Tommaso Trillò
Biographic Data
| ID | 4266571 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Tommaso Trillò |
| GIVEN NAMES | Tommaso |
| FAMILY NAME | Trillò |
| SIGNATURE | TRILLÒ T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Hebrew University of Jerusalem |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2830-528X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 24 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 54 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
How to do things with a keyword
While people regularly employ the term values in mundane interactions and political debates on social media, little is known about its function in public communication. Approaching values as a keyword in everyday communication, we asked: In what contexts do Twitter users invoke the term values? What discursive functions does the term serve? How do these contexts and functions differ across languages? To address these questions, we analyzed approx…
Resisting climate imaginaries
The climate crisis is simultaneously a crisis of the imagination, signaling a cultural failure to comprehend and contest unfolding ecological destruction. Conventional media representations of climate futures, including catastrophic documentaries, corporate sustainability narratives, and even climate activism imagery, often inadvertently fuel anxiety or consumerist complacency. Online communities offer alternative spaces of cultural production th…
The expression of values on social media
Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising t…
The Collective Individualism of Youtube Makeup Reviews
Beauty is one of the most popular and lucrative segments on YouTube, with broad transnational appeal, making it an ideal site to investigate the relationship between commercialization, globalization, and digital platforms. We focus on makeup reviews to utilize established research on cross-cultural differences in reviewing and ask how cultural repertoires of evaluation compare across multiple languages. We collected popular makeup reviews using k…
Broadcasting the good mom
With the rise of social media, mothers around the world publicly share their experiences with raising children, shaping broader notions of what motherhood is and should be. While scholars have documented this phenomenon’s importance, we know little about the values this online discourse expresses or how it varies across cultures. Addressing this gap, we compared the values invoked by moms in morning routine videos on YouTube. Using a novel codebo…
Global creator culture? Converging values and generic practices in YouTube reviews
Social media facilitates new forms of cultural production from professionalized and commercialized users known as creators. While some have posited the emergence of a global creator culture, others have identified substantial gender differences and local variation. To assess how these factors influence content production, we focused on the critical case of YouTube review videos, a successful genre that is both internationally popular and heavily …
Liking without borders? Authenticity and the evaluation of Instagram photo genres
While authenticity has been identified as pivotal on social media, it has not been studied as part of a broader value ecology shaping content evaluation. Addressing this gap, we investigated users’ evaluations of prominent Instagram genres in relation to perceptions of authenticity. A survey of 1,000 users from the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea revealed transnational similarities in value-related interpretations of genres,…
Values for money? The neoliberal construction of “values” across Instagram language communities
While the term “values” is widely invoked to construct identities, set boundaries, and justify decisions, its use has evaded systematic analysis. This is particularly intriguing in the context of social media, where the term simultaneously reflects and shapes what is cherished by people worldwide. Addressing this void, we analyzed how Instagram users from different language communities – English, German, Italian, Korean, and Japanese – frame the …
PoV
This article investigates the characteristics and communicative values of the popular PoV meme on TikTok to uncover mechanisms of community building on the platform. An analysis of the content, form, and stance of 250 videos revealed that creators of PoV memes lip-sync to audio remediated from pop culture and mimic how they imagine “you” would act in a given scenario. I offer the concept of “echoic affiliation” to describe how PoV memes leverage …
“I love this photo, I can feel their hearts!” How users across the world evaluate social media portraiture
Portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when judging th…
“I Love This Photo! I Can Feel Their Hearts”. How Users Across the World Evaluate Social Media Portraiture
Personal portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when j…
How to Do Things With “Values”
The term _values_ is prominent in political discourse. Yet its ubiquity is matched by its vagueness, especially when considering usage among different cultures. Twitter provides a promising venue for exploring the contested political discourse surrounding this term. In this paper, we study the use of the term values on Twitter across different language communities. We ask: _what meanings do users ascribe to the term “values”?_ and _what are the s…
Follow Me Through Instagram
Over the last decade, social media became an indispensable tool for political campaigning for populist political leaders, who successfully used social media to circumvent traditional media elite and establish a seemingly direct relationship with their constituents. Based on this premises and adopting the lens of “digital populism”, our study presents a visual analysis of the portraits and candid shots posted on Instagram by two Italian populist p…
The value(s) of social media rituals
2000), we compare discursive topics, modes of ritual participation, and the values expressed in resolutions. Our findings indicate both that the ritual crosses cultures and that there are language-specific dynamics that do not map neatly onto established divisions between 'Eastern' and 'Western' value orientations. Instead, we identify three underlying tensions organizing the articulation of values: self-acceptance vs. self-improvement, public vs…
The Middle Region Populism of Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi on Instagram
This paper investigates the Instagram self-presentation of Italian party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi. Building on the notion that circumstances are crucial to the construction of the self through digital photography, we argue that the two leaders strategically use setting and accompaniment to navigate the demands of their populist self-presentation as “ordinary super leaders”: exceptional celebrity-like personae whose lives remain non…
It's Like the Fridge Magnet of the Internet
This article investigates the values expressed by good morning memes-an understudied subgenre of social media inspiration featuring a 'good day' wish-and the criteria that users from different countries and generational groups adopt to evaluate them. Expressed values were detected through a content analysis of 414 memes in English and Italian, while insights about evaluation were derived from 20 semistructured interviews with American and Italian…
A typology of social media rituals
Given its massive volume and rapid development of new trends, the universe of user-generated content may seem utterly chaotic. Yet the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals offer a productive …
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value has…
"Have a Great, Positive, Beautiful Day!"
