International Journal of Communication

Theorizing Listening as a Tool for Social Change: Andrea Dworkin’s Discourses on Listening

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Theorizing listening’s multifarious functions has meaningful potential for critical communication studies. I argue that our understanding of listening can be enriched by examining the discourses of the U.S. radical lesbian feminist Andrea Dworkin. Employing and extending McRae’s method of performative listening, I argue that Dworkin’s rhetoric can be read as a theory and practice of radical, caring listening that promotes social change and moves us toward collective action.

Je Suis Charlie? The Framing of Ingroup Transgression and the Attribution of Responsibility for the Charlie Hebdo Attack

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

This article examines the effect of historical transgressions associated with individuals’ in-group on attribution of responsibility for the attack on the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo. While the capacity of media frames to induce emotional states is well documented, the current study expands the understanding of the underlying processes associated with the framing effect by highlighting the ability of frames to induce collective-level emotions. Through an online experiment, we suggest that framing the attack in reference to American transgressions (abuses at the Abu Ghraib prison) initiated collective guilt, resulting in less attribution of responsibility for the attack to Islam and less support for anti-immigration policy in the United States. Conversely, framing the event in terms of American victimization (9/11 attack) engendered high levels of collective victimization, subsequently heightening the perceived responsibility of Islam in the attack and harnessing support for anti-immigration policy. Relevant moderators are considered, and practical and theoretical implications are discussed.

Welcome to the Club: From Multimodal Voluntary Participation to Community Involvement

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

This study integrates the theory of media multiplexity and a social network perspective to examine whether and how multiple modes of participation in voluntary groups, that is, multimodal voluntary participation, facilitate community involvement. Analyzing a 2013 random sample survey of 400 residents in the Greater Cleveland area, Ohio, in the United States, the results show that multimodal voluntary participation contributes to community involvement after controlling for local social ties and multiple affiliations. However, the normalization hypothesis was not supported as individuals who occupy bridging affiliation positions are not necessarily more advantaged than are those without such positions in adopting multimodal voluntary participation and engaging in community activities. Implications and directions for future research are discussed.

People are the Message? Social Mobilization and Social Media in Brazil

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

In June 2013, protesters took to the streets of hundreds of Brazilian cities. The mobilizing factor was the rising fares of public transportation, which precipitated a wave of discontentment characterized by a mix of demands for better public services and changes in the discredited democratic institutions. This article discusses the role of social media in the protests and how such use configures a paradigmatic example of how communication occurs in network societies. To frame the discussion, we examine social media appropriation for the purposes of political participation through a survey applied online in 17 countries and an in-depth analysis of protests in Brazil. Looking at the Brazilian protests, the ways in which the appropriation of social media occurred and institutional responses to demonstrations developed, we argue that in the network society, the people, and no longer the media, are the message.

Free Software as Public Service in Brazil: An Assessment of Activism, Policy, and Technology

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Brazil has been one of the more progressive countries in adopting free and open source software as part of broader social and digital inclusion initiatives. Many of these policies and projects have their roots in activism during President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s presidency. Since then, free software projects and policies have continued to advance within state institutions, but the effectiveness of these projects and policies remains relatively unexplored. To that end, this article focuses on three recent projects aimed at using free software to expand social and digital inclusion. However, I argue that these projects do not adequately link intention to outcome when assessing the effectiveness of the projects or policies.

Internet Usage and Educational Outcomes Among 15-Year Old Australian Students

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Children in rich countries are using the Internet for social networking and gaming at very high rates, particularly in Australia. This study addresses whether these activities affect educational achievement in mathematics, reading, and science using the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s 2012 Program for International Student Assessment data set. The results suggest that using online social networks reduces academic achievement. Conversely, playing online games increases scores. It is argued that although both activities are associated with a high opportunity cost of study, video games potentially allow students to apply and sharpen skills learned in school. Skipping school, failing an academic year in the past, and being indigenous are also important predictors of underachievement. It is suggested that monitoring, counseling, and tutoring students who are at risk of failure may useful.

Fostering Support for LGBTQ Youth? The Effects of A Gay Adolescent Media Portrayal on Young Viewers

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

This study used experimental methods to examine the effects of a media portrayal of two gay 13-year-old characters on young viewers’ attitudes toward LGBTQ people and issues by exploring the influence of gender identity and sexual orientation on viewers’ reactions. An online quasi-experiment of 469 participants, ages 13–21, revealed that gender identity and sexual orientation influenced viewers’ emotional involvement with the storyline and identification with the characters, which was associated with a change in attitudes. For LGBTQ youth, the story evoked hope and fostered positive attitudes; however, it tended to produce a boomerang effect among heterosexual/cisgender youth, eliciting the emotion of disgust and leading to significantly more negative attitudes toward LGBTQ people and issues.

The Impact of Exposure to Media Messages Promoting Government Conspiracy Theories on Distrust in the Government: Evidence from a Two-Stage Randomized Experiment

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Does exposure to videos promoting government conspiracy theories cultivate cynicism toward the government? The results of a randomized experiment suggest that exposure to a video promoting a government conspiracy theory increased belief in the conspiracy immediately after the exposure and two weeks later. It is even more important that the immediate increase in the belief translated into higher levels of distrust in the government two weeks later. Further analysis indicated that engagement with the video might have explained the observed effects of the video on the belief and the distrust. The findings suggest that media messages promoting government conspiracy theories may have the potential to induce long-lasting cynicism toward the government through engaging viewers in the messages and, therefore, increasing belief in the theories.

Collective Action Frames, Advocacy Organizations, and Protests Over Same-Sex Marriage

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Although new theories of collective action in the contemporary media environment have provided an expanded view of the structure of action, important questions remain. These questions include how action frames flow between advocacy organizations and individuals on social media, especially in cases in which organizations do not initiate collective action. To address this question, we used Granger tests to analyze roughly 800,000 tweets about a competing boycott and buycott campaign that occurred in 2012. We found that the conversation about the campaigns began postbureaucratically (i.e., through citizen networks). Although organizations’ involvement was associated with increased citizen attention to the campaigns, the organizations neither adopted nor influenced citizen frames on the issue. We view this as an illustration of the variable and sometimes unpredictable role of organizations in communication about collective action today.

Algorithmic Labor and Information Asymmetries: A Case Study of Uber’s Drivers

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Uber manages a large, disaggregated workforce through its ridehail platform, one that delivers a relatively standardized experience to passengers while simultaneously promoting its drivers as entrepreneurs whose work is characterized by freedom, flexibility, and independence. Through a nine-month empirical study of Uber driver experiences, we found that Uber does leverage significant indirect control over how drivers do their jobs. Our conclusions are twofold: First, the information and power asymmetries produced by the Uber application are fundamental to its ability to structure control over its workers; second, the rhetorical invocations of digital technology and algorithms are used to structure asymmetric corporate relationships to labor, which favor the former. Our study of the Uber driver experience points to the need for greater attention to the role of platform disintermediation in shaping power relations and communications between employers and workers.

“What Can I Really Do?” Explaining the Privacy Paradox with Online Apathy

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Based on focus group interviews, we considered how young adults’ attitudes about privacy can be reconciled with their online behavior. The “privacy paradox” suggests that young people claim to care about privacy while simultaneously providing a great deal of personal information through social media. Our interviews revealed that young adults do understand and care about the potential risks associated with disclosing information online and engage in at least some privacy-protective behaviors on social media. However, they feel that once information is shared, it is ultimately out of their control. They attribute this to the opaque practices of institutions, the technological affordances of social media, and the concept of networked privacy, which acknowledges that individuals exist in social contexts where others can and do violate their privacy.

Dynamics of Culture Frames in International News Coverage: A Semantic Network Analysis

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

A semantic network analysis was conducted to investigate how national political culture shapes news frames for international political coverage. Specifically, the Associated Press framed the Arab Spring as a process of pursuing democracy, a core value of American political culture, whereas Xinhua News Agency framed it as a crisis that challenged authority and the related stability, the central concerns of Chinese political culture. The results of the analysis of coevolution of cultural symbols indicate that competition between the two different cultural frames happened with the purpose of negotiating the meaning of the Arab Spring on the global stage.

Digital Makings of the Cosmopolitan City? Young People’s Urban Imaginaries of London

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

This article focuses on young Londoners’ everyday digital connectedness in the global city and examines the urban imaginaries their connections generate and regulate. Young people engage with many mobilities, networks, and technologies to find their places in a city that is only selectively hospitable to them. Offline and online connections also shape urban imaginaries that direct their moral and practical positions toward others living close by and at a distance. We draw from a two-year study with 84 young people of different class and racial backgrounds living in three London neighborhoods. The study reveals the divergence of youths’ urban imaginaries that result from uneven access to material and symbolic resources in the city. It also shows the convergence of their urban imaginaries, resulting especially from widespread practices of diversified connectedness. More often than not, young participants reveal a cosmopolitan and positive disposition toward difference. Cosmopolitanism becomes a common discursive tool urban youth differently use, to narrate and regulate belonging in an interconnected world and an unequal city.

Performing Land of Smiles: Dramatization as Research in Thailand’s Antitrafficking Movement

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

This article presents a study of how the writing, composing, and production of the feminist musical Land of Smiles productively exposed and troubled the normative discourses of Thailand’s antitrafficking movement. Engaging three sets of focus group participants—Western nongovernmental organization employees, female migrants from Burma, and Western and Thai artistic production staff members—I sought to understand how discourses around victimhood, rescue, and morality were transformed following a production of the musical in Chiang Mai, Thailand. I argue that the musical performance served as a site of intervention in these discourses, allowing participants to critically evaluate the roles they play in the antitrafficking movement. This intervention represents a new approach to feminist international research, which I call “dramatization as research.”

Understanding the Death of "Citizen Journalist" Rami al-Sayed: Towards a New Interpretive Framework for Digital Journalism

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

English-language Western news coverage of the 2012 death of Syrian Rami al-Sayed, who produced both recorded videos and live feeds of civil strife in the city of Homs, exhibits discursive uncertainty about the meaning of his journalistic work. To analyze this uncertainty, this article interpolates Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia into the digital realm. Parrhesia delineates the discursive space of truth telling through duties to speak the truth, to believe that truth, and to honestly represent oneself. Risks to speakers—both reputational and existential—undergird and activate this framework. Parrhesia also offers a critical framework for understanding the discursive space of digital journalism, particularly when it is both enhanced and pressured by nontraditional journalistic actors.

Online Boundary Work in Stigmatized Groups: The Case of Support Groups for Israeli Childless Women

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Drawing from stigma, boundary work, and computer-mediated communication theories, this study examines online boundary work in stigmatized communities. It considers the efforts of group members to distinguish their group from people who are not considered group members. This study compared two online support groups—one for Israeli women who are voluntarily childless and another for Israeli women with fertility issues. In-depth interviews with group members were used to examine the ways members of the two groups maintained group boundaries when interacting with out-group members. Results indicate that the type of stigma, the media infrastructure, and the social context played an important role in online boundary work of each online group. The findings suggest that, unlike in face-to-face support groups with defined physical boundaries, online communication among stigmatized people creates challenges to group identity and stigma management.

Online Quizzes as Viral, Consumption-Based Identities

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Complexities in digital spaces problematize virtual-identity construction. Online commercialization trends that often take the form of native advertisements, including identity quizzes featured on websites such as BuzzFeed, exploit incentives for a branded self and the immaterial labor of users to create and share messages. Thus, identity politics are often depoliticized amid virtual environments that rely on ties between identity and consumption in either native advertisements or copy designed to draw users to advertisements. This article analyzes sponsored and unsponsored quizzes from BuzzFeed and resulting commentaries, arguing that in these cases, identity is often circumscribed around digestible, consumption-based “results.” This article also considers how the quiz phenomenon reflects trends in viral native advertising as it pertains to constructing virtual selves.

Desire for Cultural Preservation as a Predictor of Support for Entertainment Media Censorship in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

This article examines support for cultural preservation as a predictor of support for censorship of entertainment media in three Arab Gulf countries: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and the United Arab Emirates (N = 3,017; n > 1,000 in each country). Greater support for cultural preservation was positively associated with support for censorship; a belief that more should be done to preserve cultural traditions (Qatar, United Arab Emirates) and a desire for more entertainment that reflects one’s culture and history (Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates) were positively associated with support for censorship in two of the three countries. The belief that Hollywood films are harmful to morality was the only variable associated with stronger censorship support in all countries.

Staging and Engaging with Media Events: A Study of the 2014 Eurovision Song Contest

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Recent work on media events has questioned their integrative function, arguing that they operate as sites of symbolic struggle between different interest groups. However, relatively few studies have examined the experiences of those who design, organize, and attend such events. This article addresses this lacuna with reference to the biggest nonsporting live TV event in the world, the Eurovision Song Contest. Drawing on data from the 2014 competition in Copenhagen, Denmark, it examines the varying levels of commitment to the event among organizers, fans, broadcasters, and journalists and, in particular, notes how this shaped responses to a controversial incident involving the Russian entry. While those with an ongoing interest, including organizers and fans, tended to emphasize personal narratives and individual freedom of expression, mainstream media and audiences adopted a far more cynical standpoint, privileging geopolitical issues to make the event seem more relevant and compelling.

Why Drop a Paywall? Mapping Industry Accounts of Online News Decommodification

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Why is news sometimes free? Although the commercial press’s history is, in part, the search for new forms of commodification, journalism sometimes distances itself from commerce and economically decommodifies its work. We investigate one such moment in the form of “paywall exceptions”: instances when online news organizations drop or temporarily reconfigure their paywalls to let news circulate unmetered among subscribers and nonsubscribers alike. We document 69 exceptions from 1999 to 2015, categorize publishers’ publicly stated rationales, and reflect on what they reveal about the networked press’s negotiations between democratic and commercial logics.

Keeping Up With the Audiences: Journalistic Role Expectations in Singapore

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Scholarly work on journalistic role conceptions is growing, but the assumption that what journalists conceive of as their roles depends in part on what they believe audiences expect from them remains underexplored. Through a nationally representative survey (N = 1,200), this study sought to understand journalistic role expectations in Singapore, a country with a unique media system that brings together a highly developed information and communication infrastructure with media regulation. The study found that Singaporeans expect their journalists to serve the public, the nation, and the government—and in that order.

Pink Hijab Day: Mediation of the Hijab as a Symbol of Protest

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Pink Hijab Day (PHD) is a movement related to breast cancer awareness and countering stereotypes of Muslim women. The movement started in the U.S. and spread throughout the world through social media. This article argues that PHD did not establish a solid purchase in Muslim-majority countries because the campaign failed to establish organizational support in the region and the transnational network was not active enough to promote personal activism. It further argues that local constraints may limit the extent to which the pink hijab is adopted as a symbol of protest.

Gagged and Doxed: Hacktivism’s Self-Incrimination Complex

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

The investigation, arrest, and conviction of a number of high-profile hacker-activists, or hacktivists, reveal the ways subjectivity is mobilized through processes of revelation and evasion. We use the term subjectivation to describe the performative practices engaged in by hacktivists and contrast them with governmental and disciplinary practices of subjection. We elaborate upon two categories of subjectivation (coming out and versioning) and two categories of subjection (doxing and gagging). These categories form the vectors of hacktivist and state coproduction that emerge in selfie-incrimination. We use the term selfie to describe both intentional and inadvertent practices of online self-disclosure. Selfie-incrimination that is public and voluntary we discuss in terms of coming out. Versioning describes the public voluntary manipulation of personal identity. Being doxed entails the online disclosure of a hacktivist’s identity. Gagging refers to this ultimate silencing of illicit political digital activity, wherein the state designates the parameters of speech as well as physical movement. We conclude by examining the entangled and asymmetrical relationship between hacktivist subjectivity and the cybersecurity of the state.

Watchdogs in Chile and the United States: Comparing the Networks of Sources and Journalistic Role Performances

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

This study examined journalistic role performances in two different media systems: in Chile and in the United States. The main focus of inquiry was to assess how journalistic roles are performed and connected to sourcing in print news stories. The results revealed that the two media systems exercise different professional performances of the watchdog role. The watchdog role in the United States was centrally connected to political and government sources in news stories (54.3% of news stories performed the watchdog model), whereas the watchdog role in Chile was performed significantly less often in national news stories (11.2%) and showed weaker ties to political sources than the U.S. sample. Meanwhile, Chilean journalists covered political sources by performing the interventionist, the infotainment, or the civic journalistic role. Furthermore, the average number of sources per news item in U.S. news was 5.20, whereas the average number in Chilean items was 2.05. The findings are discussed in relation to the two cultural and political contexts.

Social Media Keep Buzzing! A Test of The Contingency Theory in China’s Red Cross Credibility Crisis

2016-08-15T11:18:43-07:00

Based on current literature on crisis management and contingency theory, this study explored how the Red Cross, China’s biggest charity, practices public relations in a low-trust society and how contingent factors influence organizational stances in the “Guo Meimei incident,” which initially erupted in 2011 as a personal issue, but quickly destroyed the reputation of the Red Cross, and continuously evolved over three years. By analyzing 1,300 public posts on social media, 576 news articles, and public relation materials of the Red Cross Society of China, I identified several unique contingent variables in the Chinese context such as the powerful public-led agenda, heavily censored media landscape, and low trust of the society as a whole. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Regulating "Hate Spin": The Limits of Law in Managing Religious Incitement and Offense

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

As democracies try to manage the risks arising from religious vilification, questions are being raised about free speech and its limits. This article clarifies key issues in that debate. It centers on the phenomenon of “hate spin”—the giving or taking of offense as a political strategy. Any policy response must try to distinguish between incitement to actual harms and expression that becomes the object of manufactured indignation. An analysis of the use of hate spin by right-wing groups in India and the United States demonstrates that laws against incitement, while necessary, are insufficient for dealing with highly organized hate campaigns. As for laws against offense, these are counterproductive, because they tend to empower the most intolerant sections of society.

