Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Review Of Bootlegging The Airwaves, Jason L. Guthrie

Journal of 20th Century Media History

Review of the book Bootlegging the Airwaves: Alternative Histories of Radio and Television Distribution (Eleanor Patterson)

Digital Identity Negotiation: How International Students Balance Home And Host Country Ideals On Social Networking Sites, Oluchi Ikwuakam

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Minority groups, including people from lower socioeconomic backgrounds, various ethnicities or races, gender non-conforming individuals, and others who are not part of the societal majority, face daily challenges due to unequal access to digital technology. From elementary school through college, the gap between students with better access to digital tools and those without becomes evident in how these technologies are used in classrooms. International students, who may be a majority group in their home country, become part of a minority in their host country as they seek better educational opportunities. These technologies, such as social networking sites, often reflect the …

Next Generation Open Textbooks: A Case Study, Christine R. Ingersoll, Larry Sheret

SOJMC Faculty Research

Design Across the Disciplines: Learning the value of communication design through practice” is an OER (open educational resource), digital textbook under prototype testing in a media design course. The text is created in collaboration with a librarian, two faculty from different colleges and two students who have completed the course. This interdisciplinary team was formed with the directive to embrace the powers of design thinking through digital content to develop a product that truly recognizes the needs of the primary users, our students and key stakeholders, the faculty. Several semesters of student feedback provided the insights for considering textbook cost; …

Design Thinking Portfolio, Christine Ingersoll

Books Published by MU Libraries in MDS

Revised in August 2024, The Design Thinking Portfolio engages learners in the design thinking process by applying problem-based learning through team engagement. This nontraditional “textbook” has interactive fillable PDF forms that engage learners in creating an artifact that showcases their understanding of design thinking. The portfolio project starts with compiling existing problems that learners wish to tackle as they work across the spectrum of design thinking to sell their best solution in a team pitch. Learners use a design thinking mindset to solve a regional social or civic issue as social entrepreneurs. Coming together and sharing their own diverse backgrounds …

Creating A Student Driven Oer Digital Textbook, Christine R. Ingersoll, Larry Sheret, Monisha Gupta, Ralph May

SOJMC Faculty Research

Design Across the Disciplines: Learning the value of communication design through practice” is an OER (open educational resource), digital textbook under prototype testing in a media design course. The text is created in collaboration with a librarian, two faculty from different colleges and two students who have completed the course. This interdisciplinary team was formed with the directive to embrace the powers of design thinking through digital content to develop a product that truly recognizes the needs of the primary users, our students and key stakeholders, the faculty.

Eyecom: An Innovative Approach For Computer Interaction, Anam Mazhar

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The world is innovating rapidly, and there is a need for continuous interaction with the technology. Sadly, there do not exist promising options for paralyzed people to interact with the machines i.e., laptops, smartphones, and tabs. A few commercial solutions such as Google Glasses are costly and cannot be afforded by every paralyzed person for such interaction. Towards this end, the thesis proposes a retina-controlled device called EYECOM. The proposed device is constructed from off-the-shelf cost-effective yet robust IoT devices (i.e., Arduino microcontrollers, Xbee wireless sensors, IR diodes, and accelerometer). The device can easily be mounted on to the glasses; …

Fixing Journalism's Credibility Problem: Lessons From The Lippman-Dewey Debate, James Michael Hoyle

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

With advancing technology and social media becoming a more filtered place, many wonder whether or not the news has lost its credibility. However, this is not the first time technology has changed the way the newsroom works. Comparing the times of today and the times of the 1920s, a literature review and an analysis of the arguments between Walter Lippmann and John Dewey shows that not only are there many parallels, but the debate these two men had nearly one hundred years ago provides a blueprint and a game plan that will allow journalism to get its credibility back in …

The Alt-Right's Use Of President Donald Trump's Twitter Account As A Propaganda Device, Erin Nicole Jorden

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The long campaign to repeal and replace the Affordable Care Act situated President Donald J. Trump in a context where attacks on President Barack Obama’s signature legislation symbolized a broader repudiation of his legacy. Even more than mainstream Republican partisans, the altright blogosphere celebrated the demise of the law to symbolically cleanse the nation of Obama’s influence. Trump attempted to honor his pledge to end Obamacare in his first year of office with his support of the American Health Care Act (March 2017), Better Care Reconciliation Act (July 2017), and the Graham-Cassidy Bill (September 2017). Members of the alt-right reframed …

