Brazil holds one of the highest mortality rates by firearms. Criminal commands operate on the outskirts of Brazilian cities, emerging as instances of sociability and parallel power, becoming a reference in values supporting community life. Violence in Brazil is a relational problem, inscribed in a conflict rooted in long-lasting inequality that opposes “crime” as a social world to socially established “citizens.” People who live in territories subjected to the logics of crime need to develop coexistence strategies that include adaptive communication practices, which thrive as they help ensure survival. The anonymous voice of crime uses “forbidden funk” (funk proibido), a subgenre of funk music in Rio de Janeiro protected as cultural heritage and pursued by the courts for an apology for crime, to communicate. Adapting funk music as an interactional device, voices situated in a precarious and vulnerable social place use the communicative power of “proibido” to reiterate strategic communication practices to coexist with crime, within it or side by side. One of these practices is “representing crime” in “proibido,” through which the anonymous voice of crime borrows the voices of the MCs to not only claim for themselves the ethical responsibility of speaking on behalf of the “world of crime” but also request a new social place, aiming to break the cycle of isolation and incommunicability of life within the criminal commands, in a lasting social conflict. The complexity of the problem requires a robust and open methodology to observe communicative practices in their production context, without enclosing them in established aprioristic theories and concepts. Here a model of proibido communicative power is depicted from an articulation between (a) an understanding of communication as a tentative and probabilistic process, (b) the idea of interactional devices and language games as heuristics, and (c) situational analysis, a variant of grounded theory for the situated analysis of communicational practices.
Article
Funk “Proibido” Music and Communication of Criminal Commands in Brazil
Luciana Fernández Moretti
Article
Game Streaming: Implications for Streamers and Game Creators
Mark Johnson
Since the 2010s, the live streaming—live online video broadcast—of digital gaming has emerged as a significant Internet phenomenon. Millions of people stream their digital gaming for leisure, profit, or some combination, in the process often accumulating large communities of fans and followers who enjoy their streamed content, or simply broadcasting to small but often very dedicated handfuls of viewers. Game live streaming is also plagued by harassment and toxicity, but nevertheless continues to have a significant influence on gaming by generating famous and noteworthy moments within wider gaming culture. Game live streaming is far from a niche practice, and rather one with interest and applicability to a range of media studies, communication studies, game studies, and Internet research agendas.
Article
Gatekeeping and Journalism
Pamela J. Shoemaker
One of the oldest social science theories applied to the study of communication, the gatekeeping approach emphasizes the movement of bits of information through channels, with an emphasis on decision points (gates) and decision-makers (gatekeepers). Forces on both sides of a gate can either help or hinder the information’s passage through a channel. The gatekeeping process shapes and produces various images of reality, not only because some bits of information are selected and others rejected, but because communication agents put information together in different ways. In addition, the timing and repetition of information can affect the prominence of events or topics and can influence the probability of future information diffusion.
Gatekeeping was originally modeled as a series of linear processes within the mass media, but in the late 20th century the flow of information through the mass and social media began to interact. Information is now understood to flow among journalists, among social media users, and among agents of both types of media. All such communication agents are gatekeepers. In addition, we can study these networked interconnections as one level of analysis, with the supra-gatekeepers (such as Facebook or Twitter) adding their own gatekeeping processes over and beyond those of their own clients of the mass media.
In addition to looking at various pairwise relationships between gatekeepers, gatekeeping theory should go beyond to instead consider the entire web of gatekeepers as a whole or system. A system is composed of elements (gatekeepers), interactions (relationships among them), and a goal or function. Multiple functions have been proposed by 20th-century scholars (such as socialization, entertainment, or surveillance) for the mass media, but scholars should now consider the function(s) of the gatekeeping system (mass and social media, as well as supra-gatekeepers) as a whole. Although each type of medium can be analyzed as its own system, such analysis would not facilitate new thinking about the various ways in which these partial systems affect one another and how the whole system functions beyond the simple addition of its parts.