Movie Selection and E-WOM Preference: A Cross-Cultural Perspective

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This article investigates the quantity- and quality-motivated bandwagon effects on individual movie selection from a cross-cultural perspective. Based on theories of information processing and decision making, we examined how people from different cultural backgrounds (e.g., collective versus individual and vertical versus horizontal cultural orientations) differ in their preferences of aggregate electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM), which is related to heuristic information processing, or more detailed individual e-WOM, which is related to systematic information processing. Empirically, we relied on an online study using movie selection scenarios that were distributed to participants in Singapore, the United States, and Germany. Results indicate significant cultural differences in the preference for e-WOM and related information processing modes. The individual cultural orientations of the participants offered a better explanation of the variance than a simple country-of-origin differentiation.

Exploring Work-Related Smartphone Dependency Among Young Working Adults in China: A Qualitative Approach

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This study extends the application of media system dependency theory to explore the work-related dependency relations of young working adults with their smartphones and the antecedents of such smartphone dependency. By conducting semistructured interviews with 32 young employees in China, this study showed that Chinese young workers mainly depend on their smartphones for understanding (e.g., being updated of the events in their work), orientation (e.g., performing work-related actions), and communication (e.g., contacting and interacting with colleagues) at work. Three task attributes (i.e., task interdependence, task mobility, and time criticality) and organizational norms influence the work-related smartphone dependency of Chinese young workers. Implications for theories and practices are discussed.

How Large-Scale Protests Succeed in China: The Story of Issue Opportunity Structure, Social Media, and Violence

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Based on analysis of 26 large-scale protests in mainland China from 2011 to 2013, this study finds that the most important factor shaping large-scale protest outcome is issue opportunity structure. I argue that the issue opportunity structure in mainland China opens space for environmental protesters to use social media as an organizational tool in a way that defuses tension/violence and increases the chance of success. Emboldened and empowered by abundant political opportunities in the environmental issue area, protesters are able to organize via social media—a rather risky mode of organizing—to construct inclusive, flexible, consistent collective action frames to further exploit political opportunities and generate the high online visibility that renders police brutality less likely. This study suggests that analysis of the causal mechanism of protest success in China must be situated in the issue opportunity structure.

Born in Facebook: The Refugee Crisis and Grassroots Connective Action in Hungary

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This article explores the impact of social networking sites on social movements and collective action. Literature on the subject ranges from celebratory claims to critical stances. However, the more sophisticated approach conceptualizing “connective action” broadens the theoretical scope. The case of Migration Aid, a Hungarian Facebook-based grassroots relief group for refugees, is such an example. In this study, we contextualize the group’s activities, exploring how they relate to the broader political environment, arguing for a need to reexamine the concept of contentious politics. We explore the characteristics that make connective action possible, with an emphasis on the group’s rhizomatic structure. The findings detail the characteristics of the rhizomatic organization and how these characteristics shape the group’s action repertoire.

Heads of Government and Their Media Biographies: How the Media Socialization of German Chancellors Influenced their Strategies Toward the Media

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

The relationship between the political strategy of the German chancellors after the Second World War toward the media and their media socialization as well as their media biography is analyzed using secondary sources, (auto)biographies, and other media sources. We interpret the influence of the chancellors’ social background and early influences, their experiences in journalism, the interplay between the chancellors(-to-be) and the media, and their media politics from the perspective of their media socialization and mediatization theory. We identify different types of fundamental perspectives on the media the politicians have taken, and conclude that media socialization continues on a new strategic level during their whole career while their social background continues to play an important role.

“Power Femininity” and Popular Women’s Magazines in China

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Western women’s glossy magazines (“glossies”) have made increasing inroads in the Chinese market and advocate a “power femininity,” which celebrates women’s assertive individualism and power as consumerist agency. While this power femininity has global neoliberal resonances, it also taps into the unique postsocialist Chinese context, where the liberation of individual desires, including the material and the sexual, is linked with a strongly felt need to undo a past socialist wrong that repressed people and deprived them of what should be an inalienable human right. This concept departs from the caregiving, self-sacrificial, and family-oriented “natural femininity” promoted in local women’s magazines in terms of aspiration, assertiveness, and a nativist-versus-international divide, yet ultimately both the Western and local women’s magazines are united by a shared stress on the need to cultivate a distinct Chineseness in the feminine ideal and to position women’s magazines as an integral part of the Chinese nationalist project of modernization and progress.

Latino Television in the United States and Latin America: Addressing Networks, Dynamics, and Alliances

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

The presence of Latino TV in the United States has been increasing during the first decades of the millennium. Many alliances and new players are emerging in this market. This article contributes to the discussion of the Latino media by addressing the dynamics and complexity of this changing U.S. media subsystem; in fact, I propose a characterization of the Latino media as a subsystem of the U.S. communication system. The research (a) analyzes the main ownership links and networks between the major U.S. media players with their Latino TV counterparts; (b) draws a map of the Latino TV subsystem with a concentric analysis and establishes the production and consumption particularities of the subsystem; (c) identifies the interaction of Latino TV companies with their partners in Latin America; and (d) establishes that the core of Latino national broadcasting networks can be divided into two levels according to their audiovisual industrial strategies and financial support.

What Do Readers’ Mental Models Represent? Understanding Audience Processing of Narratives by Analyzing Mental Models Drawn by Fiction Readers in India

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This study extends the narrative-processing literature by examining mental models constructed by individuals who have read the same narrative. Sixteen adults from Chandigarh (India) read a fictional story in Hindi, drew a picture of the story, and participated in an in-depth interview. Findings showed that human characters from the story featured in a majority of these drawings and that the strength of character involvement impacted the character’s size, detailing, and placement in readers’ mental model drawings. Readers also constructed abstract and symbolic mental models. This study corroborates research indicating that readers empathize with multiple narrative characters and that character involvement crosses generations and genders.

New Political and Communication Agenda for Political Discourse Analysis: Critical Reflections on Critical Discourse Analysis and Political Discourse Analysis

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This article advocates using theories and approaches in political communication to advance the agenda of political discourse analysis (PDA) that uses the approaches in critical discourse analysis (CDA). I first review the development in the research of PDA and criticisms against CDA and PDA, along with my reflections on these criticisms. I also discuss how basic concepts and dimensions in political communication can be used to advance PDA. In conclusion, I argue that traditional approaches to PDA center too much on Marxist or post-Marxist conflict theories and on linguistic description and interpretation. They fail to adequately explain political issues as CDA does to social issues. Incorporating theories and approaches in political communication can “demystify” PDA from its status quo toward a discipline that addresses political problems in communication.

Communication Asset Mapping: An Ecological Field Application Toward Building Healthy Communities

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Guided by an integrated theoretical approach combining communication infrastructure theory with methods of assets-oriented community field mapping, this study reports the findings of an engaged scholarship project we term communication asset mapping (CAM). Ecological in orientation and participatory in practice, CAM represents a tool for analyzing urban spaces’ potential as mediums for building healthy communities. This article offers two case studies from different low-income neighborhoods in Los Angeles, the first a researcher-directed CAM application and the second undertaken in collaboration with community health promotion workers. Both offer insights for researchers and practitioners interested in the intersecting roles of communication and place in creating positive community change.

Transnational Family Communication as a Driver of Technology Adoption

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

The diffusion of information and communication technologies (ICTs) has made transnational communication more affordable and intensive. In this article, we examine how transnational family communication shapes immigrant families’ technology adoption and appropriation. Through interviews with immigrant Latino families about their experiences with computers, mobile devices, and the Internet, transnational family communication emerged as a motivating factor for purchasing and introducing digital technologies into the household. Digital ICTs help parents maintain virtual intimacy with faraway relatives, secure emotional support, and engage in transnational caregiving. For their children, cross-border interactions serve as opportunities to support their parents’ efforts to maintain family continuity. Such motivations facilitate a process of appropriation as families negotiate the affordances of particular devices and platforms.

Leftward Shift, Media Change? Ideology and Politics in Spanish Online-Only Newspapers after the 15-M Movement

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

The year of 2011 was one of global change, provoked by an economic crisis that brought neoliberalism into question. In Spain, the activity unleashed by the “15-M” movement culminated in the formation of Podemos, a party that has provoked a political earthquake. Simultaneously, several alternative left-leaning online-only newspapers have erupted in Spain. This article focuses on whether these changes were accompanied by ideological/political shifts in Spanish online-only opinion journalism between 2011 and 2014. A sample of 541 opinion columns was content-analyzed. Results indicate that digital journalism criticizes the establishment, broadens the ideological spectrum, and distances itself from bipartisanship. However, the shift is fundamentally conveyed through the attack and defense of political parties without generating a clearly radical journalism.

To Tweet or Not To Tweet: Factors Affecting the Intensity of Twitter Usage in Japan and the Online and Offline Sociocultural Norms

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Japan’s external cultural borders are less penetrable and the Japanese Internet is more culturally homogeneous. Yet, Twitter has encountered few barriers in entering the country, and Japan has the highest Twitter penetration rate in the world. This study explored the factors that influence the intensity of Twitter use in Japan through the dual lenses of socioecology and the characteristics of computer-mediated communication. It found that relational mobility and information-sharing intention were significant predictors of Twitter use intensity. Positive relationships between Twitter self-disclosure and relational commitment and between relational commitment and intensity of Twitter use were also supported. Whether Japan’s offline social and cultural norms are also communicated in the virtual world is further explained.

Starlets, Subscribers and Beneficiaries: Disney, Latino Children and Television Labor

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Children’s television networks are invested with moral value not attributed to other networks, yet they depend on the labor of children to advance their economic goals. Using a case study approach of Disney’s cable channels, we found that Latino children perform labor on behalf of the corporation in three ways: as subscribers to Disney’s cable networks, as actors in programming designed to deliver those subscribers, and as beneficiaries in the company’s corporate social responsibility efforts. We found that the logic by which Disney assigns various forms of labor to different types of Latino children helps to advance the company’s economic goals, rendering Latino children hypervisible in some spaces and invisible in others.

Misperceptions as Political Conflict: Using Schattschneider’s Conflict Theory to Understand Rumor Dynamics

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Publicly confronting political misperceptions enacts political conflict, generating communicative forms of public resistance as well as psychological resistance. Applying Schattschneider’s classic model of interest group political conflict to communication by those who publicly resisted messages debunking the misperception that vaccinations can cause autism offers insight into how misperceptions evolve and survive in public discourse. It also extends the model, establishing its relevance for contemporary forms of political conflict. Faced with debunking, believers socialize conflict, inviting audiences to join the struggle on their side, and alter the debate’s terms such that discussion escapes control by authorities. The resulting political debate is a moving target with changing standards of evidence. Consequently, confronting political misperceptions may generate activism that encourages misperceptions to evolve and spread.

Selective Exposure in the Context of Political Advertising: A Behavioral Approach Using Eye-Tracking Methodology

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Selective exposure refers to the tendency of individuals to attend to information that is in line with their political views. This study advocates a behavioral approach to selective exposure research by introducing eye-tracking as a straightforward measure of selection processes. We tested participants’ selective exposure to political poster advertisements from one left-wing and one right-wing party. Individuals were simultaneously exposed to on-screen ads by the two different parties, and their eye movements were unobtrusively recorded. Findings indicate that the political orientation of the participants explained selective exposure in terms of the time taken to look at each ad. Implications for selective exposure research are discussed.

“Biased” Systematic and Heuristic Processing of Politicians’ Messages: Effects of Source Favorability and Political Interest on Attitude Judgment

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This study investigated two information-processing modes for political messages from favored politicians: “biased” systematic processing and heuristic processing. In an experiment, college students (N = 183) with different levels of political interest received messages about unfamiliar political issues from either a favored or a less favored candidate in the 2008 U.S. presidential election. For those with low levels of political interest, source favorability had a direct effect on attitudes, indicating heuristic processing. For those with high political interest, source favorability had an indirect effect on attitudes through message-relevant thoughts, indicating biased systematic processing. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed.

Image Versus Text: How Newspaper Reports Affect Evaluations of Political Candidates

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

News coverage has become more visual and research suggests that news images affect assessments of political candidates. This study experimentally investigates the effects of textual versus visual on assessments of politicians’ competency and integrity, differentially for males and females. The results show that differences in visual favorability, combined with positive or negative verbal information, shape how people perceive male and female political candidates. The findings suggest that images do matter, but not more so than text, and their impact varies depending on the type of assessment and candidate gender. The results are discussed in light of the image superiority effect and its applicability to candidate communication.

On Migrant Workers’ Social Status in Taiwan: A Critical Analysis of Mainstream News Discourse

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

It is estimated that around 20 million Southeast Asians work outside of their home country. In 1991, Taiwan first introduced about 3,000 migrant workers from Thailand. In mid-2015, there were approximately 579,000 migrant workers who came under the category of foreign laborers mainly from Southeast Asia. However, there is scarce research on representations of the south–south international migration. This study critically analyzes mainstream news discourse on migrant workers in Taiwan to discern their relations to their residing society. Four themes emerged: objectification of foreign laborers; differentiated and gendered marginalization; multilevel triangulations over migrant bodies; and imperialistic cultural attitudes toward migrant workers. Through omissions, inferences, and emphases on particular events in news reports, the migrant workers are in an impossible position to exist politically, economically, and culturally in Taiwanese society.

Increased Efforts by Modern States to Improve their Reputations for Enforcing Women's Human Rights

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This study suggests that, since the year 2000, governments have been making greater claims and efforts to enforce women’s human rights. However, their motivations appear to be to improve their reputations in the international community rather than to protect women. The findings indicate that states are submitting reports to the United Nations on their progress eliminating discrimination against women on a timelier basis. Case studies of Eritrea, Thailand, and Yemen find that they report greater efforts to combat human trafficking—which spills across national borders and is thus visible to the international community—than to combat violence against women, a crime that is heinous and pervasive but often happens behind closed doors. This suggests that the nations’ motivations are largely reputational.

Understanding Engagement and Willingness to Speak Up in Social Television: A Full-Season, Cross-Genre Analysis of TV Audience Participation on Twitter

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

The widespread use of digital platforms has changed the way people watch television. Despite an abundance of empirical studies, full-season, cross-genre analyses of different TV formats are rare. Based on a data set of 1,383,414 tweets, this study aims to close this gap by comparing Twitter commentaries around the 2012–2013 seasons of the Italian edition of The X Factor and the political talk show Servizio Pubblico. For each episode, we identify peaks of Twitter engagement and analyze the corresponding TV scene, revealing the role played by suspense and surprise in catalyzing the engagement of online audiences. A content analysis of 12,640 tweets created during peaks of engagement reveals how willingness to speak up varies when the topic is politics rather than entertainment.

The Effect of Zero-Rating on Mobile Broadband Demand: An Empirical Approach and Potential Implications

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Zero-rating, a popular practice in which certain services or applications are exempted from data charges, has motivated a debate within the broader topic of net neutrality. Advocates claim that it can be a driver of broadband adoption in less favored regions and population segments, and opponents argue that it entails socially undesirable outcomes. A growing body of literature supports these diverging positions, but empirical evidence and critical assessments are scarce. Therefore, this paper presents a regression model to provide empirical proof of the effect of zero-rating on the demanded quantity of mobile broadband. Results demonstrate that consumers are better off with zero-rating in terms of estimated consumer surplus. Because this evidence addresses only one side of an issue that should be analyzed in a multisided market framework, further theoretical implications are discussed. A key conclusion is that zero-rating can be associated with socially desirable outcomes, and, even though zero-rating also entails the potential for adverse consequences, the results advise caution regarding regulatory tools that might be too stringent.

Determinants of Media Criticism in a Democracy in Transition: Applying Field Theory to Turkey

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Following recent studies using Bourdieusian field theory to examine journalistic freedom and media criticism, we investigated the Turkish press using a comparative perspective focusing on the media’s interaction with the nexus of power/government and market mechanisms. Using a snapshot of four Turkish newspapers in 2013, we analyzed their critical content vis-à-vis reporting about the government. To explain differences of criticism across these media outlets, we extended our qualitative and quantitative analyses to three sociopolitically key years with regard to the consolidation of governmental power. Our results indicate that what explains media criticism goes beyond structural factors and should also involve both between- and within-field variations, emphasizing media as a semiautonomous field.

Pacifying the Dragon? The Role of Expatriate Media Professionals in the Gatekeeping Process in China

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

China is currently characterized as having a censored media system, which poses challenges to expatriates (expats) who work within the Chinese media system. This study analyzes the motivations for expats to work in China through a gatekeeping lens. Through in-depth interviews of expat media professionals, themes of limited acculturation emerge, as well as few opportunities for input during gatekeeping processes related to hard news, but there are more opportunities for input in the production of business news, entertainment, and lifestyle programming. Although content is restricted, participants laterally influence their colleagues by mentoring them based on individual-level forces such as professional values and education. Censorship is accepted by expats as unchangeable. Social system forces become more manifest instead of being implicit.

A Corpus-Linguistic Analysis of News Coverage in Kenya's Daily Nation and The Times of London

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This study uses institutional theory, which suggests that groups of organizations within the same field, such as the press, develop shared characteristics and unique tendencies that reﬂect their particular social and political systems, to advance empirical understanding of non-Western media organizations. This research uses word frequency comparison to examine word use across two newspapers representative of press systems in different political and social environments. The news styles show evidence of norms shared across significant cultural and geographic distances and of influences unique to particular cultural and regulative contexts—suggesting that news organizations adapt to both shared global standards and institutional constraints unique to surrounding cultures and that, despite the globalization of journalism culture, local context still matters.

