Advances in digital technologies and participatory culture have enabled the efficient use of crowdsourcing in a broad range of contexts, including journalism. Journalism is increasingly deploying crowdsourcing as a knowledge-search method and a means of engaging readers. Through crowdsourcing, journalists can tap into the collective intelligence of large online crowds. The knowledge-search mechanism is based on access to the information held by the crowd.
Using crowdsourcing, journalists can find otherwise inaccessible information that contributes to their investigations. In several countries, crowdsourced investigations have uncovered important news, including lawbreaking and corruption. Crowdsourcing can also unveil a broader range of perspectives about a story topic, leading to more inclusive and objective journalism. As a result, crowdsourcing can support the journalistic norms of accurate, objective, and transparent reporting. Moreover, it engages participants and fosters a stronger relationship between readers and journalists. Finally, in its use of crowdsourcing journalism can enact more efficiently in its monitorial role in society.
At the same time, however, crowdsourcing may compromise the journalistic goals of accuracy and objectivity. A crowd is a self-selected group, so its input reflects a participant bias. If this fact is overlooked, crowdsourcing can lead to biased reporting. Moreover, a direct connection with the crowd can increase pressure on journalists to conform to the crowd’s wishes instead of pursuing journalistic norms and news values. This pressure can be especially strong in crowdfunding, a subtype of crowdsourcing.
Article
Crowdsourcing in Journalism
Tanja Aitamurto
Article
Cultural Fusion Theory
Eric Mark Kramer
Cultural fusion is the process of integrating new information and generating new cultural forms. Cultural fusion theory recognizes the world as a churning information environment of cultural legacies, competing and complementing one another, forming novel cultural expressions in all aspects of life, including music, cuisine, pedagogy, legal systems, governance, economic behavior, spirituality, healthcare, norms of personal and interpersonal style, family structures, and so forth. This is a process of pan-evolution, involving countless channels, not merely two cultures coming together to form a third, hybrid culture. During this process the traditional pace and form of change is itself changing. Cultures are also transformed as a result of the churning process of an emergent global semantic field generated by countless networked exchanges.
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Cultural Imperialism and Communication
Oliver Boyd-Barrett
Central to many definitions of the term “cultural imperialism” is the idea of the culture of one powerful civilization, country, or institution having great unreciprocated influence on that of another, less powerful, entity to a degree that one may speak of a measure of cultural “domination.” Cultural imperialism has sometimes been described as a theory, especially where scholars build a case that the cultural influence of the stronger entity has had a pervasive, pernicious impact on the weaker.
The term evolved from 1960s neo-Marxist discourses within cultural, media, and postcolonial studies that contextualized the post–World War II “independence” wave of new nations emerging from colonial servitude. It was propelled by the writings of nationalist revolutionaries, revolutionary theorists, and their sympathizers of the 1950s and 1960s, but it has sweeping relevance across human history. The foremost western theorist of cultural imperialism in the West was Herbert Schiller. The concept was adopted and endorsed in the 1970s by both UNESCO and the Non-Aligned Movement.
Following Oliver Boyd-Barrett, the concept may denote a field of study embracing all relationships between phenomena defined as “cultural” and as “imperialism.” These encompass cultural changes that are (1) enforced on a weaker entity and (2) occur within both stronger and weaker entities through contact, contest, and resistance, including (3) assimilation of social practices encountered by the stronger in the weaker entity, and (4) original hybrids manifesting cultural traces of both stronger and weaker entities.
The concepts of cultural and media imperialism were much critiqued during the 1980s and 1990s, and many scholars preferred alternative concepts such as globalization and cultural globalization to analyze issues of intercultural contact, whether asymmetrical or otherwise. John Tomlinson critiqued the concept, identified four different discourses of cultural imperialism, and argued in favor of its substitution with the term “globalization.” Mirrlees has placed Tomlinson’s work in context by describing the dialectical—parallel but mutually aware—development of both a cultural imperialism and a cultural globalization paradigm. Both are influential in the 21st century.
