Oct. 2026 We still call the screen a window. Yet before an image appears, most of what could have appeared has been eliminated. On YouTube, one model reduces millions of videos to a few hundred; another orders them according to how long each is expected to keep the person watching (Covington, Adams, and Sargin 2016). What reaches the eye is not an open world but a field narrowed and arranged to produce a response. Looking through the screen and being targeted through it occur

Oct. 2026 What does an image demand from your body before you have decided whether you like it? A face fills the phone, and your hand moves toward your own cheek. Nothing has been said, yet something needs correcting. Further down, a couple embraces in a kitchen where nobody seems to have washed a dish. Your life has dishes, fatigue, a lover who sometimes wants silence; now these ordinary conditions begin to look like evidence against it. The image has supplied the terms of c

Oct. 2026 The headphones erase the neighbor, the feed selects the enemy, the application counts sleep while the deadline dismantles it. Everything protects us. Everything arrives with settings. Meanwhile the body, this badly managed province, continues to sweat, age, hesitate and desire at the wrong hour. Biological alienation begins when the manufactured environment overrides the organism’s capacity to establish its own rhythms. One adapts—splendidly. One answers faster, mea

Nam Phuong Ngo School of Law and Social Justice, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK Choice architecture design has become a defining feature of the digital economy, shaping how users interact with online platforms. Once designed to enhance usability, interface techniques now often exploit cognitive and emotional biases to steer behaviour – commonly known as dark patterns. While regulators increasingly recognise such practices, most legal frameworks still treat manipulatio

Oct. 2026 How many children must be assessed before their environment comes under scrutiny too? In England, around 270,000 young people awaited an ADHD assessment in December 2025, up from 21,000 in April 2019—nearly thirteenfold. The interim report distinguishes this surge from an equivalent rise in ADHD, without settling the contributions of diagnostic catch-up, service backlogs, and worsening difficulties. It acknowledges rising reported symptoms and no recent prevalence d

Oct. 2026 Published in 2026 in the International Journal of Mental Health and Addiction, Dorrestein, Nutley, and Thorell’s study of 1,820 Swedish high school and university students finds that motives—escaping worries, comparing oneself with others, compensating for unmet social needs—and content focused on appearance or negativity, rather than screen time, account for 33–40% of the variance in psychosocial problems. Its stated conclusion: move beyond screen time and target u

Sept. 2026 How much can we trust AI-generated knowledge of the world—and the concepts we use to understand it—when it draws on texts already reshaped by other AI systems? A paper published on August 24 in Nature Human Behaviour brings together three studies and over 880,000 texts (Sourati et al. 2026). In the rewriting experiments, models largely preserve the content but reduce stylistic diversity. Reported statistically significant reductions in the variance of linguistic co

Liviu Poenaru, Dark Machinic Epistemology (forthcoming) This regime has no flag, no single party and no leader required to appear on a balcony. It has an interface. The word dictatorship may seem excessive if understood only in its constitutional sense: elections still take place, speech still circulates and no digital apparatus holds a monopoly on violence. Yet the term becomes precise when it names a structure of command that progressively narrows the possibility of disobed

Sept. 2026 This highly topical book provides an integrated framework for understanding how artificial intelligence, personality traits, gender, and cultural contexts shape youth digital engagement and mental health outcomes. Grounded in cyberpsychology and extensive empirical research, AI ethics, and developmental psychology, this book addresses the urgent need for evidence-based approaches to supporting young people's well-being in an increasingly AI-mediated digital world.

