Digital Commons Network^™

Social Media, Mass Mobilization And National Development In Nigeria: Lessons From The #Endsars Protest, Eno-Obong Blaise Akpan, Tordue Simon Targema

ASEAN Journal of Community Engagement

This study explored the potential of social media for effective mass mobilization and community engagement to attain national development in Nigeria. Premised on the fact that social media have become popular platforms attracting millions of subscribers, the study examined how the opportunities they offer could be harnessed and purposefully deployed to galvanize the citizens to pursue national development causes. This was done against the backdrop of the technological determinism theory that provides the framework for investigating the indispensable role which technology plays in the advancement of a nation’s socio-economic development. The secondary research approach was adopted to carry out the …

The Jordanian Daily News Paper Coverage Of The Crisis Snow Storm "Jana": Analysis Study, Ghalib Shatnawi

Association of Arab Universities Journal for Arts مجلة اتحاد الجامعات العربية للآداب

This study aimed to know how the daily Jordanian newspapers covered the crisis of the snowstorm "jana". Using the content analysis as a method, the study analyzed materials about the crisis published in three main daily newspapers: Al-Rai , Addustour and Al-ghad through the period between 19 feb2015-22 feb of the same year. The study reached the following results: 1. News items came first with of the percentage of (17.8%) then the report with the percentage of (21.5%). 2. The Jordanian newspapers depended on several sources on its coverage.Its sources came first with the percentage of (63.6%) , then the …

Roles Played By Nigerian Youtube Micro-Celebrities During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Aje-Ori Agbese

Communication Faculty Publications

In 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, Nigerian social media micro-celebrities were prominent players in the dissemination of information. This study examines the roles that one group of Nigerian micro-celebrities, YouTube video bloggers (vloggers)—also known as “YouTubers”—played during the pandemic. The research analysed the contents of COVID-19-themed videos that 15 popular Nigerian YouTubers posted on their channels between 29 February and 5 August 2020. The study was guided by the two-step flow of communication theory, in terms of which information first flows from mass media to opinion leaders, who then, in the second step, share the information with their audiences. The …

The Impact On Gay Men Of Support And Enforcement Of Workplace Dei Policies: A Meta Analysis, Steven M. Vega

Student Theses and Dissertations

The poor enforcement of workplace DEI policies affects gay men in ways that are unique and invite close attention. The nature of the impact of missing or unsupported DEI policies on gay men has been widely debated in the field of human resources and communication studies, with scholars such as David Wicks, Helen Seitzer, James Ward, and Diana Winstansley arguing that these effects include lasting negative mental and physical health effects and discomfort with self-disclosure in the workplace. However, the existing research on this topic has not sufficiently considered the effects of the poor enforcement of workplace DEI policies side …

Filipino Physical Therapists’ Practice And Perspectives On Non-Treatment Physical Activity For Older Adults, Frances Rom M. Lunar, Attilah Mae B. Alog, Alexa Ds Tanchuling, Kristen Mari Andal, Beatrice Camille Chan, Daniel C. Chua, Claire Beatrice Martinez, Ma. Anna Carmina D. Orlino, Jem Bettina G. Tan, Koji A. Katakura Jr., Marvin Louie S. Ignacio

Philippine Journal of Physical Therapy

Introduction:

Studies have already investigated the practice of physical therapists (PTs) in promoting non-treatment physical activity (NTPA). However, these were done in the context of mostly western settings or were not specific to older adult practice. It is still unclear if a similar level of practice and perspectives on NTPA promotion exists in a setting where physical therapy is more associated with rehabilitation than health promotion, such as in the Philippines. Therefore, this study aimed to describe Filipino PTs' knowledge of WHO physical activity (PA) guidelines and their use of behavioral change techniques (BCTs) and theories when promoting PA in …

Layout And Suggestions On China’S Science And Technology Innovation Centers At Different Levels, Wenzhong Zhang

Bulletin of Chinese Academy of Sciences (Chinese Version)

Science and technology innovation center plays an important role in transforming the mode of economic development and enhancing industrial competitiveness. The formation and development of science and technology innovation center depend on the gathering of innovative talents, the support of first-rate universities and research institutions, and the cooperation and mutual promotion between innovation organizations and enterprises. In the course of future development, China should build a multi-level network system of science and technology innovation centers with international centers which can connect to global innovation networks, national centers which are capable of leading national science and technology research and development and …

Ivf So White, So Medical: Digital Normativity And Algorithm Bias In Infertility On Instagram, Caitlyn M. Jarvis, Margaret M. Quinlan

