The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and the subsequent lockdown of cities worldwide generated a dramatic increase in the use of public health trac(k)ing technologies. This article presents an empirical analysis of China’s Health Code on WeChat and Alipay, Australia’s COVIDSafe and New Zealand’s COVID Tracer. We ask: how does app-based public health monitoring differ from prior forms of state tracking and corporate surveillance, and interface with public and private ideals of health and citizenship? Based on a comparative analysis of the selected apps and the political economy that surrounds their code and implementation, we argue that there is a new corona of surveillance to address COVID-19 crises by intensifying the diffusion of national surveillance technologies and framing these into justifiable moral practice. In conclusion, we identify a new ‘corona’ of public health governmentality during COVID-19 pandemic through an intensification of top-down institutional data extraction from human bodies.

This article analyses the evolving uses of social media during wartime through the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Spokesperson Facebook and Twitter accounts. The conflict between Israel and Hamas-affiliated groups in November 2012 has generated interesting data about social media use by a sovereign power in wartime and the resultant networked discourse. Facebook data is examined for effective patterns of dissemination through both content analysis and discourse analysis. Twitter data is explored through connected concept analysis to map the construction of meaning in social media texts shared by the IDF. The systematic examination of this social media data allows the authors' analysis to comment on the evolving modes, methods and expectations for state public diplomacy, propaganda and transparency during wartime.The above tweet, transmitted across the world, signals a new confluence of propaganda and 'transparency' in the information age. Within hours of a targeted killing by air strike being carried out, Israel, Hamas and the rest of the world were shown the details and were discussing the consequences. However, this provocative tweet was only one piece of the social media content that constituted Israel's war narrative, and was not indicative of the majority of Israel's social media messaging during the 2012 Israel-Hamas conflict. This article aims to examine the IDF (Israel Defense Forces) Spokesperson social media output for evolving facets of power, legitimacy and representation in a networked terrain. It argues that the spread of information shared by states in social media in times of war is impacted by complex dynamics that include new

Although Augmented Reality (AR) scholarship is largely defined through technocentric boundary work that delineates the virtual from the real, it is nevertheless vital to consider experiential conceptualisations of AR as mediating the human–physical environment, as this makes visible for analysis specific properties that afford specific dynamics of augmented publics. We consider how AR mediates the environment in ways previous media could not, identifying four affordances of note. We name visual (dis)integrity, environmental activation, contextual pointalisation and four-dimensional place(ment), as well as reliance on digital infrastructures as sets of properties and dynamics that speak to what AR affords its users. The article first traces how the conceptualisation of AR in scholarship has yet to move past technocentric metaphors of description, adopted from the Virtuality Continuum (Milgram et al., 1995) that separates reality from mediating technologies. It then pushes media critique conceptualising AR in ways that more accurately account for lived experiences of perception. Doing so updates the metaphors used to understand AR and exposes first- and second-order affordances of AR media, which define but are not definitive of the constraints and potentials present in how the properties and dynamics of AR mediate perceptions of life. The article concludes by noting how future research can now consider definitions of AR media that centre on how perceptible spatial computation augments relations between objects, whether these are conjured from electrons, atoms or humans.

This article offers an interpretive critique of the political affordances created through iterations of the WikiLeaks project. The research shows that delineated phases of the WikiLeaks transparency project often correlate with specific paradigms of digital democracy that were previously enunciated in this journal by Lincoln Dahlberg. The research builds upon and extends Dahlberg’s democratic paradigms by comparing new objects against the typology and offering a theoretical explanation towards how political affordances are formed in digital democracy. Specifically, the article relates theories of affordance to an informing/deforming design process to explain how political positions are created in new media apparatus. The article traces iterations of WikiLeaks from 2006 to 2011, as well as derivative projects of radical transparency that existed in 2012 and 2013.

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