Communication Commons^™

Online Legal Help-Seeking For Victims Of Intimate Partner Violence During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Christina S. Walker

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

Legal, court, and criminal justice professionals regularly navigate court procedures and processes through online portals. They know where to locate applicable court rules, such as a specific section on a court website or a departmental contact. However, these tasks can be extremely daunting for laypersons seeking court assistance, especially for victims of violence who have limited time away from the abuser. To determine how state judicial branches make information available about protective order procedures and general information to a layperson, especially to victims of intimate partner violence, this study assessed court websites of five states where intimate partner violence (IPV) …

A Cross-Country Investigation Of Social Image Motivation And Acceptance Of Lab-Grown Meat In Singapore And The United States, Mark Chong, Angela K. Y. Leung, Verity Lua

Research Collection Lee Kong Chian School Of Business

This research has three goals. First, it sets out to compare consumer acceptance of lab-grown meat in the U.S. and in Singapore. Second, it seeks to explain the difference in Americans' and Singaporeans' acceptance of lab-grown meat by examining their eating motivations. Specifically, we focused on social image motivations – the motivations to present oneself positively in social contexts. Third, this study also aims to assess if exposure to information about lab-grown meat communicated by celebrity versus expert social media influencers (SMIs) can impact people's acceptance of lab-grown meat products. Our analysis showed that Singaporean participants had greater acceptance of …

Balancing Learning And Enjoyment In Serious Games: Kerbal Space Program And The Communication Mediation Model, Sonny Rosenthal, Rabindra A. Ratan

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

When designed well, serious games can support effective learning. This study used the communication mediation model to examine the process and outcomes of playing serious games, in this case, the science-themed game, Kerbal Space Program. During a 4-h research session, 241 undergraduate students played through the game's tutorial missions and completed surveys to measure variables of interest. Results of structural equation modeling showed that game progress was positively related to self-efficacy in computer gaming (β = 0.26) and ordinary science intelligence (β = 0.13). Knowledge acquisition was positively related to game progress (β = 0.21) and positively predicted experiential attitude …

Communicative Strategies For Building Public Confidence In Data Governance: Analyzing Singapore's Covid-19 Contact-Tracing Initiatives, Gordon Kuo Siong Tan, Sun Sun Lim

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

Effective social data governance rests on a bedrock of social support. Without securing trust from the populace whose information is being collected, analyzed, and deployed, policies on which such data are based will be undermined by a lack of public confidence. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated digitalization and datafication by governments for the purposes of contact tracing and epidemiological investigation. However, concerns about surveillance and data privacy have stunted the adoption of such contact-tracing initiatives. This commentary analyzes Singapore's contact-tracing initiative to uncover the reasons for public resistance and efforts by the state to address them. The government's contact-tracing program …

Linking Online Vaccine Information Seeking To Vaccination Intention In The Context Of The Covid-19 Pandemic, Han Zheng, Shaohai Jiang, Sonny Rosenthal

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

This study examines how online vaccine information seeking is related to vaccination intention in the United States and China during the initial stage of their coronavirus disease 2019 vaccination programs. Analysis of the pooled sample showed a positive relationship between online vaccine information seeking and vaccination intention. There was also a negative indirect effect via perceived information overload, vaccine risk perception, and negative affective response. Multigroup analysis revealed differences between the United States and China. This study highlights the bright and dark sides of online health information during a global pandemic and has practical implications for communication campaigns to promote …

Legitimizing Viewing Publics Through Nostalgia: The Mediated Tropicality Of Singapore's 'Kampong Spirit', John Lowe, George Wong

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Using two recent films-Long Long Time Ago and Diam Diam Era-this article analyses how Jack Neo communicates a sanitized nostalgia for the "kampong spirit" through his films, which calibrates willing acceptance of the Singapore government's authoritarian rule. In supporting the state's presentist historiography, the films of Jack Neo induce a depoliticization of unpleasant memories arising from the ruling party's unpopular housing and language policies of the past. The nostalgia mediated in both films is aligned towards an imaginary geography and mental map of a First World nation, which exhorts Singaporeans to disavow "the tropics" by nostalgizing the state's modernization efforts. …

