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The current period of disruptive social change is inextricably bound up with new means and modes of communication, information, and media streams. The Communication, Information Technologies & Media Sociology section of the American Sociological Association (CITAMS) locates these factors at the center of our collective interests, investigating them through a plethora of methods, theories, and empirical cases. Each year, CITAMS runs a special issue in ICS showcasing select works presented at the previous year's American Sociological Association conference and the affiliated Media Sociology preconference. Papers in the 2022 CITAMS Special Issue reflect a social context defined by a prolonged global pandemic and wrought by democratic uncertainty. Across these social circumstances, technology and media loom large. Simultaneously, everyday life continues and classic CITAMS scholarship sustains relevance for the ways people interact, construct identity, consume, and mobilize. All of this and more are contained in the pages of this year's Special Issue, from which readers can get a sense of what CITAMS has to offer and consider how their own work may fit within the broad CITAMS umbrella. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
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This paper describes a 2020 disinformation campaign promoting the unsubstantiated claim that the novel coronavirus is the product of a Chinese bioweapons program. Exploiting a vulnerability in open-access scientific publishing, the campaign was based on papers posted to an online preprint repository designed to accelerate the diffusion of scientific knowledge. This provided the campaign with an air of scientific legitimacy, helped it reach millions of Americans, and muddied public discourse over the origins of SARS-CoV-2. This case study offers insights into the tactics and practices of media manipulation, the contested nature of modern epistemic systems, the interplay of technical and social systems, and the vulnerability of open systems to manipulation. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
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News media plays a vital role in communicating scientific evidence to the public during the COVID-19 pandemic. Such communication is important for convincing the public to follow social distancing guidelines and to respond to health campaigns such as vaccination programmes. However, newspapers were criticised that they focus on the socio-political perspective of science, without explaining the nature of scientific works behind the government's decisions. This paper examines the connections of the nature of science categories in the COVID-19 era by four local newspapers in the United Kingdom between November 2021 to February 2022. Nature of science refers to different aspects of how science works such as aims, values, methods and social institutions of science. Considering the news media may mediate public information and perception of scientific stories, it is relevant to ask how the various British newspapers covered aspects of science during the pandemic. In the period explored, Omicron variant was initially a variant of concern, and an increasing number of scientific evidence showed that the less severity of this variant might move the country from pandemic to endemic. We explored how news articles communicate public health information by addressing how science works during the period when Omicron variants surge. A novel discourse analysis approach, epistemic network analysis is used to characterise the frequency of connections of categories of the nature of science. The connection between political factors and the professional activities of scientists, as well as that with scientific practices are more apparent in left-populated and centralist outlets than in right-populated news outlets. Among four news outlets across the political spectrum, a left-populated newspaper, the Guardian, is not consistent in representing relations of different aspects of the nature of scientific works across different stages of the public health crisis. Inconsistency of addressing aspects of scientific works and a downplay of the cognitive-epistemic nature of scientific works likely lead to failure in trust and consumption of scientific knowledge by the public in the healthcare crisis.
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Based upon a mixed-methods follow-up exploratory model, we examined the link between trust and coping during the early outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic at the society level. Qualitative data were collected from the supportive messages written by 10,072 community adults across 35 societies. Trust and coping were used as the two pre-defined themes in the conceptual content analysis. Five subthemes emerged from the theme trust, depicting five distinct trusted targets: God, a larger us, country/government, science/healthcare, and the affected. Six subthemes emerged from the theme coping, depicting six distinct coping strategies: interpersonal/social coping, religious/spiritual coping, acceptance, blame, wishful thinking, and strength-based coping. A follow-up quantitative investigation also showed that four society-level factors (viz., individualism, cultural tightness, globalization, and severity of pandemic) had differential effects on people's trusted targets and ways of coping with the pandemic. Our study made both methodological and practical contributions to cross-cultural research on COVID-19 by using a mixed-methods approach in a multinational study and demonstrating the importance of making meaningful virtual connection during a time of physical distancing.