Article
Gender and Journalism
Linda Steiner
Understanding the role of gender in the newsroom involves tracing a shift from an initial consensus that women’s only journalistic role was to write with “a woman’s touch” about women, for women readers, to a claim that women should be allowed to produce the same “unmarked” news as men. The claim became that women’s forms—women’s sections or other materials intended for women audiences—represented professional ghettos, and that women were needed to produce better, more ethical journalism. That is, within the newsroom, gender was first dichotomized, rendering the interests of women and men as opposites, and then it claimed to be irrelevant. Feminist scholars point out that, over time, men have consistently tried to protect their status, jobs, and salaries, and have failed to acknowledge how journalism was set up as a male enclave with “macho” values and a culture that disadvantaged women, especially mothers, with its tradition of long and irregular hours and lack of childcare.
Research on gender and journalism can be divided into two categories: (a) gender “at work” in newsrooms (including opportunities or inequities in jobs, promotions, and salaries, as well as sexism), and (b) representations of women. Scholars often assume that the first issue over-determines the second. On both issues, research shows improvement, but also continuing problems. Now women journalists appear to be well established; the news includes issues associated with women’s quotidian concerns, and it takes women seriously. Yet a variety of gender divides continue to characterize journalism. Researchers find gendered patterns in coverage, especially in politics and sports. Women television journalists are routinely sexualized, and their high visibility in television broadcasting—through explicit scrutiny of their bodies, hairstyles, clothing, and voices—is countered by their invisibility in management. Gendered double standards and a glass ceiling continue to stymie the promotion of women to key decision-making and governance positions in print and broadcast news organizations. Moreover, women are far from enjoying equity in the online context.
Women continue to be concentrated in low-status media outlets and beats: they dominate community, small-town, and regional news organizations, and they produce “soft news,” human-interest stories and features. Men still dominate, although they do not monopolize, most of the high status areas of news production, particularly politics and business, as well as the lucrative and popular area of sports, a highly gendered and sexist domain. The most overtly gendered arena is war correspondence. Women who report on war and conflict are judged by very different standards than men. In particular, mothers are condemned when they go off to dangerous conflict areas, although fathers who cover war continue to be largely immune from public criticism. Women war reporters run a high risk of sexual violence and harassment, although women who have been sexually attacked rarely tell their supervisors—probably for fear of being pulled off an assignment.
Countless platforms are now available to citizens to disseminate their views as citizen journalists, including blogs and Twitter; these provide opportunities for challenging gender roles and democratizing relations between men and women. On the other hand, social media threaten the business model of professional journalism; the resulting trend to part-time, freelance, and even unpaid work creates a precarious and potentially highly feminized labor force.
Article
The Globalization of Superheroes: Diffusion, Genre, and Cultural Adaptations
Kyle Hammonds
Superheroes are a global phenomenon. The superhero genre has been proliferated through modern industrial societies by way of movies, television, comics, and other forms of popular media. Although virtually every nation in the world has heroic myths, the modern superhero, as marked by the inception of recent American comics heroes in 1929, is a uniquely Western invention. Superheroes are “Western” insofar as they embody and exhibit Western civic values, such as democracy, humanism, and retributive justice. These characters have been communicatively incorporated into globalization processes by means of diffusion and thereby enact aspects of cultural imperialism. Even so, superhero figures have been in high demand across many populations for their entertainment value. As superheroes have diffused in non-Western cultures, they have not only been absorbed by new cultures but also refigured and adapted. These non-Western adaptations have had a recursive influence, such as the global popularity of Japanese manga. The recursive relationship between Western superheroes and their non-Western adaptations implies superheroes are an important aspect of cultural fusion in global popular culture.
Article
Global Jihad and International Media Use
el-Sayed el-Aswad, M. Joseph Sirgy, Richard J. Estes, and Don R. Rahtz
Globalization and international media are potent contributors to the rise of the Islamist global jihad. Widespread digital communication technologies that connect people all over the world are a substantial component of globalization. Over the past three decades, “virtual jihad” has emerged as a potent disseminator of radical religious-political ideologies, instilling fear and fostering instability worldwide. Western and global media, while often misrepresenting Islam and Muslims, have played a significant role in disseminating jihadist ideologies. The involvement of global jihadists (mujāhidīn) across myriad media outlets and platforms has allowed them to promote their agenda around the world. Using the Internet and media outlets, global jihadists are able to attract and recruit people to their ranks in an accelerated manner. Jihadists have engaged in media activities that have empowered and expanded the global jihad movement, even in the face of increased mitigation efforts.