This paper adopts the lens of social media rituals to study a new incarnation of ritualized greetings: good morning memes. These are a popular yet under-studied form of ritualized greeting posted every morning by social media users across the global. Such memes feature text with a wish for the incoming day paired with elements such as flowers, food or animals. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which these memes construct values, broadly defin…
Happy Monday friends! Coffee?’ Matteo Salvini, good morning selfies, and the influencer politician
Social media have reshaped how people achieve, retain, and perform celebrity. This, in turn, has re-shaped how celebrity and politics intersect. We contend that the established concept of the ‘celebrity politician’ no longer captures all of the most common celebrity practices of highly visible political figures. This is because politicians increasingly model their public personae on internet celebrities. We substantiate this argument with an anal…
Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres
This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey ( N = 4770) in five countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions about the types of content people like and dislike. Through iterative and inductive coding, we identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres, or narrower categories …
Memetic commemorations
This paper examines memetic content as a window into the values expressed by far-right constituents. Our main premise was that far-right memes are a site of interaction between two types of values: those of the far-right as a social movement and those characterizing memetic communication on social media. We studied this notion through a case from Italy: the photo-based meme genre of ‘alternative calendar commemorations’ that memorialize events or…
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as compassion or freedom. While visualizing the abstract is not new, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. In this paper, we address an unexplored question about this process: which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Ins…
Memetic Commemorations
Memes are efficient tools for far-right activism. They also offer a window into the reactionary values expressed by far-right constituents in digital spheres. In this paper, we conceptualize memes as a meeting place between the values of the far-right and the values characterizing memetic communication on social media. We examined this process through the lens of Schwartz’s theory of basic human values and a case study from Italy. Specifically, w…
Memetic commemorations
This paper examines memetic content as a window into the values expressed by far-right constituents. Our main premise was that far-right memes are a site of interaction between two types of values: those of the far-right as a social movement and those characterizing memetic communication on social media. We studied this notion through a case from Italy: the photo-based meme genre of ‘alternative calendar commemorations’ that memorialize events or…
A typology of social media rituals
Given its massive volume and rapid development of new trends, the universe of user-generated content may seem utterly chaotic. Yet the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals offer a productive …
The Middle Region Populism of Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi on Instagram
This paper investigates the Instagram self-presentation of Italian party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi. Building on the notion that circumstances are crucial to the construction of the self through digital photography, we argue that the two leaders strategically use setting and accompaniment to navigate the demands of their populist self-presentation as “ordinary super leaders”: exceptional celebrity-like personae whose lives remain non…
PoV
This article investigates the characteristics and communicative values of the popular PoV meme on TikTok to uncover mechanisms of community building on the platform. An analysis of the content, form, and stance of 250 videos revealed that creators of PoV memes lip-sync to audio remediated from pop culture and mimic how they imagine “you” would act in a given scenario. I offer the concept of “echoic affiliation” to describe how PoV memes leverage …
The expression of values on social media
Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising t…
Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres
This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey ( N = 4770) in five countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions about the types of content people like and dislike. Through iterative and inductive coding, we identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres, or narrower categories …
Happy Monday friends! Coffee?’ Matteo Salvini, good morning selfies, and the influencer politician
Social media have reshaped how people achieve, retain, and perform celebrity. This, in turn, has re-shaped how celebrity and politics intersect. We contend that the established concept of the ‘celebrity politician’ no longer captures all of the most common celebrity practices of highly visible political figures. This is because politicians increasingly model their public personae on internet celebrities. We substantiate this argument with an anal…
Liking without borders? Authenticity and the evaluation of Instagram photo genres
While authenticity has been identified as pivotal on social media, it has not been studied as part of a broader value ecology shaping content evaluation. Addressing this gap, we investigated users’ evaluations of prominent Instagram genres in relation to perceptions of authenticity. A survey of 1,000 users from the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea revealed transnational similarities in value-related interpretations of genres,…
Values for money? The neoliberal construction of “values” across Instagram language communities
