Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Childhood And A Culture Of Fear In Lemony Snicket’S A Series Of Unfortunate Events, Nur Aini Annapurna, Dhita Hapsarani

International Review of Humanities Studies

This article is an excerpt from an undergraduate thesis of the same title which focuses on A Series of Unfortunate Events, a children‟s book series by Lemony Snicket. This thesis explores how a culture of fear shapes childhood, which is represented in the series. By using qualitative textual analysis the research discusses how the series represent the way childhood is shaped by a culture of fear through the depiction of various characters and social institutions in the novels. This research also explores the author‟s attempts in challenging the notion that children are vulnerable by analyzing the Baudelaires‟ identity and vulnerability. …

Online Blaming And Intimate Partner Violence: A Content Analysis Of Social Media Comments, Jason Whiting, Rachael Dansby Olufowote, Jaclyn D. Cravens-Pickens, Alyssa Banford Witting

The Qualitative Report

Social media has become a ubiquitous form of interacting and sharing information. However, comments on social media sites are often aggressive and contemptuous, especially when topics are controversial or politically charged. For example, discussion of intimate partner violence (IPV) tends to provoke strong reactions from outsiders, who make angry or blaming remarks about those involved. Although IPV is common, it has not been widely discussed in popular media until recent years when high-profile cases of abuse have come to light. In 2016, a celebrity accusation of domestic violence led to thousands of comments on social media, with outsiders weighing in …

#Metoo And The Politics Of Collective Healing: Emotional Connection As Contestation, Allison Page, Jacquelyn Arcy

Communication & Theatre Arts Faculty Publications

Participants in the #MeToo movement on Twitter expressed emotions like rage, pain, and solidarity in their personal accounts of sexual violence. This article explores the digital circulation of these affects and considers how the outpouring of tweets about sexual harassment and abuse contribute to a feminist politics centered on collective healing. The particular emotions expressed in the #MeToo Twitter archive subvert the logics of quantification and visibility that undergird popular feminism and the attention economy, and produce an affective excess that works toward movement founder Tarana Burke’s original project of “mass healing.” At a moment wherein popular feminism emphasizes individual …

Fraud Detection Protocol For Web-Based Research Among Men Who Have Sex With Men: Development And Descriptive Evaluation, April M. Ballard, Trey Cardwell, April M. Young

Epidemiology and Environmental Health Faculty Publications

Background: Internet is becoming an increasingly common tool for survey research, particularly among “hidden” or vulnerable populations, such as men who have sex with men (MSM). Web-based research has many advantages for participants and researchers, but fraud can present a significant threat to data integrity.

Objective: The purpose of this analysis was to evaluate fraud detection strategies in a Web-based survey of young MSM and describe new protocols to improve fraud detection in Web-based survey research.

Methods: This study involved a cross-sectional Web-based survey that examined individual- and network-level risk factors for HIV transmission and substance use among young MSM …

2019 Icrcc Proceedings Table Of Contents, Conference Organizers

International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference

These proceedings are a representative sample of the presentations given by professional practitioners and academic scholars at the 2019 International Crisis and Risk Communication Conference (ICRCC) held March 11-13, 2019. The ICRCC is an annual event that takes place the second week in March in beautiful sunny Orlando, Florida. The conference hosts are faculty and staff from the Nicholson School of Communication. The goal of the ICRCC is to bring together prominent professional practitioners and academic scholars that work directly with crisis and risk communication on a daily basis. We define crisis and risk broadly to include, for example, natural …

The Implications Of Science And Technology For Chinese Women: A Cultural Study Of The Chinese Era Of Reforms, Wenjing Liu

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Abstract

This dissertation addresses the gendered implications of science and technology in the era of reforms. It argues that in this era, which began in 1978 and continues today, science and technology are highly romanticized as nearly omnipotent. This results in its being embedded not only into ordinary Chinese people’s lives, hoping to bring them positive changes, but also into the Chinese government’s political practices, hoping to achieve its political purposes through science and technology. It also points out that in the era of reforms, Chinese women’s lived experiences are full of tensions, struggles, and conflicts, as evidenced by the …

Rhetorics Of Functionally Applicative Game Design: Designing And Testing The Project Management Game Scrummage, Matthew Carson Beale

English Theses & Dissertations

In this project, I designed and tested Scrummage, a tabletop game to teach the scrum project management system to undergraduate students. The project grew from the gaps in both academic literature and pedagogical tools for project management and collaboration in the technical communication classroom. Although the field of technical communication places significance on project management, research shows that many employers find the project management skills and knowledge of recent graduates to be under-developed. Situated in the fields of game design, game studies, project management, and technical communication, this project asks how we as educators can improve the project management learning …