Value Priority and Humor as a Defense to Cultural Schism: Analysis of Istanbul Gezi Park Protest

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

The Istanbul Gezi Park protest started as an environmentalist action at Taksim against the uprooting of the park’s trees for the replacement of the military barracks that were demolished in 1940, and it turned into an uprising against the government after a police attack. This article turns the spotlight on a unique protest in the context of the protestors’ value priority preferences and the humor they used as a defense to cultural schism. It investigates the protestors’ cognitive mental frames, cultural and ideological positions, their demands for self-actualization and more freedom, and the changing methods of protest against the authority within the context of value change hypothesis and humor theories.

PageOneX: New Approaches to Newspaper Front Page Analysis

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

PageOneX is a Free/Libre and Open Source Software tool that we designed to aid in the coding, analysis, and visualization of newspaper front pages. Communication scholars have long analyzed newspaper front pages, using column inches as an important indicator of mass media attention. In the past, this involved obtaining physical copies of newspapers, coding and measurement by hand, and manual input of measurements into a spreadsheet or database, followed by calculation, analysis, and visualization. PageOneX automates some of these steps, simplifies others, and makes it possible for teams of investigators to conduct shared newspaper front page analysis online. We review scholarship in this area, describe our approach in depth, provide concrete examples of analysis conducted by media scholars using PageOneX, and discuss future directions for research and development.

Communicative Action and Citizen Journalism: A Case Study of OhmyNews in South Korea

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Drawing on Habermas’s theory of communicative action, this case study of OhmyNews in South Korea examines how citizen journalism operates in a broad organizational and social context. Through in-depth interviews with professional and citizen journalists, the study reveals that citizen journalism can be well understood at the intersection between the lifeworld and systems. Specifically, the study finds a coexistence mechanism by which citizen journalism competes, collaborates, coordinates, and compromises with professional journalism through communicative action, such as mutual understanding, reason-based discussion, and consensus building.

The Signs of a Strongman: A Semiotic and Discourse Analysis of Abdelfattah Al-Sisi’s Egyptian Presidential Campaign

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This study employs semiotic analysis to examine the sign system in two of Abdelfattah Al-Sisi’s 2014 Egyptian presidential campaign posters, and discourse analysis to uncover dominant discourses in Al-Sisi’s most prominent campaign video. The semiotic analysis finds that the campaign presented Al-Sisi as a familiar, yet transcendent, figure, and the discourse analysis suggests that the video producers discursively constructed Al-Sisi as the ultimate patriot and a strongman with immense leadership abilities.

Beyond the Binary: Toward the Paraconsistencies of Russian Communication Modes

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Russian communication is often viewed as inherently mysterious or even mystical. The present article is aimed at the exposition of this view and shows how Russian communication modes can be conceptualized as a constant search for their own logical and practical grounding: This search goes beyond the binary model and focuses on the contingent nature of communication. To that end, we first present a short overview of the concepts of analog and digital. Then, the analog roots of Russian culture are discussed, followed by an examination of the role of the digital in today’s Russia. It is argued that the dynamic of the analog and the digital leads to a third ground, which is conceptualized by using the ideas of paraconsistent logic developed by Nikolai Vasil’ev. Finally, this third ground is identified with the public sphere and is presented as interaction between the state and individuals; electronic communication exemplars are given.

The Politics of Privacy on State Socialist Television

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Existing theories of television often emphasize the inherently private nature of the medium: its propensity for personal narratives, its modes of address, and its centrality to domestic life. Yet, is this perception of television universally applicable? As this article argues, state socialist television was marked by a different relationship with the private–public boundary, rooted in the public thrust of the communist vision of modern society. Although television became a medium consumed in the comfort of one’s home, the narratives it offered were rarely centered exclusively on the private realm and often privileged communal and public values. The nature of televised representations of privacy in the socialist world also changed over time and differed across countries, with some countries markedly more open to depictions of privacy than others. This is demonstrated through a longitudinal and comparative investigation of domestic serial fiction covering the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The results suggest that theories of television need to pay more attention to the multiple forms of modern television cultures globally, anchored in competing visions of modern society.

Data Localization and the Role of Infrastructure for Surveillance, Privacy, and Security

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Due to the increased awareness of the politics embedded in Internet technologies, there has been a growing tendency for state and nonstate actors around the world to leverage Internet infrastructure configurations to attain various political and economic objectives. Governments push for infrastructure modifications in pursuit of economic development, data privacy and security, and law enforcement and surveillance effectiveness. Information intermediaries set and enact their infrastructure to maximize revenue by enabling data collection and analytics, but have the capacity to implement tools for protecting privacy and limiting government surveillance. Relying on a conceptual framework of the politics of infrastructure, this article explores tensions and competing interests that emerge around intermediaries’ technical and policy infrastructure through analysis of (a) data localization strategies in a number of countries and (b) privacy and security undertakings by information intermediaries.

Diversity Policies in the Media Marketplace: A Review of Studies of Minority Ownership, Employment, and Content

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Achieving diversity has long been a goal of U.S. communications policy. However, the diversity and minority preferences governing the Federal Communications Commission’s broadcast ownership policies have been challenged on the basis of doubts concerning the assumed nexus of minority ownership, a diverse workforce, and content: the triangle. Acknowledging the lack of consensus regarding whether the triangle actually exists, this article reviews previous studies (the majority of which adopted quantitative methods) and suggests some support for the nexus. Building on prior scholarship, this article suggests that future studies can adopt qualitative methods to provide explanations for the nexus by investigating broadcast station stakeholders, content, and the audience, and systematically collect longitudinal, industry-wide datasets to establish causal inferences of ownership, employment, and content.

The Dark Side of "Reality TV": Professional Ethics and the Treatment of "Reality"-Show Participants

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This article proposes an inventory of key ethical issues emerging from the production of reality TV shows, with a primary focus on participants’ rights/interests and program makers’ responsibilities. The analysis is structured according to four categories of potential harm (intrusion, humiliation, misrepresentation, and appropriation) and different stages of the production process, integrating theorizations on media, documentary, and image ethics with insights derived from 48 semistructured qualitative interviews with reality professionals and participants and several contracts. It is argued that professional practice needs to be informed by ethical considerations and accountability measures, touching a middle ground between incident-centered and all-encompassing critiques and between structural factors at industry and genre levels and (situational) measures of agency and differentiation.

Frailties at the Borders: Stalled Activist Media Projects in East Africa

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This article considers two activist projects involving attempts to export communication technologies. Groups of technologists based in the United States and Europe designed a radio station and an “oral wiki” for use in Tanzania and Rwanda, respectively. Both projects stalled before they could be fully implemented. But they did not languish because of user ambivalence or disregard; indeed, in both cases activists and local grassroots actors alike hailed the technologies as uniquely suited to the local conditions in which they were to be deployed. Drawing on social studies of technology, I argue that the Tanzanian radio station and Rwandan oral wiki cases illustrate that it matters where actors draw lines around where “technology” starts and ends. To distinguish between “the artifact” and “the social” is an act of boundary-drawing, with important consequences for media activism and technology transfer projects.

Changing the Rules of the Game: Strategic Institutionalization and Legacy Companies’ Resistance to New Media

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Drawing from communication research, history, and organizational studies, this article uses a new, interdisciplinary approach to study how legacy media companies—understood as established players in a specific media sphere—respond to the emergence of new media. The article examines the example of copyright legislation in news, using two case studies from Germany on radio in the 1920s and online news aggregators today. The article combines historical archival research with other qualitative research methods to explore when and why contemporary transitions follow similar patterns to the past. Our results show that legacy media companies frequently engage in what we term “reactive resistance” to reconstitute their media environment. Rather than just fighting new media companies on their own turf, legacy media pursue what we call “strategic institutionalization” to consolidate their business models.

Compulsive Creativity: Virtual Worlds, Disability, and Digital Capital

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

In this article, we analyze the intersection of creativity and agency by examining what might appear to be a very different intersection: disability and the digital. We do this by exploring what we term “compulsive creativity” as experienced by persons living with Parkinson’s disease who are active in the virtual world Second Life. To address forms of social and cultural capital, we introduce the notions of “digital embodied states” and “digital objectified states.” In doing so, we suggest ways that compulsive creativity speaks to questions of cultural capital in the context of disability online and emerging creative economies.

Who’s the Boss? Setting the Agenda in a Fragmented Media Environment

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Recent work on media choice calls into question the continued influence of traditional news media on the public agenda. We asked whether agenda setting persists either in its traditional form or an alternative form. Coverage of the 2008 American economic collapse provides a unique case as it offers a rare moment of uniform media attention across outlets. We combined a content analysis of news coverage with survey data from the National Annenberg Election Study. Using multivariate time series analysis, we found that the news media respond to issue concerns of viewers and their effects vary by source.

Global Maladies, Local In Treatment: “Quality” TV Fiction Formats, Glocal Forms of Prestige, and Cumulative Cross-Cultural Dialogues

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

With the rise of television formats in global television, several studies have examined the economic, political, and cultural aspects of this media product’s production and circulation. This study analyzes the complex path of a television drama series from a local critical and popular phenomenon to a global “quality” fiction format, focusing on the transnationalization process of the format of the Israeli program BeTipul from its arrival in the United States to its adaptation and reception in Canada, Argentina, Brazil, and Italy. The study emphasizes the cross-cultural dialogic attributes of the quality fiction format, which support a strategy comprising both mutual benefits and competition, as opposed to the allegedly “odorless” or “neutral” features of reality and game-show formats.

Mobile Phones as Participatory Radio: Developing Hmong Mass Communication in the Diaspora

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

In this article, I explore the development of Hmong teleconference radio: a thriving form of mass communication for Hmong in the diaspora that uses conference call software to provide listeners with a wide array of radio-like programming accessed through their mobile phones. It is based on a qualitative analysis of Hmong media that assesses the history of Hmong media development in the United States, the content and formatting of teleconference radio programs, and the perspectives of those who participate in creating and consuming media. In exploring the development of a new form of participatory radio, this article expands our understanding of diasporic media practices to include communities that must overcome the challenge of using limited resources in their efforts reach geographically dispersed audiences.

The Ubiquitous Presidency: Toward a New Paradigm for Studying Presidential Communication

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

The rhetorical presidency—a deeply influential paradigm for understanding presidential communicative governance—has been disrupted by dramatic changes in the U.S. electorate, the media environment, the goals of public appeals, and the nature of political content. To address the rhetorical presidency’s limitations with regard to current presidential communication practices, we conceptualize and offer a preliminary test of a new paradigm: the ubiquitous presidency. This paradigm argues that modern presidents cultivate a highly visible and nearly constant presence in political and nonpolitical arenas of American life by being accessible, personal, and pluralistic.

The Tube on YouTube: TV Series, Media Strategies, and User Tactics in a Transmedia Environment

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This study analyzes the traffic generated on YouTube around television series. We selected a sample of 314 short YouTube videos about 21 Spanish TV series that premiered in 2013 by Spain’s three most popular mainstream television networks (Telecinco, Antena 3, and La1). These videos, which together received more than 24 million views, were classified according to two key variables: the nature (official or nonofficial) of the YouTube channel on which they were located and the exclusivity of their content (already broadcast on TV or Web exclusive). The analysis allows us to characterize the strategies used by TV networks on YouTube and the activity of fans as well as their efforts in the construction of a transmedia narrative universe around TV series.

One-to-One and One-to-Many Dichotomy: Grand Theories, Periodization, and Historical Narratives in Communication Studies

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

Besides other popular dichotomies in communication history, the one-to-one and one-to-many matrix has been very powerful in the 20th century political, economic, and social imaginary, yet it is overlooked. This article originally aimed to reconstruct a long history and periodization of eras in which one-to-one forms of communication prevailed over one-to-many and vice versa, from Ancient Greece to the digital era. Nevertheless, the evidence has shown that this grand narrative/theory was impractical and, in general, that dichotomies and periodization are often more nuanced ontological concepts than generally expected. Thus, this article turned out to be a “failed” project on the history of grand theories, but still useful for the historiography of communication, proposing a more complex framework to look at technologies as they develop over time.

“That Show Really Spoke to Me!”: The Effects of Compatible Psychological Needs and Talk Show Host Style on Audience Activity

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

One recent change in the U.S. media landscape is the shift toward specialized audiences consuming specialized news content. With this trend as a backdrop, this study argues that viewers of a news talk show are more involved with the show’s content when the style of the show is compatible with their psychological needs. This proposition is tested across two instances of compatibility: a host promoting critical debate and viewers with a high need for cognition, and a host promoting humorous commentary and viewers with a high need for humor. Results from an experimental design support the compatibility argument. When compatibility occurred, respondents perceived the program as more relevant, which in turn increased cognitive and behavioral activity regarding the program’s content.

When Cousins Feud: Advancing Threat Appraisal and Contingency Theory in Situations That Question the Essential Identity of Activist Organizations

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

This article reports on an experiment that applied the concepts of avowed and ascribed identities to situations where similar activist organizations clash. By using the threat appraisal model and contingency theory, this study advances theories and practices of strategic conflict management by analyzing the effects of an attack on a group’s essential identity due to hypocritical behavior. This work seeks to revise and extend theories concerning the distinction between internal and external threat and the linear perspective in stance predictions on the contingency continuum.

A Comparative Investigation Into Press–State Relations: Comparing Source Structures in Three News Agencies’ Coverage of the North Korean Missile Crisis

2016-08-15T11:18:44-07:00

News media are on the frontline of international conflicts. Media messages play a pivotal role in increasing the diplomatic leverage at the negotiation table, which represents press–state relations. The present study applied indexing theory to examine these press–state relations from a global perspective. Using social network analysis, this research analyzed the development of source structures of news on the North Korean missile crisis by examining news agencies in the United States, China, and South Korea. The study found that these agencies conformed to their respective national interests; thus, their issue framings were an extension of each country’s domestic politics. These results add more insight into not only press–state relations, but also the complex system of global politics.

Transmedia Testimonio: Examining Undocumented Youth’s Political Activism in the Digital Age

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Undocumented youth activists, otherwise known as DREAMers, have drawn attention for the ways they use and deploy new media in challenging anti-immigrant policies and making various claims to rights. In this article, I focus on “coming out” events wherein undocumented youth declare their undocumented legal status at protests and meetings and through social media, including digital videos, blogs, and podcasts. I refer to these events as forms of transmedia testimonio in which activists give accounts of their immigration experiences, reveal their legal status, and document their participation in civil disobedience. Through the concept of transmedia testimonio, I demonstrate how undocumented youth broaden the boundaries of public space beyond the confines of formal and state-sanctioned public spheres. By doing so, undocumented youth can use the testimonio to make claims to citizenship as new rights-bearing subjects, even if the state has not legitimized or recognized them as such. This article adds to the literature on how face-to-face activism interweaves with online activism, understanding media tactics from the vantage point of activists.

Which Countries Does the World Talk About? An Examination of Factors that Shape Country Presence on Twitter

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This study investigates which countries were mentioned most on Twitter during 2013 and what factors—country attributes, communication and economic resources, and contexts—can explain country presence on Twitter. Tweet mentions from 210 countries were derived using full fire hose archival searches. We identify trends that differ from the patterns found in news flow literature. And the results suggest a new era of international communication via Web-based social networks. Although core and semiperiphery countries are mentioned more than periphery countries, mobile phone penetration and sociopolitical instability have reshaped the contours of country images, and only 28% of the 50 most-mentioned countries on Twitter were core countries. This study discusses the implications of evolving social media for traditional news media outlets, world politics, and international relations.

The Challenge of Delocalized Channels: Transfrontier Television in Poland (Characteristics, Typology and Content)

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article focuses on the so-called delocalized channels (a product of broadcasters registered in other European Union countries that direct their broadcasts to Polish audiences). In recent years, the Polish National Broadcasting Council has recognized that delocalizing content as an increasing problem. In this study, I established the following goals: to describe the character and scale of delocalization content in the Polish market of audiovisual media services, to create a complete typology of delocalized channels in the Polish market, and finally to analyze 20% of the delocalized channels from the point of view of their quality and topics. Some suggestions for the Polish National Broadcasting Council are provided.

A Mediation Model to Explain the Effects of Information Seeking from Media and Interpersonal Sources on Young Adults' Intention to Use Marijuana

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Guided by the integrative model of behavioral prediction and research on information seeking, we tested a mediation model of information seeking about marijuana across two samples of young adults from the United States (N = 498) and Israel (N = 426). Results of online surveys showed direct associations between information seeking and (nonmedical) marijuana use intention in both samples. In addition, across both samples, results showed indirect associations between information seeking and behavioral intention through changes in attitude and perceived normative pressure. Cross-comparative differences were also examined. Findings suggest that information seeking may shape determinants of behavioral intention to use marijuana nonmedically. Information seeking may serve as an indicator of risk behavior and as a target for drug prevention efforts.

Enjoyment and Appreciation as Motivators for Coping: Exploring the Therapeutic Effects of Media Messages on Perceived Threat

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This study explores how experience-based media messages featuring victims, survivors, and outperformers provide therapeutic benefits through the enjoyment and appreciation of the messages. Using the economic crisis as a context, our findings indicate that whereas distressed individuals were more likely to appreciate threat-related stories featuring victims and survivors over outperformers, nondistressed individuals were more likely to enjoy such stories featuring outperformers over victims and survivors. Appreciation and enjoyment of these threat-related stories predicted effective coping outcomes: positive reappraisal of the economic situation that also led to increased perceived control over the threat through positive affect. Health implications for enjoyment and appreciation of experience-based stories as motivators for coping outcomes are also discussed.

Smiles, Babies, and Status Symbols: The Persuasive Effects of Image Choices in Small-Entrepreneur Crowdfunding Requests

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article examines the persuasive effects of images in the context of online peer-to-peer microfinance. The theoretical framework—based in self-presentation and impression management—relates micro-entrepreneurs’ loan-request image choices to lending decisions and lenders’ perceptions of the borrower’s trustworthiness and need. We explore effects of three specific visuals: (1) genuine enjoyment (Duchenne) smiles; (2) material status symbols; and (3) babies, children, and husbands. Using loan-request image data from 323 women micro-entrepreneurs on the Kiva.org website, results suggest smiling behavior is not associated with funding speed. However, loan-request images that include a baby are associated with significantly quicker funding, and those that include a man or an indication of relative material well-being are associated with delays in the average funding speed.