Responses To Covid-19 Threats: An Evolutionary Psychological Analysis, Stephen M. Colarelli, Tyler J. Mirando, Kyunghee Han, Norman P. Li, Carter Vespi, Katherine A. Klein, Charles P. Fales

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Responses to Covid-19 public health interventions have been marginally effective. For example, only 64% of the US population has received at least two vaccinations. Because most public health interventions require people to behave in ways that are evolutionarily novel and are mismatched with evolved human perceptual and decision-making mechanisms, it is imperative that we gain a better understanding of how people respond to public health information—including how they respond under different pandemic conditions and how specific groups may differ in their responses. We conducted two studies using data from primarily public sources. We found that state-level Covid-19 threats (e.g., infection …

Augmentative And Alternative Communication Use, Service Delivery Experiences, And Communicative Participation For People With Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, Betts Peters

Dissertations and Theses

People with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) often experience changes to their speech, and may use augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) devices and techniques to maintain the ability to communicate. The use of AAC may facilitate the participation of people with ALS in various life situations involving communication. There is limited data in the literature about the AAC approaches currently used by people with ALS, the professional services they receive to support communication, or the effects of AAC on their communicative participation. This dissertation involved a nationwide online survey of people with ALS, and comprises three papers intended to add to …

Outside The Boundaries Of Biomedicine: A Culture-Centered Approach To Female Patients Living Undiagnosed And Chronically Ill, Bianca Siegenthaler

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

As a community who voices feeling misunderstood, unheard, and uncared for by the medical system, female patients who live undiagnosed and chronically ill and their health narratives lie beyond biomedical boundaries. To examine how chronically ill and undiagnosed female patients narrate their experiences in and with the biomedical system and how these narratives resist biomedical health standards, I employ semi-structured interviews with 20 female patients living undiagnosed and chronically ill as well as engage in critical autoethnography to recount my own health experiences living a part of this community. In utilizing the culture-centered approach to health communication as a theoretical …

Look At All Those Big Knobs! Online Audio Technology Discourse And Sexy Gear Fetishes, Eliot Bates, Samantha Bennett

Publications and Research

Despite a predominantly digital, 21st century music production landscape, analogue hardware professional audio technologies persist. In the discoursal throes of the leading online audio technology message forum Gearslutz, such technologies are routinely objectified, sexualized, fetishized and socialized into gear. Situated in a contemporary critical, interdisciplinary framework of fetish, masculinity and sexuality studies, this research interrogates how audio technologies manufactured and intended for music production contexts become sexy. Applying a mixed-mode methodology, including an intensive discourse, image and material-semiotic analysis of an ‘epic’ sexy gear thread, we collated extensive data about technological fetishization. Sexy gear discourse articulates themes of voyeurism, acquisition, …

International Cross-Media Adaptation: A Case Study Of The Witcher, Alexa Schmidt

Book Publishing Final Research Papers

As consumer media habits further diverge with the introduction of new technologies and social spaces, literature has increasingly been adapted in new mediums. Adaptations of written works have the exposure and visual appeal to draw in a larger audience than the pages of the original would.