“Imperialism” commonly references relations of conquest, dominance, and hegemony between civilizations, nations, and communities. “Cultural imperialism” relates primarily to the cultural manifestations of such relations. Culture and empire relate in many different ways, fueling different theories that often play on dichotomous discourses, including territorial/non-territorial, totalistic/partial, benign/malign, ephemeral/perpetual, superficial/essential, voluntary/involuntary, intended/unintended, welcome/unwelcome, forceful/peaceful, noticed/unnoticed, linear/interactive, homogeneous/heterogeneous, and acceded/resisted.
The concept has affinities with hegemony, the idea that stability in conditions of social inequality is achieved not mainly by force but by securing the consent of the masses (starting with co-option of their indigenous leaders)—through persuasion and propaganda—to the elite’s view of the world. This process is commensurate with forms of democracy that provide the appearance but not the reality of choice and control. Fissures within the ranks of the elites and within the masses create spaces for resistance and change.
Culture encompasses the totality of social practices of a given community. Social practices are manifest within social institutions such as family, education, healthcare, worship, labor, recreation, language, communication, and decision-making, as well as their corresponding domains. Any of these can undergo change following a society’s encounter with exogenous influences—most dramatically so when stronger powers impose changes through top-down strategies of command and influence.
Analysis of cultural imperialism often incorporates notions of media imperialism with reference to (1) print, electronic, and digital media—their industrialization, production, distribution, content, and capital accumulation; (2) cultural meanings that media evoke among receivers and audience cultures; (3) audience and media interactions in representations of topics, people, and ideas; and (4) relationships between media corporations and other centers of power in the reproduction and shaping of social systems.
Media are logically subsumed as important components of cultural imperialism. Yet the significance of media can be understated. The concept of mediatization denotes that “knowledge” of social practices draws heavily on media representations. Social practices that are experienced as direct may themselves be formed through exposure to media representations or performed for media.
Discourses of cultural imperialism speak to major current controversies, including: cultural suppression and genocide; ideas of “globalization”; influential economic models of “capitalism” and “neoliberalism”; ideologies that are embedded in the global spread of concepts such as “modern,” “progressive,” “growth,” “development,” “consumerism,” “free market,” “freedom,” “democracy,” “social Darwinism” and “soft power”; cultural specificity of criteria and procedures for establishing “truth”; instrumentalization for the purposes of cultural conquest of academic disciplines such as psychoanalysis, economics, social anthropology, or marketing, or environmental crises, especially as linked to western ideologies that underwrite humanity’s “right” to dominate nature.
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Cyberculture and Globalization
André Lemos
Globalization should be understood as a new economic, political, and cultural dynamic in what is now a global space. It is diagnosed based on a description of the different phases in its development, as an abstract, modern narrative reinforced by cyberculture, the information and communications technologies (ICTs) culture that emerged in the 1970s. Communications media have enabled the constraints and limits of space and time to be overcome, expanding human agency and connecting people and objects. Globalization is linked to the development of cyberculture precisely because this increases the number of different types of connections between people, products, and information all around the planet. It is constructed abstractly, as it does not pay the price of the connections and connectors that locate social relations. At the same time as it helps to create the fiction of “global globalization,” cyberculture reveals mediators that always connect objects, processes, people, and places, making a “localized globalization” visible. Rather than being merely deterritorializing, globalization produces connections and situations with the aid of connectors. Like every sociotechnical network, it is involved in the creation of new spatialities. The narrative of globalization ignores the connectors and overlooks the notion of territory, asserting the global nature of globalization when in fact it is the result of concrete mediations performed locally, produced by a specific and material network. It is important to politicize globalization. This requires “relocalization” of the global, that is, identifying specific, material situations. Having an appreciation of this dependence leads us to very concrete political attitudes. Attention is drawn to the need to give visibility to the mediators that anchor experiences, gainsaying the generic nature of globalization and allowing it to be politicized.