Curriculum Change In Undergraduate Strategic Communications Programs: How Strategic Communications Programs Are Adapting To 21st Century Media, Allyson B. Goodman

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The year 2014 has been described by scholars as transformative in how consumers interact with technology and media. Pointing to such digital milestones as the explosion of social media and mobile technology and the decline of traditional television ratings, these scholars have described the evolution as a move from a broadcast era to a postbroadcast era of media. This mass media evolution has opened a digital talent gap between the skills needed by the industry and the abilities of current and potential employees.

Focusing on undergraduate strategic communications programs, this research discusses the current status of new and social media …

Smartphone-Based Self Rescue System For Disaster Rescue, Xitong Zhou

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Recent ubiquitous earthquakes have been leading to mass destruction of electrical power and cellular infrastructures, and deprive the innocent lives across the world. Due to the wide-area earthquake disaster, unavailable power and communication infrastructure, limited man-power and resources, traditional rescue operations and equipment are inefficient and time-consuming, leading to the golden hours missed. With the increasing proliferation of powerful wireless devices, like smartphones, they can be assumed to be abundantly available among the disaster victims and can act as valuable resources to coordinate disaster rescue operations. In this paper, we propose a smartphone-based self-rescue system, also referred to as RescueMe, …

Steve Jobs' Moment Of Silence, Janet Dooley

SOJMC Faculty Research

Steve Jobs, founder and longtime center of Apple Inc. passed away on October 5, 2011. Tributes to this visionary were spontaneous and abundant. Two students from the School of Visual Arts in New York, Hyui Yong Kim and Bryan Wolff, working with KNARF® Advertising, conceived of a means by which a traditional remembrance, the moment of silence, was upgraded to a modern technological tribute. Users of iPods, iPhones, iPads and other computing devices could download to their iTunes library eight seconds of silence as a remembrance to Jobs’ contributions to technology, to communication and to the impact on their …

Principals And Technology: A Case Study Of The Use And Perceived Effectiveness Of Technology To Communicate With Constituents, Bonnie Ann Allman

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Among the many qualities or attributes that serve as the framework for school leadership development programs, communication is repeatedly noted as being an important facet of the administrative leader’s repertoire (Finch, Gregson & Faulkner, 1992; Gougeon, 1991). It is not enough for a leader to be concerned only about communicating with constituents; it is essential that the leader also considers the effectiveness of this communication (Gougeon, 1991). The consolidation of schools in West Virginia over the past forty years has placed more importance on the ability of a principal to communicate with staff, other administrators, students, parents and communities. Each …

Trait And Situational Variables Affecting Communication Channel Preferences In College Students, Britt Alan Frye

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

As more and more interpersonal communication is being conducted via mediated communication channels, important theoretical questions about the impact of this shift in the use of communication media are raised. This study began the process of exploring the implications of the shift in channels used in interpersonal communication situations by examining several factors that previous research has linked to important aspects of relationship development and maintenance. Specifically, respondents were surveyed about their preferred channel of communication in four types of interpersonal communication situations that reflect varying levels of interpersonal comfort in association with communication locus of control scale (CLOC) scores. …

George W. Bush, The American Press, And The Initial Framing Of The War On Terror After 9/11, Stephen D. Cooper, Jim A. Kuypers, Matthew T. Althouse

Communications Faculty Research

President George W. Bush's speech to the General Assembly of the United Nations on November I 0, 200 I, marks an important moment in the history of the War on Terror. 1 It followed closely upon the joint U.S.-Northern Alliance military capture of Mazari Sarif, Afghanistan, which significantly disrupted the Taliban's operations and arguably marked the official beginning of America's War on Terror. As President Bush stated, "The time for sympathy has now passed; the time for action has now arrived."2 In some ways, the speech offered nothing new. It reiterated words and ideas that the president frequently used to …

Rights, Principles, And Data Use: An Investigation Of User Knowledge And Opinion Of Facebook's Legal Contract, Nikolas D. Payne

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This project investigated the legal contract to which users must agree before creating a Facebook account. Multi-methodological in nature, this research explored user knowledge and perception of the contract as well as how the contract measures up to the principles which Facebook claims serve as its foundation. For the quantitative portion of this analysis, a survey including measures of knowledge and perception was administered to respondents. The qualitative portion critically compared Facebook’s legal contract to the list of principles espoused by the company on their website. These analyses reveal that users rarely read this contract before agreeing to it, tend …

West Virginia Internet2 Consortium, Jan I. Fox

IT Research

No abstract provided.

