Sharenting (sharing parenting on social media) has become a widespread activity, and some of those parents become family influencers. Female influencers have been on the rise, partly as an alternative to the precariousness of the job market. This article presents a qualitative study on 11 Portuguese mummy and family influencers, analysing social media content observed throughout 2.5 years, as well as media discourses on them. It focuses on how these female content creators portray parenting and family, work–life balance as an influencer and their boundaries for privacy and intimacy. It demonstrates how prominent mummy influencers reproduce a neoliberal ethos which favours an individual management of reconciling motherhood and a career in the context of post-austerity and precarity, through an emotional discourse that promotes relatability with the audience, converted into an essentially consumerist agenda.

This article looks at the discourses of Instagram users about interrupting the use of social or digital media, through hashtags such as “socialmediadetox,” “offline,” or “disconnecttoreconnect.” We identified three predominant themes: posts announcing or recounting voluntary interruption, mostly as a positive experience associated to regaining control over time, social relationships, and their own well-being; others actively campaigning for this type of disconnection, attempting to convert others; and disconnection as a lifestyle choice, or marketing products by association with disconnection imaginary. These discourses reproduce other public discourses in asserting the self-regulation of the use of social media as a social norm, where social media users are responsible for their well-being and where interruption is conveyed as a valid way to achieve that end. They also reveal how digital disconnection and interruption is increasingly reintegrated on social media as lifestyle, in cynical and ironic ways, and commodified and co-opted by businesses, benefiting from—and ultimately contributing to—the continued economic success of the platform. As Hesselberth, Karppi, or Fish have argued in relation to other forms of disconnection, discourses about Instagram interruptions are thus not transformative but restorative of the informational capitalism social media are part of.

This paper analyzes how female teen YouTubers manage intimacy and trust in the narration of their personal lives and the ways in which this is perceived by followers. The analysis of two case studies of popular teen YouTubers from Portugal and Brazil – SofiaBBeauty and Manoela Antelo, respectively – revealed that their presentation is anchored in discourses about whom they are with and where they are, what they are doing, and their personal tastes and styles. Through their comments on the videos, followers express trust connections with the vloggers, based on a sense of proximity, a desire for exclusivity in their relationship, relatability with banal aspects, and recognition as cultural intermediaries. These case studies have demonstrated strong similarities in the vloggers’ practices of constructing intimacy and consequent trust with peer audiences, bearing great resemblance with older YouTubers from central cultures. Although Sofia and Manoela put forward different class performances, the trust they inspire in their followers is a fundamental form of capital for both.

Digital nomads (DNs) are independent professionals who rely heavily on digital media and communications, are not bound to the constraints imposed by traditional organizations, and prioritize variables such as cheaper living costs when deciding where to live. Communication technologies enable the emergence of this digital lifestyle that is characterized by high mobility, self-efficacy, location-independent resource-sharing, and minimalism. The immediate outcome of the Covid-19 pandemic created an unprecedented space for debate between the DN community and the mainstream. On the one hand, the mainstream recognized the adaptive advantages of location independence and working remotely; on the other, DNs realized that one of their most fundamental values—the freedom to move—could become compromised by stringent border regulations forcing them to reassess nomadism. This article draws on risk society theories, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and self-actualization, to approach this problem. We Analyzed content produced by DN creators on YouTube, focusing on risk perceptions and arguments about the choice of staying nomad, compared with the alternative, that is, going back “home” seeking safety: (1) we found that most creators upheld core DN values, rather than shifting to fear-based or risk-control narratives driven by the effects of the pandemic. The narratives circulated in the videos thus contributed to reinforce the community’s values related to self-actualization, in a time of crisis; (2) as a group, the creators we studied were not biased to one option (keep moving or go home) and rather offered strong arguments to support either choice.

The polymerization of peptidoglycan is the result of two types of enzymatic activities: transglycosylation, the formation of linear glycan chains, and transpeptidation, the formation of peptide cross-bridges between the glycan strands. Staphylococcus aureus has four penicillin binding proteins (PBP1 to PBP4) with transpeptidation activity, one of which, PBP2, is a bifunctional enzyme that is also capable of catalyzing transglycosylation reactions. Additionally, two monofunctional transglycosylases have been reported in S. aureus : MGT, which has been shown to have in vitro transglycosylase activity, and a second putative transglycosylase, SgtA, identified only by sequence analysis. We have now shown that purified SgtA has in vitro transglycosylase activity and that both MGT and SgtA are not essential in S. aureus. However, in the absence of PBP2 transglycosylase activity, MGT but not SgtA becomes essential for cell viability. This indicates that S. aureus cells require one transglycosylase for survival, either PBP2 or MGT, both of which can act as the sole synthetic transglycosylase for cell wall synthesis. We have also shown that both MGT and SgtA interact with PBP2 and other enzymes involved in cell wall synthesis in a bacterial two-hybrid assay, suggesting that these enzymes may work in collaboration as part of a larger, as-yet-uncharacterized cell wall-synthetic complex.

Sharenting, or the practice of sharing one’s parenting or information about one’s children on social media, occurs in an increasingly platformized digital culture, where visual formats are central across participatory and commercial repositories. This paper investigates the articulation between sharenting as performed by celebrities and the wider construction of children’s digital identities. Through qualitative content analysis, this research looks at how Cristiano Ronaldo, the most-followed individual on Instagram since 2018, his partner, and his mother shared information about his children on that social media platform between 2018 and 2020. Through manual exploration, we searched for Ronaldo’s children across a variety of digital spaces. Our analysis reveals that sharenting on Instagram engages audiences through the portrayal of children as the parents’ extended self. Content from Instagram and news media is appropriated in vernacular and commercial digital spaces for conflicting affects: the cute father-son dyad, and the son as extension of the uber-famous, vain father. This extreme case shows how the digital identities of children of celebrities are widely public, formed by the everyday, intimate content of the family’s life, which is persistent and collectively recreated by news media, vernacular culture, and commercial platforms.