Mass Communication Commons^™

Human-Machine Communication: Complete Volume. Volume 7 Special Issue: Mediatization

Human-Machine Communication

This is the complete volume of HMC Volume 7. Special Issue on Mediatization

Mediatization And Human-Machine Communication: Trajectories, Discussions, Perspectives, Andreas Hepp, Göran Bolin, Andrea L. Guzman, Wiebke Loosen

Human-Machine Communication

As research fields, mediatization and Human-Machine Communication (HMC) have distinct historical trajectories. While mediatization research is concerned with the fundamental interrelation between the transformation of media and communications and cultural and societal changes, the much younger field of HMC delves into human meaning-making in interactions with machines. However, the recent wave of “deep mediatization,” characterized by an increasing emphasis on general communicative automation and the rise of communicative AI, highlights a shared interest in technology’s role within human interaction. This introductory article examines the trajectories of both fields, demonstrating how mediatization research “zooms out” from overarching questions of societal and …

An Examination Of How The Media Portrayed Professional Female Athletes During The 2023 Women's World Cup In The Match-Up Between Spain And The United States, Brianna R. Breazier

College of Journalism and Mass Communications: Professional Projects

This project is an examination of how the media portrayed professional female athletes during the 2023 Woen's World Cup in the match-up between Spain and the United States. This project consists of a literature review of the history of both countries, an overview of feminist theory, and past studies that show current patterns of biases or stereotypical behavior in today’s mainstream media. This project also consists of a cross-examination and comparison between Spain and the United States, specifically examining the timeline of events between the two. The purpose of this study is to compare the media trends of professional female …

Examining Active News Avoidance Across Countries: A Multilevel Moderation Analysis Of News Interests, News Trust, And Press Freedom, Gabriel Miao Li, Fan Liang, Qinfeng Zhu

Communication Faculty Articles and Research

Previous studies have identified various individual factors explaining news avoidance, but the understanding of how these factors function within the broader political information environment is limited. This study, leveraging a large-scale cross-national survey, reveals that the relationships between individual news interests, news trust, and news avoidance differ across countries with varying levels of press freedom. In nations where the press is strong and free, personal preferences minimally influence individuals’ active avoidance of hard news. News avoidance is not solely a product of individual-level attributes. Rather, the impact of these individual factors is significantly shaped by the overarching political information environment.

Trust Me: Film + Q&A; (February 22, 2024, 5:30 Pm, Sheldon Museum Of Art) [Poster], Sheldon Museum Of Art, University Of Nebraska-Lincoln

Sheldon Museum of Art: Catalogs and Publications

Poster for Trust Me: Film + Q&A held February 22, 2024 at 5:30 PM at the Sheldon Museum of Art (University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, Nebraska, United States).

Poster blurb:

In today's information landscape, how do you know whom--and what--you can trust? Watch the award-winning, feature-length documentary Trust Me, which explores how media technology is influencing society and what we can do about it.

A Q&A with Rosemary Smith, filmmaker and managing director of the non-partisan Getting Better Foundation, follows.

More information about the screening is available at https://news.unl.edu/newsrooms/today/article/trust-me-documentary-to-screen-at-sheldon/.

More information about the film is available at https://www.trustmedocumentary.com/ …

The Uses And Gratifications Of Social Audio-Focused Apps: A Case Study Of The Clubhouse Application, Dalia Abdelhamid Younes

Theses and Dissertations

Social audio has recently emerged recently as a new form of social media based on voice. It spread rapidly through the Clubhouse application, which became a significant trend during the COVID-19 pandemic. The study aims to explore Egyptian content creators' motivations to join Clubhouse, study their motivations to produce their content, and identify the gratifications obtained from using this application. It also seeks to investigate the application`s sustainability within the Egyptian context by outlining the challenges faced by the Egyptian content creators. The study employs the uses and gratifications theory, conducting in-depth interviews with 17 Egyptian content creators. The findings …

Identifying Youth Appeals In Alcohol Alternative Social Media Content Through Framing, Melina Oneal

