks to assist each other and better cope with the platform economy. We rely on 12 interviews with Chinese riders from 4 platforms (Meituan, Eleme, SF Express and Flash EX) in 5 cities, and draw on a 4-month online observation of 7 private WeChat groups. The article provides a …
The limits and boundaries of digital disconnection
This editorial introduces a themed section aimed to spark further reflections on the limits and boundaries of disconnection as a form of critique, activism and response to the pervasiveness of digital devices, platforms, and infrastructures. We outline two key limits in current thinking about disconnection: first, the universalist discourse of disconnection, which contrasts with the reality of a profound inequality of access to both connection an…
From pre-emption to slowness
Debates on the temporal shift associated with digitalization often stress notions of speed and acceleration. With the advent of big data and predictive analytics, the time-compressing features of digitalization are compounded within a distinct operative logic: that of pre-emption. The temporality of pre-emption attempts to project the past into a simulated future that can be acted upon in the present; a temporality of pure imminence. Yet, inheren…
Vinyl won’t save us
Disconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an increasing saturation with digital technologies. Yet, experiences with disconnection are often reduced to a form of disengagement that diminishes their political impact. Disconnective practices focused on health and well-being are easily appropriated by big tech corporations, defusing their transformative potential into the very dynamics of digital capital…
The Rise of the Data Poor
Quantification is central to the narration of the COVID-19 pandemic. Numbers determine the existence of the problem and affect our ability to care and contribute to relief efforts. Yet many communities at the margins, including many areas of the Global South, are virtually absent from this number-based narration of the pandemic. This essay builds on critical data studies to warn against the universalization of problems, narratives, and responses …
Amplification, evasion, hijacking
While scholars of activism have begun to unfold the dynamics of the ‘contentious politics of data’, less explored are the forms of appropriation of algorithms to pursue political objectives by social movements. This article fills this gap by offering a novel theoretical framework, a conceptual vocabulary, and a typology to foreground and articulate algorithmic activism as a subset of algorithmic politics. It starts discussing why an excessive foc…
Challenging mainstream media, documenting real life and sharing with the community
The aim of this article is to explore the motivations that drove many ordinary people to produce citizen journalism after the earthquake that destroyed the Italian city of L’Aquila in 2009. Using in-depth interviews, we investigate the motivations and the obstacles underlying the publication of grassroots information related to the post-earthquake situation. Findings highlight that people were largely motivated to upload their content online: (1)…
The Dark Side of Digital Politics
Various strands of literature on civic engagement, 'big data' and open government view digital technologies as the key to easier government accountability and citizens' empowerment, and the solution to many of the problems of contemporary democracies. Drawing on a critical analysis of contemporary Mexican social and political phenomena, and on a two-yearlong ethnography with the #YoSoy132 networked movement, this article demonstrates that digita…
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms
Introduction to algorithmic antagonisms: Resistance, reconfiguration, and renaissance for computational life
Fire as an aesthetic resource in climate change communication
This article uses the case study of the California wildfires of 2020/2021 to examine the visual discourse on fires on social media and investigate how it was harnessed by environmental activists to shape narratives and meanings regarding climate change. The article draws on two datasets scraped from Twitter/X (350 images), i.e. the visual discourse of the California wildfires (250 images) and the visual data of environmental NGOs (100 images). Ou…
The rise of a new media ecosystem
This article explores the influence that the educommunicative dimension of the 15M Movement has had on the creation and consolidation of a new ecosystem of independent media. To this end, we rely on a document analysis of the movement’s minutes and manifestos and on the review of the editorial principles and educational activities of a sample of independent media. We also draw on ten in-depth interviews with key journalists and activists who acti…
Imaginarios activistas sobre Internet
Este artículo explora los mitos e imaginarios sociales sobre Internet compartidos y vehiculados por el discurso académico y por los activistas de los nuevos movimientos sociales que utilizan la tecnología de forma intensiva como base de sus estrategias de organización y acción colectiva. Se indagan los discursos, imaginarios y mitos sobre la Red mediante una metodología cualitativa basada en la observación participante y en la entrevista activa a…