Article
Deaf or Hard of Hearing Message Recipient Sociodemographic Characteristics
Michael McKee
Hearing loss is common, with approximately 17% of the population reporting some degree of a hearing deficit. Hearing loss has profound impacts on health literacy, health information accessibility, and learning. Much of existing health information is inaccessible. This is largely due to the lack of focus on tailoring the messages to the needs of deaf and hard of hearing (DHH) individuals with hearing loss. DHH individuals struggle with a variety of health knowledge gaps and health disparities. This demonstrates the importance of providing tailored and accessible health information for this population. While hearing loss is heterogeneous, there are still overlapping principles that can benefit everyone. Through adaptation, DHH individuals become visual learners, thus increasing the demand for appropriate visual medical aids. The development of health information and materials suitable for visual learners will likely impact not only DHH individuals, but will also be applicable for the general population. The principles of social justice and universal design behoove health message designers to ensure that their health information is not only accessible, but also equitable. Wise application of technology, health literacy, and information learning principles, along with creative use of social media, peer exchanges, and community health workers, can help mitigate much of the health information gaps that exist among DHH individuals.
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Diffusion Theory in Integrative Approaches
Gary L. Kreps
Diffusion is the process through which new ideas, technologies, products, or processes are spread through communication among members of a social system via communication channels over time. Diffusion is a specialized form of communication that focuses on disseminating information about new ideas, products, technologies, services, or regulations. It is an especially important form of communication because it promotes social progress in the evaluation and adoption of important new ideas to address social issues. Diffusion helps to reduce uncertainty about how to address difficult issues and provides direction for achieving social goals.
A large body of research has been conducted from many disciplines on the diffusion of innovations since the original publication of Everett M. Rogers’ seminal book The Diffusion of Innovations in 1962, which is now in its fifth edition (2003). In this book, he introduced the Diffusion of Innovations (DOI) model, which describes a general process of adopting new ideas across multiple populations, cultures, and applications. This research has examined innovations in fields such as agriculture, engineering, sales, education, architecture, technology, public policy, and health care, and has been applied to a range of different issues, such as the adoption of new technologies, consumer purchasing behaviors, and public support for political issues and candidates, but has been especially influential in guiding strategic health promotion. The DOI model has contributed to a greater understanding of health behavior change, including adoption of health promotion recommendations. The model has led to a broad scope of practical applications for promoting public health.
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The Digital and the Postcolonial
Sangeet Kumar
The growth and expansion of the field of digital media studies and critical internet studies opens up opportunities for it to engage with other existing areas of scholarship that can infuse it with new questions, vantage points, and conceptual categories. The field of postcolonial studies that begins with an attempt to understand the material and symbolic dynamics of colonial rule and extends to making sense of the varied aspects of the postcolonial condition, is one such potential area. The existing debates within postcolonial theory about how the symbolic, psychic and material structures of the past animate and shape power dynamics in our world today hold many lessons for analyzing what is arguably the most global media technology ever. This article presents three areas of convergence between digital media studies and postcolonial studies in order to draw out their common concerns and show how the lessons from the latter can help animate scholarship of the former. The three areas that focus respectively on the consequences of the global digital divide, the nature of cultural power in the digital world and the emerging global division of labor each show the value of existing debates within postcolonial studies in deepening and expanding the scholarship in digital media studies. As they traverse national boundaries effortlessly, create unprecedented national and global solidarities, and seemingly democratize cultural and knowledge production, the web and the digital media ecosystems have also handed unprecedented abilities to nation-states and corporations to surveil, control, and modulate the behavior of citizens and users. The complex layers of these dynamics where Western digital platforms spread globally and expand their userbase under the guise of doing global good and spreading liberal values while authoritarian regimes often push back using tropes of anti-colonialism and anti-imperialism can best be understood when filtered through some of the analogous lessons of postcolonial theory. Bringing in those lessons about how the past lives in the present, control in freedom and the colonial in the postcolonial can make analyses of global power in the digital domain historically informed and theoretically nuanced.