Fragile Oceans, Synthetic Flotsam And Microbial Collaboration – Explorations In The Visual Communication Of The Plastic Crisis, Ivan Langesfeld

Pomona Senior Theses

Scientific evidence that the ocean plastic crisis is larger in scale and more sinister than previously thought continues to mount, but the rate of plastic production is only rising. What will it take to decisively turn the tide against plastic? We need scientists, politicians, and industry changemakers to continue producing knowledge and positive change in the industry, but we need to go further still. This thesis explores art as an alternative visual communication strategy with the capacity to encourage curiosity, empathy, and positive engagement with the issue of ocean plastics. The series of work explores bacterial bioluminescence as an artistic …

The Intermedial Politics Of Handwritten Newspapers In The 19th-Century U.S., Mark A. Mattes

Faculty and Staff Scholarship

Handwritten newspapers appeared in a variety of social contexts in the 19th-century U.S.1 The largest extant portion of 19th-century handwritten newspapers emerged from home and school settings. More far-flung examples include those written aboard ships during exploratory and military voyages. Others were produced within institutions such as hospitals and asylums. Such works were written during times of privation, including life in an army regiment or a prisoner-of-war camp during the Civil War. At other times, handwritten newspapers accompanied efforts at westward settlement and transcontinental railway journeys. Impromptu papers could follow in the wake of natural disasters that knocked out print-based …

Beauty Boys: The Aesthetic Labour Of Transformation, Keer Wang

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

Under the advertising banner of recognizing gender fluidity, the past year has seen global makeup brands announcing male spokesmodels for campaigns that seek to be more diverse in capturing the emerging Generation Z by promoting makeup for boys. The media has described the rise of the “boy in makeup” as propelled by male social media influencers known as beauty boys who are destabilizing the traditional boundaries of gender roles. I turn my attention to the necessary interrogation of the corporeality of these socially mediated bodies in manner of a Foucauldian genealogy approach to trace the power relations of subjectification and …

A Research Program For Studying Lams And Community In The Digital Age, Andreas Vårheim, Roswitha Skare, Noah Lenstra, Kiersten F. Latham, Geir Grenersen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The paper outlines a research effort into the changing representations, policies, strategies, activities, and practices of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) in the digital age. Comprehensive social changes including big slow-moving processes, such as aging populations, global migration, technological change, and environmental change, expose communities and LAM institutions to vulnerabilities. How do the institutions handle vulnerabilities, how do they become more resilient, and how do they contribute to building the resilience of their local communities?

Inside The Virtual Ambazonia: Separatism, Hate Speech , Disinformation And Diaspora In The Cameroonian Anglophone Crisis, Sombaye Eyango Jules Roger

Master's Theses

This study examines the dynamics of the anglophone separatist claims in Cameroon, the so-called “Anglophone Crisis”. I focus on explaining why the separatist claims reemerged in 2016 after being shut down for about 20 years. It explains how the Anglophone separatist revendications have sustained over time despite the extremely centralized power of the Paul Biya government.This paper first argues that the Anglophone Crisis is more than an identity struggle between Anglophone/Francophone Cameroonians, but rather a conflict about historical and institutional grievances, political competition, and regional politics involving the neighboring state of Nigeria.

Second, it verifies the hypothesis that the sustainability …

A Model Of Prophetic-Liberation Communication Behavior: The Explanative Study Of E-Literacy And Information Behavior Among Islamic Academics In Indonesia, Ade Abdul Hak, Tine Silvana Rachmawati, Agus Rusmana, Asep Saeful Muhtadi

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This research investigated a model of the effect of information literacy, media literacy, moral literacy, and learning & thinking skills as the construct of e-literacy maturity level through information behavior (IB) on prophetic-liberation communication behavior (P-LCB). The model was constructed based on social cognitive theory (SCT) and uses and gratifications theory (UGT). P-LCB is an applied model of ethical values in the Qur’an that liberates humans from social injustice and misuse of information and communication technology. In this case, e-literacy as a personal characteristic factor will influence a person's P-LCB through IB. The study employed an explanatory-quantitative analysis. A total …