Agreeing Not to Disagree: Iterative Versus Episodic Forms of Political Participatory Behaviors

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

People talk about politics with others who may or may not share their views. These conversations shape their understanding and engagement with politics. However, studies have resulted in a conundrum in the relationship between disagreeable discussion and participation. Some studies suggest that the relationship is likely contingent on the type of participation. In addition, considering the characteristics of one’s social networks alongside exposure to disagreement serves to extend our understanding of how communication matters for political engagement. Our results suggest that episodic forms of participation, such as voting or protesting, are not directly impacted by exposure to disagreement, whereas iterative forms, including certain forms of civic engagement and expressive behaviors, are enhanced by exposure to political disagreement, particularly among those with larger discussion networks.

Jus Algoritmi: How the National Security Agency Remade Citizenship

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Classified U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) documents released in the summer of 2013 detailed a trove of controversial surveillance programs, igniting a debate about state power and the rights of citizens. But how can citizenship be evaluated in a digital, networked world? In response to this question, the NSA created an algorithmic, data-based version of citizenship (and foreignness), where a user is legally foreign if his or her “selectors” are “at least 51 percent confidence” foreign. These selectors, which can include telephone numbers, Internet protocol addresses, or language, became effectual arbiters of citizenship online. This article explains what algorithmic citizenship means, what the NSA’s citizenship and foreignness look like, and what the implications are when a formal rubric of U.S. citizenship is based exclusively on algorithmic interpretations of communications data.

Source Variety, Event Frequency, and Context in Newspaper Crime Reporting

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Crime and criminal justice content remains an important part of local news reporting because underreporting can lead to underenforcement and overreporting can lead to misuse of resources or misguided public policies. To explore this issue, we conducted a content analysis of six daily newspapers from markets with the highest and the lowest crime per capita. The stories analyzed were overwhelmingly reported as episodic incidents and focused on violent crime. Nonviolent crimes were greatly underreported. Source variety was a key issue, with law enforcement the most commonly cited source and often the only source. This demonstrates a lack of depth in reporting, whether prompted by a desire for convenience or by necessity created from lack of resources.

Bottom of the Data Pyramid: Big Data and the Global South

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

To date, little attention has been given to the impact of big data in the Global South, about 60% of whose residents are below the poverty line. Big data manifests in novel and unprecedented ways in these neglected contexts. For instance, India has created biometric national identities for her 1.2 billion people, linking them to welfare schemes, and social entrepreneurial initiatives like the Ushahidi project that leveraged crowdsourcing to provide real-time crisis maps for humanitarian relief. While these projects are indeed inspirational, this article argues that in the context of the Global South there is a bias in the framing of big data as an instrument of empowerment. Here, the poor, or the “bottom of the pyramid” populace are the new consumer base, agents of social change instead of passive beneficiaries. This neoliberal outlook of big data facilitating inclusive capitalism for the common good sidelines critical perspectives urgently needed if we are to channel big data as a positive social force in emerging economies. This article proposes to assess these new technological developments through the lens of databased democracies, databased identities, and databased geographies to make evident normative assumptions and perspectives in this under-examined context.

Mediated Contact, Intergroup Attitudes, and Ingroup Members’ Basic Values: South Koreans and Migrant Workers

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

An experiment was conducted to examine the effects of mediated contact between ethnic Koreans and migrant workers in South Korea. Positive contact generated more positive perception of and affect toward the migrant workers but did not change South Koreans’ social distance from migrant workers. The effects of negative contact, on the other hand, were consistently significant across all three attitude measures. When the effect sizes of positive and negative mediated contact were compared, positive contact generated a stronger effect, albeit only marginally significant, than negative contact on the perception of migrant workers. In the affect and social distance measures, no significant difference was found. Furthermore, negative mediated contact increased power values through its influence on the attitudes toward migrant workers; parallel indirect effects of positive contact on universalism values were not found. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, followed by suggestions for future studies.

Communication in a Post-Disaster Community: The Struggle to Access Social Capital

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article conceptualizes social capital in communicative terms to describe the social resources available to members of one suburb in Christchurch, New Zealand, as they seek to recover from a natural disaster. It notes how communicative social capital was distributed unequally and frequently experienced as in deficit or as inaccessible. The idea of community was a powerful focal point for residents, but there was little evidence that social connectedness at this level provided the resources for civic engagement more generally. The idea of the city that arose out of people’s shared ideals and investment in collective civic institutions appeared to be still broken three years on from the initial disaster.

The Efficacy of Chinese News Coverage of Tobacco Control: A Comparison between Media Agenda and Policy Agenda

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This study examines the news coverage of tobacco control in China between 2010 and 2012 and compares it with the China Tobacco Control Program (2012–2015), a recent national policy initiative. The study finds that the relative salience of second-level tobacco control issues in the media have a moderate positive association with the policy agenda. However, the news coverage of tobacco control was more consistent with the agenda of anti–tobacco control forces than with the agenda of pro-control forces. The implications of the findings are discussed.

Hosting Together via Couchsurfing: Privacy Management in the Context of Network Hospitality

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Practicing network hospitality—that is, taking part in the processes wherein users of hospitality exchange services, connect, and interact with one another online and off-line—is commonly approached as a dyadic interaction between a host and a guest. In contrast, this article elaborates on communication privacy management theory in the context of network hospitality based on an interview study of how multiperson households regulate access to their domestic sphere as they welcome visitors via Couchsurfing, an online hospitality exchange service. The findings depict how multiperson households (1) establish privacy rules related to hosting, (2) cooperate to control interior and exterior privacy boundaries, and (3) manage privacy with the help of physical and temporal boundaries. The study contributes to communication privacy management theory by applying it to the study of network hospitality and providing insight into how privacy management unfolds as a cooperative process within multiperson households in settings where networked media are used to arrange social encounters that raise questions of physical space and territoriality.

Co-mmodifying the Gay Body: Globalization, the Film Industry and Female Prosumers in the Contemporary Korean Mediascape

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Gay people are now easy to find in Korean popular culture. Although increased representation of the gay body in media is encouraging, the current version of commodification raises questions. Why did Korean mainstream media decide to commodify gay sexuality despite the unfavorable public sentiment toward gay people in Korea? Who does the industry aim to reach, and what are the roles of the target audience in the commodification process of gay bodies? This article points to the liberalization and Hollywoodization of the Korean film industry and its active co-optation of local young female fandom for gay media commodities. Furthermore, it underlines how the commodification of the gay identity in Korean media is an ongoing process and cultural phenomenon in which female fans continue to participate.

Beyond the Four Theories: Toward a Discourse Approach to the Comparative Study of Media and Politics

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Leading communication scholars have recently called for questions of meaning and ideology to be brought back into comparative media research. This article heeds that call by delineating a discourse approach to the comparative study of media and politics. This discourse approach is introduced with reference to a formerly influential but recently stigmatized strand of research in the tradition of Four Theories of the Press by Siebert, Peterson, and Schramm (1956/1973), although it abandons and goes well beyond this work. To illustrate the benefits of such an approach, a case study of the media-politics discourse dominant in Russia in 2012–2013 is presented. The findings are then marshalled to unravel three seemingly paradoxical observations about the Russian media landscape.

Moral Economies: Interrogating the Interactions of NGOs, Journalists and Freelancers

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Using Sayer’s ideas about the moral economy, this article generates a new theoretical model for interrogating complex relations between journalists and their sources, especially nongovernmental organizations. It tests this framework using a case study about the production of a TV report about a Congolese rebel commander wanted for war crimes. This news story involved exchanges between Human Rights Watch, the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 News, and several freelancers and was indirectly shaped by Amnesty International and Invisible Children Inc., the creators of Kony2012. In analyzing these exchanges and their mixed effects, this article refines notions of trust, news cloning, and information subsidies.

Internationalization Through Americanization: The Expansion of the International Communication Association's Leadership to the World

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Based on Bourdieu’s concepts of sociology, this article explores the International Communication Association’s internationalization effort involving recruiting non-U.S. scholars into top positions. Therefore, it examines both the habitus and the capital of the 26 communication researchers from outside the United States who have been distinguished as ICA presidents and fellows. The study contributes to the discipline’s reflexivity and shows that despite the expansion of ICA’s leadership, the field’s power pole is still a U.S.-centered enterprise. Today, ICA’s international leadership is located in world regions closely linked to the United States and educated at U.S. universities or heavily influenced by North American research traditions, even if it includes a numerous contributions from other associations and alternative approaches. Consequently, this internationalization hardly changed ICA but instead changed the world’s communication field. At least up to a certain extent, new perspectives are perceived at the discipline’s power pole. However, in return, national academic environments in U.S.-affiliated countries became Americanized, especially via ICA fellows serving as role models to get scientific capital. Thus, ICA’s efforts to expand its leadership are assumed to have an unintended effect of conserving the power structures in the field.

Construction of Obedient Foreign Brides as Exotic Others: How Production Practices Construct the Images of Marriage Migrant Women on Korean Television

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Love in Asia is the longest running Korean television program to portray multicultural families with emphasis on the life experiences of marriage migrant women. Since its premiere, Love in Asia’s consistent average rating of 13–14% has made it the most watched show in its time slot and most watched documentary program in Korea. We examined how various factors such as work routines, financial constraints, language barriers, and genre conventions affected the construction of popular images and narratives regarding marriage migrant women on television. We found that Love in Asia’s construction of marriage migrant women as obedient brides who conform to Korean patriarchal norms reflects the creators’ adaptation to work routines and production practices.

Russian News Coverage of the 2014 Sochi Winter Olympic Games: A Transmedia Analysis

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

The journalistic coverage of the 2014 Winter Olympic Games in Sochi, Russia, involved various media platforms and the flow of information between mass media and social media. This phenomenon is not new; therefore, the research question that motivates this article is to what extent transmedia strategies were effectively applied to the Russian official news coverage of the Sochi Olympic Games. The theoretical framework focuses on transmedia journalism, and the method is based on the analytical model regarding transmedia news coverage of planned events developed by Gambarato and Tárcia. The research findings demonstrate that, although transmedial features are incorporated in the Russian coverage, there is modest content expansion and limited engagement with the audience.

A Korean Mother’s Cooking Notes: Maintaining South Korean Cooking and Ideals of Housewives in Glocal Influences

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article examines A Korean Mother’s Cooking Notes and analyzes the role of cookbooks in understanding the changes in South Korean cooking and the lives of South Korean women in the 1990s. Using a framework of glocalization, I examine the ways in which the cookbook redefines the components and meanings of traditional Korean cooking. I argue that this cookbook specifically portrays the anxiety and desire of South Korean housewives in preserving home cooking and values while adapting to foreign influences. The cookbook also redefines the traditional ways in which mothers-in-law educated their daughters-in-law through translating oral cooking instructions into written and mediated pedagogy.

Green Brand Positioning in the Online Environment

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

The online environment has been influential in building corporate brands. This study explores green brand positioning in the online environment via content analysis and network analysis approaches. Using the techniques of centrality measure and structural equivalence, the study offers a network perspective on content and structural relationships of green brand positioning in corporate websites. This study extends brand positioning knowledge to online green branding contexts and offers researchers a new approach to explore the structural relationships among positioning elements. The results have significant implications for green brands’ development of e-business positioning strategies.

When Race Matters: What Newspaper Opinion Pieces Say about Race and Poverty

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article investigates discussions of race and poverty in newspaper opinion pieces during a period of welfare reform debates in the United States, 1994–2010. Results show that, often, the poor are identified as deserving of societal support, and outside entities (external causes) are identified as the source of their hardship. However, when the poor are identified by race, how contributors say poverty should be remedied shifts. When identified as African Americans, poor individuals are blamed for their poverty and solutions obviate structural explanations. Our research advances dialogue around the racialization of poverty and creates an opportunity to understand the relationship between public discussions of race and poverty and shifts in policy.

"Mom’s Voice" and Other Voices:Civil-Military Relations as a Media Ritual

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article looks at how sonic media rituals are created, performed, and negotiated to understand the ways in which citizens are persuaded to risk their lives in the name of the imagined national community. It does so through an analysis of the representation of civil–military relations on the veteran Israeli radio program Kola Shel Ima (“Mom’s Voice”). As shown, the performance of the Kola Shel Ima ritual is enabled because of off-air preparations, on-air conversations, and common values shared by ritual participants. Yet, at times various components of the ritual are challenged on-air. On a larger scale, the debate over Kola Shel Ima positions it as a ritual of flashing out or, conversely, a ritual of covering up.

Discovering the Divide: Technology and Poverty in the New Economy

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article uses archival materials from the Clinton administration to explore how the “digital divide” frame was initially built. By connecting features of this frame for stratified Internet access with concurrent poverty policy discourses, I reveal the digital divide frame as a crucial piece of the emergent neoliberal consensus, positioning economic transition as a natural disaster only the digitally skilled will survive. The Clinton administration framed the digital divide as a national economic crisis and operationalized it as a deficit of human capital and the tools to bring it to market. The deficit was to be resolved through further competition in telecommunications markets. The result was a hopeful understanding of “access” as the opportunity to compete in the New Economy.

Food Content of TV Shows Seen by Children in Peru: A Double Dose of Food Messages?

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

The public health community generally agrees that TV exposure influences children’s cognitions and behaviors. Research on TV’s influence on children’s eating habits has mainly analyzed advertisements aired during TV programs for children and how they influence children’s food preferences and practices. Yet little is known about the food messages children encounter in the content of their favorite programs. Most previous studies may have underestimated children’s total exposure by failing to take food exposures within programming into account. The current study addresses this by examining the amount and characteristics of food content appearing in commercials and the content of shows seen by children in Peru. Using a sample of children’s TV programs and the ads run during the programs’ commercial breaks, it was found that overall, 17% of all commercials in the sample were for food and beverages, and 28% of all the program content included food items such as water, fruit, snacks, or prepared meals. Overall, children in Peru seem to be exposed to TV messages about food and beverages that mostly should be consumed only sparingly.

Hate Speech and Covert Discrimination on Social Media: Monitoring the Facebook Pages of Extreme-Right Political Parties in Spain

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This study considers the ways that overt hate speech and covert discriminatory practices circulate on Facebook despite its official policy that prohibits hate speech. We argue that hate speech and discriminatory practices are not only explained by users’ motivations and actions, but are also formed by a network of ties between the platform’s policy, its technological affordances, and the communicative acts of its users. Our argument is supported with longitudinal multimodal content and network analyses of data extracted from official Facebook pages of seven extreme-right political parties in Spain between 2009 and 2013. We found that the Spanish extreme-right political parties primarily implicate discrimination, which is then taken up by their followers who use overt hate speech in the comment space.

Politician Seeking Voter: How Interviews on Entertainment Talk Shows Affect Trust in Politicians

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

During election campaigns, politicians regularly feature on entertainment talk shows in which they are typically approached in uncritical and positive manners. To test how such appearances affect trust in politicians, we conducted an online experiment with a Dutch adult sample in which participants were randomly allocated to see an entertainment talk show interview, a current affairs program interview with the same politician, or a control condition without exposure. Findings demonstrate that exposure to the talk show interview affected participants’ trust in politicians. Moreover, this effect was strongly moderated by political knowledge. Trust in politicians was positively affected by talk show exposure among individuals with low political knowledge, but negatively for those with the most political knowledge.

The Myth of Media Literacy

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Since the late 1990s, media literacy has become an increasingly prominent paradigm within the fields of media and communication studies in the United States and elsewhere. This article investigates the convergence of forces in that propelled this approach to its currently ascendant position. With a nod to Harvey J. Graff’s analysis of the mythic power associated with the concept of literacy, the article explores the techniques and rationales that have coalesced around media literacy, making it at once central to the operation of neoliberal capitalism and to its critique. Putting media literacy into a longer history of the instrumental and biopolitical use of media in education and considering the role of education in connecting children’s interests to moral and economic regulation, media literacy is taken to be the most recent iteration of a long-standing set of ideas that have been taken up in different ways by early educational reformers, postwar development communications theorists, and countercultural media educators.

Copies, Clones, and Genre Building: Discourses on Imitation and Innovation in Digital Games

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article addresses the tension between innovation and imitation in the games industry based on a case study on a cloning conflict. Developing new games necessarily involves adopting existing elements, but recent disputes centering on alleged copying have gained prominence. What are the criteria to delineate legitimate inspiration from cloning? Given the ambiguous copyright situation, the legitimacy of imitation is contested. Drawing on discursive institutionalism, we investigate professionals’ discussions around an alleged cloning case. We find that imitation is accepted practice in the industry. Originality can involve making small adjustments to existing games, but practitioners condemn wholesale copying of games. The article suggests that, even beyond the games sector, imitation is a necessary part of innovation. Discourses are important in governing innovation practices in creative sectors.

Free Dailies in the European Cross-Border Metropolis: The State-Based Economic Deals

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article examines the business model of free metropolitan newspapers in a cross-border context. Based on a series of interviews with economic agents and on a content analysis of articles and advertising inserts in three free dailies published in transfrontier metropolises, the analysis explores the ability of editing companies to profit from commercial revenues and resources located beyond the state border. The results indicate that this boundary is crossed to settle agreements between publishers at the international level. However, economic assets located beyond the state but within cross-border regions are rarely valuable. The lack of mobility of advertisers, readers/customers, and publishers in the functional urban areas determines the scale and limits of the free newspapers’ commercial space.