Article
Disruption Information Seeking and Processing Model Applied to Health and Risk Messaging
Joshua A. Braun
The disruption information seeking and processing (DISP) model is a variation on the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model. While both the DISP and the original RISP models seek to predict how individuals will search for and attend to information in response to a perceived hazard, DISP aims to broaden analysts’ view of the sorts of information individuals may seek in such situations. It does so by expanding the repertoire of social psychology theory on which the model is constructed to include ideas from the literatures on sensemaking and identity maintenance.
A major argument of DISP is that on many occasions the information that people seek in response to a risk will not be directly related to the risk itself. For example, if you hear a news bulletin on an outbreak of food poisoning associated with ground beef, the next thing you look for may not be information on the risks of E. Coli, but a recipe for chicken. While the observation that people seek non-risk-related information in response to risks is a broad one, the DISP concerns itself with one particularly important aspect of this idea.
Specifically, based on research in the sensemaking and identity maintenance traditions, the DISP model proposes that, for information seekers, the self and the various identities in which individuals are personally invested are often as much the objects in need of interpretation as the hazardous environment. The implication of this is that when faced with a risk, individuals are likely to pay attention not just to information on the risk itself (the sort of information prioritized by RISP), but on the identities impacted by the hazard—for example, how a person’s acceptance of or strategy for coping with the risk might affect her self-image as being a good parent, a conscientious employer, etc.
The DISP also proposes that some hazard situations are likely to be more disruptive to individuals’ sense of self than others—namely instances where the individual has a high vested interest in a particular identity that is challenged by the hazard combined with a low sense of self-efficacy with respect to remediating the hazard. A typical example would be a parent who prides herself on keeping her kids safe, who finds out about an environmental risk to children in her neighborhood, but who cannot afford to move.
According to the DISP model, in such a circumstance the individual would likely become more attuned to information about the countervailing positive aspects of the neighborhood, such as good schools or a low crime rate. These sorts of information, which do not pertain to the risk directly, but are nonetheless sought as a consequence of the risk, exemplify the manner in which DISP seeks to expand the focus of the original RISP model. In the parlance of DISP, the model adds a “self-relevant” information dimension to RISP’s original focus on “risk-relevant” information.
Finally, the DISP model proposes the notion of “norm trumping,” suggesting that individuals experiencing disruption in the face of a hazard—who run afoul of the set of social norms associated with an identity in which they are highly invested—are likely to pay particular attention to self-relevant information that emphasizes alternative sets of norms that help to preserve or reconstitute a desired sense of self.
This model has yet to be tested empirically.
Article
Editorial Journalism and Newspapers’ Editorial Opinions
Julie Firmstone
Editorial journalism and newspapers’ editorial opinions represent an area of research that can make an important contribution to our understanding of the relationship between the press and politics. Editorials are a distinctive format and are the only place in a newspaper where the opinions of a paper as an organization are explicitly represented. Newspapers and the journalists who write editorials play a powerful role in constructing political debate in the public sphere. They use their editorial voice to attempt to influence politics either indirectly, through reaching public opinion, or directly, by targeting politicians. Editorial journalism is at its most persuasive during elections, when newspapers traditionally declare support for candidates and political parties. Despite the potential of editorial opinions to influence democratic debate, and controversy over the way newspapers and their proprietors use editorials to intervene in politics, editorial journalism is under-researched. Our understanding of the significance of this distinctive form of journalism can be better understood by exploring four key themes.