Article
The Global Open Society: Civilizations and Cultural Interpretations
Algis Mickunas
Mass media are global and involve numerous and varied cultures whose customs, languages, beliefs, and arts are different. The differences require bridges for mutual understanding, and such bridges are offered as cross-cultural communication. The latter point raises a question of translation and interpretation, showing how cultures are suppressed, absorbed by other cultures, or how they survive. Historical examples will be provided to form basic canons for an understanding of cross-cultural interpretation. The analyses of interpretation suggest that cultures belong to civilizations with more fundamental and more encompassing structures, capable of providing frameworks for their own cultures. At this level, cultures become symbolic designs of a given civilization. With this turn, cross-cultural communication is shifted toward comparative civilizations and their capacity to offer more fundamental frameworks of cross-cultural communication. Moving through major theories of comparative civilization, the critical questions are as follows: Does a specific theory favor the structure of one civilization over others, and does it contain features that do not belong to other civilizations? In brief, do scholars of civilizations assume the concepts of their civilization and contextualize all other civilizations in one context? In spite of these questions, civilizations, by virtue of their cultures as symbolic designs, offer phenomena that allow the formation of basic rules available in all civilizations. By comparing such rules, it is possible to decipher the way that such rules form the communicative ground at the level of cultural symbolic designs as interpretations of the broader structures—civilizations.
Article
The Global Open Society: Dialogue in Communication
Algis Mickunas
Dialogue and its extension to polylogue are presented as an intersubjective basis of communication. The intersubjective aspect cannot be explained by any discipline without a contradiction, since any explanation would require intersubjective awareness. While necessary, dialogue requires a third aspect: dialogue about something, a theme, a subject matter, a problem, a point of disagreement, such that the topic sets a limit to the dialogical partners. This third aspect shifts the discussion away from subject-to-subject encounter as inadequate and moves to the subjects as partners who first are engaged in a dialogue about something. While speaking to someone about something, there is a mutual exchange of awareness and a broadening of horizons of both, with an addition of others who are co-present even if they are not empirically available. To speak to someone of physical laws is also to speak with Newton, Einstein, Planck, and others who form a polylogical field—forming an extension of the awareness of dialogical partners. The issue that arises is whether the individual can form her own position, or whether she is dominated by a historical tradition of interpretation. The dialectical debate between Habermas and Gadamer shows the problem, which is finally resolved by an extension of dialogue through education. The final and most concrete aspect of dialogical communication is present at the level of praxis as bodily activity which is equally intercorporeal. We build our world and thus our history and form a depth of intercorporeal communication of what we can do.
While the dialogical domain is the focus of this research, it also includes suggestions on critical evaluation of specific theories and mutual controversies among theorists, e.g., Habermas and Gadamer. Such controversies are necessary to show how dialogical procedures not only posit different theoretical positions but help such positions to become clearer and more articulated.
Article
Global Political Economy, Platforms, and Media Industries
Dal Yong Jin
Critical political economy has emphasized the tensions and power relations between global forces and local forces as well as the political and the economic. Since media ownership has become one of the major elements to widening the existing gaps between a few powerful actors and the majority of underprivileged players, critical political economy focuses on the significant role of ownership in media and communication studies. Critical political economy has also continued to emphasize the structural change in media industries in the broader socio-economic milieu. In the early 21st century, critical political economy has shifted its emphasis toward digital platforms, such as over-the-top service platforms like Netflix, social media platforms like YouTube, and search engines like Google, as these digital platforms supported by artificial intelligence algorithms and big data are primary actors in the global cultural industries. They are not only shifting the milieu surrounding cultural industries but also transforming the entire value chain in cultural production, including the production of popular culture, the circulation of cultural products, and the consumption of cultural content. Critical political economy needs to analyze power relations between platform owners and platform users as well as between a few countries in the Global North that possess these digital platforms and the majority of countries in the Global South that, owing to the lack of capital, manpower, and know-how, cannot advance their own platforms. This implies that critical political economy needs to analyze how global digital platforms as part of Western cultural industries have controlled and manipulated local cultural industries. By discussing the change and continuity in the cultural industries in the digital media–driven media environment, which expedites the concentration of the industry, new international division of labor, and platform imperialism practice, critical political economy will shed light on the existing debates about power relations within the broader society.