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This paper analyzes the media frames adopted by the official WeChat and Sina Weibo accounts of the People's Daily between January 1 and December 31, 2020, for reports about female medical personnel involved in pandemic prevention and control. Although the number of female medical personnel involved in pandemic prevention and control far exceeded that of their male counterparts, the extent of media reports on the former was far less than that of the latter. The human interest frame about female medical personnel was mainly applied, while the use of the action frame was less frequent, which highlighted the gender identity and family role of these women but weakened their professional identity. This was not conducive to praising the contributions of female medical personnel in fighting the pandemic. The media frames of reporting medical personnel in WeChat and Sina Weibo accounts of the People's Daily are not always the same. After Wuhan's lockdown ended on April 8, the proportion of the human interest frame of the report text of female medical personnel decreased, and the proportion of the action frame increased, while the proportion of the human interest frame of the report text of male medical personnel increased and the proportion of the action frame decreased. Previous studies mainly analyzed the use of the media frames of female news personalities, but few studies focused on whether women had the possibility of breaking away from the gender media frames. This study shows that some female medical personnel with exceptional professional competence are likely to transcend the gender media frames and receive similar coverage to that of male medical professionals, like Li Lanjuan and Chen Wei.
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Malatino compares two billboards, one declaring "Trans lives are sacred," found in Detroit in July 2019, and one stating "Trans people deserve health care, support, justice, safety, love," stationed near the border of Joshua Tree and Twentynine Palms in November 2018 (2020, 25–26 and 30–31). (Nothing works for staving off isolation, illness, and routine workplace discrimination like stabbing your friends dressed as a neon cartoon alien with funky accessories, am I right?) Play, laughter, and jokes—collective endeavors, done with others, whether real or imaginary, present or distant (Freud 1905, Bergson 1912)—are key to trans care via media2. Playing together, via media, including the comedy of our own making, on the other hand, can take on a form of care, and we in turn keep each other alive. The newest iteration of the decades-long irony wherein cis/straight people reveal themselves as relying on the very healthcare they would deny trans and queer folks but with a new toxic twist, a spoof image of the cover of trans theorist Paul B. Preciado's Testo Junkies with Rogan photoshopped on the cover was soon circulating through the trans internet.
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The COVID-19 pandemic had a significant impact on many areas of the workforce, including internship programs. The education sector in general started integrating technology as a kind of fusion of technology in different ways. The internship course was one of the important educational programs that get affected by the pandemic and there was a deep need for technology fusion to overcome the hard times. This study investigates the effects of COVID-19 on internship programs and provides recommendations for implementing effective strategies in a post-COVID-19 World. To accomplish this, a comprehensive review of relevant literature review has been conducted, including academic journals, governments, and industry reports, as well as employing both qualitative and quantitative research methods. This study also discussed a case study of the Professional Work Shadow Program, an internship for media students specialized in Integrated marketing communication, Broadcasting, International relations, and public relations. The study findings recommend various marketing strategies, which can help media internship providers and beyond offer effective and sustainable programs to university students. © 2023, American Scientific Publishing Group (ASPG). All rights reserved.
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Digital technology coupled with the quarantines caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has made working from anywhere (WFA)-a modern form of remote working-a widespread phenomenon. Given that WFA brings new career challenges to and engenders paradoxes of knowledge exchange among employees, this research aims to examine how the interactions of remote work time (RWT), knowledge sharing (KS), and knowledge hiding (KH) affect career development (CD) from a culturally grounded paradoxical framing of yin-yang harmonizing. The data were collected from Chinese manufacturing employees, and a moderated hierarchical regression analysis was used to examine the hypotheses. The results show an inverted U-shaped relationship between RWT and CD. The interaction of KS and KH is significantly related to CD, and the inverted U-shaped RWT-CD relationship is moderated by the interaction term, in which RWT exerts the most substantial positive impact on CD when KS is high and KH is low. This study offers valuable implications for coping with perplexing employment relationships and increasing career challenges in volatile work environments. The primary originality is to adopt a novel cognitive frame of yin-yang harmonizing to examine the nonlinear effect of remote working and the symbiotic impact of KS and KH on CD, which not only enriches the understanding of flexible work arrangements in the digital economy but also provides novel insights into the interconnectedness of KS and KH and their interacting effects on HRM-related outcomes.
