The article analyzes Kim Kardashian's Instagram Stories through the lens of film studies, viewing 24h worth of posts as single video streams. With an approach grounded in film analysis inspired by the poetics of film (Bordwell, 1989) and Eisenstein’s (1988) theory of montage, the study examines the effects of editing and juxtaposition of stories in shaping an user’s online presence. Preliminary findings reveal a visual tension between static and moving images, highlighting the rhythmic and visual shock caused by abrupt cuts between story segments. The study also observes the fusion of multimodality and cross-platform interactions, such as images of magazine articles and political support posts, creating a combination of seemingly disconnected content that, when viewed in sequence, produces an artistic and shocking effect. Despite limitations, such as the arbitrary choice of profile and the restricted corpus, the study concludes that Instagram Stories can be seen as artistic works, albeit unintentional, constructed through an editing process that involves the user and the platform in a hybrid human-technical process. Kardashian's stories, multifaceted and contradictory, offer a view of the construction of her online persona, highlighting activist content in an unexpected but effective way.

Social media have become a popular object of public debate in which they are often blamed for substantially causing socio-political rupture, such as the current “return” of racist and fascist sentiments across Europe. While much attention has been paid to social media, the important role of national legacy media and their potentially nurting role for such “ruptures” is often overlooked and still understudied.

Focusing on the mediation of sexual misconduct in the Netherlands, this paper therefore critically examines how social media and national legacy media intersect in collectively maintaing cultural issues that social media exposure turns into perceived “ruptures” across Western countries.

For operationalizing the analysis, the paper departs from the Dutch cross-media research infrastructure project Twi-XL which grants access to different archival media collections. Leveraging television transcripts from 1981 until 2023 and Dutch tweets from 2011 until 2023, the paper introduces a methodological framework with topic modeling for systematically tracing how the “overexposure” of certain issues on social media has potentially emerged through their “underexposure” on television over time.

The paper finds that Dutch television paid ample attention to the internal, structural and complex dimensions of sexual misconduct. While Dutch television historically framed sexual misconduct within institutional contexts from a progressive and feminism-oriented agenda, it neglected any critical and in-depth engagement alongside the axes of race and gender. Conversely, Dutch Twitter—particularly since the 2015 European “refugee crisis”—externalized the issue, reducing its complexity and often appropriating feminist paradigms and wordings to advance Islamophobic and far-right discourse.

“Bitterness [苦]” is a prominent affect in Chinese culture, rooted in sensory and emotional experiences and extending to an existential awareness of life’s uncertainty. Since time immemorial, bitterness has been linked to the hardships of agricultural labour and patriarchal exploitation. During the Maoist era, bitterness, particularly embodied by rural women, was reframed as a feudal remnant to be eliminated through rituals like "spitting out bitterness" for a socialist future. Meanwhile, rural women were expected to “eat more bitterness,” forming a cycle of bitterness.

This cycle now recurs on short-video platforms. Through textual analysis, interviews, and observations of ten rural female content creators in China, this paper explores their self-representation of suffering. Building on critiques of self-branding in digital cultures (Banet-Weiser, 2013), I argue that Chinese rural women repackage bitterness as a commodity within platforms' attention economy. The bitterness they ‘spit out’ through short video essentialises rural identities as inferior and backward for urban audiences, who see these qualities as virtues rather than stemming from structural inequalities. Fundamental aspects of rural bitterness, such as the urban-rural division, remain intact. Rural women must continue to ‘eat’ bitterness, now even more tied to their rural subjectivities. During this process, inspired by Butler’s theory of “grievability” (2010), bitterness is seen as affective governance tied to social conditioning, intersecting with personal feelings. Paradoxically, it also lets these women monetise the very affects associated with their hardships and marginalised status through the attention economy.