Historical Effects Of Electronic Interfaces, G James Mitchell

Publications and Research

Electronic interfaces are a primary tool for most professional and personal communication currently happening. Electronics, like the human mind, are limited by the understanding of executing will, or commands. This can be characterized as “interface limitations” of digital technology. Identifying this bottleneck in technological development has been critical in historical changes to both hardware and software technology. Recent medical research examines a novel user interface to reduce task load. I hypothesize, interface developments that take cues from nonverbal human communication enhance and sustain the significance of those technologies in society. By examining pivotal moments of historical technology we can identify …

Breaking Through The Echo Chamber: Teaching Students To Use Technology For College Research And Global Citizenry, Kaitlin Drake

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

Preparing high school students for college level courses is vital to their success in higher education. Information literacy and digital literacy are necessary skills for college students in order to conduct their research for their classes. My own research was a compilation of scholarly articles and books focused on digital literacy, information literacy, and the issues surrounding these terms to understand what today’s students need in the classroom to succeed as young researchers. Search engines like Google operate under a facade of being an unbiased source. In reality, they are a for profit company whose search results go through an …

Exploring Echo-Systems: How Algorithms Shape Immersive Media Environments, James N. Cohen

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In the lead up to the 2016 election, fake news often “outperformed” actual news in users’ social media feeds (Silverman, 2016). This paper attempts to analyze the process in which fake news proliferates social networking sites and presents a method of understanding and articulating ways in which personalized feeds are shaped by algorithm-based user feedback. The algorithm systems are embedded programs that analyze past user data and search history in combination with other users’ searches and history to calculate digital outcomes, anticipate possible recommendations, and present consumers with feeds that represent their own unique immersive media environments.

As of August …

Both Facts And Feelings: Emotion And News Literacy, Susan Currie Sivek

Journal of Media Literacy Education

News literacy education has long focused on the significance of facts, sourcing, and verifiability. While these are critical aspects of news, rapidly developing emotion analytics technologies intended to respond to and even alter digital news audiences’ emotions also demand that we pay greater attention to the role of emotion in news consumption. This essay explores the role of emotion in the “fake news” phenomenon and the implementation of emotion analytics tools in news distribution. I examine the function of emotion in news consumption and the current status of emotion within existing news literacy training programs. Finally, I offer suggestions for …

Fake Or Visual Trickery? Understanding The Quantitative Visual Rhetoric In The News, Rohit Mehta, Lynette Deaun Guzmán

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In online and video/television spaces, news media discourses incorporate multimodal design as a discursive move capable of steering meaning toward desirable implications. Around the 2016 U.S. presidential elections, while polarized news outlets made their positionality on the candidates obvious, more neutral or central news outlets revealed their preferences through subtle multimodal design choices. One of these design choices is using a quantitative visual rhetoric: persuasive multimodal moves that draw on quantification through visual, spatial, and textual manipulation—involving the choice of data representation, visual images, and illustrations, (im)balance between numeric and alphabetic texts, and general quantitative narrative. This quantitative visual rhetoric …

Civic Media Literacy In A Transmedia World: Balancing Personal Experience, Factual Accuracy And Emotional Appeal As Media Consumers And Circulators, Ellen Middaugh

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Amid growing concerns over the role of “fake news” in civic and political life, efforts to understand how to best prepare youth to evaluate and reason about online sources have gained a sense of urgency. However, less attention has been paid to how such skills are used in the context of the broader array of information behavior that is typical of civic and political participation today—particularly in the circulation of information. Through thematic analysis of interviews and think aloud tasks with n=24 urban high school students reasoning through the processes of search, credibility analysis and circulating information for the purposes …

Media Literacy And Climate Change In A Post-Truth Society, James S. Damico, Mark Baildon, Alexandra Panos

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In this article we draw from ecolingusitics (Stibbe, 2015) and a civic media literacy framework (Author, in press; Masyada & Washington, 2016) to consider what happened when three pairs of preservice teachers with different academic backgrounds and climate change beliefs jointly evaluated the reliability of two media sources that make opposing arguments about climate change. An ecolinguistics perspective attends to the environmental impact of the “stories-we-live-by” (Stibbe, 2015) and a civic media literacy lens highlights the centrality of dialogue and deliberation along with critical reading when evaluating the reliability of information sources about complex socioscientific topics like climate change. Our …

Media Literacy, Democracy, And The Challenge Of Fake News, Lance E. Mason, Dan Krutka, Jeremy Stoddard

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In this essay, the authors offer a context for discussions about fake news, democracy, and considerations for media literacy education. Drawing on media ecology and critical media studies, they highlight the longer history of fake news and how this concept cannot be separated from the media technologies in which cultures grow. They discuss current iterations of this phenomenon alongside the effects of social media and offer a preview of the special issue.

