Pandemic in the Time of Trump: Digital Media Logic and Deadly Politics

This paper examines the power of a mediatized President to use reflexive propaganda—the rules and assumptions of digital media—to define a public health crisis. During the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, President Trump engaged in attention-based politics, or the use of media to draw attention of the largest audience to himself, at the expense of an efficient response to a major public health crisis. The repetitive tweets, with a common form—vulgar and combative language, usually against journalists—converted Donald Trump into a digital meme and enabled the President to dwell on his distorted accomplishments and TV ratings, to downplay health risks, and initially define the lethal virus as a benign hoax.     

The representation of future generations in newspaper coverage of climate change: A study of the UK press

Climate change will rob future generations—today's children and those yet to be born—of the stable climate that previous generations have enjoyed. The article explores how future generations are represented in climate change coverage in the UK national press. We examine the ‘popular’ (Mail, Mirror) and ‘quality’ (Guardian, Telegraph) press from 2010 to March 2019. We found that little attention was given to future generations; young people rarely spoke and, along with those yet to be born, were represented in ways that obscured the temporal and social inequalities that are built into climate change.     

Women’s Political Firsts and Symbolic Representation

ABSTRACT

The extent to which politics is still a “man’s game” is made evident every time a top political office has a female holder for the first time. These incredibly revealing moments may give a new social meaning to women in politics—women’s political presence—and women and politics—gendered social constructions about women’s capacity to rule. This article explores the types of gendered mediation underpinning the representation of first-ever women serving in historically male-dominated political offices in Spain. It shows that gender media frames are pervasive, which may lead to an effective annihilation of women’s symbolic representation.     

Priming Implicit Racism in Television News: Visual and Verbal Limitations on Diversity

We highlight an understudied aspect of racism in television news, implicit racial cues found in the contradictions between visual and verbal messages. We compare three television news broadcasts from the first week after Hurricane Katrina to reexamine race and representation during the disaster. Drawing together insights from interdisciplinary studies of cognition and sociological theories of race and racism, we examine how different combinations of the race of reporters and news sources relate to the priming of implicit racism. We find racial cues that are consistent with stereotypes and myths about African Americans—even in broadcasts featuring black reporters—but which appear only in the context of color‐blind verbal narration. We conclude by drawing attention to the unexpected and seemingly unintended reproduction of racial ideology.     

Testing an environmental framework for understanding public relations practitioners’ orientation toward relationship management

This study offers an alternative conceptual framework for an integrated understanding of public relations practice globally. It investigates the relationships between political, economic, and media constructs and relationship management in public relations by building upon an environmental framework for understanding public relations. Based on a survey of public relations practitioners in Singapore, this study positions relationship management as a conceptual locus for public relations theory and practice. Four environmental variables—perceptions of the degree of democracy in the political system, level of economic development, level of economic freedom, and level of media freedom—are found to be associated with public relations practitioners’ orientation toward relationship management, based on Hon and Grunig’s relationship management scale.     

Echo chambers and social mediators in public advocacy issue networks

The growing trend of politically motivated consumer boycotts and buycotts on social media not only impacts a company’s financial bottom line, but more fundamentally disrupts relationships between the firm and its publics, the cornerstone of public relations (Ferguson, 1984; Sommerfeldt, & Kent, 2015). On a broader level, such politically motivated advocacy is a critical facet of civil society with important implications on the societal role of public relations (Taylor, 2010). In light of the significance of politically motivated consumer advocacy to public relations, a multi-phase, exploratory study was conducted. Study 1 applies content analysis and social network analysis to examine how different interactive mechanisms on social media—retweet, mention, and reply—may affect communication within and between communities of different ideological views surrounding the boycott and buycott issues. Study 2 further explores the challenges and opportunities of fostering exchange of diverse viewpoints by identifying new social mediators—the “echoers” who propel information flow among in-group members, and the “bridgers” who initiate communication with political out-group members—and assess the key network characteristics of these social mediators. The findings of these two studies advance public relations theories on networks, intergroup communication, and civil society by illustrating how social media structure and social mediators shape the networked public discourse to facilitate or inhibit conversations between publics of different ideological orientations.     