Human-Machine Communication

Increasingly, women experiencing infertility are turning online to social media platforms, like Instagram, to engage with a support network and foster empathy. However, Instagram is also noted for its augmentation of White, cis, and heteronormative femininity through a process of silencing and minoritizing alternative, non-White voices. Through an inductive analysis of the most frequently used infertility hashtags, we collected and analyzed 252 Instagram posts to investigate how these algorithmic practices may socially construct the idealized IVF experience through communicating normative expectations. We identify predominant patterns of use that reinforce stratification within infertility treatments as primarily accessible to White women and …

Designing A Loving Robot: A Social Construction Analysis Of A Sex Robot Creator’S Vision, Annette Masterson

Human-Machine Communication

In 2018, one of the world’s first sex robots was released by CEO Matt McMullen and his company, RealDoll. With artificial intelligence capabilities, the Harmony model is meant to support and converse with users. Using a social construction of technology theory lens, this study develops the theory’s fourth level of analysis, emphasizing mass media’s construction abilities. A critical discourse analysis of 38 publicity interviews found a tendency to emphasize the companionship of sex robots while envisioning a future where integration is normalized, and a sentient robot is possible. As the creator, McMullen’s vision could determine the future of robotic design, …

The Evolution Of Gendered Software: Products, Scientific Reasoning, Criticism, And Tools, Victoria A. E. Kratel

Human-Machine Communication

Over the past 7 decades, gendered software has become globally established. In this theoretical distribution, I outline the evolution of gendered software. The journey of gendered software started with the raw idea fueled by Alan Turing’s imitation game in the 1950s. And only shortly thereafter, in the 1960s and 1970s, the first gendered software products like Joseph Weizenbaum’s ELIZA were developed. Thus, academia took its time to not only explore technological aspects, but to further investigate the matter of gender in the 1990s CASA-paradigm (Nass et al., 1994) and Media Equation (Reeves & Nass, 1996). As these theories reasoned the …

Do People Perceive Alexa As Gendered? A Cross-Cultural Study Of People’S Perceptions, Expectations, And Desires Of Alexa, Leopoldina Fortunati, Autumn P. Edwards, Anna Maria Manganelli, Chad Edwards, Federico De Luca

Human-Machine Communication

Mainly, the scholarly debate on Alexa has focused on sexist/anti-woman gender representations in the everyday life of many families, on a cluster of themes such as privacy, insecurity, and trust, and on the world of education and health. This paper takes another stance and explores via online survey methodology how university student respondents in two countries (the United States, n = 333; and Italy, n = 322) perceive Alexa’s image and gender, what they expect from this voice-based assistant, and how they would like Alexa to be. Results of a free association exercise showed that Alexa’s image was scarcely embodied …

Gender Ambiguity In Voice-Based Assistants: Gender Perception And Influences Of Context, Sandra Mooshammer, Katrin Etzrodt

Human-Machine Communication

Recently emerging synthetic acoustically gender-ambiguous voices could contribute to dissolving the still prevailing genderism. Yet, are we indeed perceiving these voices as “unassignable”? Or are we trying to assimilate them into existing genders? To investigate the perceived ambiguity, we conducted an explorative 3 (male, female, ambiguous voice) × 3 (male, female, ambiguous topic) experiment. We found that, although participants perceived the gender-ambiguous voice as ambiguous, they used a profoundly wide range of the scale, indicating tendencies toward a gender. We uncovered a mild dissolve of gender roles. Neither the listener’s gender nor the personal gender stereotypes impacted the perception. However, …

Bibliotherapy In The Helping Professions: A Heuristic Model For Intervention Design, Natalie Marie Haney

Masters Theses

I propose a new approach to examining bibliotherapy’s usefulness in the community-based care of individuals with serious mental illness (SMI), focused on producing a heuristic that benefits helping professionals who offer non-clinical and non-psychiatric services. Meant for writers designing bibliotherapy interventions in the helping professions, I conceptualize bibliotherapy in a model against the backdrop of community-based care’s history. A model has the potential to allow each writer to conduct situation-specific inquiry, invent bibliotherapy intervention designs suited to the unique needs of the profession’s help-seekers, and reflect on knowledge generated for intervention reiteration. Referring to Dewey, Rosenblatt and Barnlund to create …

Hey Girl, Feel My Thesis. Know What It's Made Of? Research Material., Mya Lynn Pritts

Masters Theses

As Generation Z becomes the newest generation to enter adulthood, it is valuable to understand their thought processes and communication patterns. Individuals of Generation Z are known to be digital natives, as they were born into a world of technology with the internet at their fingertips. Understanding Generation Z's use of memes is an area where little research has been done so far. The purpose of this study was to determine how Generation Z interprets and communicates with memes on the internet and social media platforms. Unlike previous research, this study analyzed the participants' perceptions, which further contributes to an …

Utilizing Resilience And Persistence Strategies To Reduce African American Doctoral Attrition, Dudley Davis