"My Voice Needs to be Heard": Cultural Challengers in the Regulatory Arena

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article proposes the concept of cultural challengers, viewers whose dissatisfaction with popular culture prompts them to initiate a dialogue with media organizations. The article explores the textual dimensions that may cause such discontent and identifies three tracks for conducting the dialogue: civic, economic, and regulatory. The regulatory track is explored through three methodologies: a quantitative content analysis of 817 complaints filed to the Israeli regulatory authority (SATR) between 2005 and 2010, and of the SATR’s responses to them; participatory observation within the SATR; and an online survey of 58 viewers who had filed a complaint with the SATR. The article highlights the differing stances of the regulator and the cultural challengers and analyzes the social and cultural implications of the dialogue.

Transnational Media Coverage of the ISIS Threat: A Global Perspective?

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This study examines elements of what has been defined as global journalism and compares online news stories of Al Jazeera English and CNN regarding the ISIS threat. The empirical inquiry presents the similarities and differences in transnational news outlets’ coverage of a global crisis. The results of a quantitative content analysis (N = 320) suggest that different transnational news outlets share some features in their news coverage of a global challenge but still differ significantly. CNN mostly cites governmental official sources, whereas Al Jazeera English relies more on information from other news media. In addition, CNN mainly adopts a geopolitics frame focusing on the strategies of dealing with ISIS, whereas Al Jazeera English uses the dominant frame of existential threat. Results further indicate that elements of global journalism do not go beyond human rights issues.

Polymediated Narrative: The Case of the Supernatural Episode "Fan Fiction"

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Modern stories are the product of a recursive process influenced by elements of genre, outside content, medium, and more. These stories exist in a multitude of forms and are transmitted across multiple media. This article examines how those stories function as pieces of a broader narrative, as well as how that narrative acts as a world for the creation of stories. Through an examination of the polymediated nature of modern narratives, we explore the complicated nature of modern storytelling.

Patriots and Pedagogues: Cultural Institutions and the Performative Politics of Minority German Hip-Hop

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article examines the politics of immigrant and minority German hip-hop from its emergence until today as well as its role within the cultural policies of the state. Hip-hop in Germany has both provided scripts for political and social contestation and acted as a means for the state to manage potentially “unruly” youth. Whereas early politically oriented hip-hop was divided between minoritarian ethnic and civic national forms of affiliation, in the past decade it has increasingly embraced German national symbolism from diverse political positions. We analyze these developments in the work of three contemporary artists and examine how their cultural production operates within national and transnational pedagogical contexts.

“Who Has Time for That?" Understanding Media Use Among Conservation Photographers

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Although the environmental movement uses photographs and other visual material as part of its social change strategies, less is known about the professional content creators who attempt to use their professional skills for the movement’s benefit. This research examines Internet use among conservation photographers who must manage the tensions between their professional roles and their roles as advocates as they integrate Internet technologies into their work. The findings suggest that Internet use varies based on (1) the photographers’ relationships with traditional media, (2) how they see technology relating to building community, and (3) their strategies for bringing about social change. I present implications for environmental communication, new media, and social movements.

Media-Remembering the Falklands War: Subjectivity and Identification

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article explores the ways in which remembering is enacted, performed, and contested with media and how these processes become intrinsically linked to issues of power, agency, and identity. Drawing on ethnographic data collected with Falkland Islanders during the 30th anniversary of the 1982 Falklands war, I critically consider the context, motivation, and agency involved in how and why Islanders remember through and with the media and the potentially profound implications this may be having on their understanding, negotiation, and performance of identity, which is (at times) at odds with their everyday existence. The result of the analysis raises critical questions about what societies remember and want to be remembered for, the implications of which extend far beyond the Falklands.

Eating Together, Separately: Intergroup Communication and Food in a Multiethnic Community

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

In multiethnic communities, food pathways can bring diverse residents into contact in restaurants and in the aisles of grocery stores—though the communication that ensues does not always lead to greater understanding. Drawing from communication infrastructure theory, as well as intergroup contact and racial formation concepts, this article explores the relationship between food practices and how residents perceive their demographically changing communities. The article synthesizes a survey, field observations, and interviews with Asian, Latino, and White residents in a majority-minority city in Los Angeles County. Findings suggest that, although discursive networks within commercial food spaces are often ethnically bounded, communication in and about food spaces can act as a barometer of attitudes toward community change and intergroup relations.

Measuring Freedom of Information: Issues and Opportunities from an Expert Survey

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This study describes some relevant but neglected issues in measuring freedom of information. A questionnaire was administrated to 36 international experts. Then we conducted 18 in-depth interviews with some experts to evaluate relevant issues that emerged from the questionnaire. We find that ideological, theoretical, and financial issues affect the three most important instruments for measuring freedom of information: the Freedom of the Press Index by Freedom House, the World Press Freedom Index by Reporters Without Borders, and the Media Sustainability Index by the International Research and Exchange Board. The study constitutes a preliminary step for future research to address these issues and improve the instruments.

Giving Attention to Conduct on Social Media: Discursive Mechanisms of Attention Structures in Mediating Governance-at-a-distance in Today’s Russia

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Some recent legal and political interventions implemented in Russia aim to regulate the spheres of the life of the individual, such as sexuality, freedom of speech, and information. Drawing on Foucault’s work on the technologies of governance and, in particular, his conceptualization of discipline and governmentality, this article examines the range and the reach of these transformations into the everyday communication and practices of individuals. By analyzing the discursive mechanisms through which the actors give attention to the practices of censorship at the computer-mediated site Woman.ru, the study demonstrates how the attention structures formed in the interaction enable governance to operate at a distance across the technologies of omnipresent surveillance and strategic conduct.

Media Freedom Indexes in Democracies: A Critical Perspective Through the Cases of Poland and Chile

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

We analyzed the media freedom indexes of Freedom House and Reporters Without Borders to determine which areas they focus on and which they omit. We also assessed the degree to which these indexes are appropriate for measuring media freedom in democratic countries. We concluded that these instruments—with their focus on violence against journalists and government constraints on media—are more appropriate for assessments in nondemocratic countries than for understanding the subtle problems of democracies, often related to the media ownership structure, media’s dependence on advertising, self-censorship, and the scant presence of citizen voices. The instruments examined reduce freedom of expression to its negative dimension, freedom from government interference, and ignore positive freedom that is the universal right to free speech.

Common Sense, Good Sense, and Commercial Television

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

In an era when identity is a hybrid process, it is interesting to examine whether and how it is possible to glean the presence or absence of certain cultural groups from their representations in a given culture. To do so, I employ two key Gramscian concepts: common sense and good sense. Using three research reports (from 2003, 2005, and 2011) that employed content analysis techniques, this article assesses the visibility of various subgroups in Israeli TV programs and majority-minority power relations in a variety of genres on commercial channels in the prime-time slot. This article focuses on three aspects of identity: nationality, ethnicity, and gender.

Connecting Political Communication with Urban Politics: A Bourdieusian Framework

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

In this article, I connect political communication with urban politics by conceptualizing an interdisciplinary urban politics research framework. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s theories of practice and communication, I offer an urban politics research model that simultaneously addresses the dimensions of power struggle and symbolic struggle in urban politics. The theoretical modeling is discussed from an interdisciplinary approach to social studies and constructed with a methodological suggestion of tripartite social network analysis.

Effeminate Speech on New Media: @HillaryClinton's Public Intimacy through Relational Labor

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

New media platforms enable new forms of the feminine style. For political candidates, these media may be used strategically to enact unique forms of public intimacy influenced by the norms of relational labor and self-disclosure that govern social media. These arguments are illustrated through a case study of Hillary Clinton’s Twitter account, which shows that she is able to use the political feminine style to great effect by softening her image through digital intimacy and interactivity while still preserving elements of her traditional forensic style. In this way, Clinton enacts a second-wave feminist persona that is substantively political without being seen as extreme or strident. This case study informs how female political candidates can strategically enact femininity.

Crimea River: Directionality in Memes from the Russia-Ukraine Conflict

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

The Russia–Ukraine conflict of 2014 sparked political upheaval, military action, and the emergence of Internet memes as a forum for discursive critique among netizens of the affected countries. A qualitative content analysis was conducted of Internet memes posted to the RuNet Memes Twitter account in 2014 and revealed a preponderance of memes that fell into one of two categories: directionally Russian or directionally Ukrainian. Directionality as a thematic category is a novel methodological approach in memes research. While the memes reference a given news story or event, they continued to be consumed and reproduced along similar thematic categories. This tendency to follow a narrative is at once endemic to viral media in general and unique to memes given their remix, parody, iteration, and rapid diffusion.

Debating "Alternative" Gender Identities: The Online Discourse Triggered by 2014 Life Ball Advertising Posters

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

The article examines an online discourse induced by two advertising posters created by photographer David LaChapelle for the Life Ball, an AIDS charity event in Vienna in 2014, depicting a nude transgender model. We consulted 1,897 posts on highly frequented Austrian online forums to explore and analyze the discourse’s organization, thematic and argumentative patterns, and contrary positions using the sociology-of-knowledge approach. Connected mainly to the “doing gender” perspective, the findings shed light on collective knowledge repertoires of “alternative” gender identities. We inter alia conclude that at least in Austria, transgender and gay people are framed physically rather than socially and indeed as alternative to the overall norm of gender duality and heterosexuality.

In Search of Reason-centered Discussion on China’s Twitter: The Effects of Initiating Post and Discussion Format on Reasoning

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

Reason-centered discussion of politics is an important route toward improving the quality of public opinion. This study examined predictors of reason-centered online discussion, including the use of a debate format with two sides displayed as opposing columns, as well as various characteristics of the post that initiates the discussion. A content analysis was conducted to examine 6,360 reply posts in 291 threaded discussions on Sina Weibo, one of China’s most popular venues for online discussion. Results showed that debate format is greatly associated with a higher reasoning level of the corresponding threaded discussion, with opinion presence and multiple viewpoints playing a role as well. Moreover, debate format can elicit differences in the effects of initiating posts on the overall reasoning level of a threaded discussion. Implications for online discussion in the virtual sphere are discussed.

The Effect of Anonymity on Conformity to Group Norms in Online Contexts: A Meta-Analysis

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This research meta-analyzed 13 journal articles regarding anonymity and conformity to group norms. Results showed that there was a positive relationship between anonymity and conformity, with a weighted mean effect size = 0.16, which was in line with the social identity model of deindividuation effects. This study also investigated the differences between different types of anonymity and found that visual anonymity had a medium magnitude of effect size on conformity ( = 0.33), whereas evidence was lacking in terms of the significant effects of physical anonymity and personal information anonymity. In addition, the presence of an outgroup was also a moderator of the effect of anonymity on conformity. Studies in which participants were aware of the existence of an outgroup ( = 0.22) had larger effect sizes than those with no outgroup ( = 0.10).

Effects of National Identity in Transnational Crises: Implications of Social Identity Theory for Attribution and Crisis Communications

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This study addresses the current gap in international crisis communications literature by introducing principles of social identity theory into the existing body of crisis communications theory. Hypotheses were tested via an experimental examination of attribution, feelings of empathy, and organization evaluation in several scenarios. Analysis revealed that organizational nationality can offer some level of reputational protection but crisis location does not.

Independent Audiovisual Regulators in Spain: A Unique Case in Europe

2016-08-15T11:18:45-07:00

This article describes and analyzes the configuration process, characteristic features, and future prospects of the Spanish model of independent audiovisual regulators. This model currently has a national multisectoral regulator (Comisión Nacional de los Mercados y de la Competencia), which was created in 2013, and two regional audiovisual regulators, which were created more than a decade ago. This combination of a national multisectoral regulator and regional audiovisual regulators is unlike any other in the European Union.

Liquid Youth: From Street Kids to Theater Actors. An Account of a Reaffiliation Process

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

We report an action research investigating ways of using communication strategies to help abandoned adolescents living in a shelter in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, to be reaffiliated with society. A team of researchers, psychiatry in-training students, and municipal caretakers worked with teens who decided to engaged in theater production. Adolescent mothers and fathers, pregnant girls, and boys participated in the collaborative writing of a theater play, its performances, and collective debates. Data were analyzed, during the process, around the notions of affiliation, disaffiliation, and reaffiliation to feed the action research. The article discusses how vulnerable Afro-Brazilian adolescents are affected by negative globalization, suggesting that the theater process can lead them to resignify their lives and to reaffiliate with society.

A New Measure for the Tendency to Select Ideologically Congruent Political Information: Scale Development and Validation

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Selective exposure is a popular research construct, but the strategies used to operationalize ideologically congruent exposure in contemporary correlational research are problematic. This article offers a novel approach, asking people directly about their tendency to seek information that is ideologically congruent with their opinions. A new measure for the tendency toward congruent selective exposure is proposed and was tested on three different data sets. In all three studies, confirmatory factor analysis revealed a two-factor model, with one factor representing the tendency to select congruent information and the other representing the tendency to avoid incongruent information.

Burmese Media in Transition

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article offers an assessment of media and their role in the ongoing political transition in Myanmar, and an overview of lessons learned from other countries undergoing transition. It demonstrates how media function in this process as active agents of stability, restraint, change, or all three, and assesses how Myanmar’s experiences reinforce or challenge common assumptions about democratic transition. The discussion draws from interviews over many years with journalists, editors, advocacy groups, and policy makers and participant observation in media offices and at media-related events. The research examines the origins of the recent changes, the importance of history, the role of civil society—including ethnic and formerly exile media—and issues of political economy and media diversity.

Spatiotemporal Diffusion Modeling of Global Mobilization in Social Media: The Case of 2011 Egyptian Revolution

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This study explores transnational diffusion of social movement information in social media by introducing a mathematical model. Although the literature extensively discusses social media uses in social movements, few studies have examined a spatiotemporal dynamic diffusion process. Even fewer have taken into account international relational factors that may interplay with the diffusion process. This study addresses this gap by examining different notions of spatial proximity—each of which pertains to the level of democracy, diaspora size, economic relations, and physical distance—and applying them to a mathematical “diffusion-advection” model. The model was validated by tweets during the Egyptian revolution of 2011. The spatial diffusion was most effectively explained when the model was fitted using a democracy-based spatial arrangement. Although the diffusion of ad hoc reporting and action supportive messages were particularly in high volume during the most active protest period, situation-verifying information was diffused at a steady pace throughout the entire period examined. By demonstrating the model’s validity with the Egyptian revolution Twitter data, the article reveals the potential of using mathematical modeling in social movement research.

“I Like the Metamorphosis of the Characters”: Dynamics of Transnational Television Comedy Engagement

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article contributes to debates on transnational television comedy audiences through analysis of Eastern European audiences’ engagement with British television comedy. Using questionnaire and focus group data, it examines the extent and nature of British television comedy engagement by Romanian audiences and the limits of broadcasting British television comedy to Romanian audiences. The research reveals Romanian audiences’ high involvement with television comedy. More than half of the participants watch British television comedy. Three themes regarding Romanian audiences’ engagement with British television comedy are identified: (1) transnational television comedy aesthetics; (2) transnational television comedy as intellectual comedy; and (3) ethical limits of transnational television comedy. These themes highlight the complex contours of transnational television comedy engagement.

"A Tiny and Closed Fraternity of Privileged Men”: The Nixon-Agnew Anti-Media Campaign and the Liberal Roots of the U.S. Conservative “Liberal Media” Critique

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

The Nixon administration’s antimedia campaign of the late 1960s and early 1970s, led by Vice President Spiro Agnew, is often cited as a foundational moment for the conservative critique of liberal media bias in U.S. politics. Drawing on analysis of Agnew’s speeches and contemporary conservative writing on the media, this article argues that Agnew and his supporters drew substantially on arguments from liberal media reform traditions in their attacks on a liberal media elite. Conservatives’ reworking of traditionally progressive rhetoric that opposed monopoly power in media and touted the public’s rights in the media system aided in the development of an enduring populist conservative media critique that identified liberal journalists with privilege and power and conservatives with the people.

Discussion. Dialogue, and Discourse| Doing the Talk: Discussion, Dialogue, and Discourse in Action — Introduction

2016-08-16T16:42:42-07:00

Discussion, dialogue, and discourse have long been regarded as important concepts across a range of communication-related disciplines such as public relations, organizational communication, interpersonal communication, and strategic management. These concepts are becoming even more significant with the increasing use of social media and other forms of online communication by organizations and their publics/stakeholders/citizens. This Special Section of the International Journal of Communication presents theoretical frameworks and propositions, methodological approaches, and empirical findings that add to the understanding of discussion, dialogue, and discourse.

Discussion, Dialogue, Discourse| Elegy for Mediated Dialogue: Shiva the Destroyer and Reclaiming Our First Principles

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

The field of public relations has embraced dialogic theory as a valuable theory and paradigm for almost two decades. More recently, scholars have used dialogue as a framework to study mediated communication via the Internet and social media. However, many studies of mediated dialogue have concluded that the communicator/organization failed to be dialogic, or that various social media tools such as Twitter had failed to deliver on their “potential” for dialogue. In this essay, we argue that much of the dialogic scholarship has largely been dialogue in name only, failing to examine most aspects of dialogic communication, and at best having only “dialogic potential.” We conduct a critique of dialogic theory providing suggestions for moving forward.

Discussion, Dialogue, Discourse| Language and Discourse in Social Media Relational Dynamics: A Communicative Constitution Perspective

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article presents and discusses a theoretical proposition to study social media and their relational dynamics based on the role of language and discourse in communicative interactions that occur in social media. We propose a theoretical foundation that is grounded on the communicative constitution perspective that focuses on the power of communicative acts and practices to create organizational realities. The theoretical proposition suggests that social media are communicatively constituted, just as are relationships; thus, relational dynamics in social media that feature oral or written communications should be analyzed through the study of actors’ language and discourses. The article concludes with reflections on the implications of this theoretical proposition for the study of relational dynamics in social media and provides suggestions for future research.