This research question is extremely relevant to the shift the industry has made with the introduction of new technologies for cross-media storytelling through video games, film and television. Increasingly, publishers, like Level 4 Press, look for stories that will translate well into a TV series or movie, and cross-media stories and adaptations have been …

Social Media Marketing And Insurance: An Analysis Of The Impact Of Social Media Marketing On Small Independent Brokerages Of Property And Casualty Insurance, Kaylee B. Brucker

University Honors Theses

Property and casualty insurance is an intangible service. It is a large industry within the US that in most regard is perpetual. Marketing for insurance is not similar to marketing for most other services or products. The agent must relay the value to the consumer prior to them purchasing it. Further, when considering social media marketing, we find a separate strategy of marketing. Social media marketing is becoming increasingly popular, it has shown as a successful strategy for obtaining consumers' attention and their business. This success has been seen in many industries, including insurance. However, there is a lack of …

Towards Practicalization Of Blockchain-Based Decentralized Applications, Songlin He

Dissertations

Blockchain can be defined as an immutable ledger for recording transactions, maintained in a distributed network of mutually untrusting peers. Blockchain technology has been widely applied to various fields beyond its initial usage of cryptocurrency. However, blockchain itself is insufficient to meet all the desired security or efficiency requirements for diversified application scenarios. This dissertation focuses on two core functionalities that blockchain provides, i.e., robust storage and reliable computation. Three concrete application scenarios including Internet of Things (IoT), cybersecurity management (CSM), and peer-to-peer (P2P) content delivery network (CDN) are utilized to elaborate the general design principles for these two main …

Summoning Laplace’S Demon: The Erosion Of Meaningful Voter Choice In An Era Of Algorithms?, Stephen Bork

Compass: An Undergraduate Journal of American Political Ideas

Precise individual microtargeting threatens to remake the political landscape as thoroughly as it has remade marketing. This paper explores the observed uses to date of political microtargeting as well as the many difficulties, some inherent to politics, of measuring its effects. Considering the philosophical difficulties of predictively removing human choice, it then assesses the observed risks of and some potential remedies to the current trajectory and finds that free electoral choice is not doomed to be written out of the system.

A Framework For Understanding How People Can Draw Different Conclusions Based On The Same Information, Evan Schapiro

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

At least partially fueled by misinformation, political polarization is growing in the United States, leading to a breakdown of confidence in our traditional academic and political institutions. A popular belief is that a solution is to train people to think more rationally by eliminating the cognitive biases embedded in their subconscious thought patterns. This paper identifies the influences on my thinking and the framework used to look at these issues from a different perspective through methodological believing and the application of models of learning and conversation. The paper also points out that the methods of scientific inquiry often assume that …

Building Constructive Interpersonal Communication Skills In Military Professionals: Generating A Culture Of Trust, April L. Baptiste Robertson

Critical and Creative Thinking Capstones Collection

Trust and open communication are interdependent and as a post 9/11 career Army leader, I have witnessed what appears to be the erosion of both within the military ranks. Military quality of life and mental health issues are on the rise, with compliance and prevention programs appearing to be less than impactful solutions. The resulting effects of which is a loss of trust and confidence in leadership. The research and findings presented within this synthesis strongly indicate that targeted training on interpersonal communication skills and counseling would simultaneously foster leader development and underpin a culture of trust and open communication. …

Georgia Southern University's Communication During Covid-19 Analyzed Using The Discourse Of Renewal Theory, Jessica Hickman

Honors College Theses

This research aims to analyze how Georgia Southern University handled COVID-19 through a public relations perspective using the discourse of renewal theory. In order to do this, this research looks at the communication sent from the University to the faculty, staff, and students during the time periods of March to April of 2020 and July to August of 2020. The three research questions this research will examine are: how did the University apply the discourse of renewal theory to speak to the students, faculty, and staff regarding COVID-19, how did the University use its email system to communicate with the …

“Ambassadors Of Good Will”: The Peace Corps In U.S. Capitalist Imperialism, Jasmine Shirey

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

The Powerful Myth Of Racial Equality: A Review Of Colombia’S Mestizaje, Adriana Fajardo Mazorra

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Noam Chomsky On The State Of The U.S. Empire, Chris Helali

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

The Power Of Mis-Education, Ladarius Dennison

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Men We Reaped: A Call For A Revolutionary Social System, Ladarius Dennison

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Blue Satin Pajamas: Omar Little And Hegemonic Masculinity In The Wire, Pierce Ellinwood

CLAMANTIS: The MALS Journal

No abstract provided.