While the term “values” is widely invoked to construct identities, set boundaries, and justify decisions, its use has evaded systematic analysis. This is particularly intriguing in the context of social media, where the term simultaneously reflects and shapes what is cherished by people worldwide. Addressing this void, we analyzed how Instagram users from different language communities – English, German, Italian, Korean, and Japanese – frame the …
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as compassion or freedom. While visualizing the abstract is not new, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. In this paper, we address an unexplored question about this process: which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Ins…
Memetic Commemorations
Memes are efficient tools for far-right activism. They also offer a window into the reactionary values expressed by far-right constituents in digital spheres. In this paper, we conceptualize memes as a meeting place between the values of the far-right and the values characterizing memetic communication on social media. We examined this process through the lens of Schwartz’s theory of basic human values and a case study from Italy. Specifically, w…
What Does #Freedom Look Like? Instagram and the Visual Imagination of Values
Instagram is the place for the visualization of everything, from travel and food to abstract concepts such as freedom. Over the past decade, the platform has introduced a bottom-up process where users co-produce image repertoires that shape the boundaries of the imaginable. Drawing on an epistemology of social constructionism, we ask which visual repertoires are associated with value-related terms on Instagram. We studied 20 widely used value has…
"Have a Great, Positive, Beautiful Day!"
This paper adopts the lens of social media rituals to study a new incarnation of ritualized greetings: good morning memes. These are a popular yet under-studied form of ritualized greeting posted every morning by social media users across the global. Such memes feature text with a wish for the incoming day paired with elements such as flowers, food or animals. In this paper, I focus on the ways in which these memes construct values, broadly defin…
Happy Monday friends! Coffee?’ Matteo Salvini, good morning selfies, and the influencer politician
Social media have reshaped how people achieve, retain, and perform celebrity. This, in turn, has re-shaped how celebrity and politics intersect. We contend that the established concept of the ‘celebrity politician’ no longer captures all of the most common celebrity practices of highly visible political figures. This is because politicians increasingly model their public personae on internet celebrities. We substantiate this argument with an anal…
Mapping the transnational imaginary of social media genres
This article presents a transnational study of the classification and evaluation of social media content. We conducted a large-scale survey ( N = 4770) in five countries (Germany, Italy, Japan, South Korea, and the United States) with open-ended questions about the types of content people like and dislike. Through iterative and inductive coding, we identified 29 topics, or broad areas of interest, and 213 recurrent genres, or narrower categories …
Memetic commemorations
This paper examines memetic content as a window into the values expressed by far-right constituents. Our main premise was that far-right memes are a site of interaction between two types of values: those of the far-right as a social movement and those characterizing memetic communication on social media. We studied this notion through a case from Italy: the photo-based meme genre of ‘alternative calendar commemorations’ that memorialize events or…
A typology of social media rituals
Given its massive volume and rapid development of new trends, the universe of user-generated content may seem utterly chaotic. Yet the flow of content is underlined by deep-rooted patterns of communication. In this article, we present the first systematic attempt to identify these patterns using the concept of social media rituals. Understood as typified communicative practices that formalize and express shared values, rituals offer a productive …
“I love this photo, I can feel their hearts!” How users across the world evaluate social media portraiture
Portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when judging th…
“I Love This Photo! I Can Feel Their Hearts”. How Users Across the World Evaluate Social Media Portraiture
Personal portraits on social media are value-laden constructs. Whether documenting graduation or flexing in the gym, users express what they care about and present it for others to evaluate. Since “global” portrait genres are produced and consumed in different locales, their interpretation and evaluation may vary. We thus ask: What values do people identify in different types of social media portraits? Which evaluative criteria do they use when j…
How to Do Things With “Values”
The term _values_ is prominent in political discourse. Yet its ubiquity is matched by its vagueness, especially when considering usage among different cultures. Twitter provides a promising venue for exploring the contested political discourse surrounding this term. In this paper, we study the use of the term values on Twitter across different language communities. We ask: _what meanings do users ascribe to the term “values”?_ and _what are the s…
Follow Me Through Instagram
Over the last decade, social media became an indispensable tool for political campaigning for populist political leaders, who successfully used social media to circumvent traditional media elite and establish a seemingly direct relationship with their constituents. Based on this premises and adopting the lens of “digital populism”, our study presents a visual analysis of the portraits and candid shots posted on Instagram by two Italian populist p…
The value(s) of social media rituals