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The present multi-study article investigates the subjective experience of professional football (a.k.a. soccer) referees and players during the COVID-19 pandemic and the so-called ghost games (i.e., games without supporters). Referees from the Austrian Football Association completed questionnaires inquiring about self-efficacy, motivation, and general personal observations and perceptions (e.g., arousal or confidence). In addition, two players and one referee in the Austrian Football Bundesliga were interviewed retrospectively regarding their subjective experience during ghost games and the effects of emotions on behavior and performance using semi-structured, video-taped interviews. Results of the referee survey indicate that the most profound differences between regular games and ghost games lie in the domain of intrinsic motivation and multiple aspects of subjective experience. Specifically, the experience in ghost games compared with regular games was reported by referees as being significantly less motivating, less excited/tense, less emotional, less focused, and overall, more negative, despite being easier to referee and the players behaving more positively. Qualitative analyses of the video-taped interview footage indicated (i) substantial inter-individual variability regarding the extent of the effect of the empty stadiums on the subjective experience of emotions, (ii) consequently, different strategies to regulate emotions and arousal from suboptimal to optimal levels, both before and during competition, and (iii) interactions between reported emotions, arousal, motivation, self-confidence, behavior and performance on the pitch. In addition, non-verbal expressions of emotion were captured using fully automated AI-software that coded facial movements during interviews. The results of this exploratory facial expression analysis revealed varying degrees of arousal and valence in relation to the content of the statements during the interviews, demonstrating the convergent validity of our findings. Our findings contribute to the growing literature on the effects of football games without fans during the COVID-19 pandemic and provide insights into the subjective experience of professional football referees. Concerning referees and players alike, emotions are investigated as potential processes related to home-field advantage and performance in professional football by means of a multi-methods approach. Further, the combination of qualitative and quantitative measures-as well as verbal and non-verbal communication channels-can deepen our understanding of the emotional influence of (missing) spectators on the subjective experience and the behavior of sports professionals is discussed.
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This article constructed a food taste deviation index using text analysis based on food culture as a measure of cultural inclusion. Cultural inclusion was related to corporate total factor productivity, aiming to investigate whether the cultural inclusion affects corporate sustainability. The findings showed uneven distribution of cultural inclusion in various areas of China, contributing to the unbalanced sustainable development of firms in different regions, as reflected by the higher total factor productivity of firms located in regions with higher cultural inclusion. A test using mountainous undulation as an instrumental variable verified the causal relationship between cultural inclusion and firm sustainability. Besides, a regression discontinuity design was employed to mitigate the impacts of the bidirectional causality. Moreover, a high level of cultural inclusion in top managers' hometown significantly improved corporate sustainability, suggesting that executives can transmit cultural inclusion in society. In addition, firms in more inclusive regions are more motivated to increase their social responsibility to staff as a way to promote their total factor productivity, suggesting that cultural inclusion promotes firm sustainability by increasing firms' care for staff. This article also found that cultural inclusion has heterogeneous effects across firms of different levels of industry competition, and different levels of analyst attention. The research reveals the impact of cultural inclusion on the real economy and help academics dissect the informal institutional reasons behind the sustainable development of firms in different geographies from a new perspective, contributing to the promotion of economic sustainability at the regional level and related policy formulation.
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This mixed method arts-based study aims to answer the research question: How do undergraduates enrolled in an online course investigating visual culture at a large public Midwestern university relate to possibly manipulative and misleading online media imagery? Before educators can attempt to improve student media literacy, they must first understand how students experience visual media online. A holistic approach where students visualize their relationship with online media, respond to a survey of their attitudes and behaviors concerning online media, and demonstrate their abilities on anassessment of their critical media literacy, provides a rich snapshot of how members of Generation Z or Zoomers relate to online media.My findings reveal that students are extremely susceptible to manipulative or misleading media and that their unwarranted overconfidence may compound that vulnerability. Meanwhile, their art depicted feelings of anxiety, distrust, confusion, and helplessness regarding their relationships with media. With the increasing reliance on online media, exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, it seems as though misinformation online will only continue to proliferate with increasingly dangerous consequences in the real world. As a result, educators, especially art educators, are urged to try to help students develop visual and critical media literacy skills. Recommendations and lesson ideas are provided. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)
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Book Review Book Review ;The Distance Cure: A History of Teletherapy, by Hannah Zeavin (MIT Press, 2021) Elizabeth Ellcessor University of Virginia eae2f@virginia.edu We are surrounded by remote or "virtual” therapy. During the COVID-19 pandemic, remote therapy services have been increasingly promoted by insurance companies, podcast advertisements, Reddit forums, and corporate wellness offices as a plausible solution to the rising rates of depression and other mental health concerns exacerbated by death, unemployment, and endless uncertainty. For people with interest or experience using telehealth or app-based mental health services, the last two chapters offer analyses of computer-driven and self-directed therapies. Efforts to broader access to therapy have often relied upon increased mediation to reduce costs and simultaneously reduce the availability of dedicated professional attention.
