Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

The Needs That Instagram Satisfies For People Seeking News & How This Displaces Time Spent With Traditional Media, Madeleine Dunn

Graduate Theses and Dissertations

This paper examines how the current climate of mainstream media is changing, and how this may affect journalistic norms and practices. There are many outlets for consumers to receive news, including traditional media, such as television news, newspapers, magazines, etc. There is also social media. The future of mainstream media outlets, like television stations, newspapers, magazines and radio stations, seems to depend on the growing use of social media sites for the use of getting news. This research will focus on Instagram as an alternative to traditional media, and why people prefer to use this outlet to get their news. …

An Imc Plan For The Blue Dolphin Company, A Local Nonprofit, Allison Evelyn Campbell

Journalism

Alan Godley's journey into marine preservation began as a dock boy, a role that brought him face-to-face with the environmental impact of boat cleaning practices. Witnessing the washing of harsh chemicals into the ocean and waterways fueled his environmental consciousness. Years later, he founded the Blue Dolphin Company in 1989, an “organization focused on furthering the awareness of whales and dolphins, and all marine life … [supporting] the rehabilitation and release of marine mammals and other wildlife”. Over the three decades, Mr. Godley has operated this nonprofit and small business, leveraging educational initiatives to inform people of all ages about …

Argumentation For Critical Heterogenous Political Discussions: Constructing A Rebuttal, Rebecca Oliver

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

This activity seeks to explain to undergraduate students how to craft a proper attack and defense in argumentation and debate, persuasion, or political communication courses. The activity teaches students 1) the parts of a basic argument structure and 2) how to construct a rebuttal using a basic argument structure. Students will argue against their true political typology by selecting an opposing typology from the Pew Research Typology Quiz. Broadly, this exercise is designed to encourage students to engage in dialogues with people who disagree with their political positionality. Specifically, the activity accomplishes this by teaching students the value of basic …

Encoding & Decoding: Artfully Modeling Communication, Daniel L. Foster, Ashley D. Garcia

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

Drawing objects and concepts, such as cats, trees, love, democracy, and family, is probably the last activity students expect to do in a communication course. Although this sounds like an introductory art activity, creating visual representations provides a nuanced understanding of the encoding and decoding processes. Encoding and decoding are the most hidden and often the most unfamiliar and complex fundamental components of communication for students to comprehend. By engaging in this activity, students translate their decoding process into drawings, which serve as personal artifacts representative of their encoding and decoding. Students come to better conceptualize this cognitive process with …

“Party In The Communication Classroom”: Exploring Communication Competence To Raise Social Awareness, Nancy Bressler

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

This activity demonstrates communication competence and allows students to observe, assess, and ultimately utilize the model of communication competence to engage with other people successfully. To understand how to engage in communication competence, students must recognize that appropriateness and effectiveness are crucial aspects of their communication. Through the communication competence model, students examine how to achieve effectiveness in their communication by setting goals for specific contexts; they also consider to what extent their goals are achievable given the particular situation. Using a 2014 MTV Video Music Award example, students can analyze why Miley Cyrus allowed a homeless man to accept …

Introducing Public Speaking Self-Concept (Pssc): A Novel, Qualitatively-Derived Communication Anxiety And Competence Variable, Karla M. Hunter, Joshua N. Westwick

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

Despite numerous quantitative assessments of teaching interventions that have helped mitigate public speaking anxiety (PSA), this common barrier to public speaking persists. In addition, quantitative measures may not be appropriate for all instructional goals, especially with students from across a variety of cultures. To enrich educators’ capacity to help diverse bodies of students overcome the challenges presented by PSA, this qualitative study asked students to “Please describe yourself as a public speaker” at the beginning and the end of a freshman-level, general education public speaking class. Thematic analysis identified a two-dimensional pattern within student responses (N = 51) (a …

Front Matter

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

No abstract provided.

Discourse: The Journal Of The Scasd, Volume 8 (2023), The Speech Communication Association Of South Dakota

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

No abstract provided.