First, asking “What is editorial journalism?” establishes the context of editorial journalism as a unique practice with opinion-leading intentions. Several characteristics of editorial journalism distinguish it from other formats and genres. Editorials (also known as leading articles) require a distinctive style and form of expression, occupy a special place in the physical geography of a newspaper, represent the collective institutional voice of a newspaper rather than that of an individual, have no bylines in the majority of countries, and are written with differing aims and motivations to news reports. The historical development of journalism explains the status of editorials as a distinctive form of journalism. Professional ideals and practices evolved to demand objectivity in news reporting and the separation of fact from opinion. Historically, editorial and advocacy journalism share an ethos for journalism that endeavors to effect social or political change, yet editorial journalism is distinctive from other advocacy journalism practices in significant ways. Editorials are also an integral part of the campaign journalism practiced by some newspapers.
Second, research and approaches in the field of political communication have attributed a particularly powerful role to editorial journalism. Rooted in the effects tradition, researchers have attributed an important role to editorials in informing and shaping debate in the public sphere in four ways: (1) as an influence on readers, voters, and/or public opinion; (2) as an influence on the internal news agendas and coverage of newspapers; (3) as an influence on the agendas and coverage in other news media; and (4) as an influence on political or policy agendas. Theorizing newspapers as active and independent political actors in the political process further underpins the need to research editorial journalism. Third, editorial journalism has been overlooked by sociological studies of journalism practices. Research provides a limited understanding of the routines and practices of editorial journalists and the organization of editorial opinion at newspapers. Although rare, studies focusing on editorial journalism show that editorial opinion does not simply reflect the influence of proprietors, as has often been assumed. Rather, editorial opinions are shaped by a complex range of factors. Finally, existing research trajectories and current developments point to new challenges and opportunities for editorial journalism. These challenges relate to how professional norms respond to age-old questions about objectivity, bias, and partisanship in the digital age.
Article
Embarrassment and Health & Risk Messaging
Spring Chenoa Cooper and P. Christopher Palmedo
Embarrassment, according to Fischer and Tangney, is an “aversive state of mortification, abashment, and chagrin that follows public social predicaments.” It is usually related to our perceptions of how others perceive us as well as their judgments of us, and it is associated with a loss of self-esteem when we perceive that others have judged us as inadequate or incompetent. However, even mere exposure or attention publicly placed on someone can elicit embarrassment (think of someone pointing at you and laughing).
Embarrassment is considered a self-conscious emotion. Self-conscious emotions include those that are evoked by self-reflection and self-evaluation: embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride. Shame, an intense form of embarrassment, also has structural and larger social contexts, while embarrassment is more individually experienced. Self-conscious emotions play an important role in regulating behavior; they assist us in behaving according to social standards and guide us in responding when those rules are broken. While these emotions provide feedback in social situations, they also provide feedback for anticipated outcomes.
Embarrassment can play an important role in health, both in communication and behavior, and occurs through different forms. Primary embarrassment is the first rush of blood to the face and increased heart rate that usually lasts a few moments. Secondary embarrassment is the after-effect that shapes future behavior. Anticipatory embarrassment is the emotion surrounding the potential for embarrassment in an upcoming situation. Solitary embarrassment is the one that no one actually observes.
Three stigmatized areas of health—mental health, healthcare, and sexual health—may be assessed as case studies through which to understand the literature around embarrassment, as both an affect and an emotion.
Article
Ethical Issues and Considerations in Health and Risk Message Design
Nurit Guttman
The design and dissemination of health and risk messages invariably involves moral and ethical issues. The choice of the topics, the focus on particular recommended practices, the choice of particular groups to be the intended recipients of the messages and their inclusion in or exclusion from the message development process, all raise ethical issues. Further, the persuasive tactics used to influence people to change their attitudes and beliefs and to adopt recommended changes in their lives also raise ethical concerns. For example, persuasive tactics may infringe on people’s privacy when people view images they may find intrusive, offensive, or cause them distress. Tactics that “tug” at people’s emotions may infringe on their unhindered ability to make a conscientious decision. Employing digital media and sophisticated advertising and marketing tactics also elicits ethical challenges both related to their manipulative potential and their differential reach: all of which may contribute to social and health disparities. In addition, the practices recommended in health and risk messages may conflict with values people cherish. For example, people could be urged to change the way they communicate with their spouses on intimate issues, relinquish the consumption of favorite traditional foods—or messages may raise issues that recipients find taboo according to their culture or religious beliefs. Health and risk messages may have unforeseen and unintended adverse effects that could affect people’s emotional and physical aspects by inadvertently contributing to people’s sense of guilt through shaming or stigmatization. Also, on the cultural and social level, such messages may contribute to an idealization of a certain lifestyle or commercialization of products and celebrities associated with the messages.