Does Web 3.0 come after Web 2.0? Deconstructing theoretical assumptions through practice
Current internet research has been influenced by application developers and computer engineers who see the development of the Web as being divided into three different stages: Web 1.0, Web 2.0 and Web 3.0. This article will argue that this understanding – although important when analysing the political economy of the Web – can have serious limitations when applied to everyday contexts and the lived experience of technologies. Drawing from the con…
Redescubriendo el poder transformador de la comunicación para el cambio social en la era del Big Data
El autor del libro que se resena a continuacion es el doctor Victor Manuel Mari Saez, actualmente profesor a tiempo completo de la Facultad de Ciencias Sociales y de la Comunicacion (Universidad de Cadiz, Espana), donde imparte, entre otras, las materias “Teoria de la comunicacion” y “Comunicacion para el desarrollo y el cambio social”. Director de Commons. Revista de Comunicacion y Ciudadania Digital (indexada en Latindex) y del Grupo de Investi…
Challenging mainstream media, documenting real life and sharing with the community
The aim of this article is to explore the motivations that drove many ordinary people to produce citizen journalism after the earthquake that destroyed the Italian city of L’Aquila in 2009. Using in-depth interviews, we investigate the motivations and the obstacles underlying the publication of grassroots information related to the post-earthquake situation. Findings highlight that people were largely motivated to upload their content online: (1)…
Media Practices, Mediation Processes, and Mediatization in the Study of Social Movements
The aim of this article is to explore the use of 3 concepts of media studies—media practices, mediation, and mediatization—in order to build a conceptual framework to study social movements and the media. The article first provides a critical review of the literature about media and movements. Secondly, it offers an understanding of social movements as processes in which activists perform actions according to different temporalities and connect t…
In search of the ‘we’ of social media activism
An internet meme using the Anonymous’ Guy Fawkes mask ‘going viral’ on Facebook; the hashtag #wearethe99percent launched by the Occupy Wall Street movement being adopted by thousands of internet us
Reclaiming, proclaiming, and maintaining collective identity in the #YoSoy132 movement in Mexico
This article starts from the recognition that digital social movements studies have progressively disregarded collective identity and the importance of internal communicative dynamics in contemporary social movements, in favour of the study of the technological affordances and the organizational capabilities of social media. Based on a two-year multimodal ethnography of the Mexican #YoSoy132 movement, the article demonstrates that the concept of …
Media ecologies and protest movements
Studies adopting the media ecology metaphor to investigate social movements form a promising strand of literature that has emerged in the last years to overcome the communicative reductionism permeating the study of the relation between social movements and communication technologies. However, contributions that apply ecological visions to protest are scattered, and only seldom connect their analyses to more general media ecological frameworks. T…
Redes sociales, participación ciudadana y democracia
The Dark Side of Digital Politics
Various strands of literature on civic engagement, 'big data' and open government view digital technologies as the key to easier government accountability and citizens' empowerment, and the solution to many of the problems of contemporary democracies. Drawing on a critical analysis of contemporary Mexican social and political phenomena, and on a two-yearlong ethnography with the #YoSoy132 networked movement, this article demonstrates that digita…
From Global Justice to Occupy and Podemos
Special Section of tripleC: Communication, Capitalism & Critique (http://www.triple-c.at) Edited by Todd Wolfson, Emiliano Treré, Paolo Gerbaudo, Peter FunketripleC 15 (2), 2017, pp. 390-542 Please note that the editors appear in reversed alphabetical order, not in order of importance. This special issue represents a collective effort, and all the four editors contributed equally to it
Comparing Digital Protest Media Imaginaries
This article presents findings from an empirical study of repertoires of contention and communication engaged during anti-austerity protests by the Indignados in Spain, the precarious generation in Italy, and the Aganaktismenoi in Greece. Drawing on 60 semistructured interviews with activists and independent media producers involved in the 2011 wave of contention, we bring together social movement and communications theoretical frameworks to pre…
Distorsiones tecnopolíticas