The Crusading Days Of Jackie Stewart: Evaluating The Development Of Safety In Motor Racing During The 1960s., Alex Twitchen

Journal of Motorsport Culture & History

This article critically evaluates the contribution of Jackie Stewart in making motor racing a safer sport for competitors. It challenges the validity of the popular assumption that Jackie Stewart by himself developed a ‘culture of safety’ that transformed the sport. Instead, the role of other individuals are identified alongside the importance of three social processes. These processes are identified as the changing balance of power between different masculine identities, the development of commercial sponsorship and a growth in the coverage of the sport on television.

The development of motor racing from the 1960s onwards as a safer sport in which …

Book Review: I Was A Nascar Redneck: Recollections Of The Transformation Of A Yankee Farm Boy To A Southern Redneck In The Golden Era Of Nascar And Beyond., Quinn Beekwilder, Daniel Dean

Journal of Motorsport Culture & History

No abstract provided.

Casar Student Discussion Series: ‘Does Social Media Bring More Harm Than Good?’, The Prince Alwaleed Center For American Studies And Research Casar

Performances, Events, and Presentations

CASAR Student Debate Series - Launched in Fall 2023:

The Center of American Studies and Research (CASAR) launched a Student Discussion Series in Fall 2023 semester, it is a student-led debate on a plethora of current hot topics. In this student discussion series, students play the role of delving into topics together to understand one another. This event is broadcasted on Facebook live via the CASAR Facebook Page, where the entire record is still available to watch. Students passionately present their arguments in an organized manner, going back and forth between the two sides, and often students become excited about …

Small Historically Black Colleges And Universities Bridging Social Capital: The Use Of Language, Tone And Content To Share Information On Instagram, Pamela Peters

Journal of Research Initiatives

The COVID-19 pandemic has strained higher education institutions, especially small Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). As campuses closed and reopened, Black communities' digital divide grew, adding to the need to stay connected. This study uses social capital to examine how institutions use language, tone, content, and information to bridge social capital. An analysis of 35 small liberal arts HBCUs’ Instagram posts was undertaken to compare post frequency, types of information, engagement, tone, language, and content in 2019 before the COVID-19 pandemic and during the pandemic, 2020 and 2021. This study indicates that post-oversaturation in 2020 and 2021 and information …

Prevalence And Factors Associated With Vaping Cannabidiol Among Us Adolescents, Hongying Daisy Dai, Roma Subramanian, Avina Mahroke, Ming Wang

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

IMPORTANCE e-Cigarette use and vaping marijuana (cannabis) are popular among US adolescents. Cannabidiol (CBD) is a compound found in the cannabis plant that has recently increased in use.

OBJECTIVES To examine the prevalence of and factors associated with youths vaping CBD

DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS This cross-sectional study included a nationally representative sample of students from middle and high schools (typical age, 11-18 years) in the US from the 2022 National Youth Tobacco Survey, conducted from January to May 2022.

EXPOSURE Demographic characteristics, harm perception of tobacco use, and vaping behaviors.

MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES The main outcomes were weighted …

Review, Democracy And Fake News: Information Manipulation And Post-Truth Politics, Peter Krapp

Secrecy and Society

No abstract provided.

Social Distortion: Disinformation, Polarization, And The Politics Of Identity In An Online World, Jennifer Duck Brown

All Dissertations

This dissertation addresses three issues that intertwine: Disinformation, polarization, and the politics of identity. Social media currently dominates how we receive our news and information. This coincides with a disinformation pandemic full of false news and propaganda running rampant online. What often ensues is a social distortion that poses as reality. Seventy-two percent of all Americans use some type of social media according to Pew Research. Not all social media is nefarious, but the design of the social platforms further aggravate how people learn and communicate. Through original and peer-reviewed mixed methods research on topics including the conspiracy theories of …

Thyroid Sat510 I-131 Therapy With Dosimetry For Advanced Thyroid Carcinoma: Recombinant Tsh Vs Thyroid Hormone Withdrawal, Dana Awad, Jarod Hamsa, Abbey Fingeret, Craig M. Johnson, Frank Rutar, Carrie Carso, Anupam Kotwal, Anery Patel, Angela Thornburg, Whitney Sears Goldner

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Faculty Publications

Background: Dosimetry can be used to calculate an optimal and safe dose of Iodine-131 (I-131) for treatment of advanced differentiated thyroid cancer (DTC). Thyroid hormone withdrawal (THW) is the preferred method of TSH elevation for I-131 therapy with dosimetry. At our institution, Recombinant TSH (RhTSH) is used in patients in whom prolonged hypothyroidism is deemed clinically unsafe or cannot tolerate THW. We aim to evaluate if RhTSH and THW are equivalent methods of preparation for I-131 therapy using dosimetry (I-131D).