Philosophical and ethical frameworks typically used in communication ethics, bioethics, communication campaigns, and social marketing literature emphasize the central guiding principles of personal autonomy and privacy with the aim to ensure equity and fairness. The obligation to avoid “doing harm” includes concerns regarding labeling, stigmatizing, and depriving; the obligation to help; the obligation to respect people’s autonomy to make free choices, particularly concerns regarding persuasion tactics and manipulations and the use of threat tactics, provocative appeals, distressing images, framing tactics, cultural sensitivity, and moral relativism; the obligation to obtain consent; the obligation to truthfulness; the obligation to sincerity; the obligation to correctness, certitude, and reliability; the issue of personal responsibility; equity obligations including concerns regarding segmentation and “targeting”; the obligation to comprehensibility; the obligation of inclusion; utility and efficiency considerations; the “harm reduction” approach; and concerns regarding social value priorities and “distortions,” which includes prosocial values as moral appeals.
Article
European Union Telecommunications Policy
Seamus Simpson
For most of the 20th century, telecommunications was a matter of national governance and thus of peripheral interest to the European Union. Then from the mid- to late-1980s, the EU began to develop an intensified policy package for the telecommunications sector. Telecommunications has now grown to become one of the most prominent and extensive policy areas addressed by the EU. But what accounts for such a remarkable Europeanization of telecommunications governance? In polar contrast to its origins, telecommunications has become a key focus in neoliberal economics and policy in effecting sectoral change. This development went hand in hand with arguments around propounding the benefits of economic globalization, which sustained a move to internationalize the organization of telecommunications to the European level along neoliberal lines. However, notwithstanding the remarkable growth of the EU governance framework for telecommunications, there are nuances in the analysis of the constant resistance to the wholesale Europeanization of telecommunications policy that provide evidence of a residual tension between national- and EU-level interests. This tension has been evident in policy proposals, decision-making, and implementation at key junctures for more since the late 1980s The policy has played key roles at different times, in particular, on the national level, involving governmental, regulatory, and commercial actors. Telecommunications thus provides a classic illustration of the balance that needs to be struck in the development of communications policies in the EU between supranational and intergovernmental interests. Now part of a converging electronic communications sector, this feature of telecommunications governance is as prominent today as it was in the very early days of EU telecommunications policy development in the mid- to late-1980s.
Article
Exemplification Theory in Health and Risk Messaging
Patric R. Spence, David Westerman, and Robert G. Rice
Humans often prefer representations that are cognitively easier to store, and such representations are easier to retrieve later to make judgments about the social world. Exemplification theory draws on physiological memory mechanisms and argues that simple, iconic, concrete, and emotionally arousing depictions of events (exemplars) are favored and thus more likely to be stored and used than are abstract, inconsequential depictions or representations. Inconsequential information or representations are forgotten because they are not processed as being essential for survival. Exemplified events vary on a continuum of how accurately they represent a larger occurrence of events. Through specific uses of pictures, quotes and other depictive strategies, concrete, iconic, and emotionally arousing information is often added to a story. Research has documented the strength of specific exemplars in creating inaccurate estimations of events and perceptions of severity and susceptibility. Moreover, in the presence of a risk, portrayals with exemplars have been shown to motivate individuals to intend to change behavior. Exemplification is a strong theory that is understudied and underutilized. The theory has strong explanatory, predictive, and organizing power, and it has application to phenomena in contexts such as media effects, persuasion, crisis and risk communication, health communication and public relations.