Varias corrientes de la literatura sobre compromiso social, medios digitales y big data conciben las plataformas digitales como un atajo hacia la rendición de cuentas gubernamental y el empoderamiento de la ciudadanía. Según estas visiones, las redes sociales y las nuevas posibilidades brindadas por el análisis de grandes datos representan la solución a las problemáticas de las democracias contemporáneas. A partir de un análisis crítico de div…
Digital rebellion
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Hybrid Media Activism
This book is an extensive investigation of the complexities, ambiguities and shortcomings of contemporary digital activism. The author deconstructs the reductionism of the literature on social movements and communication, proposing a new conceptual vocabulary based on practices, ecologies, imaginaries and algorithms to account for the communicative complexity of protest movements. Drawing on extensive fieldwork on social movements, collectives an…
Hybrid Media Activism
Exploring Data Justice
In May 2018 over 200 people from around the world met at Cardiff University in the United Kingdom to participate in a conference on ‘Data Justice’ hosted by the Data Justice Lab. They included scho
Citizen Media and Practice
Movimientos sociales, redes sociales y Web 2.0
Estudios empíricos han señalado que la interacción en las plataformas de los movimientos sociales suele ser muy baja, aunque otros autores argumentan que la Web 2.0 aumenta las posibilidades de participación y de interacción. Este artículo presenta un análisis cuali-cuantitativo de la página Facebook del Movimiento por la Paz con Justicia y Dignidad. El objetivo consiste en investigar si esta página constituye un espacio de diálogo e interacción …
Big Data from the South(s)
This article introduces the tenets of a theory of datafication of and in the Souths. It calls for a de-Westernization of critical data studies, in view of promoting a reparation to the cognitive injustice that fails to recognize non-mainstream ways of knowing the world through data. It situates the “Big Data from the South” research agenda as an epistemological, ontological, and ethical program and outlines five conceptual operations to shape thi…
Live democracy and its tensions
Drawing on one hundred interviews with activists, this article examines the relationship between livestreaming and the democratic cultures of the 15M and Occupy movements. The article investigates how the technical affordances of livestreaming – immediacy, rawness, liveness and embedded/embodied perspective – connect with the movements’ understandings of how democracy should be practiced, specifically in terms of political equality, participation…
The banality of WhatsApp
Drawing on interviews with social movements and organizations in Mexico and Spain, this paper sheds light on the dynamics of ‘backstage activism’ with a focus on WhatsApp. It illustrates how activists have integrated this app into their media ecologies to reinforce collective identity, cement internal solidarity and lower the pressure of protest. It shows that within WhatsApp groups, campaigners have countered the paranoia experienced in the fron…
Vinyl won’t save us
Disconnection has recently come to the forefront of public discussions as an antidote to an increasing saturation with digital technologies. Yet, experiences with disconnection are often reduced to a form of disengagement that diminishes their political impact. Disconnective practices focused on health and well-being are easily appropriated by big tech corporations, defusing their transformative potential into the very dynamics of digital capital…
The limits and boundaries of digital disconnection
This editorial introduces a themed section aimed to spark further reflections on the limits and boundaries of disconnection as a form of critique, activism and response to the pervasiveness of digital devices, platforms, and infrastructures. We outline two key limits in current thinking about disconnection: first, the universalist discourse of disconnection, which contrasts with the reality of a profound inequality of access to both connection an…
From pre-emption to slowness
Debates on the temporal shift associated with digitalization often stress notions of speed and acceleration. With the advent of big data and predictive analytics, the time-compressing features of digitalization are compounded within a distinct operative logic: that of pre-emption. The temporality of pre-emption attempts to project the past into a simulated future that can be acted upon in the present; a temporality of pure imminence. Yet, inheren…
Repression, resistance and lifestyle
Studying the nexus of media and social movements is a growing subfield in both media and social movement studies. Although there is an increasing number of studies that criticize the overemphasis of the importance of media technologies for social movements, questions of non-use, technology push-back and media refusal as explicit political practice have received comparatively little attention. The article charts a typology of digital disconnection…
Political science (38 works) · Sociology (35 works) · Law (23 works) · Social Media and Politics (23 works) · Politics (20 works) · Computer Science (17 works) · Media studies (16 works) · Social media (12 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Law (9 works)