Leap Of Faith: Megachurches And The Struggle To Create A Brand Experience That Sells, Carly Middleton

Posters-at-the-Capitol

Leap of Faith: Megachurches and the struggle to create a brand experience that sells

Carly Middleton

Marcie Hinton, PhD

Department of Journalism and Mass Communications

Murray State University

As churches across the Commonwealth experience a decline in attendance, membership and giving, religious organizations are failing to connect with their audience and their organizational goals on social media. This exploratory content analysis evaluated the social media branding practices of Kentucky’s 20 megachurches and proposed areas of improvement.

A megachurch is defined as a Protestant Christian congregation with an average of 2,000 weekly attendees, including adults and children across all worship locations. …

Book Review: Exploring Critical Digital Literacy Practices: Everyday Video In A Dual Language Context, Lucie Roemer

Journal of Media Literacy Education

No abstract provided.

How Brazil’S Unified University Entrance Exam (Enem) Impacts Media Literacy Education, Danilo Venticinque, Andrew Whitworth

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This article discusses the outcomes of research into the media literacy aspects of ENEM (Exame Nacional do Ensino Médio), Brazil's unified university entrance exam, which contains a significant number of exam questions based on excerpts from newspaper articles, online news and other media sources. Through content analysis, these questions are classified according to the platform (digital or print) and source (traditional media, niche media and government agencies). The results show a strong prevalence of traditional media, either in print or digital platforms, and a tendency to present the government in a positive light, avoiding issues such as the …

Foregrounding Morality: Encouraging Parental Media Literacy Intervention Using The Tares Test For Ethical Persuasion, Kevin J. Pearce, Stanley Baran

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In the United States, children are exposed to literally hundreds of thousands of television commercials a year and virtually every aspect of kids’ lives are replete with commercial messages. The negative effects of this exposure are well documented. Yet, there remains very little regulation or limit on advertising to children beyond that which exists for adults. Additionally, only about 1/3 of U.S. parents wish for stronger controls. This presents a challenge for media literacy scholars and practitioners. Research has shown that, when presented with information about the negative effects of commercial messages, parents are more likely to adopt some form …

Teaching Girls Online Skills: Results Of The Wikid Grrls Intervention, Stine Eckert, Jade Metzger-Riftkin, Joanna Nurmis

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In 2013-2016 we designed and implemented Wikid Grrls, a 10-week after-school workshop series to teach online skills to middle school girls in U.S. schools. We interviewed and surveyed 80 participants before and after the workshops. Girls’ online skills and confidence in them increased measurably for the duration of the workshop series. Participants expressed great interest in learning more, but media literacy programs at their schools regarding online skills were lacking. Using feminist theories and the reader-to-leader framework, we argue that such media literacy interventions bring immediate learning rewards for participants. Yet, we conclude that to narrow gender gaps in digital …

Are Social Media Comparisons Thieves Of Joy?, Jessica F. Saunders, Asia A. Eaton

Research Briefs

Women's eating behavior is impacted by socio-cultural factors, regardless of the main social networking site they use.

Making It Pay To Be A Fan: The Political Economy Of Digital Sports Fandom And The Sports Media Industry, Andrew Mckinney

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation is a series of case studies and sociological examinations of the role that the sports media industry and mediated sport fandom plays in the political economy of the Internet. The Internet has structurally changed the way that sport fans access sport and accelerated the processes through which the capitalist actors in the sports media industry have been able to subsume them. The three case studies examined in this dissertation are examples of how digital media technologies have both helped fans become more active producers and consumers of sports and made the sports media industry an integral and vanguard …

Software Of The Oppressed: Reprogramming The Invisible Discipline, Erin R. Glass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of software practices within the university and the ways they contribute to a broader status quo of software use, development, and imagination. Through analyzing the history of software practices used in the production and circulation of student and scholarly writing, I argue that this overarching software status quo has oppressive qualities in that it supports the production of passive users, or users who are unable to collectively understand and transform software code for their own interests. I also argue that the university inadvertently normalizes and strengthens the software status quo through what I call …

Report On The Oxford Symposium On Food And Cookery 2018, Anke Klitzing

Reports

The annual Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery brings together food scholars from different disciplines, but predominantly in history and humanities. However, while continuing its tradition of more than 30 years in food studies, this international gathering also looks to the future, with several activities in the realm of Digital Humanities linked to the conference and its participants.