Communities of guitarists have existed and evolved in parallel with the instrument’s long and varied historical development. Technological progress in the twentieth century saw two major milestones for the guitar: the invention of the electric guitar, and the birth of the internet. This chapter explores the shift of guitar-based communities to virtual spaces starting with email groups, internet forums, and chat rooms. These communities serve similar functions as real-world communities by sharing knowledge and resources as well as providing spaces for discussions and performances. Peer-to-peer file sharing regenerated an old form of guitar-specific written notation: tablature. Then along came social media, which changed the entire music industry, including online guitar communities. Many of the world’s largest and most visited websites, Facebook, YouTube, X, and Instagram, are havens for guitar communities no longer defined by geographical boundaries. This has had enormous consequences as cultural and aesthetic expressions, particularly in the form of guitar performance practices, are now freely transmitted globally and instantaneously via virtual networks.

This chapter uses a transmedia approach to compare three international web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet: Romeu and Romeu (Brazil, 2016), Rome and Juliet (USA, 2017), and Romil and Jugal (India, 2018/2019), arguing that these shows use transmedia conventions to foreground how they re-write the Shakespearean text. All three shows included at least one protagonist with aspirations to succeed in the performing arts, and included lines from that play as set pieces. All three altered Shakespeare’s tragic ending to conclude with young people who feel supported within their sexuality and with previously hostile families reconciled. But the shows also added additional identity markers – whether of caste, language, social class, able-bodiedness, region or career aspirations – to the conflicts faced by their youthful protagonists, and some of these identity markers overshadowed the romantic plot to such an extent that none of these endings is 'happy' in a traditional or fairy-tale sense. I conclude that the transmedia characteristics of these shows make these adaptations ‘queer’.

I will explore how web-series adaptations of Romeo and Juliet challenge and revise the famous (and infamous) narrative of the star-crossed lovers. Participating in a new model for Shakespeare on screen, these series change the plot of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, expanding the number and variety of the female characters, adapting Shakespeare to address issues of gender, sexuality and love in the digital age. The young women who create web-series such as Any Other Rosie, Any Other Vlog, Jules and Monty and Rome and Juliet shift the viewer’s focus away from Juliet and her complicated legacy.

The chapter delves into the transnational dimension of the global TV system. Transnational media have evolved, and this chapter contends that a new generation has emerged. The first, which developed in the later part of the twentieth century, consists of cross-border TV networks and formats. The second is the rise of streaming platforms. During the first generation, the transnational remained a professional practice out of viewers reach. With the arrival of the second generation, the transnational has become an everyday mode of media consumption and interaction. The chapter’s second purpose is to examine the key organisational characteristics of the transnational media firm. It compares four types of organisational configuration (multinational, global, international, and transnational), and analyses the latter in depth. It connects organisational theory to the GVC framework, demonstrating how the nature of a firm’s activities and position in the value chain play a determining role in the type of organisational structure it is most likely to adopt.

This chapter outlines how social media data, such as Facebook and Twitter, can be used to study language attitudes. This comparatively recent method in language attitudes research benefits from the immediate accessibility of large amounts of data from a wide range of people that can be collected quickly and with minimal effort – a point in common with attitude studies using print data. At the same time, this method collects people’s spontaneous thoughts, that is unprompted attitudinal data – a characteristic usually attributed to methods drawing on speech data. The study of language attitudes in social media data can, however, yield wholly different insights from writing and speech data. The chapter discusses the advantages and pitfalls of different types of content analysis as well as the general limitations of the method. The chapter presents an overview of software programmes to collect social media data, as well as geo-tagging, and addresses data analysis as well as the general usefulness of the method (e.g. its applicability around the world or the potential for diachronic attitudinal change). The case study in this chapter uses examples from Twitter, focusing on attitudes towards the Welsh accent in English.