Discussion, Dialogue, Discourse| Why Dialogic Principles Don’t Make It In Practice — And What We Can Do About It

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article considers the occurrence of Kent and Taylor’s dialogic principles in contemporary public relations practice. The research concludes that the work of public relations practitioners takes place within situational constraints that make it difficult—if not impossible—to undertake communication that demonstrates Kent and Taylor’s dialogic principles. Although this conclusion is not itself new, this article also identifies what these constraints are and proposes them as the foundations of a newly expanded theoretical conceptualization of two-way communication in which dialogue is distinguished as the normative ideal for pragmatic practice. In addition, the article suggests ways in which public relations educators and practitioners might be able to overcome the constraints that limit the conduct of dialogue in practice.

Discussion, Dialogue, Discourse| Understanding Dialogue and Engagement Through Communication Experts' Use of Interactive Writing to Build Relationships

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Dialogic communication is an important public relations theory, yet scholarship has found few organizations using it to its full potential. Meanwhile, multiple overlapping definitions exist for related terms like engagement, interactivity, and responsiveness, causing potential confusion for researchers and professionals. This research reports the results of in-depth interviews with top digital public relations professionals regarding how they use interactive writing, a form of social media engagement, to build relationships. Through their own unprompted words, the research also describes how professionals use terms such as dialogue, engagement, interactivity, and responsiveness, and corresponding definitions, to refer to their daily work. Our model clarifies relationships between similar concepts and recommends areas of future research to advance theory informed by practice

Discussion, Dialogue, Discourse| Dialog in Public Relations Roles: A Q Study Among Young Professionals

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article addresses the need to analyze dialogue and its aspects in functionalist public relations (PR) role research. In addition to exploring PR roles with regard to the relevance of dialogue, it analyzes how dialogue may be linked to individual or organizational contexts. This study builds on the literature on dialogue in PR and role research. It presents a Q study that used a sample of 22 young PR professionals in Germany. This study identified four roles differing with regard to dialogic aspects. Findings suggest that dialogic practice may be linked to contextual variables, such as one’s personal life. This study contributes to the exploration of PR roles and illustrates a method that has great potential for PR research.

Discussion, Dialogue, Discourse| Quality of Understanding in Campaign Communication of Political Parties and Mass Media in Austria Between 1970 and 2008

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Following the notion of deliberative democracy, political decisions are legitimized when they are based on debate that permits the circulation of information, stances, arguments, and ideas to create mutual understanding. We investigate to what extent political parties and the mass media in political campaign communication follow qualitative principles demanded by the public sphere concept. We introduce and test the index of a quality of understanding (IQU). We define four indicators for deliberation quality: statement of reasons, proposals for solutions, respect, and doubts. In the empirical part, we examine political parties’ press releases and newspaper coverage of the Austrian national elections in 1970, 1983, 1999, and 2008.

Communication Activism| Communication Activism Research: Engaged Communication Scholarship for Social Justice — Introduction

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Communication Activism| Crossing Boundaries between Communication Activism Research and Applied Communication Research Discourses

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Communication Activism| Missing in Action: Engaged U.S. Communication Research in the Context of Democratic Decline and the Digital Revolution

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Communication Activism| Critical-Cultural Communication Activism Research Calls for Academic Solidarity

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Communication Activism| Seizing the Social Justice Opportunity: Communication Activism Research at a Politically Critical Juncture — Epilogue

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Shift or Stasis| Questioning Global Communication Power — Introduction

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Over the past 50 years, both policy and research debates have at times raged over how change and power should be interpreted in global communication. This introduction to the Special Section titled “Global Communication Power: Shift or Stasis?” makes the case for the need to explore this question from fresh vantage points. It frames critical and creative pathways for thinking about and rethinking current transformations in global media. The introduction, then, provides an overview of the contributions and draws recurring themes together, posing key questions for further research.

Shift or Stasis| The 2015 Charlie Hebdo Killings, Media Event-chains and Global Political Responses

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

The forms and flows of global media coverage of the Charlie Hebdo assassinations of January 2015 compel a reexamination of cherished nostrums in media studies. Limited coverage of analogous lethal attacks elsewhere suggests the privileging of certain historical narratives over others and pinpoints the urgency of honing concepts adequate to the mediated processes in play. Current notions of integrative global media events and of a rational global public sphere demand to be replaced by far more supple heuristics that engage with these attacks from the perspective of cultural history and prioritize “thick” description. Clashing narratives around colonialism, Islamophobia, and free speech circulate instantaneously, yet some traumas receive priority in global coverage. Mere repetition of frozen concepts cannot do justice to a world of considerable violence and flux.

Shift or Stasis| The Changing Geographies of Pirate Transnational Audiovisual Flows

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Breaking with perspectives that merely criminalize audiovisual piracy, this article describes this phenomenon as one of the key elements of an informal economy of communication that shapes unofficial transnational flows. We analyze to what extent the networks of this informal economy have concurred in the changing geographies of global audiovisual flows. We first study under what conditions piracy has fueled the rise of new contraflows of non-Western cultural products and then discuss whether these have given form to counterhegemonic flows, that is, flows that carry content running counter to the dominant meanings of American programs. At the same time, we explore the ways in which piracy has contributed to an increased global presence of U.S. cultural products.

Shift or Stasis| Advertising and Media in the Age of the Algorithm

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article examines the disruption that the global advertising industry is undergoing as it struggles to adapt to the extraordinary opportunities for marketing over the Internet and still maintain its former hold over “legacy” media. The “fresh” global media players, particularly Google, have risen quickly to claim unprecedented influence over the flows of advertising revenue that are the lifeblood of the media, obliging advertising agencies to compete in the new digital space that Internet advertising has opened. However, U.S.-based new media companies are having to deal with strong local competitors in major developing markets, at the same time as they face social criticism and regulatory intervention for their practices in exploiting users for marketing purposes in their more established markets.

Shift or Stasis| CCTV News and Soft Power

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article looks at the soft power strategies of CCTV News, the global English-language television, Internet, and mobile news service run by China’s state broadcaster, China Central Television. The article focuses on the television operation, since that is the core of CCTV News and is the operation from which the other services draw much of their content. The article also addresses the concept of soft power and asks whether it is an adequate framework for understanding the channel’s strategies. It does this by answering two questions: how is CCTV News positioning itself in relation to the soft power policies of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and what soft power challenges does CCTV News face from, and pose to, competitor news channels?

Shift or Stasis| Al Jazeera’s Complex Legacy: Thresholds for an Unconventional Media Player from the Global South

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

The rise of Al Jazeera has left an indelible mark on Middle East politics, invigorated the region’s media landscape, and introduced new dynamics in global media flows and international communication. The recent unsettling developments in the Middle East, however, have altered the media dynamics on which Al Jazeera thrived all along. Taking heed of the ongoing transformation of the Arab media landscape and the geopolitical reconfigurations of the region in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings, this article explores growing tensions and conflictual pulls that are redefining the network and compelling it to change.

Shift or Stasis| Engaging Youth in Low- and Middle-Income Countries Through Chat Apps: Challenges and Opportunities for International News Organizations

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article focuses on strategies of international news organizations (INOs) in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs). In particular, I examine the potential of smartphone platforms in LMICs to reach and connect with new, younger audiences. Insights suggest that chat apps (a) tend to attract new users, often a younger audience, and (b) are accessible for low-income semiliterate or illiterate people, as they allow for dissemination of video clips and images. However, despite identifying an increasing number of pilot studies and initiatives by INOs to harness chat apps to engage with these audiences, the article uncovers, through a systematic approach, a substantial gap in research regarding the effectiveness of these strategies.

Shift or Stasis| Challenging U.S. Leadership in Entertainment Television? The Rise and Sale of Europe’s International TV Production Groups

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article is concerned with the international market consolidation in television entertainment production and its implications. The rapid growth of the TV format trade during the past 15 years has led to the formation of large European-led production groups. In recent years, U.S. media conglomerates have bought the largest of these groups. By tracing the groups’ development and the reasons for the U.S. acquisitions and by offering a model for the potential adverse implications this may have for television production and distribution in Europe, this article hopes to make a valuable contribution to media industries and policy research.

Shift or Stasis| Vacillation in Turkey’s Popular Global TV Exports: Toward a More Complex Understanding of Distribution

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Audience demand for Turkey’s TV series has increased their strength in the regional market and beyond. By mid-2014 more than 70 Turkish TV dramas reached audiences in 75 countries. Some experts have characterized this as neo-Ottoman cool, referring to Turkey’s growing “soft power” role in successfully combining Islam with democracy. However, survey data from 16 Arab countries, previous audience studies, and our in-depth interviews with Istanbul-based producers and distributors refute this. Neo-Ottoman cool does not register the full dynamics of contingent relations between economy, politics, ideology, and media flows. Our research underscores the region’s glocal flexibility and the market articulations overarching Turkey’s soft power ambitions, how the drama genre attracts women cross-culturally, and the limits of notions of cultural proximity.

Shift or Stasis| The Business Push and Audience Pull in Arab Entertainment Television

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article seeks to identify complex dynamics in Arab media. It argues that Arab entertainment television is subject to twin processes of “business push” and “local audience pull.” It also illustrates how multiple power structures hinder or facilitate these processes. Using an overview of the past five years in Arab entertainment television, the article analyzes transformative practices that illustrate key fractures in global media codistribution, format television, and media investments, as well as signs of the reassertion of national broadcasters and the impact of the YouTube phenomenon. The article argues for investigating the push/pull vectors that foster links and interactions more than actors and structures. This approach is required to better understand current global media permutations.

BRICS| Building the BRICS: Media, Nation Branding and Global Citizenship — Introduction

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

In this introductory essay we discuss the importance of studying the BRICS (acronym of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), the emerging themes of scholarship about the BRICS in general, and the eight essays collected in this Special Section. We argue that studying the BRICS demands understanding the strategic and ambivalent engagement of these nations with their own history, the colonial West, and modernity. Such an ambivalence is shown by how these countries deal with the dialectics of tradition and modernity; the local and global; nationalism and cosmopolitanism; and hope, desire, and anxiety in a postcolonial world. Thus, their nation branding and public diplomacy efforts, to a large extent, aim to facilitate domestic and global political and economic objectives.

Toward a Common Standard for Aid Transparency: Discourses of Global Citizenship Surrounding the BRICS

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

The impact of BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa) and other emerging economies on the field of international development has seen traditional donor nations wrestle with fundamental shifts in the geometry and makeup of the donor community. This has resulted in asymmetrical power relations in organizations such as the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) finding new modes of expression, as the one-way flows of cultural imperialism have given way to the multidirectional uncertainties of globalization. We question how the traditional aid donor community has taken this new geometry into account using discourses surrounding South-South cooperation as a focal point for analysis. The analysis engages with evolving discourses of indifference, skepticism, fear, integration, and conciliation, revealing complex tensions between the OECD’s Development Assistance Committee membership, BRICS, and the motivations for aid effectiveness debates.

BRICS| Strategizing for Creative Industries in China: Contradictions and Tension in Nation Branding

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article explores how China has strategized its various creative industries, including music, film, animation, and online games, by implementing a top-down cultural policy for nation branding both domestically and internationally. Based on in-depth interviews with Chinese authorities and personnel at different levels in the industries, I discuss the cultural, political, and social contradictions that are created and reflected by the state-driven cultural policy that regulates these creative industries. The dilemma created by the policy lies in the contradiction between the creative content generated by the industries and the censorship, control mechanism, and bureaucracy of the authoritarian regime. I argue that the state has adopted an interim solution in which it tolerates high levels of cultural influx and the localization of cultural products. The importation of global content with high market value can be regarded as a governmental strategy designed to fulfill market needs quickly and boost the creative national industries with expertise borrowed from overseas but without relaxing the ideological control over content.

BRICS| Branding Brazil Through Cultural Policy: Rio de Janeiro as a Creative, Audiovisual City

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article examines trends in Brazilian cultural policies from 2003 to 2014, programs specific to the audiovisual sector, and efforts to make Rio de Janeiro a creative, audiovisual city. I argue that cultural polices have functioned as a way to brand Brazil for domestic and international audiences. First, I outline how cultural policies were informed by premises of the creative economy, and I consider how these ideas impacted the audiovisual sector, emphasizing the film industry. Then I focus specifically on the film industry in Rio de Janeiro. Cultural policies specific to the audiovisual sector have sought to make Rio de Janeiro a key site for the new creative economy and a site for global consumption.

BRICS| Voters against Public Opinion: Press and Democracy in Brazil and South Africa

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

In both Brazil and South Africa, mainstream media sustain an uneasy relationship with left-wing governments. Conventional wisdom holds that this problem reflects the immaturity of their political institutions, which results chiefly from the late development of their democracies. Alternatively, this article hypothesizes that it relates to the crisis of a political order inherited from a colonial past: The mainstream media voices the perspectives of elites that present themselves as the authorized carriers of Western civilization’s legacy in their societies, living among non-civilized multitudes. However, successive victories of the Workers’ Party in Brazil and African National Congress in South Africa put these elites’ leadership at risk.

BRICS| Global Partners or International Spies? A Comparative Analysis of the Russian Media’s Coverage of the Law on “Foreign Agents”

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This article analyzes how the four Russian media that cater to different Russian and global audiences—the newspaper Izvestiya, the satellite television channel Russia Today, the newspaper Kommersant, and the radio station Ekho Moskvy—covered the debate around the controversial law on “foreign agents” passed in Russia in the summer of 2012. The law and the media coverage it received exposed the clash between Russia’s desire for global integration and the type of nationalism that defines Russian national identity as incompatible with Western values. The findings demonstrate that, although different media offer different articulations of Russia’s national identity, the dominant articulation constructs the identity of Russia around the idea of a strong state that determines and manages the conditions of Russia’s global integration.

BRICS| Getting in the Game? A Rising India and the Question of Global Sport

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

One of the most visible examples of the growing importance of BRICS economies is their emergence as hosts of the world’s top sport mega-events. These countries have become the frontline for the “global sports industrial complex,” which, furthering the mutually beneficial interests of sports organizations and governing bodies, media corporations, and transnational brands, has transformed global sport into a cultural and economic force. India is alone among the BRICS countries in that it has not hosted—or bid to host—an Olympics or Fédération Internationale de Football Association World Cup, and is the least athletically accomplished in such venues. This article situates India within the wider political economy of global sport by analyzing media debates around the country’s potential to host a mega-event. This case demonstrates how global aspirations are articulated through sport, and addresses commercial and development implications stemming from the adoption of sport as a global benchmark.

BRICS| The Global as the Postcolonial: Desire, Identity, and Liminality in Indian Rock

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This essay uses the concept of desire to reinfuse existing conversations about the postcolonial condition and its relationship with globalization. The essay uses the Indian uptake of the seemingly alien cultural practice of rock music to understand the confluence of vestigial structures of colonialism and a globalizing subjectivity that challenge unified notions of a national identity in India. By exploring media coverage of rock and testimony from musicians, the essay unravels the liminal spaces of destabilized identities and fragmented subjectivities that mark the global postcolonial condition. In doing so, it illuminates the role of structures, past and present, in shaping cultural desire and determining affective responses to global culture.

BRICS| Road to India—A Brazilian Love Story: BRICS, Migration, and Cultural Flows in Brazil’s Caminho das Indias

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

The Brazilian telenovela Caminho das Índias or India, a Love Story garnered more than 40 million viewers in Brazil and went on to win an international Emmy for best telenovela. Set in India and Brazil, Caminho das Índias highlights the challenges to established traditional values such as caste, lifestyles, and norms in emerging economies because of global migration. Through a textual and discursive analysis of the novella, this article hones in on the global migrations among the emerging economies India and Brazil to study the changes migrations bring about in terms of the spatial organization of social relations and familial and cultural ties using the concepts of deterritorialization and hybridity. Framing the novella in the context of BRICS, we interrogate the political economy of the text as a notable South–South international product, one that considerably increased the awareness of one BRICS country in another.

Media Genealogy: Technological and Historical Engagements of Power — Introduction

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This introductory article offers theoretical and methodological demarcations for media genealogy, which operates in the work of each scholar interviewed for this special issue. We first examine the limitations of the media archaeological method in the work of Friedrich Kittler, Wolfgang Ernst, and Siegfried Zielinski. We later provide an outline of what media genealogy might look like, drawing on the work of our interviewees.

Media Genealogy| Abstract Materialism: Peter Galison Discusses Foucault, Kittler, and the History of Science and Technology

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

In this conversation between Peter Galison, professor of physics and the history of science at Harvard University, and Jeremy Packer, associate professor in the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto, Galison addresses numerous concerns related to the historical analysis of technology. These include the importance of the work of Michel Foucault and Friedrich Kittler to the study of technology and science; the historical roots and continued prevalence of cybernetics on understandings of human-machine interactions; the often competing scientific virtues that drive scientific and technological innovation; and how Galison chooses the foci of his historical enquiries, which he calls “abstract materialism.”

Media Genealogy| An Archive for the Future: Paul N. Edwards on Technology, Historiography, Self and World

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

In this conversation between Paul N. Edwards, professor in the School of Information and the Department of History at the University of Michigan, and Alexander Monea, doctoral candidate in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University, Edwards addresses several concerns related to the history and critical analysis of media and technology. In particular, Edwards discusses archival methodology and interdisciplinarity in media studies, theories of technological momentum and infrastructural innovation, the political stakes of historiographic inquiry in terms of media and technology, the importance of the work of Michel Foucault, and the production of the self or subjectivization. He also discusses the contemporary implications of his earlier work on the history of computation and more recent work on climate science.