Doctoral Dissertations and Projects

The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study is to explore the attrition rate of African American doctoral students and how to improve their retention and graduation using resilience and persistence. Across all disciplines, 40–60% of students who began doctoral programs did not persist to graduation (Falconer & Djokic, 2019; Mirick & Wladkowski, 2020). A semi-structured interview format was used to collect the data from 27 African American participants, 20 females and 7 males, who had already obtained their doctoral degrees. The study sought to explain the phenomenon of African American doctoral students who persevered to finish their degree, in spite …

Engagement Journalism In Action: Supporting New Yorkers With Long Covid, Sarah Luft

Capstones

What do asthma and long COVID have in common? 1 in 13 U.S. adults are living with them. This report is a recap of my efforts to address the information needs of New Yorkers with long COVID as a student in CUNY's Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism engagement program. For my final project, I partnered with THE CITY, a nonprofit news outlet serving New Yorkers, to expand the MISSING THEM project. The report details the what, why, and how of my engagement reporting process, including a community engagement framework, a service journalism series, and lessons to carry forward. You …

Flying Hope: Bringing Pets To Safety In Nyc, Jose D. Santiago-Morales

Capstones

The animal overcrowding issue is impacting stray pets in Puerto Rico. Various not-for-profit organizations in NYC (The Sato Project and Wings of Rescue) are working to bring these animals from the island to states across the Northeast of the United States and helping by finding them their forever homes. One pet at a time.

https://dansantiagojournalist.wordpress.com/2023/10/01/flying-hope-bringing-pets-to-safety-in-nyc/

Advocacy Journalism And Climate Justice In A Global Southern Country, Shafiq Ahmad Kamboh, Muhammad Ittefaq

School of Communication Studies - Faculty Scholarship

Being among the world’s most affected countries by climate change, Pakistan is facing a variety of cases of climate injustice committed by internal and external drivers. Waisbord’s referred “Advocate-journalist” model carries a good potential to advocate these injustices to stimulate democratic dialogue among the audience that eventually pushes leadership to make eco-friendly policies. This study critically analyses advocacy journalism coverage of cases of local and regional climate injustice in the editorial contents of mainstream Pakistani newspapers by using the quantitative content analysis method. Results reveal that selected newspapers gave inappropriate coverage to climate injustice issues both in quantity and quality. …

Full Volume, Nfa Journal

National Forensic Journal

No abstract provided.

A Transdisciplinary Emergent Approach For Systems And Interventions (Easi), Chaithanya Renduchintala

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

In modeling human behavior and social structures several factors can emerge over time this can be attributed to the availability of new data, increased complexity, changes to the organizational structure, interventions, introduction of innovative technology or services and due to improved knowledge and treatments. We hypothesize a new class of emergent decision support systems that continually evolve to account for this "Causal Drift". In this work, we illustrate the application of the Emergent Approach to Systems and Intervention (EASI™) methodology with the example of Community Intervention Activity Model (CIAM) to reduce the rate of diabetic hospitalization at the local/ county …

Modeling The Effects Of Diversity And Corporations On Participation Dynamics In Floss Ecosystems, Olivia Newton

Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020-2023

A multitude of societal issues associated with the development of technology have emerged over the years including, but not limited to: insufficient personnel for maintenance; a lack of accessibility; the spread of harmful tools; and bias and discrimination against marginalized groups. I propose that a systems perspective is necessary to identify potential leverage points in technology production systems to influence them towards increased social good and evaluate their effectiveness for intervention. Toward this end, I conducted a mixed-methods study of a widely-adopted approach in tech production, free/libre and open source software (FLOSS) development. A survey was distributed to elicit responses …

An Experiment Testing The Influence Of Oral Interpretation On Entertainment And Persuasion, Shane Semmler, Megan Swets, Bailey Quanbeck, Blake Warner

National Forensic Journal

A post-test only experimental design evaluated the empirical influence of three 2016 National Forensic Association final round oral interpretation performances (two Dramatic Interpretations and one Prose Interpretation) on entertainment (parasocial interaction, identification, and narrative transportation); the capacity of entertainment to elicit enjoyment; and the capacity of entertainment to elicit persuasion (i.e., changes to attitude valence and attitude importance) through the mediating process of reduced counterarguing against subjective interpretations of arguments in the oral interpretation performances. The influence of oral interpretation on entertainment, enjoyment, counterarguing, and persuasion was substantially similar to that found in the larger body of empirical scholarship investigating …

Resisting And Persisting Through Organizational Exit: An Autoethnographic Exploration Of Disclosing Sexual Harassment In Collegiate Debate, M. A., Tennley A. Vik