Chapter 3 addresses open online knowledge sharing. Open sharing is becoming more important in all major sectors in society, including science, politics, education and innovation, knowledge products (videos, textbooks and databases). This sharing includes both the domain of expert-produced scientific knowledge and massive amounts of citizen-produced practical knowledge. Because of lower publishing costs, Open Access has become the new dominant trend that makes research accessible to everyone. Increased production of open textbooks gives a more readable access to scientific knowledge and reaches a much wider audience. In addition, scientific knowledge construction processes are becoming transparent. This includes the establishment of many more open digital databases that allow anyone both to make their own contributions and get free access to all the data (e.g. citizen science project like eBird). There is also experimentation with making knowledge construction processes more open, both within scientific discourse (e.g. Polymath project) and the development of encyclopedic knowledge (e.g. Wikipedia). In addition, the recent decade has seen an enormous increase in amateur-produced practical knowledge, not only texts, but an abundance of images and videos. Enthusiasts share their skills and passions concerning any activity that might be of interest to other like-minded persons. It also includes the sharing of political opinions, for example with new digital technologies like argument mapping. Even some companies in the business sector have begun sharing more of its corporate knowledge.

This chapter focuses on the struggle to deal with hate speech on the Internet, including concrete examples and an examination of the basic measures that Japan needs to adopt to deal address with this problem. The chapter concludes that there is a significant difference between discriminatory expressions attacking socially vulnerable minorities and expressions attacking the government and the socially strong majority, which have become the focus for debate on regulation. However, while discriminatory expressions are unpleasant, they remain mere expressions and should be treated as such. It should not be overlooked that discriminatory expressions often take on a political character because they are often focused on emphasizing equality. Regulation under the law should be based on both freedom of expression and the goal of eliminating discrimination itself, and in relation to the latter a blend of education and awareness-raising activities are called for, along with resolution by law that aims to inspire voluntary initiatives (self-regulation) among providers.

This chapter examines the state of the literature–including scientific research, legal scholarship, and policy reports–on online hate speech. In particular it explores ongoing debates and limitations in current approaches to defining and detecting online hate speech; provides an overview of what social media data and surveys can tell us about the producers, targets, and overall prevalence of harmful language; reviews empirical evidence of the offline consequences of online hate speech; and offers quantitative insights into what interventions might be most effective in combating harmful rhetoric online.

Peter Stockinger’s chapter provides a comprehensive theoretical and methodological framework for describing and interpreting audiovisual media as ‘tools’ for producing and communicating cultural images in the form of ‘common cultural topics’. This could be regarded as a potentially very fruitful way to take research on cultural values further and it includes the elaboration of a research methodology based on structural semiotics and discourse analysis for dealing with audiovisual corpora diffused on digital media platforms. More specifically, the author’s aim is to reconstruct the ‘meaning landscape’ of cultural images of migration based on a canon of ‘topoï’, which are used to produce, communicate, share and advocate cultural visions of the other. The chapter interprets such cultural representations through a corpus of 150 videos uploaded to YouTube and identifies them as folk culture frameworks, which are particularly popular with so-called millennials and post-millennials.

The photographic selfie that bulks so large in popular digital culture has given rise to a musical equivalent, in which a facial image is analysed into a set of features used to generate a sonic output – the musical selfie. Michel Foucault coined the phrase ‘technologies of the self’, and Tia DeNora applied it to music, but the musical selfie reveals a different conception of selfhood that relates to many other aspects of digital culture – a conception that is both performative and intimately linked to technology. This chapter explores the musical selfie from three perspectives, in each case a digital form that is linked to a key technological platform and a key practice. These are: the playlist, linked to Spotify and the practice of curation; headphone listening, linked to Beats by Dre and enclosure; and the self-produced video, linked to YouTube and broadcasting. Seen in this light, digital selfhood (or selfiehood) is generated in relation to other selves and through shared activities, and closely linked to such fundamental features of digital culture as self-quantification, algocracy and surveillance.