Media Genealogy| Is the Earth an Optical Medium? An Interview with Chris Russill

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

A discussion between Canadian media theorist Chris Russill, associate professor at Carleton University, and Kate Maddalena, assistant professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington, articulates Russill’s work in terms of current conversations in media-related cultural studies. Russill uses media theory, particularly the intersecting lineages of Michel Foucault, Harold Innis, and Friedrich Kittler, to describe planetary media that record, store, and transmit light. He then discusses implications for the technical media apparatus being created, largely in earth systems sciences, to read, process, and deploy appropriate action in response to the same. The conception of earth as optical medium affords insight into the power politics of ozone holes, climate change, the photosynthetic machines of science fiction, and sunscreen

Media Genealogy| Cinema/Cybernetics/Visuality: A Conversation with Orit Halpern

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

In this interview between Orit Halpern, associate professor of anthropology, sociology, and interactive design at Concordia University, and Eddie Lohmeyer, PhD student in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media Program at North Carolina State University, Professor Halpern discusses the challenges of writing a history of big data and interactivity and the possibilities that such a history might provide for advancing media criticism and practice. Particularly vital to the conversation was a discussion of method, the relationship between design, art, and scholarly practice in the humanities, and the challenges to rethinking, reworking, and revising older theoretical discussions concerning cybernetics, cinema, and biopolitics.

Media Genealogy| As If, or, Using Media Archaeology to Reimagine Past, Present, and Future: An Interview with Lori Emerson

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Jay Kirby, PhD student in the Communication, Rhetoric, and Digital Media program at North Carolina State University, conducted this interview with Associate Professor Lori Emerson to focus on her research about how interfaces and the material aspects of media devices affect our uses and relationships with those devices. Emerson, who runs the University of Colorado’s Media Archaeology Lab, explains how we can look at older technology that never became an economic success to imagine what could have been and reimagine what is and what could be. In the Media Archaeology Lab, Emerson collects still-functioning media artifacts to demonstrate these different possibilities. In this interview, Emerson draws on examples from digital computer interfaces, word processors, and other older media to show how their material aspects are bound up in cultural, commercial, and political apparatuses. By bringing these issues to light, Emerson shows how a critical eye toward our media can have far reaching implications.

Media Genealogy| The Future of Critique: Mark Andrejevic on Power/Knowledge and the Big Data-Driven Decline of Symbolic Efficiency

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Mark Andrejevic, Associate Professor at Pomona College, and J.J. Sylvia, Ph.D. student in the Communication Rhetoric and Digital Media Program at North Carolina State University, discusses the impact of the neo-materialist turn for media studies and the importance of critiquing surveillance through the theoretical framework of power in addition to that of privacy. Although the decline of symbolic efficiency, brought on at least in part by the rise of big data, seems to disrupt the link that Michel Foucault draws between power and knowledge, Andrejevic considers possibilities for reimagining the knowledge structures associated with big data’s infrastructure.

Urban Communication| Going About the City: Methods and Methodologies for Urban Communication Research — Introduction

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

This introduction to the special section on methods and methodologies for urban communication research discusses major approaches to conceptualizing and researching the relationship between cities and communication. We underline the increasing significance of scholarship on the various ways in which city dwellers relate to each other and their urban environment through symbolic, technological, and material means. We then argue that a systematic conversation on the methodological principles, protocols, and practices that set apart this burgeoning area of inquiry is not only timely, but also much needed. With this objective in mind, we invited a group of scholars to reflect on the key questions, instruments, challenges, and contributions of documentary, audiencing, material, visual, mixed-method, ecological, and applied perspectives on urban communication. Based on the seven articles included in the special section, we propose three distinct but interrelated conceptual heuristics—the city as context, the city as medium, the city as content—that highlight the importance of cities as both producers and products of particular practices, interactions, and narratives. We finally conclude that, vis-à-vis research on the automatic production of urban space, urban communication scholarship may contribute to strengthening a broader research agenda rooted in an understanding of communication as a human endeavor.

Urban Communication| Learning the City Through Stories: Audio Documentary as Urban Communication Pedagogy

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

In this article, we critically examine audio documentary at the intersections of urban storytelling, community-based learning, and urban communication pedagogy. We argue that audio documentary is both a research method and mode of storytelling production that can help students and listeners creatively learn about urban life. First, we focus on the intersections of urban communication and documentary in an effort to frame how documentary offers unique opportunities to learn about urban life and culture. Second, we argue that audio documentary production courses offer students experiential and community-based opportunities to learn about and do urban communication.

Urban Communication Research| Decentering Media Studies, Verbing the Audience: Methodological Considerations Concerning People’s Uses of Media in Urban Space

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Media studies scholars are invited today to address the pervasive mediation of contemporary cities, together with researchers from human geography, urban studies, science and technology studies, and mobility studies. Current studies of people’s uses of media in urban space, in particular, could play a central role in shedding light on the mediatedness of urban daily life. Drawing on a review of this specific strand of research within the broader field of “urban media studies,” the article argues that participation in the interdisciplinary endeavor runs the risk of being hindered by overly media-centric methodological procedures. Their restrictive implications are most problematic in the taken-for-granted employment of “urban audience” and “urban media user” as key concepts in the study of how people use media in urban space. What we propose instead is to demarcate the research object by proceeding from the primary importance of urban practices. This methodological decentering of media necessitates the “verbing” of the notion of audience, thereby shifting the research focus to the activity of “audiencing” (media-related or not) and its interrelations with other urban activities.

Urban Communication| Being Through There Matters: Materiality, Bodies, and Movement in Urban Communication Research

2016-08-15T11:18:46-07:00

Increasingly, scholars have turned to the urban built environment as a medium of communication in its own right. The bricks and mortar of cities are communicative insofar as they shape, constrain, and ultimately also mediate the everyday lives of individuals and communities. We draw on our own and others’ work in the broader field of rhetorical studies to state that “being through there” matters as a methodological approach to examining the urban built environment as a key form of mediation. Looking both backward and forward, we argue that this approach to studying the city is centered on three key concepts: materiality, bodies, and movement. This means that we must directly engage as fully embodied communication scholars with the built landscape, with temporality, and in movement. We therefore offer a number of examples to show communication scholars how to bring their own material possibilities into experiencing contact with the urban built environment, how to reconstruct urban landscapes’ histories and ongoing changes, and how to integrate considerations about both direction and speed into the study of urban communication.

Urban Communication Research| Visually Researching and Communicating the City: A Systematic Assessment of Methods and Resources

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This article explores and discusses a wide variety of resources and research techniques to visually approach and/or communicate key aspects of mediated and unmediated urban contexts. Cities and city life indeed can be investigated in unique ways through the observation of behavior in public space and by critically scrutinizing the visible features of urban spaces as social and cultural expressions of past and present intentions. Distinct visual methods—exploratory, systematic, or participatory in nature—may help bring about the actual, changing, and often hybrid experience and appearance of urban areas and their inhabitants. Visual approaches to investigating the communicative dimensions of the city also comprise innovative uses of visual materials in the reporting phase through synergetic combinations of images and other expressive features.

Urban Communication| Multi- and Mixed-Methods Approaches to Urban Communication Research: A Synthesis and the Road Ahead

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Interest in how the places we inhabit—and especially cities—impact our lives and how, in turn, humans shape the urban environment has intensified in the past 15 years across the social sciences, and in communication more specifically. An urbanization trend forecast to remain strong for at least 50 more years is fueling this interest, as are the growing appeals among policy makers for solutions to cities’ problems that are informed by research and for methodological innovations that enable the study of inherently complex urban ecosystems. This context has fostered efforts to develop multimethod and mixed-methods approaches to the study of the city. This article describes the strengths, challenges, and models of such research designs. I review the multimethod and mixed-methods communication research that has focused on the city, identify key themes and problematics that this literature has addressed, discuss theoretical orientations guiding this work, analyze research designs employed, and identify gaps that future communication-centered research on the urban condition should address.

Urban Communication| Researching Local News in a Big City: A Multimethod Approach

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Reflecting on recent research in the United Kingdom, we consider how to investigate the mediation of news in a contemporary city. We put forward the notion of a “media ecology” to capture the relationships between varied news media and practices—from mainstream news media and community media to the everyday circulation of news through local grapevines—and to explore how individuals and groups relate to the city and to one another. We outline the methodological challenges and decisions we faced in mapping such a complex thing as a media ecology and then in seeking to describe how it operates and to explain the difference it makes to the lives of city dwellers. We advocate the use of multiple methods because none could have provided an adequate explanation of the media ecology or the mediation of news in the city on its own.

Urban Communication| The Communicative City Redux

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

The communicative city is a construct that can be used to measure and recognize urban municipalities that provide or facilitate the creation and maintenance of a healthy communicative environment. Utilizing the criteria established through a series of interdisciplinary meetings, the Urban Communication Foundation introduced the Communicative City Award, honoring cities with the vision and skill to enhance communication in the interest of creating a healthy and humane social environment. The aim of this initiative is to advance the goal of underscoring the need for cities to place or foreground communication needs in the public agenda. An international jury composed of communication scholars and design and environment behavior scholars and practitioners evaluate the city’s initiative with regard to criteria of communicative cities. These criteria are clustered into three major areas: places of interaction, infrastructure, and politics/civil society. Disqualifications have been articulated as part of the criteria as well. Ultimately, this initiative seeks to not only recognize and set a communication agenda for cities but directly benefit award-winning cities through communication research–based recommendations that address remaining challenges identified by municipal leaders.

Translations| Babel and Globalization: Translating in the 21st Century — Introduction

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Translations have historically maintained an essential role in the diffusion of knowledge, culture, arts, and sciences across national and cultural borders. This article introduces the special section on translations, situating the analysis within the unfolding globalization phenomena that have fostered an international communication milieu in which English is increasingly the lingua franca in academic, economic, technological, and popular culture domains. This special section delves into the craft and challenges of translating in the 21st century, contributing to shed light on the work and vital role of translators and translations. It provides, at the intersection of diverse fields of academic inquiry and theoretical frameworks, a venue for scholarly contributions sharing an interest in translations and their relevance in the global communication landscape.

Translations| Communication Studies Without Frontiers? Translation and Cosmopolitanism Across Academic Cultures

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This article discusses the translatability of communication scholarship in the context of globalized academia and research traditions. The notion of translation is useful to reflect upon the globalization of academic cultures in communication studies. The globalization of academic cultures confronts matters that translation studies have long recognized: the clash between dogmatism and difference, language slips and gaps, and the possibility of (mis)understandings. Although globalization invites scholars to broaden perspectives, it does not necessarily promote the rapprochement of epistemic communities in communication studies or the values of universal, de-Westernized, and cosmopolitan scholarship. We may hope communication research includes a plurality of global voices, but we still lack a clear path to overcome different understandings about quality standards, conceptual languages, and epistemological premises.

Translations| Rapid and Radical Changes in Translation and Translation Studies

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This article describes the changes in the field of translation by referring to practices such as localization, amateur translation, audiovisual translation, and news translation. The changes are enhanced by computing, information, and communication technologies. Therefore, two paradigms are evolving, and they justify, to some degree, the current multiplication of labels created for translation. On one hand, the paradigm of equivalence has been replaced by the paradigm of the cultural turn. And the shift exists concurrently with the change of the platforms and media through which all the activities of translation are carried out—from the printed book paradigm to the digital paradigm.

Translations| Translation’s Histories and Digital Futures

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Drawing on Latour’s actor-network-theory and De Landa’s robot historian, this essay asks in what ways translation’s past is a prehistory of the present and to what extent nonhuman agents have shaped and are shaping translation. In particular, it examines the impact of computational media on translation and finds that the difference made by the computer as a convergence medium is that, for the first time in history, one medium has become capable of presenting in its entirety the media history of translation. To grasp the changes that translation is undergoing in the 21st century therefore requires a comparative understanding of its relations to the mediascapes of the past, present, and future.

Translations| Massively Open Translation: Unpacking the Relationship Between Technology and Translation in the 21st Century

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Globalization and translation go hand in hand because translation functions as a mechanism to enable global communication in an increasingly interconnected world. Within the technological trend set by Web 2.0 and its user-centeredness, translation practices began to incorporate an alternative scenario based on translation by self-selected volunteers. Under the framework of critical theory of technology, this article scrutinizes the development of translation as a mass, open, and collaborative task that I call massively open translation. Critical theory of technology is used to unpack the way in which technology is effecting a transformation of translation toward higher translator autonomy, uncovering the nature of the relationship between technology and translation.

Translations| The Impact of Translation Technologies on the Process and Product of Translation

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Technological advances have led to unprecedented changes in translation as a means of interlingual communication. This article discusses the impact of two major technological developments of contemporary translation: computer-assisted translation tools and machine translation. These technologies have increased productivity and quality in translation, supported international communication, and demonstrated the growing need for innovative technological solutions to the age-old problem of the language barrier. However, these tools also represent significant challenges and uncertainties for the translation profession and the industry. In highlighting the need for increased awareness and technological competencies, I propose that these challenges can be overcome and translation technologies will become even more integral in interlingual communication.

Translations|Translators as Adaptive Experts in a Flat World: From Globalization 1.0 to Globalization 4.0?

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Professional translators are highly multitasking agents whose job requires advanced language skills, advanced information literacy, and great technological and instrumental competence. Today they operate in and for an ever more technologized society, within a complex, competitive system of client and user expectations, tools, and new forms of organization and work conditions. This article explores the main industry-level, technological and social developments that have forced many translators to further resituate their practice as co-constructors of knowledge and co-communicators in today’s media landscape. It argues that despite the challenges of powerful automatic implementation and the upsurge of volunteer crowdsourcers, professional translators will continue to adapt to evolving work conditions and emerging phenomena, moving the traditional boundaries of the practice and discipline of translation.

Translations| “The Task of the Translator”: Comparing the Views of the Client and the Translator

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

As a consequence of globalization and corporate restructuring processes, most translators are now freelance and generally work for multiple clients on a project basis. The often remote and media-based cooperation can at times result in misunderstandings or dissatisfaction, which stem from the different expectations. This paper examines the expectations such clients and translators have of each other and studies how their differing views shape the cooperation and communication process and, thus, influence the translation process and the translation as a whole. In a case study, a translator and a client were interviewed regarding a specific translation assignment. Six differences between the translator’s and the client’s preconceptions and expectations could be identified.

Translations| The Challenges and Opportunities of Legal Translation and Translator Training in the 21st Century

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

The 21st century offers all professions myriad opportunities to face new challenges and redefine their current positions. Legal translation has a long tradition in translation studies and practice; nevertheless, it seems that the moment has come for profound changes in the legal translation profession’s position in society and for legal translator training. After a brief overview of legal translation, this article focuses on important challenges and opportunities for legal translators and for legal translator trainers. I revise initial steps already taken to address the challenges and to seize the opportunities of the 21st century and discuss those still requiring attention.

Translations| Cultural Translators of Communication Studies in Greater China

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

How is English-language communication scholarship translated into Chinese academia? This article uses the concept of cultural translators to understand the development of media and communication studies in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong. After providing a brief history of translation in China and of communication studies in Greater China, the article zooms in on the work of two prominent cultural translators: HE Daokuan (何道寬) at Shenzhen University in mainland China and FENG Chien-san (馮建) at National Chengchi University in Taiwan. Georgette Wang’s notion of cultural, conceptual, and structural incommensurabilities is adapted into a comparative framework for analyzing the translators, their motivations, and their modes of work. In addition to in-depth interviews with HE and FENG, the analysis draws from secondary materials and participation in various Chinese communication studies programs. Broader implications of this comparative exercise are discussed for Chinese communication studies and for the globalization of communication scholarship worldwide.

Translations| Synchronization Techniques in Multilingual Fiction: Voiced-Over Films in Poland

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This descriptive analysis of four multilingual fiction films voiced-over into Polish—Nine, Avatar, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and Inglourious Basterds—provides insight into the application of different types of synchrony and their function in multilingual movies as well as the relation between synchronization and translation techniques. The results raise important questions about the main assumptions of voice-over translation, such as the illusion of authenticity, voice-over isochrony, and the reasoning behind literal synchrony.

Translations| The Stimulating Challenges of Translating Contemporary Swiss German Poetry

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This article addresses the linguistic and cultural challenges that contemporary Swiss German poetry presented to an Italian translator. It is an outcome of a two-year experience of translating more than 100 short poems by Werner Lutz from German into Italian. The poems were translated based on a complementary twofold, seemingly contradictory approach comprising both a source-oriented viewpoint emphasizing nostalgia for the original and the unavoidable target-oriented perspective that stresses “an ultimate untranslatability” of many expressions. To highlight both aspects, the poetic language of Lutz is examined in terms of linguistic and cultural differences between German and Italian, and by presenting a comparative treatment of the translation problems.

Translations| Perils of Translation in a Conflict Situation: Lessons from Kashmir

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

The continuing tension between the necessity and impossibility of translation is explored within the context of the Kashmiri movement for self-determination. In this situation of conflict, the central term azadi is intensely contested, with different parties to the conflict inflecting the term with their own politically motivated interpretations. In addition, the act of translation itself becomes politicized, with the Indian government, the Indian mainstream press, and minorities within Kashmir insisting that Kashmiris reveal the “real” meaning of azadi and Kashmiri protestors refusing to pin down its meaning, using its polyvalence as part of the movement repertoire. In this fraught situation, engaged translation by progressive intellectuals is necessary to move beyond mutually exclusive interpretations of azadi so that new futures for Kashmir can be imagined.

Translations| Book Review| Tytti Suojanen, Kaisa Koskinen & Tiina Tuominen, User-Centered Translation (Translation Practices Explained)

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

It is rare to see a proposal for a new approach to translation research and practice; it is even rarer for this to happen in a course book. However, this is the case for User-Centered Translation, a systematic and well-written book adapted and extended from the Finnish book Käyttäjäkeskeinen kääntäminen published by the University of Tampere in 2012. The title of the book presents in condensed form the authors’ aim: a wish to emphasize that the users or readers of translations should be given the central role in the translation process. Authors Tytti Suojanen, Kaisa Koskinen, and Tiina Tuominen argue that although the awareness of the importance of target readers is not new in translation practice and research, an explicit focus on the fact that users of translations should be taken into account already within the translation process tends to be implicit in translation practice and undertheorized in translation studies (TS) research.