2000), we compare discursive topics, modes of ritual participation, and the values expressed in resolutions. Our findings indicate both that the ritual crosses cultures and that there are language-specific dynamics that do not map neatly onto established divisions between 'Eastern' and 'Western' value orientations. Instead, we identify three underlying tensions organizing the articulation of values: self-acceptance vs. self-improvement, public vs…
The Middle Region Populism of Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi on Instagram
This paper investigates the Instagram self-presentation of Italian party leaders Giorgia Meloni and Matteo Renzi. Building on the notion that circumstances are crucial to the construction of the self through digital photography, we argue that the two leaders strategically use setting and accompaniment to navigate the demands of their populist self-presentation as “ordinary super leaders”: exceptional celebrity-like personae whose lives remain non…
It's Like the Fridge Magnet of the Internet
This article investigates the values expressed by good morning memes-an understudied subgenre of social media inspiration featuring a 'good day' wish-and the criteria that users from different countries and generational groups adopt to evaluate them. Expressed values were detected through a content analysis of 414 memes in English and Italian, while insights about evaluation were derived from 20 semistructured interviews with American and Italian…
Values for money? The neoliberal construction of “values” across Instagram language communities
While the term “values” is widely invoked to construct identities, set boundaries, and justify decisions, its use has evaded systematic analysis. This is particularly intriguing in the context of social media, where the term simultaneously reflects and shapes what is cherished by people worldwide. Addressing this void, we analyzed how Instagram users from different language communities – English, German, Italian, Korean, and Japanese – frame the …
PoV
This article investigates the characteristics and communicative values of the popular PoV meme on TikTok to uncover mechanisms of community building on the platform. An analysis of the content, form, and stance of 250 videos revealed that creators of PoV memes lip-sync to audio remediated from pop culture and mimic how they imagine “you” would act in a given scenario. I offer the concept of “echoic affiliation” to describe how PoV memes leverage …
The Collective Individualism of Youtube Makeup Reviews
Beauty is one of the most popular and lucrative segments on YouTube, with broad transnational appeal, making it an ideal site to investigate the relationship between commercialization, globalization, and digital platforms. We focus on makeup reviews to utilize established research on cross-cultural differences in reviewing and ask how cultural repertoires of evaluation compare across multiple languages. We collected popular makeup reviews using k…
Broadcasting the good mom
With the rise of social media, mothers around the world publicly share their experiences with raising children, shaping broader notions of what motherhood is and should be. While scholars have documented this phenomenon’s importance, we know little about the values this online discourse expresses or how it varies across cultures. Addressing this gap, we compared the values invoked by moms in morning routine videos on YouTube. Using a novel codebo…
Global creator culture? Converging values and generic practices in YouTube reviews
Social media facilitates new forms of cultural production from professionalized and commercialized users known as creators. While some have posited the emergence of a global creator culture, others have identified substantial gender differences and local variation. To assess how these factors influence content production, we focused on the critical case of YouTube review videos, a successful genre that is both internationally popular and heavily …
Liking without borders? Authenticity and the evaluation of Instagram photo genres
While authenticity has been identified as pivotal on social media, it has not been studied as part of a broader value ecology shaping content evaluation. Addressing this gap, we investigated users’ evaluations of prominent Instagram genres in relation to perceptions of authenticity. A survey of 1,000 users from the United States, Germany, Italy, Japan, and South Korea revealed transnational similarities in value-related interpretations of genres,…
How to do things with a keyword
While people regularly employ the term values in mundane interactions and political debates on social media, little is known about its function in public communication. Approaching values as a keyword in everyday communication, we asked: In what contexts do Twitter users invoke the term values? What discursive functions does the term serve? How do these contexts and functions differ across languages? To address these questions, we analyzed approx…
Resisting climate imaginaries
The climate crisis is simultaneously a crisis of the imagination, signaling a cultural failure to comprehend and contest unfolding ecological destruction. Conventional media representations of climate futures, including catastrophic documentaries, corporate sustainability narratives, and even climate activism imagery, often inadvertently fuel anxiety or consumerist complacency. Online communities offer alternative spaces of cultural production th…
The expression of values on social media
Social media is a central arena for the articulation of values, shaping what people around the world deem important and desirable. However, traditional value typologies struggle to capture the dynamic nature of value expression in digital spheres and overlook new communication-related values prevalent in these environments. Addressing these gaps, we developed an analytical framework for investigating value expression on social media, comprising t…
Sociology (20 works) · Social media (13 works) · Computer Science (12 works) · Political science (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Social Media and Politics (10 works) · Art (9 works) · Media studies (9 works) · Media Studies and Communication (8 works) · Politics (7 works)