National Forensic Journal

Collegiate debate has documented extensive problems with sexual harassment. This manuscript uses the first author’s layered account of sexual harassment experienced as a collegiate debater, her transition to a different university, and the management of private information with her family. Communication Privacy Management (CPM) theory and a plethora of studies provide a theoretical lens of the first author’s autoethnographic experience. We advance CPM theory by examining how young adult children manage their privacy through constructing more rigid privacy boundaries than their adolescent counterparts and provide the first look at how disclosure can both enable and constrain victims/survivors of sexual harassment, …

An Intersectional Approach To Evaluating The Effectiveness Of Women’S Sexualized Body-Positive Imagery On Instagram, Megan A. Vendemia, Kyla N. Brathwaite, David C. Deandrea

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Our work adopted an intersectional approach to investigate how women’s racial identity may influence how they evaluate and are impacted by body-positive imagery of women on social media. In a 2 × 2 × 2 experiment (N = 975), we examined how source race (Black vs White) and sexualization (non-sexualized vs sexualized) in body-positive images affect Black and White viewers’ impressions of self-interest, moral appropriateness, and body positivity. Results indicated that viewers generally responded more favorably to non-sexualized (vs sexualized) images: Participants reported less self-interested motivations for sharing, found the images more morally appropriate, and believed they were more …

Volume 5, Issue 2 (2022) Migration, Community, And Environment During A Pandemic

International Journal on Responsibility

No abstract provided.

The Quest For Influence: Examining Russia's Public Diplomacy Mechanisms In Africa, Isaac Antwiboasiako

Articles

This article examines Russian public diplomacy mechanisms in Africa. These include the intentional use of historical ties, various aid programmes in education and health, the targeted use of international broadcasting and digital media, and the exploitation of anti-Western sentiments on the continent. Russia employs these to win the hearts and minds of African publics for its national interest. The article first explores Moscow’s public diplomacy in general and analyses the challenges Russia faces in Africa, which has become a ‘dumping ground’ for public diplomacy campaigns by the US, the EU and its members, the UK, and China. The article argues …

Scientology's Faq: Sciencing, Tech-Romancing, Simulacra, & Simulation An Estranged Content Analysis, David Scott Morrill

Dissertations and Theses

This thesis examines how the practice of sciencing, tech-romancing, simulacra, and simulation manifests in both the text and symbols used on audiences of the Church of Scientology’s outreach materials. It specifically examines its official FAQ page. Self-framing was observed that satisfied the definition of sciencing and tech-romancing. Under an Estranged approach, Morrill examined selections of the Church’s FAQ pages, coding for instances of sciencing, tech-romancing, simulacra, and simulation. The data indicate that the Church frequently adopts simulacra and engages in simulation. The Church was seen frequently adopting technological and scientific symbols and jargon. The degree of sciencing, tech-romancing, simulacra, and …

Book Review: Mind Over Media: Propaganda Education For A Digital Age, Faith Rogow

Journal of Media Literacy Education

No abstract provided.

Analyzing The Distinction Between Protectionism And Empowerment As Perspectives On Media Literacy Education, W. James Potter

Journal of Media Literacy Education

It has become a common practice to categorize the different perspectives on media education as following either a protectionist approach or an empowerment approach. However, the way scholars write about these two categories can be confusing and sometimes misleading. A critical analysis is presented where these writings are examined along 10 analytical dimensions that include how authors conceptualize the power differential between the media and audiences, purpose of media education, nature of instruction (scope, stance, extent, and content), role of the instructor, and outcome assessment (type of measures, timing, and indicators of success). The findings from this critical analysis indicate …

Screencasting Information Literacy. Insights In Pre-Service Teachers’ Conception Of Online Searching, Luca Botturi, Chiara Beretta

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Information Literacy (IL) has been named a key competence for the twenty-first century and is being progressively introduced in many compulsory school curricula. Nonetheless, the actual implementation of effective IL education cannot be carried out without the sound preparation of teachers. This study explores the naïve, pre-instruction conceptions of online information searching of pre-service pre-primary and primary teachers through the structured qualitative analysis of participant-produced screencasts. The results indicate that teachers have a mainly technical view of IL, leading them to focus on basic computer literacy skills (e.g., how to use a search engine) and to overlook mental processes (e.g., …

Popular Music Media Literacy: A Pilot Study, Chrysalis L. Wright, Reilly Branch, Lesley-Anne Ey, K. Megan Hopper, Wayne Warburton

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The current study pilot tested a popular music media literacy website that was developed based on the final report of the APA Division 46 Task Force on the Sexualization of Popular Music (2018). The study hypothesized that popular music media literacy education would produce significant differences between the baseline assessment and post-literacy assessment for outcomes related to music reflecting real life, viewing the self as similar to music portrayals, music skepticism, level of engagement with music, and self-reported self-esteem. It was also hypothesized that participants would report favorable attitudes regarding the popular music media literacy website being tested. Participants included …