West Chester University Master’s Theses

Proposed regulations for alcohol advertising prevent beverage companies from targeting people under the legal drinking age. However, similar regulations for alcohol alternative beverages are less explored, which could allow alcohol alternative products to create awareness for alcoholic beverages among youth. Alcohol alternatives beverages, including no-alcohol and low-alcohol products, are increasing in popularity and can function as compliments to alcoholic products to decrease the total alcohol volume consumed or as substitutes for alcoholic products. Framing theory can be operationalized through the Content Appealing to Youth Index, an index of content elements found in research literature to be appealing to youth, to …

Mapping The Ferment: Mediated Communication Research In Cios-Indexed Journals From 1970-2020, David J. Atkin, Kenneth A. Lachlan, Timothy D. Stephen, Carolyn Lagoe

Journal of the Association for Communication Administration

This study profiles scholarly publishing in the domain of mediated communication, based on an analysis of media-themed communication journals—as indexed in the CIOS’s ComAbstracts database—from 1970–2020. Analysis of 22,300 articles from media-themed scholarly journals paints a portrait of scholarly publishing configurations across the domains of Journalism and Communication. Criterion articles were subjected to cluster analysis that yielded a comprehensive unified field portrait of interlinkages among topical pairings encompassing 58 topical categories. Results suggest that just 7 of our 37 criterion journal outlets date to the 1970s, 6 additional titles were launched in the 1980s, 10 more in the 1990s, and …

Members Only: Do Mandatory Inclusive Introductions Inadvertently Cause Exclusion?, Leah Marie Mckinney

All Master's Theses

In order to establish the proper way to address peers and colleagues, an introduction is necessary. In an attempt to support inclusion, it has become standard to ask that people state their associated pronouns. Researchers have shown that the proper use of one’s pronouns can help people feel safe in a new environment (e.g., Kramer et al., 2022; Lauscher et al., 2022; Palanica et al., 2022); however, to my knowledge, very few researchers have explored the potential adverse effects of requiring pronouns in introductions. The practice of stating pronouns during introductions has been established relatively recently (MIT, 2020), limiting research …

Rhetoric On Climate Change And The Effects On Public Perceptions, Hailey Mina Rose Dossey

Undergraduate Scholarship

One of the extraordinary challenges humans are facing today is climate change and over the past two decades, the majority of the world has moved from questioning its legitimacy to accepting it as fact. With most people having accepted climate change as a reality, the goal of climate communication has shifted from spreading awareness to motivating audiences to take action. Through this analytical discussion, we will look into effective and ineffective methods of rhetoric as it can help guide us to a better understanding of why certain rhetoric that has previously been successful in other fields may not be the …

What Does It Mean To Stand Out? How Visual Design And Presentation Affects Attention And Memory In A Warning Message., Nichlas Waugh, Jeannette Sutton, Laura M. Fischer, Ginder Orton

Emergency Preparedness, Homeland Security, and Cybersecurity Faculty Scholarship

In emergency communication, it is essential to call attention to key information that can be interpreted quickly and remembered easily. Individuals possess a limited number of cognitive resources to allocate to message processing in an emergency. Because of this, they are more likely to allocate attention to messages they are motivated to care about, or to message attributes that stand out. In this study, we focus on how warning messages are attended to when they are viewed in a busy media environment and ask the question: “What does it mean to stand out?” To address the research questions, we used …

Book Review Reading Images: The Grammar Of Visual Design, Wim Honders

Journal of Media Literacy Education

No abstract provided.