Constructing Public Space: Global Perspectives on Social Media and Popular Contestation — Introduction

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This introduction to the special section on the construction of public space in social media activism discusses (1) the types of social media practices involved in the construction of publicness during contemporary episodes of popular contention, (2) the particular political institutional contexts in which these practices are articulated, and (3) the technocommercial architectures through which they take shape. Building on the five articles in this section, we argue that public space is not readily available for today’s citizens and activists, but is conquered and constructed through processes of emotional connectivity.

Constructing Public Spaces| Participants on the Margins: Examining the Role that Shared Artifacts of Engagement in the Ferguson Protests Played Among Minoritized Political Newcomers on Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Utilizing ethnographic methods, this article explores how diverse young people at the margins of politics used social media in relation to the Ferguson protests. The article argues for the significance of what is termed artifacts of engagement, referring to the photos, messages, and other materials that signal political involvement and that young students of color shared with their peers through the social media of Snapchat, Facebook, and Twitter. Shared artifacts of engagement and the affordances of the platforms through which they are shared are both found to be key to what Bennett and Segerberg (2013) term connective action, or the ways that individuals use social media as they personalize expressions of a movement’s goals and may therefore participate in larger efforts aimed at bringing about social change.

Constructing Public Space| Rousing the Facebook Crowd: Digital Enthusiasm and Emotional Contagion in the 2011 Protests in Egypt and Spain

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

The activist use of Facebook pages in the 2011 movements of the Egyptian revolution and the Spanish Indignados saw phases of exponential growth in user engagement in proximity to key protest events, signaled by spikes in likes and comments. This article analyzes these episodes as moments of digital enthusiasm facilitated by emotional communication on political Facebook pages. Drawing on quantitative and qualitative analysis of Facebook data, I argue that two elements concurred to build moments of digital enthusiasm: (a) the hopeful narrative produced by activist admins managing political Facebook pages, and (b) the receptivity and cooperation of ordinary Internet users who overwhelmingly reinforced the message put forward by activist admins. This emotional dialogue between admins and users generated a process of emotional contagion that helped establish propitious psychological conditions for mass protest participation. Moments of digital enthusiasm demonstrate the power of social media and emotional communication in mass protest mobilization. However, they also highlight the risk of evanescence of collective action in a digital age.

Constructing Public Space| “Legit Can’t Wait for #Toronto #WorldPride!”: Investigating the Twitter Public of a Large-Scale LGBTQ Festival

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This article investigates whether participation on Twitter during Toronto’s 2014 WorldPride festival facilitated challenges to heteronormativity through increased visibility, connections, and messages about LGBTQ people. Analysis of 68,231 tweets found that surges in activity using WorldPride hashtags, connections among users, and the circulation of affective content with common symbols made celebrations visible. However, the platform’s features catered to politicians, celebrities, and advertisers in ways that accentuated self-promotional, local, and often banal content, overshadowing individual users and the festival’s global mandate. By identifying Twitter’s limits in fostering the visibility of users and messages that circulate nonnormative discourses, this study makes way for future research identifying alternative platform dynamics that can enhance the visibility of diversity.

Constructing Public Space| New “Danger Zone” in Europe: Representations of Place in Social Media–Supported Protests

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Social media–supported protests build circuits of collective interaction that grow across physical, material, digital, and virtual spaces. Extending the research on the governance of communicative spaces, we ask whether representations of place define the public space and whether their analysis suffices to grasp the powerful processes embedded within that space. Consequently, we analyze the available representations of place in the Twitter communication about the protests against the Akademikerball, which is a ball organized by the right-wing populist party, the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), in Vienna, Austria. The analysis shows multiple forms of representation, but further consideration of its limitations takes into account three other key features of the public space. Together with an examination of representations, the analysis of textures, structures, and connections inform four modes of analysis that ought to be explored simultaneously to comprehensively understand the governance of the communicative space that is occupied in social media–supported protests.

Constructing Public Space|Weibo, WeChat, and the Transformative Events of Environmental Activism in China

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

The emergence of China and the advent of social media are two events that rupture the world as it is and force a rethinking of activism and public spaces. Environmental protests in China, often performed on a mediascape dominated by social media, suggest new conditions of possibility for activism and a need to adopt new methods and tools for understanding the myriad practices of activists in China that exceed the strictures of governmental control and offer hope for different futures. This essay theorizes emerging practices of citizenship and inventive imaginings of public spaces by introducing wild public screens. To do so, we analyze how Chinese environmentalists deploy Weibo, WeChat, and other social media platforms.

Digital Age| The Management of Visibilities in the Digital Age — Introduction

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

What we see, what we show and how we look are fundamental organizational concerns made ever more salient by the affordances, dynamics, and discourses of the digital age. Contemporary organizing practices are awash with material, mediated and managed visibilities: companies erect glass buildings with open and networked office spaces to efficiently share information, respond to stakeholder demands by crafting extensive transparency policies, and orchestrate the massive distribution of information online in the name of accountability. At the same time, states and corporations aggregate digital traces to track and profile citizens and users, while activists use the same tools to expose corporate and state malfeasance.

Digital Age| Transparency: Mediation and the Management of Visibilities

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This article challenges the view of transparency as a matter of providing openness, insight, and clarity by conceptualizing it as a form of visibility management. We tend to think of transparency as a process of ensuring accountability through the timely and public disclosure of information. But with the ubiquity of digital technology and data, transparency efforts have more elaborate and complex effects. To conceptualize these, this article discusses the technological and mediated foundations of transparency and the dynamics of visibility practices resulting from efforts to make people, objects, and processes knowable and governable. This implies that we shift our attention away from the provision of information and consider the wider social processes and dynamics at work in transparency efforts. Using empirical illustrations from organizations with an explicit commitment to transparency, this article articulates the complexities and dynamics of visibility management and highlights a set of critical questions about the politics, technologies, and power effects of contemporary transparency regimes.

Digital Age | Managing Opacity: Information Visibility and the Paradox of Transparency in the Digital Age

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Organizational transparency is in vogue. When technologies make it possible for information about actors’ behaviors, communications, decisions, and opinions to be visible to interested parties, those actors and the organizations in which they work will presumably be forced to behave more responsibly because they can be held accountable for their actions. The assumption traditionally held by scholars who theorize the relationship between visibility and transparency is that more visibility results in higher levels of transparency. In this paper, we question this assumption. We begin by distinguishing between transparency and visibility and offer a conceptualization of visibility as the combination of three attributes: availability of information, approval to disseminate information, and accessibility of information to third parties. Although transparency is generally believed to be achieved at high levels of each of these attributes, we demonstrate how highly visible information can actually increase opacity and how each attribute of visibility independently and/or co-jointly contributes to the degree to, and manner in which, the relationship between visibility and transparency is managed. Our discussion surfaces a phenomenon we call the “transparency paradox” in which high levels of visibility decrease transparency and produce opacity. The theorization of this transparency paradox and the mechanisms through which it operates have important implications for theory and practice surrounding the role of technologies in organizational action in the digital age.

Digital Age| From Radical Transparency to Radical Disclosure: Reconfiguring (In)Voluntary Transparency Through the Management of Visibilities

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This article challenges how the concepts of voluntary and involuntary transparency are understood in the digital age by focusing on the management of involuntary and voluntary disclosure. We tend to understand radical transparency through new forms of involuntary networked data dissemination, spread without the consent or knowledge of whoever held the data. This view conflates the politics of exclusion with crucial questions of compulsion. At the same time, radical transparency’s promise to end secrecy has not materialized. Instead, the social-material relations underpinning digital disclosures suggest they function to reconfigure visibilities of control and recognition rather than reveal extant objects. Thus, the article introduces a typology of disclosure to better understand the involuntary and autonomous and inclusive and exclusionary dimensions of managing visibility in the digital era. It then explores two sets of empirical “radical disclosure” practices, made with purpose but without consent, to articulate how digital disclosures reconfigure visibility and set limits and opportunities in society. The article concludes with a suggestion toward ramifications for governance and autonomy.

Digital Age| Managing Secrecy

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

As many anthropologists and sociologists have long argued, understanding the meaning and place of secrets is central to an adequate representation of society. This article extends previous accounts of secrecy in social, governmental, and organizational settings to configure secrecy as one form of visibility management among others. Doing so helps to remove the secret from a post-Enlightenment value system that deems secrets bad and openness good. Once secrecy itself is seen as a neutral phenomenon, we can focus on the politicality or ethics of any particular distribution of the visible, sayable, and knowable. Alongside understanding the work secrecy performs in contemporary society, this article argues that we can also seek inspiration from the secret as a methodological tool and political tactic. Moving beyond the claim to privacy, a claim that has lost bite in this era of state and consumer dataveillance, a “right to opacity”—the right to not be transparent, legible, seen—might open up an experience of subjectivity and responsibility beyond the circumscribed demands of the current politico-technological management of visibilities.

Digital Age |Managing Surveillance: Surveillant Individualism in an Era of Relentless Visibility

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Contemporary surveillance occurs in the context of communicative abundance, where visibility is not only easy but relentless: never ending, far reaching, and ceaseless. Managing surveillance therefore has considerable implications for democratic politics, workplace control, economic practices, cultural politics, and individual subjectivity. This article identifies surveillant individualism, or the pivotal role that individuals play in surveillance and countersurveillance, as a major feature of contemporary surveillance management. It seeks to clarify current research trajectories on digital surveillance management and to chart a course for organizational research on surveillant individualism.

Digital Age| Occult(ing) Transparency: An Epilogue

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This epilogue seeks to discover hidden as well as perceptible patterns in the special issue. It senses four ghosts haunting transparency

Where is the Queerness in Games?: Types of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Content in Digital Games

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

With increasing popular and academic attention being paid to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) content in video games, the time has come for a thorough account of the history of this content in this medium. In the project reviewed here, we have documented more than 300 games and more than 500 examples of LGBTQ content spanning 30 years. Using a grounded theoretical approach, we were able to classify this content into nine large categories—characters, relationships/romance/sex, actions, locations, mentions, artifacts, traits, queer games/narratives, and homophobia/transphobia—each of which contains several subcategories. In outlining our classification system here, we will demonstrate the myriad ways queerness in gender and sexuality have been integrated into digital games.

The Significant Other: A Longitudinal Analysis of Significant Samples in Journalism Research, 2000–2014

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This study examined the methodology journalism scholars use when studying significant samples, or “those persons who have attained an unusually pervasive and lasting reputation, regardless of whether that reputation be great or small.” Using Simonton’s work as the theoretical guide, the study content analyzed a census of articles published in 10 major journalism journals from 2000 to 2014. Results showed that the typical study examining significant samples is psychometric and is also quantitative, nomothetic, longitudinal, singularly focused, and exploratory. In addition, it uses macro units and observes the subject indirectly. The study also found similarities between the study of significant samples and extant work in terms of the preponderance of quantitative methods and the use of content analysis as a data collection method. The ramifications are discussed.

International Media and Latvian Sovereignty: From Liberation to Today’s Vexation

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This report examines the significance of international news in Latvian politics. Today, in light of coverage stemming from the crisis in Ukraine, news from Russia is a prominent concern, but a generation ago Latvian politicians working for independence from the USSR devoted their primary attention to news from the West. This study examines the relationship between press and politics in the twilight of the Soviet era and contrasts it with today’s “information war” between the small Baltic state and its neighbor Russia. In the process, it suggests directions for future research based on the case of Latvia in conjunction with insights derived from research on the “CNN effect.”

The Herald and Daily News' Framing of the Leaked Zimbabwean Draft Constitution and Vice President Joice Mujuru’s Fall from Grace

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Debates in Zimbabwe give the impression that mass media are central to the country’s democratization. Focusing on two seemingly unrelated but defining events in Zimbabwe’s political life—the framing of the leaked draft constitution (January–February 2012) and Vice President Joice Mujuru’s fall from grace (August 2014–June 2015)—this article investigates whether the concern about the media’s role in Zimbabwe’s democratic project is justified. A comparative analysis of Daily News and The Herald was carried out to ascertain how the two newspapers framed the two events and to judge the extent to which they can be said to be informative and educative. Content analysis of the two publications and in-depth interviews with The Herald news editor and a senior reporter and with Daily News’ news editor and political editor were used to establish their perceptions regarding their newspapers’ framing of the two events. The article reveals that the two publications’ framing of the events was polarized and did not assist citizens to make informed decisions. The Herald was pro-Mugabe, while Daily News was anti-Mugabe.

Epistemological (Im)possibilities and the Play of Power: Effects of the Fragmentation and Weak Institutionalisation of Communication Studies in Europe

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This article is about the marginalization of communication studies in the European research and education landscape. The central thesis is that the fragmentation and weak institutionalization of communication studies entail its marginalization in the competition for legitimacy. As a result, they stunt the growth of critical, collaborative approaches to communication theory and practice, with the potential to challenge the theoretically thin, instrumental approaches to communication analysis flourishing in the neoliberal knowledge economy. The article takes its starting point in the debate about the fragmentation of media and communication studies, and then discusses the fragmentation of communication studies in Europe, considers the consequences for critical communication scholarship in the neoliberal knowledge regime, and sketches out some ideas for dealing with those consequences.

“I Has Seen Image Macros!” Advice Animals Memes as Visual-Verbal Jokes

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This essay considers the prevalent but underresearched phenomenon of humorous Internet memes by focusing on Advice Animal image macros, conceptualized as an internally diversified joke genre proliferating across social media. Specifically, Advice Animals are seen as cycles of visual–verbal jokes—widespread humorous units typical of participatory new media, which flourish via individual users’ creative contributions. Based on a selection of meme templates that have been very popular in the past few years, I advance several hypotheses about the pragma-cognitive mechanisms underpinning the humor that stems from the visual or verbal components, or combinations of them.

Relocating Development Communication: Social Entrepreneurship, International Networking, and South-South Cooperation in the Viva Rio NGO

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

This piece addresses how the oft-invoked but rarely interrogated discourse on social entrepreneurship presents new opportunities and issues for community activists. While its champions argue that this practice has the potential to radically reconfigure the geopolitics of international development by privileging local innovations over outside intervention, specific case examinations of this practice are as of yet rare. Drawing on the projects developed by Viva Rio, the first non-governmental organization working in the favelas (or unincorporated urban slums) of Rio de Janeiro, this piece investigates integral elements and larger implications of this practice including how local actors working in marginalized communities design and implement interventions, how they market projects to international support networks, and larger possibilities for developing south-south collaborative relationships.

Silas F. Harrebye, Social Change and Creative Activism in the 21st Century: The Mirror Effect

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Angela MacRobbie, Be Creative: Making a Living in the New Cultural Industries

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Kevin Barnhurst, Mister Pulitzer and the Spider: Modern News from Realism to the Digital

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Garrett M. Broad, More Than Just Food: Food Justice and Community Change

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Ying Zhu, Two Billion Eyes: The Story of China Central Television

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Lori Emerson, Reading Writing Interfaces: From the Digital to the Bookbound

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Joseph M. Reagle, Jr., Readings the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Elisabeth L. Engebretsen, William F. Schroeder & Hongwei Bao (Eds.), Queer/Tongzhi China: New Perspectives on Research, Activism and Media Cultures

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Gary D. Rawnsley & Ming-yeh T. Rawnsley (Eds.), Routledge Handbook of Chinese Media

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Elizabeth Cowie, Recording Reality, Desiring the Real

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Alvin Y. So & Yin-Wah Chu, The Global Rise of China

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Orit Halpern, Beautiful Data: A History of Vision and Reason Since 1945

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

François Cooren, Organizational Discourse: Communication and Constitution

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

David Lyon, Surveillance after Snowden

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Shawn M. Powers & Michael Jablonski, The Real Cyber War: The Political Economy of Internet Freedom

2016-08-15T11:18:47-07:00

Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner & Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Jean K. Chalaby, The Format Age: Television’s Entertainment Revolution

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

W. Lance Bennett & Alexandra Segerberg, The Logic of Connective Action: Digital Media and the Personalization of Contentious Politics

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Victoria A. Farrar-Myers & Justin S. Vaughn (Eds.), Controlling the Message: New Media in American Political Campaigns

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Gender at the Margins of Gamer Culture

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Perspectives on Copyright in Education: A Review of Selected Works Pertaining to Copyright and Fair Use in the Educational Setting

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Phoebe H. Li, A Virtual Chinatown: The Diasporic Mediasphere of Chinese Migrants in New Zealand

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Mohan J. Dutta, Communicating Social Change: Structure, Culture, and Agency

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Joseph M. Reagle Jr., Reading the Comments: Likers, Haters, and Manipulators at the Bottom of the Web

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Benedetta Brevini, Arne Hintz, & Patrick McCurdy (Eds.), Beyond Wikileaks: Implications for the Future of Communications, Journalism and Society

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Frederik Claeyé, Managing Nongovernmental Organizations: Culture, Power and Resistance

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Shane Greenstein, How the Internet Became Commercial: Innovation, Privatization, and the Birth of a New Network

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Cynthia Carter, Linda Steiner and Lisa McLaughlin (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Media and Gender

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Zizi Papacharissi, Affective Publics: Sentiment, Technology, and Politics

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Pavel Shlossberg, Crafting Identity:Transnational Indian Arts and the Politics of Race in Central Mexico

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Christian A. Klöckner, The Psychology of Pro-Environmental Communication: Beyond Standard Information Strategies

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

John Durham Peters, Marvelous Clouds: Toward a Philosophy of Elemental Media

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Shi-xu, Chinese Discourse Studies

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Joe Sacco, Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00

Kaitlynn Mendes, SlutWalk: Feminism, Activism, Media

2016-08-15T11:18:48-07:00