Sept. 2026 Drawing on primary empirical research, this book considers the democratic outcomes of political news avoidance, selective news exposure, and misinformation. Political information environments across democracies are in flux, fundamentally changing the way citizens gain political information and leading to widespread concerns about consequences for democracy. From selective media use leading to increased attitudinal polarisation, to declining trust in legacy media an

Sept. 2026 This book examines and critiques Steve Fuller’s social epistemology on his study of four ways to understand the nature of post-truth: way one’s understanding is an epistemic crisis in which emotion has taken over and facts are irrelevant; way two’s understanding is a legitimation crisis of cognitive authority of science on the legitimation and delegitimation of knowledge claims; way three’s understanding is the Internet and social media have led to the democratiza

Edited by Kathrin Maurer, Rikke Munck Petersen, Dominique Routhier, Kassandra Wellendorf and Kristin Veel Sept. 2026 An interdisciplinary glossary on machine vision and aesthetics within the humanities and beyond. The Aesthetics of Machine Vision brings together scholars, researchers, and artists who explore machine vision from various academic and nonacademic perspectives. Edited by Kathrin Maurer, Rikke Munck Petersen, Dominique Routhier, Kassandra Wellendorf, and Kristin V

What if artificial intelligence is not replacing the state, but concealing who already governs? Jill Lepore’s The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State is not principally a history of AI. It is a history of political substitution. Functions once associated with constitutional government—organising public discourse, representing populations, producing knowledge and shaping collective decisions—have migrated towards private technological systems. Citizens become data; deliberat

Aug. 2026 What if Silicon Valley’s authoritarian turn is not a betrayal of its culture, but one of its political conclusions? Gil Durán’s The Nerd Reich rejects the comforting story that a few eccentric billionaires suddenly drifted to the right. It reconstructs an ideological lineage: from The Sovereign Individual and Curtis Yarvin’s neo-reactionary writings to Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen, Balaji Srinivasan, Elon Musk and JD Vance. What was marketed as technological emancip

Aug. 27, 2026 Liviu Poenaru This Scientific Watchdog brings together significant scientific findings published over the past three months and examines what they reveal when read as components of the same transforming mental environment. What if the mental-health crisis is not primarily a failure of individuals to cope, but evidence that environments have become better at acting on nervous systems than institutions are at protecting them? Recent studies do not demonstrate a si

Sinem Evin Akbay Ali Ammar Kurt Bilge Bakir Aygar Şaziye Yaman Front. Psychol., 16 June 2026 Sec. Personality and Social Psychology Abstract Introduction: Fear of missing out (FOMO) has been increasingly linked to social-evaluative concerns and approval-seeking motivations, yet the psychological mechanisms underlying these associations remain insufficiently modeled. The present study examined the mediating role of need for social approval in the relationships between fear of

Qiuyu Fan Front. Psychol., 29 July 2026 Sec. Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology “Traffic anxiety” has become a collective psychic condition among digital content producers. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis as its theoretical framework, this article conceptualizes “traffic” (viewership metrics) as objet petit a, arguing that it is constructed under the gaze of the algorithmic “big Other” as an ever-escaping object-cause of desire. After clarifying the functional divisi

Tatiana Guevara & Gwendolyn Paige Watson Occupational Health Science As technology becomes increasingly embedded in the modern workplace, understanding its psychological effects on employees is critical for reducing work-family conflict (WFC). This study investigates how technostressors—specifically, techno-overload and techno-invasion—are associated with WFC through psychological detachment. Drawing on the Stressor Detachment Model (SDM), this study also examines attentiona

Holly Bear, Emma Soneson, Galit Geulayov & Mina Fazel Nature Mental Health (2026) Adolescents increasingly inhabit digital environments where exposure to self-harm content may occur unintentionally or through active engagement, yet little is known about how different exposure pathways relate to psychosocial risk. Here we examine past-month exposure to online self-harm content, its frequency and pathways of exposure using 2025 OxWell Student Survey data from 32,102 students a

Zhong Cao, Yuheng Luo, Lirui Jiao, Wenjin Chen, Klaus Prettner, Michael Kuhn, David E. Bloom, Dean T. Jamison, Till Winfried Bärnighausen & Simiao Chen Nature Medicine (2026) Depression is a major contributor to the global burden of diseases with substantial socioeconomic consequences. Here, to estimate the economic effects of depression, we developed a macroeconomic model using data from the World Bank and Global Burden of Disease Study 2021. The model estimated the impact