Article
Glocalization of the Television Format in China
Yang Liu
For the past two decades, global television formats have received more attention in academia. Being theorized as mass-produced transnational cultural products, global TV formats have been articulated as dynamic junctures of cultural imperialism, media imperialism, and cultural homogenization in the realms of media and popular culture. These theoretical approaches, however, adopt a dualistic understanding of globality and locality, ignoring the multi-relational interactions between discourses of the global format and the local context constrained by specificities of global TV formats’ importing countries. Compared to the notion of globalization, glocalization attends more to the dialectical relationship between the global and the local, with its emphasis on postmodern understanding of local contents’ reproduction or repackaging within the framework delineated by global TV formats. With global TV formats’ transnational flow, these cultural commodities have gone through complex reproduction or adaptation in order to fit importing countries’ specific cultural, social, and even political milieus. Besides adaptation, global TV formats are inevitably subject to incompatible constraints in importing countries and thus exposed to disputes that may bring damages to their sustainability outside of their countries of origin. In order to present a comprehensive review of cross-border transaction and glocalization of global TV formats, it is necessary to examine this phenomenon’s origin and global expansion and explore its entrance into China. This can be done by analyzing the rise and fall of The Voice as a representative case and as one of the most successful global TV formats in the Chinese context within the framework of glocalization.
Article
Government-Driven Incentives to Improve Health
Peter Anderson
Worldwide, key behavioral risk factors for ill-health and premature death include smoking, alcohol, too much or too little of several dietary factors, and low physical activity. At least three structural factors (biological attributes and functions, population size and structure, and wealth and income disparities) modify the global impact that the risk factors have on health; without accounting for these structural drivers, the effect of government-driven incentives to act on the behavioral risk factors for improved health will be suboptimal. The risk factors and their impact on health are further driven by malleable circumstantial drivers, including technological developments, exposure to products, social influences and attitudes, and potency of products. Government-driven incentives, which can be both positive and negative, can act on the circumstantial drivers and can impact on the behavioral risk factors to improve or worsen health. Government-driven incentives include a range of policies and measures: policies that reduce exposure; regulation of the private sector; research and development to reduce potency; resource allocation for advice and treatment; direct incentives on individual behavior; and, managing co-benefits and adverse side effects. Within a framework of government-driven whole-of-society approaches to improve health, an accountability system is needed to identify who or what causes what harm to health to whom. A health footprint, modeled on the carbon footprint is proposed as the accounting system.
Article
Health-Related Warning Message Processing
Christopher B. Mayhorn and Michael S. Wogalter
Warnings are risk communication messages that can appear in a variety of situations within the healthcare context. Potential target audiences for warnings can be very diverse and may include health professionals such as physicians or nurses as well as members of the public. In general, warnings serve three distinct purposes. First, warnings are used to improve health and safety by reducing the likelihood of events that might result in personal injury, disease, death, or property damage. Second, they are used to communicate important safety-related information. In general, warnings likely to be effective should include a description of the hazard, instructions on how to avoid the hazard, and an indication of the severity of consequences that might occur as a result of not complying with the warning. Third, warnings are used to promote safe behavior and reduce unsafe behavior. Various regulatory agencies within the United States and around the globe may take an active role in determining the content and formatting of warnings.
The Communication-Human Information Processing (C-HIP) model was developed to describe the processes involved in how people interact with warnings and other information. This framework employs the basic stages of a simple communication model such that a warning message is sent from one entity (source) through some channel(s) to another (receiver). Once warning information is delivered to the receiver, processing may be initiated, and if not impeded, will continue through several stages including attention switch, attention maintenance, comprehension and memory, beliefs and attitudes, and motivation, possibly ending in compliance behavior. Examples of health-related warnings are presented to illustrate concepts. Methods for developing and evaluating warnings such as heuristic evaluation, iterative design and testing, comprehension, and response times are described.
Article
Hope and Health and Risk Messaging
Amy E. Chadwick
Hope has been defined in primarily two ways, and both have implications for message design within health and risk communication. First, hope has been defined as a way of thinking, or disposition, that affects how people pursue goals. Dispositional hope manifests in beliefs about one’s capacity to initiate and sustain action toward goals (agency) and one’s ability to generate ways to reach those goals. Dispositional hope has been associated with positive physical and mental health outcomes. For example, high-hope women have greater intentions to engage in cancer prevention behaviors than do low-hope women. Numerous studies have associated higher hope with better pain management, and people who are higher in hope have a greater pain tolerance than people lower in hope. Hope is also related to better psychological adjustment.