Pre-Service Training On Media Education For Teachers At Czech Universities, Karolína Mackenzie

Journal of Media Literacy Education

The study shows the content of future teachers’ education and their needs to teach media education in their future practice. The preparation of future teachers within the faculties of education varies considerably across Europe, as does the level of teaching in primary and secondary schools. In the Czech Republic, media education is a cross-cutting topic in primary and some types of secondary schools and is rather rarely found in the university training of future teachers. The research shows the areas in which future teachers were prepared in their teacher training, their sense of readiness to teach and their needs in …

Podcasting Practices: Mediators Of Archival Work, Ela Teacher Education Curricula, And Digital Identities, Nancy Heiss, Morgan King, Courtney Adang, Donna E. Alvermann

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This paper investigates how a semester-long online course in a language and literacy teacher education department coupled a podcast project with archival pedagogy and restorying to explore how ELA (English Language Arts) teachers (preservice, inservice teachers, and those seeking re-entry) worked collaboratively to enrich understandings of instruction embedded in a high-tech environment. The course was taught in the southeastern United States at the height of a global pandemic. After the semester ended, three graduate students (from a class of 21) joined the instructor to qualitatively analyze data collected during the previous 14 weeks. Data sources included digitally stored videos, archived …

Teaching Critical Race Media Literacy Through Black Historical Narratives, Christine Mcwhorter, Tiffany Mitchell Patterson

Journal of Media Literacy Education

On the 400th anniversary of American enslavement the New York Times (NYT) 1619 project launched an interactive digital experience including a popular podcast centering the contributions and narratives of Black Americans. This study sought to understand how HBCU students responded to learning Black music history through what we term a “pop culture podcast.” This study explored the ways in which this particular podcast could support the development of Critical Race Media Literacy (CRML) based on a media discourse at a Historically Black College/University (HBCU). This study employed survey research and focus group discussions with HBCU students in two courses. The …

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.

Analyzing The Prophylactic And Therapeutic Role Of Inoculation To Facilitate Resistance To Conspiracy Theory Beliefs, Alicia Mason, Josh Compton, Emerson Tice, Brooklyn Peterson, Isaac Lewis, Tanner Glenn, Tricia Combs

Faculty Submissions

Conspiracy theories pose a variety of social and psychological consequences for individuals and society, and research suggests that around half of the U.S. population believes at least one. A two-phase inoculation experiment was conducted. Inoculated participants reported more negative general attitudes toward conspiracy theories and lower Phase II generic conspiracist beliefs, which are both indicators of harm-reduction and the beneficial healing impacts of therapeutic inoculation. The addition of therapeutic inoculation as a harm-reduction or healing technique in practitioners’ stakeholder response toolkit is a valuable contribution to both theory and practice.

Reputation Themes From Communication Perspective: A Qualitative Systematic Review, Omar Abu Arqoub

Journal of the Association of Arab Universities for Research in Higher Education مجلة اتحاد الجامعات العربية للبحوث في التعليم العالي

The article aimed to systematically review communication reputation-related research to shape the reputation literature from a communication perspective. After investigating several databases, a total of 366 peer-reviewed communication journal articles focusing on reputation were selected based on the inclusion and exclusion criteria of the study. A qualitative text mining and thematic analysis approach was conducted using the NVivo program to examine the most frequently used words and major emergent themes. The results revealed that the topmost frequently repeated words in communication reputation-focused articles were “crisis,” “public,” “reputation,” “communication,” “media,” and “relations.” Also, this study discussed the six major themes that …

Outbreak Communication: Exploring The Relationships Between Health Information Seeking Behaviors, Vested Interests, And Covid-19 Knowledge In U.S. Midwest Populations, Alicia Mason, Josh Compton, Elizabeth Spencer, Kaitlin Barnett

Faculty Submissions

On February 15, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) Director, General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, stated at a Munich Security Conference, “We’re not just fighting an epidemic; we’re fighting an infodemic,” (Zarocostas, 2020, p. 676). The term ‘infodemic’ refers to the onslaught of both accurate and inaccurate health information surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. The concept of an ‘infodemic’ was quickly integrated into mass media, popular culture (i.e., documentaries, podcasts), and eventually scholarly literature. In response to COVID-19, health communication scholars have centered on understanding specific messaging strategies such as the use of fear appeals (Stolow et al., 2020), nature of advertising …