Small Groups: Effectiveness In A University Classroom And The Role Gender Plays In Group Interactions, Nikkie Saldivar Hodgson, Savannah Margaret Hanson

Communication Faculty Publications

Previous studies demonstrate that working in small teams enhances motivation, enthusiasm, and cooperative learning when compared to traditional learning methodology (Davies, 2009; Gaudet, Ramer, Nakonechny, Cragg, & Ramer, 2010). The purpose of this study is to understand the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of working in small groups in classrooms, and the effects that gender roles have. The present survey (N=138) reports on the effectiveness and ineffectiveness of working in small groups on assignments and projects in college level courses. Using a self-recording paper-and-pencil instrument, the researcher asked if the respondents have had the opportunity to work in small groups and how …

The Guardian The Week Of May 30, 2022, Wright State Student Body

The Guardian Student Newspaper

News articles from The Guardian for the week of May 30, 2022. The Guardian is the official student-run newspaper for Wright State University. It has been published regularly since March of 1965.

Entities: A Field Of Imaginary Games, Thrasyvoulos Ioannis Kalaitzidis

LSU Master's Theses

With this body of work, I am looking for visual symbols that help communicate unuttered meanings through storytelling and stimulate an affectual response to the viewer. This exploration is presented in two different forms: a surreal sculptural installation and a board game. The installation consists of large-scale sculptures made from light and soft materials (polyurethane foam, plastic waste, paper) that are available to move inside the gallery, while the board game is presented as a set of 3D prints with instructions on how the participants can play it. The materials used in the installation suggest a way to transform waste …

Artificial Intelligence As Agent In Journalism: A Concept Explication, Chad S. Owsley

Communication Faculty Publications

This article attempts to provide a conceptual explication for Artificial Intelligence functioning as an agent within journalism. The information presented relies on critical review of existing scholarship written on the topic of Artificial Intelligence operating in journalism and from the field of Artificial Intelligence. The function of this paper serves to better understand key concepts used by scholars and how developing technology in Artificial Intelligence is affecting essential conceptualizations employed by the field of journalism.

Muslim Fashion Influencers Shaping Modesty In The Twenty-First Century On Social Media, Awa Sanno

Student Theses and Dissertations

The depiction of Muslim women in Western media has been a long-running joke, as they are framed to be oppressed by the burdens of their religion and the hijab. However, Muslim women have used the power of social media to counter that narrative through their large followings as fashion influencers, digital creators, food bloggers, makeup artists, lifestyle bloggers, musicians, and so much more. Specifically, Muslim fashion influencers are changing and redefining the notion of modesty throughout their posted content on social media. Many people in Muslim communities see this redefinition of modesty as a conflict with the "proper" ways of …

Don’T Be Like Me: A Letter To My Daughters, Morénike Giwa Onaiwu

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

It is often stated that parenting is "the toughest job you'll ever love." And it certainly doesn't come with an instruction manual. However, though we will falter, because of our love for our children, most of us learn a lot on the journey. This growth helps us to develop the skills and understanding needed, as parents, to be able to effectively guide, support, and nurture our children. Such knowledge, though beneficial for all families, is critical within neurodiverse households.

So what do you do when you just don't have it? What do you do when you have as much (if …

An Ethical Discussion About The Responsibility For Protection Of Minors In The Digital Environment: A State-Of-The-Art Review, Charles Alves De Castro, Aiden Carthy, Isobel Oreilly Dr

Articles

Many ethical questions have been raised regarding the use of social media and the internet, mainly related to the protection of young people in the digital environment. In order to critically address the research question "who is responsible for ethically protecting minors in the digital environment?", this paper will review the main literature available to understand the role of parents, the government, and companies in protecting young people within the digital environment. We employed a holistic process that covers a state-of-the-art review and desk research. The article is divided into four sessions; (1) Government Policies from the European Union (EU) …