At Home with Media Technology

ABSTRACT

People's engagement with media devices in the domestic sphere varies greatly, as do the decisions they make regarding when, where, and how the devices are utilized. How do we organize our houses for media consumption and/or creation? How do our houses' spatial configurations affect our media consumption and habits? How does time play a role in media engagement? These questions directly relate to design—our homes are both spatially and temporally designed—by us, and for us. The design issues of creating and maintaining a “home” are compounded by the various media devices we use—telephone, TV, stereo, Internet-enabled computer, and so on. We not only “design” how we use these devices, but where and when they are used. In this context, media devices are not passive objects, but rather through our engagement with them, they alter domestic space/time, and may ultimately challenge how we understand and define domesticity. Media technology simultaneously constructs new, and interrupts existing, domestic territories. We will explore the reciprocal impact of domestic space/time and media technology, with a view to revealing the ways in which this nexus becomes a question of design.     

Amnesia: Cultural Memory,Reconciliation, and Communal Accountability in the Americas

Contributing to debates on the status of comparison in transnational American studies, this essay offers a morphologically comparative approach to memory’s cultural politics in conflict resolution, juxtaposing two histo-ries — one ‘geo-political’ (nation-state, transatlantic) and the other ‘micro-history’ (small-town, regional) — whose ensuing negotiations unsettle paradigms of silencing and forgetting, especially as these pertain to ‘reconciliation’. Offering an alternative to predominantly psychoanalytic treatments of cultural memory and power, this essay employs morphological analysis and queer theory to explore cultural amnesia through blending ethnographic and media sources on the politics of it in the assignment of accountability and belonging.     

Bounded Explorers: Online Constructions of Solo Women Travelers

Women have navigated the world with much less freedom than men—with restrictions particularly great for their solo, or independent, travel. Although much research documents women’s experiences of these constraints, less is known about travel media’s framing of women as solo travelers—with online media an especially neglected research area. Drawing on a leisure constraints perspective, our study examines differences in online travel articles (n = 100) targeting solo women versus men. Resonating with this perspective, as well as the findings of studies examining women’s actual travel experiences, our findings reveal a framing of women as “bounded explorers,” constrained in their solo travel by the emotional, social, and behavioral burdens imposed upon them, hinging on their perceived vulnerability and men’s perceived dangerousness. We find two processes through which women are constructed in online travel articles as bounded explorers—creating negative expectations and encouraging vigilant risk avoidance. As one of the first studies to examine cultural representations of solo travelers in online media, our research provides further evidence of gendered constraints in leisure by revealing the framing in travel articles of women as more bounded than men—a framing that may, in turn, have implications for women’s experiences in the realm of leisure and perhaps beyond.     

Reddit and the Social Studies: Exploring the r/Democratic Curriculum

In this article the author seeks to present social studies educators with practical means for using Reddit—an emerging social media website—as a tool for providing students with a democratic education grounded in citizenship and multicultural education. The author focuses on ways in which Reddit offers students the opportunity to learn from experts, explore social studies content that may not be present within a traditional textbook, and voice their opinion in an online community that values equality and democracy among its members.     

Covering the Dawsons: Racial Variation in Newspaper Framing of Urban Crime

This article uses newspaper coverage of a case from Baltimore, Maryland, to explore racial variation in the rhetorical framing of urban crime. In October 2002, seven members of the Dawson family were murdered in a house fire. The murders became an expression of Baltimore’s character and the lives of its residents. After analyzing 206 newspaper articles about the case, we find stark differences in the way the case, its causes, and its consequences are presented to readers. Newspapers with primarily white audiences—both “mainstream” and “alternative” papers—present the case as a horrific, singular instance, placing responsibility on the perpetrator. In contrast, articles in African American newspapers offer a complex web of explanation, calling attention to the structural inequalities and disparate access to state resources. Whereas white newspaper portray the Dawson family as martyrs in the drug war, black newspapers position the family as part of a wider of community of African Americans who are victims of slack policing, racial discrimination, and negligent social policy. We argue that these rhetorical differences are more than cosmetic. Rather, they provide a framework for better understanding the relationship between the press and policy makers. Differences in coverage of the case also contribute to our understanding of why blacks and whites have fundamentally different understandings of race in the United States.     

“Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE

Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use variant spellings stylistically to deploy personae and characterological figures (Agha, 2003), by examining the presence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) features in a corpus of 15,804 tweets extracted from the timelines of 10 gay British men. I argue that the stylization of AAVE signals the development of a very specific persona—the “Sassy Queen”—which relies on an essentialized imagining of Black women as “fierce” and “sassy.” Concluding, I emphasize the value of micro‐level analyses in complementing quantitative analyses of linguistic variation in social media.     

Making Sense of Neoliberal Subjectivity: A Discourse Analysis of Media Language on Self-development

The influence of neoliberalism on culture and subjectivity is well documented. This paper contributes to understanding of how neoliberal ideology enters into the production of subjectivity. While subject formation takes place in multiple and contradictory ways and across multiple social sites, we focus on the increasingly popular media discourse of self-development, and examine it as a technology of neoliberal subjectification. Drawing on Foucauldian understandings, we analyze data from two different newspapers from two different national contexts, both of which are heavily influenced by neoliberalism. Based on our analysis, we detail four interrelated discourses—rationality, autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurship, and positivity and self-confidence—demonstrating how these discourses constitute the neoliberal subject in ways consonant with neoliberal governmentality. There is no observable resistance to subject positions offered within these discourses. Self-development discourse instills stronger individualism in society, while constraining collective identity, and thus provides social control and contributes to preserving status quo of neoliberal societies.     

‘We need to start building up what's called herd immunity’: Scientific dissensus and public broadcasting in the Covid-19 pandemic

This article uses content and thematic analyses to examine how UK public service broadcasting (PSB) reported on the Covid-19 pandemic prior to the first lockdown on March 23, 2020. This was a period when the British government's response to the pandemic was being heavily criticised by the World Health Organisation and other parts of the scientific community. This paper finds that in PSB these criticisms were muted and partially given. Instead, broadcasting explained in detail—and directly endorsed—government policy, including the ‘herd immunity’ approach. Most coverage of international responses focused on the United States and Europe with little attention paid to states that had successfully suppressed the virus. When such states were featured their public health measures were not explained nor compared to the UK's strategy with the consequence that PSB was unable to alert the public to measures that could have contained the virus and saved lives. These patterns in PSB coverage can be explained by the close links between key lobby journalists and the government's communication machine as well as the broader political and social contexts surrounding broadcasting at the onset of the pandemic.     

Social Activity,School-related Activity,and Anti–substance Use: Media Messages on Adolescent Tobacco and Alcohol Use

In this article, we present the effects of three hypothesized protective factors—social activities, school-related activities, and anti–substance use media messages—on adolescent tobacco and alcohol use. Data were drawn from the “Monitoring the Future” research project, which was conducted by the Institute for Social Research at the University of Michigan. The sample included 2,551 twelfth-grade students. The results of the structural equation model showed that exposure to media anti-drug messages had an indirect negative effect on tobacco and alcohol use through school-related activity and social activity. The results suggest that comprehensive ecological interventions encompassing media, family, and school can increase the preventive effects of adolescent's substance use.     

Olympic Films and Public Memory

How is our memory of mega‐events structured? This article investigates the relationship between cinema and the Olympic Games. To this end, it first unravels the historical origins of the strong link between the two, as both are symbolic products of the 20th century. The Olympics reaffirm the image of the modern nation‐state; the cinematic medium visually represents the Games as spectacle. Leni Riefenstahl's film, Olympia (1938), recorded at the 1936 Berlin Olympic Games, supplies the most enduring imagery of this type. In addition to Riefenstahl's thoughts and methods, this study delves into Kon Ichikawa's Tokyo Olympiad (1965), which was influenced by Olympia. Ichikawa's film, which reflects his artistry and showcases his various skills, won critical acclaim and, intriguingly, precipitated the “document or art” controversy that involved the Japanese state and the mass media. Whether document or work of art, this film has supplied the public with imagery for the 1964 Tokyo Olympic Games—various images that most of us recognize—and thereby played a key role in constituting our memory of them. Therefore, our experience of the Games is a mediated experience through the construction of our public memory. Our memory culture is composed of “prosthetic memories” that are technologically assembled through cinema and act as Freudian “screen memories.”     