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Bac kground: Given the escalating anti-Asian racism and xenophobia caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, this Research in Brief presents a rapid review of relevant research published between March 2020 and February 2022 in cultural studies and communication journals. Analysis: The data collection identified only 1 3 articles published by the target journals, indicating the marginal status of communication and media studies in the expanding body of research on anti-Asian racism. Further qualitative thematic analysis of the 13 articles revealed their analytical emphasis on anti-Asian discourse and rhetoric online. Meanwhile, the structural factors underlying the reproduction of systemic racism remain underexplored. Conclusion and implications : Based on this rapid review, it is recommended that future research pay more attention to how racial tension and discrimination are woven into everyday communications across a range of media including social media, traditional media, and interpersonal communication. There is also an urgent need for communication scholars to develop intersectional lenses that facilitate the critical analysis of macro factors (class, gender, geopolitics, etc.) that contribute to the reproduction of racial hierarchy in Canada and other settler states. (English) [ FROM AUTHOR] Cont exte : Dans une situation où la xénophobie et le racisme anti-asiatiques causés par la COVID-19 sont en pleine croissance, cette recherche en bref présente un compte rendu rapide d'études publiées dans des revues sur les études culturelles et la communication entre mars 2020 et février 2022. Analyse : La collecte de données n'a identifié que 13 articles dans les revues cibles, indiquant le statut marginal des études en médias et en communication en ce qui a trait à la recherche en pleine croissance sur le racisme antiasiatique. Une analyse thématique qualitative des 13 articles montre que ceux-ci portent une attention analytique particulière sur les discours et la rhétorique anti-asiatiques en ligne. En revanche, les facteurs structurels soustendant la reproduction du racisme systémique demeurent sous-explorés. Conclusion et implications : Sur la base de ce compte rendu rapide, nous proposons que les recherches futures portent une plus grande attention à l'imbrication des tensions et discriminations raciales dans les communications médiatiques quotidiennes, y compris celles des médias sociaux et traditionnels et la communication interpersonnelle. Il y a en outre un besoin urgent pour les chercheurs en communication de développer un point de vue intersectionnel pouvant faciliter l'analyse critique des facteurs macros (classe, genre, géopolitique, etc.) qui encouragent la reproduction d'hiérarchies raciales au Canada ainsi que dans d'autres colonies de peuplement. (French) [ FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Canadian Journal of Communication is the property of University of Toronto Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full . (Copyright applies to all s.)
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Temporary school lockdowns and physical distancing practices due to the Covid‐19 pandemic have led to the risk of problematic social media use (PSU) in students who need to socialize. The effect of PSU on students' academic commitment and the mechanisms that moderate this effect spark interest in researchers. For this reason, the present study sought answers to the following two research questions: (a) Whether PSU positively predicts academic procrastination (AP), (b) Whether this relation is moderated by self‐control and gender. Employing the additive multiple moderation model, the study was carried out with 370 Turkish middle school students (female: 65.1%, Mage: 12.82). The findings indicate that PSU positively affects AP. The positive effect of PSU on AP is higher in boys than in girls. Self‐control acts as a buffering moderator in the positive effect of PSU on AP. As students' self‐control levels increase, the positive effect of PSU on AP weakens. Self‐control plays a greater role as a buffering moderator in girls than in boys. Regarding the context of middle school students' PSU and AP, the results extend the literature, which states that boys tend to act more impulsively. Also, this study adds new empirical evidence to the literature regarding the importance of high levels of self‐control in minimizing the negative effects of PSU, which has become more common among middle school students after the Covid‐19 pandemic, on AP. Practitioner Points: Problematic social media use (PSU) positively affects academic procrastination (AP).Self‐control acts as a buffering moderator in the positive effect of PSU on AP.The positive effect of PSU on AP is higher in boys than in girls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of Psychology in the Schools is the property of John Wiley & Sons, Inc. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)
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This work shows that positive old music listening surged during the early phase of the Covid-19 pandemic, suggesting a rise in preference for nostalgia and positivity in music. Using the music streaming data of Spotify users in the UK and employing multivariate regression analysis, this work documents that users were more likely to listen to songs older than 5 years during the national lockdown that began in late March 2020 compared with the pre-lockdown period. Such a change in preference was not observed in the same period in 2019. Meanwhile, more frequent listening to old music is found in samples of positive songs and also negative songs. This suggests that the preference for nostalgic music is to a certain extent independent of the positivity bias during the pandemic found in the literature. Yet, this work also provides evidence that the nostalgia-seeking behaviour and the preference for positive songs reinforced each other during the lockdown as the surge in positive old music was more persistent than that in positive recent music.