Article
Fear Arousal and Health and Risk Messaging
Jessica Gall Myrick and Robin L. Nabi
Fear is a negatively valenced discrete emotional state that is an inherent part of the human experience. With strong evolutionary roots, fear serves important functions, including alerting people to present threats and motivating action to avoid future threats. As such, fear is an emotion that frequently attracts the attention of scholars and message designers who hope to persuade audiences to change their behavior in light of potential threats to well-being and public safety. Several theories have aimed to describe the effects of fear-based appeals on audiences, focusing largely on the cognitive correlates of fear (i.e., severity and susceptibility) and their subsequent impacts on persuasive outcomes. However, more recent theorizing has returned to a focus on the influence that the emotion of fear itself has on attitude and behavior change. Given that many health-oriented fear appeals have been shown to evoke multiple emotions, including anger, disgust, and sadness, current theorizing has taken a mixed-emotions or emotional flow perspective to provide a deeper understanding of fear appeal effects. Further, individual differences have been considered to determine who is most likely to experience fear during and after message consumption.
In addition to fear appeals that purposefully aim to scare audiences to motivate attitude and behavior change, recent work suggests that fear can be generated by other forms of messages (e.g., news accounts, social media posts, interpersonal conversations) that may influence receivers’ approaches to health issues. Moreover, research also suggests that fear may motivate social sharing of messages, which can in turn allow for more widespread influence of fear-based messages.
Article
Flow Experiences and Media
Paula T. Wang, Kylie Woodman, and René Weber
“Flow” originated in the field of positive psychology and describes an optimal psychological state obtained when skilled individuals face challenges that leave them creatively stimulated, attentionally immersed, and flourishing. It was introduced into the communication literature at the turn of the 21st century, when media researchers began to revisit enduring questions surrounding media use, selection, and behavior. At the time, the established uses and gratifications (U&G) framework offered limited explanatory power to address newer questions arising from the emergence of interactive media such as the proliferation of video game consoles and advent of early social media. Flow has since become increasingly adopted within the field of media research as an alternate approach that addresses many of the criticisms of the U&G framework. Flow is characterized by a single key antecedent—that participants engage in an activity that maintains strict balance between task challenge and user skill. Video games in particular offer the ideal vessel for flow because they most easily fulfill the required challenge–skill balance due to their interactive and adaptable nature. Attempts to advance the development of the flow construct have faced challenges stemming from conceptual ambiguity and operational inconsistency, resulting in findings that are difficult to consolidate across studies. Despite these contentions, nascent research has been largely focused on identifying the correlates and predictors used to measure flow across new behavioral, psychophysiological, and neurological avenues. The development of more robust measures of flow will allow researchers to resolve lingering conceptual ambiguities and answer new and emerging questions, such as the length, depth, and stability of flow episodes and the role of flow in promoting problematic gaming behavior and behavioral addictions.
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
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak: Relevance for Communication Studies
Raka Shome
Gayatri Spivak is one of the foremost intellectuals of the 20th and 21st centuries. Although a literary critic, her work can be seen as philosophical as it is concerned with how to develop a transnational ethical responsibility to the radical “other,” who cannot be accessed by our discursive (and thus institutionalized) regimes of knowledge. Regarded as a leading postcolonial theorist, Spivak is probably best seen as a postcolonial Marxist feminist theorist, although she herself does not feel comfortable with rigid academic labeling. Her work is significantly influenced by the deconstructionist impulses of Jacques Derrida. Additionally, the influence of Gramsci and Marx is prominent in her thinking.