Much of the research on dispositional hope focuses on correlating hope with a variety of positive health and non-health outcomes; however, psychotherapeutic interventions have also been designed to increase dispositional hope. These interventions have shown improvements in health-related outcomes. Although their potential is not yet realized, interventions for developing dispositional hope could improve compliance with medical recommendations, increase adoption of health behaviors, and decrease risk behaviors.
The second way that hope has been defined is as a discrete emotion. Discrete emotions are brief, intense, psychological, and evaluative reactions directed at external stimuli (e.g., people, events, or objects). In response to these external stimuli, emotions help individuals adapt to their environment by activating a unique pattern of thoughts (cognitions), physiological changes, subjective feelings, motor expressions, and action (or behavioral) tendencies.
Lazarus’s cognitive-mediational theory has been one of the most influential theories of discrete emotions that includes a definition of hope. Lazarus identifies the core relational theme of hope as “fearing the worst but yearning for better.” Lazarus deems hope to be a problematic emotion because he believes hope contains both positive and negative elements. Despite uncertainty about the exact nature of hope, Lazarus believes that hope is vital to coping with stress. Hope enables people to believe in the possibility of better circumstances and therefore is critical as a coping mechanism against despair. Lazarus does not provide guidance for what a message might need to include to evoke hope.
Drawing on Lazarus and appraisal theories in general, MacInnis and de Mello suggest tactics that consumer marketing advertisements could use to induce hope. Specifically, the authors focus on turning “impossibility into possibility” and enhancing “yearning.” De Mello and MacInnis also theorize that hope can lead to motivated processing of information resulting in both positive (e.g., coping, well-being, and goal achievement) and negative (e.g., risky behavior, self-deception) outcomes. Unfortunately, the theorizing of de Mello and MacInnis was never empirically tested.
To further explore how feelings of hope are created, Prestin examined underdog narratives in entertainment media. Underdog narratives show characters who are attempting to meet a goal despite unfavorable circumstances and odds. These narratives evoke hope and make people more motivated to meet their own personal goals. Although their potential has not been fully explored, underdog narratives may assist individuals in overcoming challenging circumstances, such as battling addiction or developing new health habits. There are numerous mechanisms still to be examined that may explain the effects of underdog narratives beyond their ability to evoke hope.
Recently, Chadwick defined hope as a future-oriented, discrete emotion that focuses on an opportunity to achieve a desired future outcome. Her definition builds on the work of Lazarus and Roseman and has implications for the design of messages that evoke hope. According to Chadwick, hope is evoked by appraisals of a future outcome as (a) consistent with goals (goal congruence), (b) possible but not certain (possibility), (c) important (importance), and (d) leading to a better future (future expectation). All four of these appraisals combine to create a perception of opportunity and the discrete emotion hope. Hope motivates behavior by focusing one’s thoughts on capitalizing on an opportunity. Chadwick states that hope also involves (a) an approach action tendency that motivates individuals to take, or continue, action to achieve the desired outcome, (b) increased heart rate and skin conductance, (c) an open facial expression, heightened focus, and alert body posture, and (d) a feeling of eager attention.
Chadwick’s definition has clear implications for developing messages that evoke hope. Messages designed to create appraisals of the importance, goal congruence, positive future expectation, and possibility of a future event evoke hope and are called hope appeals. Like other theoretical explications of emotional appeals, a hope appeal has two components: (a) the inducement of hope through the presentation of an opportunity and (b) the presentation of recommended actions to achieve the desired outcome. The recommended actions component includes information designed to (a) increase the receiver’s perception of his or her ability to perform the recommended action (i.e., self-efficacy) and (b) demonstrate the ability of the recommended actions to achieve the desired outcome (i.e., response efficacy).