The Effects Of A Web Presence On Sportscasting Audiences, Adam Cavalier

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The purpose of this research is to determine how much and what type of Web presence/content effectively draws listeners and viewers to the major sportscasts a station presents. Ad revenue, viewership/listenership and audience fragmentation all are conundrums in today's fluctuating media landscape. Combine those issues with the present economic crisis and the vast majority of media companies must rethink the way they do business. This research seeks to lay groundwork as to what new strategies effectively draw listeners/viewers back to the traditional media of radio and television while expanding upon the relatively new online media offerings. Furthermore, this research is …

The Opppositional Framing Of Bloggers, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

As a new feature of the media system, the blogosphere is an extremely interesting subject for scholarly inquiry. One might spend research time along a variety of lines: why people blog, why people read blog content, the relationship of the blogosphere to the established media outlets, the who/what/when of blog content production and consumption, the subject matter of blog posts, the effects of exposure to blog content, the potential for and limitations on interactions, and so on, for quite a long list. Given that the blogosphere is a recent addition to the media mix, and itself a (presumably) unintended consequence …

A Comparative Analysis Of The New York Times [U.S.A.] And The Nation Media Group [Kenya] Presidential Opinion Polls Coverage 90 Days Prior To Election Day, David Okoth

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

This study seeks to find out whether there exists a relationship between the New York Times (U.S.) and the Nation Media Group (Kenya) coverage of presidential opinion poll results 90 days prior to Election Day. One research hypothesis was identified; (_H1) that there is a relationship – of difference – in how the two publications cover presidential opinion poll stories. The study identified 440 presidential opinion poll stories over a 90- day period prior to Election Day. It analyzed election coverage from October-December 2007 for the Nation and August-November 2008 for the Times. The study established that …

The President And The Press: The Framing Of George W. Bush’S Speech To The United Nations, Stephen D. Cooper, Jim Kuypers, Matt Althous

Communications Faculty Research

In this essay, we provide a brief overview of how frames work, discuss the relationship of frames to the news media, and perform a qualitatively based, comparative framing analysis of President Bush’s speech to the United Nations and the mainstream American press response that followed. Findings suggest that by the end of formal military operations in Afghanistan, the press was increasingly framing its reports in such a way that President Bush’s public statements were inaccurately transmitted to the public at large. Three key findings are advanced: one, the press depicted the Bush administration as an enemy of civil liberties; two, …

A Concise History Of The Fauxtography Blogstorm In The 2006 Lebanon War, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

Whatever the other consequences of the kinetic war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, it gave rise to a neologism now commonplace in the blogosphere. In the blog lexicon, fauxtography refers to visual images, especially news photographs, which convey a questionable (or outright false) sense of the events they seem to depict.i Apart from the clever word play evident in the term, it is shorthand for a serious criticism of photojournalism products, both the images and the associated text. Since accuracy is a cardinal tenet of journalistic ethics, clearly stated in the ethics code of the Society …

Watching The Watchdog: Bloggers As The Fifth Estate, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

This author is inclined to think that social structures which evolve through the voluntary interactions and exchanges among people, such as the blogosphere, tend in general to be more beneficial than structures created through the deliberate exercise of power, however well-intentioned, such as regulatory bureaucracies. That idea cannot be fully explored here. For our purposes, we can simply note that the blogosphere would seem to be a near-perfect instantiation of the ideal discourse.