Spivak’s work has consistently called attention to the logics of imperialism that inform texts in the West, including in Western feminist scholarship. Relatedly, she has also written significantly on how the nation, in attempting to represent the entirety of a population, cannot access otherness or radical alterity. This is best seen in her work on the subaltern and in her intervention into the famous Indian group of Subaltern Studies scholars. Other related foci of her work have been on comprehending translation as a transnational cultural politics, and what it means to develop a transnational ethics of literacy.
Article
Gilles Deleuze and Communication Studies
J. Macgregor Wise
Gilles Deleuze (1925–1995) was one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century. His key writings include Difference and Repetition and The Logic of Sense as well as a number of commentaries on a range of philosophers and volumes on film, literature, and painting. His is well known for his collaborations with radical psychoanalyst Félix Guattari, including Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. Deleuze’s work focused on matters of immanence, becoming, and multiplicity. In Difference and Repetition he challenged the image of thought as representation and argued instead for the idea of thought as an encounter and event. In The Logic of Sense he explored the relation of language and event, developing his concept of sense. In his collaborations with Guattari they promoted the idea of thought as a rhizome and developed the concept of assemblage as a process of articulating and arranging bodies, discourses, affects, and other elements. Deleuze’s work therefore challenges common models and understandings of communication. In his later work he elaborated on the idea that communication was a means of control. Deleuze’s work has entered the field of communication scholarship through the influence of both Australian and North American Cultural Studies and through the uptake of his work on cinema and concepts of rhizome, assemblage, and control in media studies research.
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
Goals, Plans, and Action Models
Janet R. Meyer
The messages spoken in everyday conversation are influenced by participants’ goals. Interpersonal scholars have distinguished two types of goals thought to influence the wording of a message: instrumental goals (primary goals) and secondary goals. An instrumental goal is related to a speaker’s primary reason for designing the message. Instrumental goals would include goals such as to ask for a favor, seek information, apologize, give advice, or change the other person’s opinion. Secondary goals pertain to more general concerns. They include goals such as to manage one’s impression, avoid offending the hearer, and act consistently with one’s values. The ability to design a message that pursues an instrumental goal effectively while also addressing (or at least not conflicting with) relevant secondary goals is associated with greater communication competence. Considerable research has sought to explain differences in the ability to design messages that effectively address multiple goals. One such factor appears to be the extent to which a speaker can adapt the language of a message to the communication-relevant features of a specific situation or hearer. If a speaker’s primary goal is to seek a favor, relevant situation features may include the speaker’s right to ask, expected resistance, and qualities of the speaker–hearer relationship. A second behavior associated with the ability to produce multiple-goal messages is suggested by research on cognitive editing. The latter research indicates that the likelihood of producing a message that addresses relevant secondary goals will sometimes depend upon whether a speaker becomes aware, prior to speaking, that a planned message could have an unwanted outcome (e.g., the message may offend the hearer). When such outcomes are anticipated in advance, the message may be left unspoken or edited prior to speaking.
The ability to produce a message that achieves a speaker’s goals may also depend on the type of planning that precedes the design of a message. The plan-based theory of strategic communication views plans as hierarchical structures that specify goals and actions at different levels of specificity. The theory holds that a person pursuing a goal first tries to retrieve from memory a preexisting plan that could be modified for the current situation. When that is not possible, speakers must formulate a novel plan. Research employing indicants of fluency suggests that formulating a novel plan (which requires changes at a higher, more abstract level of a plan) makes heavier demands on limited capacity than does modifying an existing plan at a lower level of the hierarchy (e.g., speaking more slowly). Insight into how persons plan what to say has also come from research on imagined interactions, conflict management, anticipating obstacles to compliance, and verbal disagreement tasks. In an effort to better understand the design of messages in interpersonal settings, a number of scholars have proposed models of the cognitive processes and structures thought to be involved in designing, editing, and producing such messages. Action models of this sort, which generate testable hypotheses, draw from work in artificial intelligence, cognitive models of language production, and research on social cognition. Three such models are action assembly theory, the cognitive rules model, and the implicit rules model.