The first lady of social media: The visual rhetoric of Michelle Obama’s Twitter images

While American first ladies have long used media to craft their image, Michelle Obama is the first contemporary first lady to use social media to promote her public persona. We use the lens of symbolic convergence theory to explore the fantasy themes incumbent in images shared through Michelle Obama’s Twitter account. Since first ladies have long been perceived as representing the American “everywoman,” understanding the fantasies built into the social media image of the first lady extends knowledge about the perception of American women more broadly. Our findings indicate that Michelle Obama’s Twitter images are strategic in that they reflect the visual themes that the media traditionally use in their coverage of first ladies. Specifically, Michelle Obama’s social media messaging portrays her as an activist mother—who espouses noncontroversial causes such as education and children’s health—and a nonpartisan figure with deep familial ties.     

An Interactional Space of Permanent Observability: WeChat and Reinforcing the Power Hierarchy in Chinese Workplaces

Does digital media empower or disempower workers? In existing studies on how information and communication technologies influence work, researchers investigate work–life boundaries and how workers use digital media to obtain more control. This article focuses on how digital media influences daily interpersonal interactions in the workplace: how does social media use influence workplace hierarchies and power dynamics? Based on 56 in‐depth interviews with WeChat users in Chinese workplaces, I find that lower‐ranked individuals were compelled to constantly express loyalty and appreciation, and publicly submit to their superordinates by clicking “like” or commenting on their WeChat posts. They also had to provide immediate and polite responses to their superordinates in WeChat group chats after work hours or to non‐work‐related issues. The distinctive features of online interaction—lack of physical interaction spaces, recordability of past conversations, and n‐adic nature of online disclosures—created an environment where past encounters were omnipresent and accessible, and placed workers under permanent observability. This social interaction environment leaves little room for forms of resistance and, in response, employees retreat into cynical performances of submission. This study finds that, under certain circumstances, WeChat use actually intensifies workplace hierarchies and power dynamics, thereby sharpening social inequality, rather than eliminating it.     

Reference Groups,Mob Mentality,and Bystander Intervention: A Sociological Analysis of the Lara Logan Case1

Despite that it involves mobs, bystanders, and political theater—three classic concepts in social psychology—academics have neglected analyzing the Lara Logan sexual assault case through these lenses. I explore how the case has been discussed in the media and suggest that analysis of the mob and bystanders has been, oddly, lacking. I argue that the best reference group to use when discussing this case is not other journalists or even other women who have survived assaults, but is instead enemy women who have survived politically motivated wartime gang sexual assaults. Most observers have overlooked the relevant reference group due to focusing on the traits of the victim, rather than on the context of the event itself. I argue that the case conforms to important dimensions: (1) the sociological norm that gang violence involves premeditation, (2) an agreement of values among perpetrators, and (3) that the violence itself lacked cultural and social legitimacy. Logan was likely targeted because she was a “stranger”; she was saved, in part, for the same reason. The case illustrates known patterns of mob mentalities and bystander intervention, yet it is unlike most cases of both nonwartime gender violence and violence against journalists.     

Gender,rank, and social networks on an enterprise social media platform

In this paper, we harness server-side data—540,000 messages generated by 2085 users on TamTamy, an Enterprise Social Media (ESM) platform—to examine how gender and rank shaped “homophily” (the tendency to connect with similar others) and centrality in an ESM network. Drawing on the logic of “distinctiveness theory,” which argues that the numeric rarity of a category in a given setting promotes the use of that category as a basis for connecting with others, we hypothesized and found: (a) the tendency to connect with same-gender others was stronger among women than among men; (b) the tendency to connect with same-rank others was stronger among high-ranking employees than among low-ranking employees; (c) for high-ranking men, rank was more important than gender as a basis for connecting with others; and (d) for low-ranking women, gender was more important than rank as a basis for connecting with others. We also found that whereas higher ranking individuals were more likely to be in central (bridging) positions in the overall network, gender was unrelated to network centrality. Our study suggests that the affordances of ESM for open and distributed communications notwithstanding, the social networks that emerge on ESM platforms may reinforce social stratification on some dimensions while diminishing it on others.