Show Or Tell? A Systematic Review Of Media And Information Literacy Measurements, Daniel Schofield, Reijo Petter Kupiainen, Vegard Marinius Frantzen, Anette Novak

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media and information literacy (MIL) is a key concept in several research fields and measuring the levels of MIL is considered valuable for policy stakeholders. However, the concept is complex, and few systematic reviews of research on measuring MIL levels have been conducted. This article draws on a systematic review of peer-reviewed studies measuring MIL between 2000 and 2021. Out of a total of 4008 publications, 236 were included in the analysis, and 87 were analysed in depth. A key finding was that several studies applied broad understandings of MIL, often based on initiatives by international organisations such as UNESCO, …

Online Media Literacy Intervention In Indonesia Reduces Misinformation Sharing Intention, Trenton Ford, Michael Yankoski, Matthew Facciani, Tim Weninger

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Media literacy is widely viewed as an important tool in the fight against the spread of misinformation online. However, efforts to boost media literacy have primarily focused on Western-media and Western-oriented social media platforms, which are substantively different from the media and platforms used widely in the Global South. In the present work, we focus on the media ecosystem of Indonesia and report the results of an online media literacy intervention consisting of short-videos that were targeted specifically to social media users in Indonesia (N= 656). We found that participants in our media literacy intervention were 64% more …

Media Literacy And Covid-19 Communication: Work And Home Sphere Differences, Donnalyn Pompper, Tugce Ertem-Eray

Journal of Media Literacy Education

As a learning process wherein we ask questions to enhance knowledge, media literacy offers a powerful lens for examining how people practice communication across diverse applied contexts such as professional communicators shaping messages about COVID-19. Borrowing a page from Renee Hobbs’ (1998, 1999, 2010, 2011, 2021) media literacy education research, we sought to compare/contrast media content creators’ (journalism, advertising, public relations, marketing communication) information-seeking behaviors during the 2020-2022 COVID-19 pandemic for both their paid work and unpaid volunteer work, as well as for their own and family edification. Blending the media literacy lens with social construction theory (Berger & Luckmann, …

Improving Indonesian Seniors’ Digital Resilience And Quality Of Life Through The Digital Academy For Seniors Program, Mite Setiansah, Nuryanti Nuryanti, Edi Santoso, Agus Ganjar Runtiko, Wiwik Novianti

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Digital literacy education is essential for everyone, including seniors to sustain their quality of life. The Digital Academy for Seniors aims to instill digital skills among seniors through a non-formal learning program. This qualitative research aimed to provide a comprehensive description of how the program can develop digital resilience and improve the quality of life of seniors. This study concluded that the program can improve the knowledge and attitudes of seniors in using digital media safely. Both of these are important assets for seniors to develop their digital resilience so that they can take advantage of digital media to support …

Parental Education In Media Literacy, Social Media And Internet Safety For Children In Bosnia And Herzegovina, Dragana Trninić, Anđela Kuprešanin Vukelić, Jovana Mlinarević

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Parents have a great responsibility to protect their children while online, and to make sure that they are using digital technologies in a safe manner; at the same time, parents are not sufficiently educated and are unfamiliar with all regulatory mechanisms and possibilities of controlling and protecting their children online. Children need some help to take advantage of all positive aspects of digital trends and to protect themselves from those which are potentially negative. The international framework in the legal sense, which is in charge of standardizing the protection of the interests and rights of children on the Internet, is …

Social Media Reactions To Apologies From Public Figures, Brands, And Companies And Its Impact On Reputation, Melissa N. Dolan

Student Theses and Dissertations

Apologies issued by public figures, brands, and companies after a scandal or public perception of wrongdoing are common occurrences that have a significant impact on a brand's overall reputation. The impact on reputation hinges on how apologies are dissected and criticized by audiences on social media, which in turn influences public opinion and perception of the brand, company, or public figure. Furthermore, social media has exacerbated condemnation or support for public apologies, because it provides a platform for public discourse on the matter. Apologies are powerful tools that can be effective if implemented well or can be detrimental to a …