Social Issues In America, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

One of the more contentious issues in social science at this time is the question of media bias. Both the scholarly and popular literature are thick with writings on this topic, yet for all the interest in it and work devoted to it we are far from a consensus on how media bias can be defined, conceptualized, or researched. Ironically enough, many writings on the subject of media bias do take the position that the news content distributed to the public fails, in one respect or another, to accurately and fairly represent real events, issues, personalities, and situations. Studies differ …

Connecting The Dots: Implicit Commonalities Among Cultural Morphogenesis, Structuration, And Market Economics, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

Perhaps the central foundational issue of our time is the relationship of human agency and social structure. If human actors are constrained by the rules and rhetoric of the social system, how is it that those actors can yet bring about radical change in that social system? A similar puzzle exists in economics: how is it that individual transactions both maintain and transform the marketplace? This paper begins to identify common ground implicit in the work of Margaret Archer, Anthony Giddens, and Friedrich Hayek. Emergence, change, reproduction, time, agency, power, and knowledge are themes which can be read in these …

Embedded Versus Behind-The-Lines Reporting On The 2003 Iraq War, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

A 2003 study by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that “Most Americans (53%) believe that news organizations are politically biased, while just 29% say they are careful to remove bias from their reports ... More than half—51%—say that the bias is ‘liberal,’ while 26% discerned a ‘conservative’ leaning. Fourteen percent felt neither phrase applied” (Harper, 2003). Now add to this that even some academicians are finally accepting the idea that journalists, as a group, are more liberal than the population as a whole. However, whether political or other biases (Hahn, 1998) affect news coverage …

Press Controls In Wartime: The Legal, Historical, And Institutional Context, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

News coverage of warfare poses a dilemma for social systems with a free press, such as the United States. In an era of high-tech weaponry and nearly instantaneous global communications, conflict is inevitable between the obligation of the press to inform the general public and the obligation of the military to successfully conduct war. The importance of secrecy to the conduct of warfare heightens the issue in the current counterterrorism operations. The competitive advantage of live coverage raises the stakes in a crowded media market. The military’s control over newsgathering during the 1990-91 Persian Gulf War set off a controversy …

An Assessment Of The Fundamental Differences Between Mainstream And Independent Media : A Content Analysis Of The Print Media, Chadford D. Roush

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

The mainstream media in the United States is an institutional arrangement of structural power within the political economy of capitalist society. The concentration and centralization of the media corporations creates the structural constraint for ideological social control. A few multinational corporations control a vast amount of media access that creates a filtering process for information. The mainstream media is extremely powerful in American society. The media helps to mold opinions on an array of news topics. Major media sources in the US are conforming their news coverage to be “industry friendly”. In simply terms the American people are only getting …

Collaborative Musical Expression And Creativity Among Academics: When Intellectualism Meets Twelve Bar Blues, Gary P. Radford, Stephen D. Cooper, Robert W. Kubey, David S. Mccurry, Jonathan Millen, John R. Barrows

Communications Faculty Research

The Professors are a blues, rock, and sometime heavy metal band made up of communication professors from a number of New Jersey schools. Formed in 1995, the band has played in clubs in New York City as well as a number of academic venues, including the annual conference of the International Communication Association in Chicago in 1996 and the annual conference of the National Communication Association in New York City in 1998. The Professors have been featured in both local and national press, including the Chronicle of Higher Education. When we learned of the call for papers for this special …

An Effect Of The Medium In News Stories: “The Pictures In Our Heads”, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

This study used an experimental design to test for a channel effect in news stories. Four television news stories were recorded off-air, then the narrations were transcribed to form a print news story containing the same words; the broadcast video and the print story were the two treatment levels. Subjects received the stories in one of the treatment levels, and were asked to judge the blameworthiness or praiseworthiness of the actors named in the story. Logistic regressions could predict with substantial accuracy the medium in which subjects had received the story from these judgments, indicating a channel effect on their …

Common Law, And Privacy In Computer-Mediated Environments, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

Computer-mediated environments pose a special challenge to our legal and cultural protections of privacy. These environments are unprecedented in the way commercially valuable information can be generated in their very use. The ease and low cost with which electronic information can be gathered and disseminated in these environments have led many to advocate regulation protecting privacy interests from commercial encroachment. At the same time, the use of digital communications to support criminal or terrorist activities have led others to advocate regulation allowing law enforcement agencies to eavesdrop or intercept. The cultural history of the Internet as a self-regulating, almost anarchical, …