Midweed: A Comparison Between Marijuana Laws, Regulations, And Social Attitudes In Cannabis-Legal Vs. Cannabis-Illegal Midwest States, Abagail Lim

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Professional Projects

This professional project is a series of three journalistic articles. Each article focuses on laws, regulations and social attitudes surrounding marijuana in the United States. These topics are explored primarily through the lenses of two Midwest states (Illinois & Nebraska), which have highly contrasting laws and regulations regarding marijuana. The state of Illinois legalized medical marijuana in January 2014 and recreational marijuana in January 2020, while in Nebraska, both medical and recreational use still remains illegal, though possession of up to one ounce has been decriminalized.

The purpose of choosing these two states is to show how stark a contrast …

Implementation Of Health Communication In Tb Management In Indonesia, Olih Solihin, Djuara P. Lubis, Pudji Muljono, Siti Amanah

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Tuberculosis (TB) remains a public health problem in Indonesia despite various efforts to combat it. TB is the leading cause of death in Indonesia and requires more comprehensive action, including in health communication. Indonesia ranks second after India in the number of TB cases and fourth in TB deaths in Asia. Efforts to address TB in Indonesia continue, including the implementation of more comprehensive prevention and treatment programs and effective health communication campaigns. However, the implementation of health communication in TB management in Indonesia still faces challenges such as infrastructure, policy, human resources, and community participation. Evaluation of the effectiveness …

Content-Based Unsupervised Fake News Detection On Ukraine-Russia War, Yucheol Shin, Yvan Sojdehei, Limin Zheng, Brad Blanchard

SMU Data Science Review

The Ukrainian-Russian war has garnered significant attention worldwide, with fake news obstructing the formation of public opinion and disseminating false information. This scholarly paper explores the use of unsupervised learning methods and the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) to detect fake news in news articles from various sources. BERT topic modeling is applied to cluster news articles by their respective topics, followed by summarization to measure the similarity scores. The hypothesis posits that topics with larger variances are more likely to contain fake news. The proposed method was evaluated using a dataset of approximately 1000 labeled news articles related …

Re: Beyond Fake News, Nate Floyd, Jaclyn Spraetz

Journal of Media Literacy Education

A student success librarian with a Ph.D. in mass communication and an information literacy librarian with an M.A. in secondary English education describe their efforts to innovate in the field of news literacy by incorporating the media effects research tradition. By highlighting the emotional, behavioral, and cognitive elements of information processing, the authors hope to show students how professional norms, institutional and market pressures shape the news while their own predispositions influence how they interpret the news they consume. The authors emphasize agenda-setting and framing, two fundamental media effects paradigms, and report on their effort to develop news literacy classes …

The Promise Of Media Literacy Education When “Everything Is At Stake” And “Everything Is Expected”, Monica Bulger, Gina Baleria, Renee Hobbs, Kimberly R. Moffitt

Journal of Media Literacy Education

In the midst of a tumultuous time in American and global history, the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication Annual Conference 2021 hosted a panel to explore the promise and limits of media literacy. Panelists discussed the vital role of media literacy education in responding to challenges to democracy, social justice, and public health. With “everything at stake,” the panelists moved through responses to current crises while grounding in a historical context and offering recommendations for the future. Curated transcripts share a pivotal moment when much was expected of media literacy and media literacy experts explored promise and …

Tiktok Battlefield: Comparative Analysis Of English And Arabic Language Representations Of The 2022 Russian Ukrainian Conflict On Tiktok, Dina Magdeldin Mahmoud Elhawary

Theses and Dissertations

This study extends the growing political communication research on TikTok platform through studying the representation of a major political conflict in modern history; the 2022 Russian Ukrainian conflict. The study is providing a cross cultural comparison by studying the perspectives of English and Arabic speakers about the conflict. The study is based on the analysis of the 500 most liked TikTok videos - in one month duration that starts with the day of the Russian invasion - with top hashtags about the conflict in order to find the common message themes. The study uses a multi-dimensional analysis approach of connective …