Empirically, scholars have tested the effects of hope and messages that evoke hope. Hope appeals increase attention to messages about climate change and increase mitigation behavioral intention and mitigation behavior. In addition, feelings of hope increase interest in climate change protection and are positively correlated with pro-environmental behaviors and support for climate change policies. Feelings of hope significantly predict interest in climate protection, self-efficacy, interpersonal communication intention, information seeking intention, and behavioral intention. Hope and hopeful narratives have also been associated with greater perceived message effectiveness and more agreement with the message content. After a stressful experience that accelerates heart rate, evoking hope decelerates heart rate and decreases state anxiety. This research provides evidence that messages that evoke hope can counter the psychological and physiological effects of stressful events. In addition, researchers have examined the effects of hope on a variety of health, persuasion, political communication, and marketing outcomes. Preliminary evidence indicates that hope appeals are equally as or more effective than guilt and fear appeals at increasing interpersonal communication intention, self-efficacy, information seeking intention, and behavioral intention. In addition, hope appeals create less reactance (anger) than fear appeals. Together these results indicate that hope and hope appeals have substantial potential to influence health and risk behavior.
Article
Identification and Parasocial Relationships With Video Game Characters
Arienne Ferchaud
The field of game studies rests on how video game players use their relationships with their avatars to fulfill the goals of the game. From studies on the effects of violence in video games to examinations of serious games for entertainment and/or education, all areas presume a level of connection between player and the avatar they control. This relationship is first defined by the type of play style—that is, the approach the player takes when sitting down to play. Next is the avatar—the graphical representation of the player—that will differ drastically from game to game. Based on these two individuals, one actual the other simulated, a relationship of some sort is built. This relationship can be monadic, meaning the player fully identifies with the avatar to the point that they are the same being. In contrast, it could be dyadic, in which a separation exists between player and avatar more akin to a parasocial relationship (PSR). Further, some scholars have suggested that the relationship between player and avatar exists on a continuum known as player-avatar relationships. Concepts like presence and empathy can be used to predict the strength of the relationship between player and avatar. This bond is incredibly important and can be used to predict both enjoyment of the game and cultivate story-consistent attitudes. Future research should examine more closely the nature of PSRs between avatar and player, as this context is relatively unexplored.
Article
Identity and Online Groups
Marko Siitonen
Questions related to identity have been central to discussions on online communication since the dawn of the Internet. One of the positions advocated by early Internet pioneers and scholars on computer-mediated communication was that online communication would differ from face-to-face communication in the way traditional markers of identity (such as gender, age, etc.) would be visible for interlocutors. It was theorized that these differences would manifest both as reduced social cues as well as greater control in the way we present ourselves to others. This position was linked to ideas about fluid identities and identity play inherent to post-modern thinking. Lately, the technological and societal developments related to online communication have promoted questions related to, for example, authenticity and traceability of identity.
In addition to the individual level, scholars have been interested in issues of social identity formation and identification in the context of online groups and communities. It has been shown, for example, how the apparent anonymity in initial interactions can lead to heightened identification/de-individuation on the group level. Another key question related to this one is the way group identity and identification with the group relates to intergroup contact in online settings. How do people perceive others’ identity, as well as their own, in such contact situations? To what extent is intergroup contact still intergroup contact, if the parties involved do not perceive it as such? As online communication continues to offer a key platform for contact between various types of social groups, questions of identity and identification remain at the forefront of scholarship into human communication behavior in technology-mediated settings.
Article
The Independent Media of New Zealand
Linda Jean Kenix
New Zealand has high global measures for press freedom, democracy, and wealth. Historically, if a country has had strong index rankings for press freedom, democracy, and wealth, they also have a robust independent media system. However, that has not been the case in New Zealand where the independent media is lacking, despite the fact the country ranks extremely highly for press freedom, democracy, and wealth. The lack of a robust independent media in New Zealand may be due to five unique reasons: the small size of the country, the reliance on international news, a wariness toward the entire media landscape, the reserved culture of New Zealand, and the flood of content online.
Article
The Korean Wave and Korean Dramas
Hyejung Ju
For the past two decades, the Korean Wave has been recognized in many parts of the world, and has articulated dynamic junctures of globalization, regionalization, and localization in the realms of media and popular culture. Due to online media platforms such as streaming services, television content has been diversifying and increasing its transnational circulation. More recently, the outbound scope of K-drama and K-pop has further reached dispersed global audiences, most of whom are not Korean media consumers or fans, thanks to active use of social media, such as YouTube, in transnational media consumption. The Korean Wave can be a meaningful contra-flow in transnational pop culture. Moreover, the Korean Wave is an evolutionary cultural flow, as traced in the history of its growth. The Wave has been experiencing continuities and discontinuities in its stream for years, along with its popularity cycle, and interestingly disjuncture has shaped it differently. A set of studies of the Korean Wave should map out the presence of the Wave in the big picture of cultural globalization, beyond the pre-existing geocultural divisions. The very recent Korean Wave drives not only the flow of various kinds of content and formats but also reciprocal interchanges of diverse levels of human, financial, technological, and cultural elements; this reconstructs implied meanings of the Korean Wave and its globalizing phenomena.
