This study sought to understand social media users’ responses to Division-I football players’ early exit announcements as manifestations of BIRGing and CORFing. Researchers analyzed social media users’ replies ( N = 2,009) to six collegiate student-athletes’ early exit announcements on Twitter and Instagram during the 2018 National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) football season. Results identified four responses to exit announcements: (a) supporting, (b) noting significance, (c) disagreeing, and (d) capitalizing. These reactions varied as a function of fan identification: (a) those who expressed fandom for exited teams supported student-athletes, (b) those who expressed fandom for other teams capitalized on the announcements, and (c) those who expressed no fandom noted the significance of and disagreed with student-athletes. These findings offer unique insights that reinforce and diverge from assertions about fans’ BIRGing and CORFing behaviors. The results also have consequences for how scholars and practitioners come to view the intersections between team/organizational processes, athlete expression, and athlete–fan interaction.

This article draws from a critical discourse analysis of Google’s three-year process to gain permission to extract greater amounts of water from an aquifer in South Carolina located near one of its data centers. Through an account of this local conflict by analyzing local news coverage, we participate in ongoing academic research regarding how the conditions of media infrastructures – the otherwise banal and largely taken-for-granted facilities that help technologies like cloud storage and streaming to operate – need to be explored in terms of the particular, local conflicts that arise from major corporations like Google building infrastructure in places like Berkeley County, South Carolina. To advance this research, we offer what we call an agri-cultural approach, which emphasizes how digital culture is formed from conflicts over the relationships between natural resources like water and digital infrastructures like data centers.

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Many reports indicate higher education counseling centers are finding it difficult to keep pace with the growing rates of stress, anxiety, depression, and sleeping difficulties in undergraduate populations. Some universities are turning to telepsychology, or means of providing mental health care through videoconferencing, software, and other digital tools. This article analyzes one such platform, therapy assistance online (TAO), through a critical walkthrough of the platform’s self-help modules to consider how they communicate and construct care as individual labor which generates data for the platform. We argue that by removing traces of the therapist’s body and, in turn, dialogic communication, the platform produces modes of neoliberal self-care operationalized through data extraction, where the individual user works through modules while providing personal information to the platform. While TAO is offered as a solution to overcrowded and understaffed care facilities, it demonstrates some limitations of relying on third-party platforms to care for students.