IJOC-MASTS Special Forum

Though much of life entails making and navigating “scale,” this fundamental concept is often invisible, assumed, and unexamined. How is a phenomenon bounded as small or big? Which practices are local versus global? Who has the power to aggregate actions and declare similarities among people? What makes a goal short-term versus long-term? Answering these and related questions often requires grappling with sociotechnical systems that convene, fragment, measure, compare, aggregate, anchor and shift perspectives on, speed up and slow down, narrow and expand human-nonhuman relationships.

This Forum on SCALE: Tracing the Sociotechnical Convenings, Sizes, Transitions, and Measurements Shaping Communication Systems, guest edited by Mike Ananny, Kyooeun Jang, and Colin Maclay, traces sociotechnical scale across a richly interdisciplinary set of 10 essays examining everything from machine learning, content moderation, viral memes, and digital labor to self-tracking apps, prenatal development, venture capitalism, planetary exploration, urban planning, and dreams of better futures.

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on August 6, 2026.