The "Othering" Of America: How The Strategic Use Of Crisis And Ressentiment Succeeded In The Trump Era, Laura J. Franklin

Dissertations

The establishment of a crisis theme through public rhetoric often triggers widespread attention, resulting in public concern and media coverage of an issue that could potentially be overblown or deceptive. In right-wing political discourse, this crisis warning is typically delivered by a White male leader with ready access to the powerful news media. An “us versus them” theme often occurs. Within this mode of a hegemonic exclusion, a culture of immigrants or an American minority are often depicted, perhaps aggressively, as a threat: A threat used to motivate, enrage and create the frustrations inherent in ressentiment. This dissertation explores the …

Mental Health In Sports Media, Samuel Ridgley

Communication & Media Studies | Senior Theses

This paper looks at the increasingly popular conversation surrounding mental health in sports. It provides a glimpse into how common the struggle of mental health can be for many high-level athletes while also examining the narrative and expectations that society and the media have created. The paper also provides examples of prominent athletes from a variety of different sports and delves into their personal mental health experiences in the eyes of the media. The goal of this paper is to show the progression and change of how the media portrays mental health amongst athletes in today’s ever-changing world.

Local News Deserts In China: The Role Of Social Media And Personal Communication Networks, Zixue Tai, Bai He, Jianping Liu

Journalism and Media Faculty Publications

The field of local news is often associated with news deserts, commonly defined as geo‐based communities without news‐ papers or other legacy media as providers of locally oriented news and civic information. This phenomenon is expanding in global society due to the diminishing presence of newspapers at moments of accelerated digitization. This study examines the multiplex nature of news deserts in rural and suburban areas in China. Data were collected through a multi‐methods approach combining two focus groups and 44 semi‐structured in‐depth interviews. Patterns of engagement among inter‐ viewees reveal that smartphone‐based social media applications and digital platforms function as …

Inspirational And Worthy Of Charity: (Mis)Representations Of Disability In Sport Media, Katherine Holland, Steven K. Holland, Justin A. Haegele

Human Movement Studies & Special Education Faculty Publications

This study explored how one United States-based sports media company (SMC) represents disability through their Twitter account. A directed content analysis approach was utilized to analyze the tweets of the SMC for calendar year 2019. Of 6080 tweets reviewed, 126 (2.1%) were determined to represent disabled athletes or individuals. 43 (34.1%) tweets represented disabled athletes or individuals in participant roles while 83 (65.9%) represented disabled individuals in spectator or nonathlete roles. The tweets were coded into one of four categories of disability portrayal (Garland-Thomson, 2002): wonderous (n = 73), sentimental (n = 43), realistic (n = 7), …

Source Credibility And Trust Of Media Information Based On Gender Of Reporter, Madison R. Urse

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports (ETD)

An experiment was used for this study to explore if the gender of a reporter impacts perceived source credibility and thus trust in information. Previous research has shown how gender biases can affect how topics are covered, reported on, perceived and marketed in the journalistic world. Modern media and newsrooms are meant to mirror reality as they convey information to the public, yet women continue to be gatekept out of reporting on certain types of news. Further, changes in the mode of delivery of news are also impacting the journalism landscape. Thus, this study employed a digital stimulus to explore …

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 …

Reconnecting With The Truth: Conspiracies, Perspective Taking, And Misinformation, Scott Sellnow-Richmond, Mili Pinski

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

“I’ve done my research.” Misinformation has become a prevalent topic in communication courses, particularly those focused on argumentation, public speaking, or even interpersonal and family communication. Students thus benefit from adapting public speaking-focused assignments to illuminate how to understand - and thus combat- disinformation in their own lives. This assignment works toward this goal in two stages, allowing students to argue not just against misinformation and conspiracies, but also to argue for them as an act of empathy and understanding. The applied nature of this exercise also empowers instructors with a way to concretely address this issue in the classroom. …

Front Matter

Discourse: The Journal of the SCASD

No abstract provided.