Article
Mass Communication and Policy Gatekeeping
Richard T. Craig
Who filters through information and determines what information is shared with media audiences? Who filters through information and determines what information will not be shared with media audiences? Ultimately, who controls the flow of information in the media? At times commentary pertaining to media content references media as an omnipotent individual entity selecting the content transmitted to the public, reminiscent of a Wizard of Oz manner of the all-powerful being behind the curtain. Overlooked in this perception is the reality that in mass media, there are various individuals in positions of power making decisions about the information accessed by audiences of various forms of media. These individuals are considered gatekeepers: wherein the media functions as a gate permitting some matters to be publicized and included into the public discourse while restricting other matters from making it to the public conscience.
Media gatekeepers (i.e., journalists, editors) possess the power to control the gate by determining the content delivered to audiences, opening and closing the gate of information. Gatekeepers wield power over those on the other side of the gate, those seeking to be informed (audiences), as well as those seeking to inform (politics, activists, academics, etc.). The earliest intellectual explanation of gatekeeping is traced to Kurt Lewin, describing gatekeeping as a means to analyze real-world problems and observing the effects of cultural values and subjective attitudes on those problems like the distribution of food in Lewins’s seminal study, and later modified by David Manning White to examine the dissemination of information via media. In an ideal situation, the gatekeepers would be taking on the challenge of weighing the evidence of importance in social problems when selecting among the options of content and information to exhibit. Yet, decisions concerning content selection are not void of subjective viewpoints and encompass values, beliefs, and ideals of gatekeepers. The subjective attitudes of gatekeepers influence their perspective of what qualifies as newsworthy information. Hence, those in the position to determine the content transmitted through media exercise the power to shape social reality for media audiences. In the evolution of media gatekeeping theory three models have resulted from the scholarship: (1) examination of the one-way flow of information passing through a series of gates before reaching audiences, (2) the process of newsroom personnel interacting with people outside of the newsroom, and (3) the direct communication of private citizens and public officials. In traditional media and newer forms of social media, gatekeeping examination revolves around analysis of these media organizations’ news routines and narratives. Gatekeeping analysis observes human behavior and motives in order to make conceptualizations about the social world.
Article
Measuring Graph Literacy
Rocio Garcia-Retamero, Dafina Petrova, Adam Feltz, and Edward T. Cokely
Graphical displays generally facilitate the communication of complex information and are ubiquitous in media. Unfortunately, people differ in their ability to extract data and meaning from graphical representations of quantitative information (i.e., graph literacy). This means that for some people, even well-designed, simple graphs will cause confusion and misunderstanding. Research on the psychology of graph comprehension focuses on two instruments that efficiently assess fundamental graph literacy among diverse adults. The Objective Graph literacy scale is a well-established instrument with good psychometric properties that measures skill via cognitive performance testing (e.g., interpreting and evaluating various graphs). The recently developed Subjective Graph Literacy scale is a brief self-report of graph literacy that can outperform the objective test in notable ways, while reducing text anxiety. Emerging applications in clinical research and practice, including computerized decision aids, can personalize content as a function of one’s graph literacy.
Article
Media and Emotion
Robin L. Nabi
Emotion has been incorporated into media effects research in multiple ways, which can be broadly summarized as considering emotion as a predictor of media selection, an outcome of media exposure, and a mediator of other psychological and behavioral outcomes resulting from media exposure. Specifically, evidence suggests that the desire for particular feeling states influences the media that people choose to consume. Much research also considers the feeling states resulting from exposure, including fright reactions and enjoyment. Finally, there are well-established lines of inquiry into how emotional responses to media influence the processing of those messages in terms of attention, processing depth, and cognitive and behavioral outcomes. More contemporary research is extending these research programs, examining how emotional media messages are socially shared with others as well as the positive emotional effects that may emerge in response to media exposure.
