Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Quantum Computational Supremacy: Security And Vulnerability In A New Paradigm, Deborah Brennan

Irish Communication Review

Despite three decades of research, the field of quantum computation has yet to build a quantum computer that can perform a task beyond the capability of any classical computer – an event known as computational supremacy. Yet this multi-billion dollar research industry persists in its efforts to construct such a machine. Based on the counter-intuitive principles of quantum physics, these devices are fundamentally different from the computers we know. It is theorised that large-scale quantum computers will have the ability to perform some remarkably powerful computations, even if the extent of their capabilities remains disputed. One application, however, the factoring of ...

Data Protection And Privacy For Media And Individuals Under Irish And Eu Law, Sarah Kearney

Irish Communication Review

Recent public discussion has seen an increasing emphasis placed on data protection and privacy. An accord must be struck between the individual's right to privacy and an organisation’s right to examine an individual’s personal information for its given commercial, contractual or social media activities. This paper examines the evolution of data protection and regulation in Irish and EU law, Illustrating that data protection applies in relation to the publication of material in the media, even if it may still be set aside in the case of public interest. It concludes that the Irish and European Courts place ...

The Self And Other: Portraying Israeli And Palestinian Identities On Twitter, Jason Deegan, John Hogan, Sharon Feeney, Brendan K. O'Rourke

Irish Communication Review

The conflict between Israel and Palestine has lasted over half a century, with both sides enduring military and political turmoil. This paper explores how Twitter is being used as a medium to portray identities in the conflict. We examine the tweets contained in the @IDFspokesperson and @ISMPalestine Twitter accounts between late 2015 and early 2016. Using textual analysis, we gain an insight into how these Twitter accounts, defined by the conflict, are used in portraying the self and the other.

Text Analytics Techniques In The Digital World: A Sentiment Analysis Case Study Of The Coverage Of Climate Change On Us News Networks, Jerome Casey

Irish Communication Review

This paper analyses nearly 600 news segments relating to climate change broadcast on 3 American news networks over a period of 8 years. The paper demonstrates the typical steps involved in a text analytics solution. It shows how the text data was sourced and imported into a software program. The steps carried out in pre-processing the text data are outlined as well as explaining key terms in the text analytics pipeline. A sentiment analysis is applied using a lexicon and further processing is carried out to answer the

original questions posed such as what words drive a particular sentiment category ...

Text Analytics Techniques In The Digital World: Word Embeddings And Bias, Marisa Llorens

Irish Communication Review

The proliferation of textual data in the form of online news articles and social media feeds has had an impact on the text analytics developments in recent years. Some of the challenges of natural language processing, understanding and generation have been successfully resolved and the results are applications such as AI personal assistants and bots. Word embeddings are an example of these successful solutions where unsupervised data-driven algorithms are used to understand concepts and relationships between words. This paper presents a description of word embedding algorithms, and a discussion on how bias in the training data can be captured, reproduced ...

Like, Post, Share, Buy: The Commercial Value Of Affective Networking On Social Media, Cáitríona Murphy

Irish Communication Review

The purpose of this article is to unpack the complexities of how economic value is generated in the digital economy, specifically on social media. This article looks at social networking sites (SNSs), such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and Snapchat, and analyses the labour that is carried out by SNS users.

This is a theoretically oriented project that has aimed to identify and analyse the ways in which SNS users create value and profit for corporations. The article explores the labour processes carried out on social media such as the generation of data, the creation of content and the creation of ...

All Aboard? Seniors And Their Media, Adrian Smyth

Irish Communication Review

It is a plain chronological fact that personal digital technologies – such as the mobile phone, computers and the internet and digital television services – have arrived late in the lives of many older people. The ‘problem’ here – if it is to be perceived as such – is that this late arrival may present some older people with a particular set of challenges which may not necessarily apply to other, younger, people; and while it is important to acknowledge older people must never be considered an homogenous cohort when it comes to experiences of ageing, considerations such as late-life physiological changes are nevertheless ...

In An Era Of Fake News, Information Literacy Has A Role To Play In Journalism Education In Ireland, Isabelle Courtney

Irish Communication Review

Framed by the problem of fake news and misinformation, a recent study into journalism education in Ireland focused on the overlaps that exist between two professions: journalism and librarianship. The emerging literature on fake news is overwhelmingly coming from these two disciplines. Historically both have deep roots in truth and fact and employ a specific range of tools for the evaluation of information. Librarians use a framework called information literacy, while journalism educators speak of media literacy, fact-checking and verification of sources. With the many overlaps in media and information literacy, journalists and librarians would appear to be natural partners ...

Media Literacy And Disciplinarity: A Case Study, Clare Scully

Irish Communication Review

Recent years have seen a number of changes and developments in Ireland’s third-level education sector. Increasing concerns about student literacy issues have been accompanied by an apparent institutional logic in which generic ‘one size fits all’ modules are privileged on the basis of their expediency in the context of an underfunded, neoliberal educational landscape. While these modules may offer efficiencies at an administrative, teaching and practical level, there is little research that investigates their impacts and effectiveness on students in terms of disciplinary identity and knowledge, grades or quality assurance. As a contribution towards this topic, this exploratory paper ...

Editors' Introduction: Critical Media Literacy - Who Needs It?, Harry Browne, Deborah Brennan

Irish Communication Review

No abstract provided.

