Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Art And Internet Infrastructure, Liat Berdugo

Journal of Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Scholarship

In her essay Art and Internet Infrastructure, multimedia artist, curator, and professor Liat Berdugo contemplates and complicates our overreliance and relationship with networks and technology especially during shelter-in-place.

What Does A Pandemic Sound Like? The Emergence Of Covid Verbal Art, Karen E. Pennesi

Anthropology Publications

In times of social upheaval, people create and engage with verbal art for entertainment and a feeling of connection. While millions of people were forced to stay home to reduce the spread of COVID‑19 from March to July 2020, verbal artists posted recorded performances online and viewers had more time than usual to watch and share them. COVID verbal art refers to songs, poems, and comedy skits that mention social and physical distancing, quarantine and isolation, hygiene and cleaning practices, everyday experiences during the pandemic, as well as social and political critiques of policies and practices that explicitly mention COVID‑19 …

Exploring Health And Risk Information Seeking In The Context Of Covid-19: Testing The Comprehensive Model Of Information Seeking And Risk Information Seeking And Processing Model As Competing Explanatory Models, Xianlin Jin

Theses and Dissertations--Communication

Facing a pandemic caused by a novel coronavirus (COVID-19), the public feels uncertainty and fear. To cope with the pandemic and reduce uncertainty, the public needs accurate and prompt information. By theoretically and empirically comparing the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS) and the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model (RISP), this dissertation aims to unpack the core mechanism of health and risk information seeking. Built on the two models, the author proposed an Integrated Model and explored which variables are the significant predictors of health and risk information seeking.

The author recruited 729 adult participants and analyzed 394 completed …

A Qualitative Examination Of The Agency Of Women In Their 30s And 40s Who Use Dating Applications, Tera Buerkle

Theses and Dissertations--Family Sciences

The use of dating applications (apps) to find romantic and sexual partners is widespread across age groups, however, there is a paucity of research on dating apps with those in middle adulthood. Sexual script theory suggests that women’s agency (i.e. the ability to act in one’s own best interest) may be impacted by expectations from an inherently sexualized context, such as dating apps. Feminist theory contends that women’s agency is complicated by gender socialization due to the imbalance of power in society that greatly favors men. In this study seventeen women aged 30 to 49 completed in-depth semi-structured interviews, and …

Lessons From Our Living Rooms: Illuminating Lockdowns With Technology Domestication Insights, Sun Sun Lim, Yang Wang

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

With at least half of humanity under lockdown to arrest the spread of COVID-19 (Sandford, 2020), adults have been working from home and children engaging in home schooling for months on end. Competing for scarce resources such as digital devices, bandwidth, as well as physical and personal space, families have had to contend with rising tensions around the quality of digital engagement, children’s learning abilities, parent-child relationships and overall familial wellbeing. This fraught situation shone the spotlight on the household context of technology use but also enabled us to marshal academic insights to advance advocacy and public education. The pandemic …

FacebookʼS Latest Attempt To Address Vaccine Misinformation — And Why ItʼS Not Enough, Ana Santos Rutschman

All Faculty Scholarship

On October 13, 2020 Facebook announced the adoption of a series of measures to promote vaccine trust “while prohibiting ads with misinformation that could harm public health efforts.” In the post written by Kang-Xing Jin (head of health) and Rob Leathern (director of product management), the company explained that the new measures were designed with an emphasis on encouraging widespread use of this yearʼs flu vaccine, as well as in anticipation of potential COVID-19 vaccines becoming available in the near future.

The changes focus mainly on the establishment of a multiprong informational campaign about the seasonal flu vaccine, which includes …

Reflections Of A World In Crisis

Conversations

Photojournalism professor Robin Hoecker discusses teaching during a period of pandemic and social unrest, including the challenges of remote and trauma-informed teaching, and offers advice.

The Importance Of Net.Art Legacy And The Right To Communicate, Anton Makarevych

International Programs

No abstract provided.

It Is All About Location: Smartphones And Tracking The Spread Of Covid-19, Jordan Frith, Michael Saker

Publications

Mobile phone location data have become tied to understandings of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Data visualizations have used mobile phone data to inform people about how mobility practices may be linked to the spread of the virus, and governments have explored contact tracing that relies upon mobile phone data. This article examines how these uses of location data implicate three particular issues that have been present in the growing body of locative media research: (1) anonymized data are often not anonymous, (2) location data are not always representative and can exacerbate inequality, and (3) location data are a …

“A Slow-Moving Disaster:” Early Coverage Of The Coronavirus Pandemic At Us Local Newspapers, Beth Knobel

Covid-19 Digital Research

The outbreak of the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic provides an opportunity to investigate several aspects of the work of local newspapers in the United States, including their ability to create original reporting, gatekeeping, the influence of chain ownership, and the possible effect of political polarization on hard news coverage. This study examines the early coverage of COVID-19 in a selection of American local newspapers in 28 states—15 Republican-dominated (“red”) and 13 Democrat-dominated (“blue”) —during January and February 2020. The local papers produced a fraction of the coverage of large, national newspapers, as their lower resource levels and local focus limited their …

Covid-19 In Indigenous Communities: Five Protective Factors Of “Exercising” Sovereignty, Kelsey Leonard, Natalie Welch, Alisse Ali-Joseph

Faculty Publications

Indigenous Peoples have an inherent responsibility and right to “exercising” sovereignty - the practice of sport and physical activity in performance of our cultural, political, and spiritual citizenship (Ali-Joseph 2018). During the COVID-19 pandemic, access to and equity (inequity) in sport and physical activity has been felt (physically, spiritually, politically) within Indigenous communities. We implement an abundance-based Indigenous approach to understanding Indigenous Peoples’ responses to the coronavirus pandemic through sport and its far-reaching ramifications in Indian Country. In response to the COVID-19 pandemic we have seen Indigenous Peoples utilize social media such as Facebook and TikTok to reimagine Indigenous sport …