Reputational Threats Online: Social Media As A Simultaneous Agent Of Crisis And Tool For Response And Resolution In The Case Study Of An American Academic Library, Margaret C. Stewart, Maria Atilano

Maria Atilano

This paper details a reputational threat to an American academic library where a viral social media post and associated negative comments misrepresented the institution and brand’s values. Immediately, the marketing librarian responsible for social media responded to the threat by engaging directly with the library consumers, sharing content and information with the broader online community, and reinforcing the library’s values and commitment to consumers. While the resolution to the crisis was mostly favourable, the event was unanticipated and invited a keen learning opportunity that is documented in this case study. Reflections and takeaways from this incident are discussed ...

Andrews Graduates Receive Awards At Film Festival, Gillian Sanner

Andrews Agenda: Campus News

No abstract provided.

The Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood And Ikhwanweb: Deliberative Ethic/Voice In A Counterpublic’S Rhetoric?, Soumia Bardhan

Journal of Public Deliberation

Using counterpublic theory as framework and situating the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood (MB) as a counterpublic, counterpublics being alternative, non-dominant publics who voice their oppositional needs and values through diverse discursive practices, the goal of this study is to: (a) Examine, in the context of the years preceding the 2011 Egyptian uprising, whether the Egyptian MB, as a counterpublic, portrays a deliberative ethic/voice in its cyber rhetoric; (b) Explore whether traditional/Western ideas of deliberation are upheld or challenged in the cyber rhetoric of the Egyptian MB; and (c) Comment on the role of Ikhwanweb, as a counterpublic sphere, in ...

Communication And Trust In Virtual And Face-To-Face Teams, Anthony Lee Baker

Dissertations and Theses

Virtual teams (VTs) accomplish shared goals by relying on technology-mediated communication to counteract geographic disparities. Rapid advances in technology have led to the near-ubiquity of VTs within modern organizations, but gaps in existing research designs afflict extant empirical VT research. This experiment evaluates the constructs of trust, communication, and effectiveness in VTs. Two-hundred six participants (103 teams) completed an interdependent task either face-to-face, mediated by a videoconferencing telepresence robot, or mediated by a voice call. I collected measures of cognitive trust, trust propensity, communication quality, and team effectiveness, and conducted in-depth communication analyses. Results suggest that while virtual teamwork does ...

Augmented Personalized Health: Using Semantically Integrated Multimodal Data For Patient Empowered Health Management Strategies, Amit P. Sheth, Hong Y. Yip, Utkarshani Jaimini, Dipesh Kadariya, Vaikunth Sridharan, R. Venkataramanan, Tanvi Banerjee, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Maninder Kalra

Kno.e.sis Publications

Healthcare as we know it is in the process of going through a massive change from:

1. Episodic to continuous

2. Disease-focused to wellness and quality of life focused

3. Clinic-centric to anywhere a patient is

4. Clinician controlled to patient empowered

5. Being driven by limited data to 360-degree, multimodal personal-public-population physical-cyber-social big data-driven URL: https://mhealth.md2k.org/2018-tech-showcase-home

Secular Sells: How Secular Lifestyle Influences Religiosity, Elyse Clark

Honors Theses

This study examines the relationship between secular behaviors and religious behaviors among youth in the United States. While there is no doubt that these two things are intrinsically linked, the nature of that relationship has been predominantly studied in the direction of religion affecting secular behavior. However, in today’s society with secularization and the prevalence of the mass media, it makes more sense to examine the relationship the opposite way and see how secular behavior affects religiosity. Using the National Study of Youth and Religion (NSYR) dataset and change in change modeling, causality can be established showing how behaviors ...

Conspiracy Theories And The Zika Epidemic, Shawn Smallman

International & Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

After a Zika outbreak began in Brazil in April 2015, narratives blamed the virus on a variety of international actors, including chemical companies and the Gates Foundation. Many of these narratives drew upon older conspiracy theories that had circulated in Latin America during the 2009 H1N1 influenza pandemic. Whether these narratives denounced transgenic mosquitoes or pesticides, they reflected not only the fear created by a mysterious wave of birth defects but also a profound mistrust of health authorities and transnational corporations. This paper will examine the narratives that circulated on YouTube, blogs, podcasts, and other alternative media sources, which typically ...

Social Media In Political Campaigning Around The World: Theoretical And Methodological Challenges, Daniela V. Dimitrova, Jörg Matthes

Journalism Publications

No abstract provided.

For Better, Or For Worse: Photographing In A Digitally Cluttered Crowd, Dale L. Carty Ii

Masters Theses

In recent years, smartphones have been utilized to photograph treasured moments. However, some are unaware they are distracting others in events such as weddings. The distracting smartphone user could potentially obstruct professional wedding photographers and hinder them from capturing priceless shots. The purpose of this thesis is to research the motive behind the addictive nature of smartphones and potentially decrease the number of smartphone pictures taken during the wedding ceremonies. The goal of this study is to bring awareness to the problem and to create a mobile application, which could then reduce the intrusiveness of smartphones during weddings. The researcher ...

Authentically Disney, Distinctly Chinese: A Case Study Of Glocalization Through Shanghai Disneyland’S Brand Narrative, Chelsea Michelle Galvez

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

In 2016, the Walt Disney Company launched Shanghai Disneyland--the company’s first theme park in mainland China. Entering mainland China poses significant political and cultural challenges for American companies. To address these challenges, Disney pursued a “glocalization” strategy -- it accounted for local norms and values in launching Shanghai Disneyland. This paper examines how Shanghai Disneyland constructed its brand narrative to negotiate tensions in this glocalization process. A semiotic analysis of two Shanghai Disneyland commercials illustrates the ways in which Disney tapped into culturally meaningful themes of harmonic balance and collective identity to produce the park’s brand narrative--“China’s ...