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The novel coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic required implementation of a variety of measures. In addition to pharmaceutical measures, such as vaccines, changing individuals' nonpharmaceutical preventive behaviour is essential to prevent the spread of infection. In uncertain situations, such as a pandemic, media sources are important for guiding individuals' decision-making behaviour. In this study, we examined the effects of media use on preventive behaviour during COVID-19. Earlier studies have shown that social networking service (SNS) browsing promotes preventive behaviour. However, those studies only assessed a single point during the early stages of the pandemic; therefore, the effects on ongoing preventive behaviour are unclear. Thus, a two-wave panel survey was conducted in 2020 and 2021 for an exploratory analysis of changes in the effects of media on individuals' preventive behaviour over time. The results show that the effect of SNS browsing on preventing going out was confirmed only during the early stage of the pandemic and was not observed 1 year later. It is also shown that those who shifted from self-restraint to going out within 1 year were not affected by the type of media use, but by cognitive factors. As the situation changes during a pandemic, analyses that consider time-series changes are essential for gaining insights about the effects of media on the promotion and maintenance of continuous prevention behaviours.
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Packer and Reeves also collaborated on the forthcoming co-authored book Prison House of the Circuit: Politics of Control from Analog to Digital (Packer, Nuñez de Villavicencio, Monea, Oswald, Maddalena, & Reeves, in press). [...]just two or three weeks ago, the U.N. released a report explaining that it's likely that the first instance of autonomous drones making their own decision to kill soldiers occurred in a skirmish in Libya in March 2020 (United Nations Security Council, 2021). [...]I think there's a general recognition by folks in the military, by journalists writing about this issue, by intellectuals, that there has been a shift in the past half century, 75 years, to a different kind of warfare. In terms of a paradigm, too, I'm also just interested because the American military, post-Vietnam, has described itself as subscribing to the idea of information warfare-using embedded journalists, managing the flows of information surrounding conflicts. Media doot only manipulate soldiers to fight better and citizens to support various military efforts but rather, the scale of warfare has reached a level of complication that without a vast logistical apparatus, war is going to be lost-that logistical terrain of war is going to be lost-and the "logistically dominant" force, nation, (or) group of allies will prevail.
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This exploratory study examines how three major Canadian newspapers-the Globe and Mail, the National Post, and the Toronto Star-reported on Alberta's bitumen industry throughout 2020, when the COVID-19 pandemic introduced significant market volatility. Through a combination of computational text analysis and qualitative interpretation, the study identified four recurring themes in 685 articles published by the target newspapers: (1) contention over bitumen infrastructure, (2) economic challenges for the bitumen industry, (3) political divide over the future of bitumen, (4) the bitumen industry's environmental impacts. A further qualitative assessment of these themes indicates that despite the pandemic's exposure of the structural weaknesses underlying Canada's resource-dependent economy, voices supporting the bitumen industry continue to dominate Canadian mainstream newspapers.
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The COVID-19 pandemic as a global threat caused the introduction of different biopolitical measures accompanied by discourses on otherness, including xenophobic, racist, nationalist, or new orientalist discourses. The aim of this research is to map discourses on otherness during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our general hypothesis is that, despite the differences in social and cultural contexts, discourses on otherness generated during the pandemic legitimized biopolitical actions and/or measures in addition to exacerbating social, political and cultural differences. The research is based on a semi-systematic approach to literature review using Situational Analysis and Sociology of Knowledge Approach to Discourse. In conclusion, we discuss the impact of discourse studies in the context of the global emergency.
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The present study describes, assesses, and compares the experiences of distance teaching in media and communication departments in six Arab countries, including Egypt, Tunisia, Iraq, Yemen, Oman, and Qatar, during the early phase of the COVID-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020. Three research questions were answered through a cross-country comparison. 1) Which organizational steps and arrangements had to be taken by the administration and teaching staff to transition to distance teaching? 2) How was distance teaching perceived by students in the six countries? 3) How was the transition evaluated by the teaching staff, and which suggestions can be made for the future? To answer the questions, we collected empirical data from different groups involved in the teaching process, including teachers, administration, and students, through interviews, focus groups and a questionnaire. Results show that the necessity of teaching online from a distance took most Arab universities by surprise. A lack of infrastructure and financial means proved to be the most relevant problem in conflict-ridden countries like Iraq and Yemen, but also in Egypt and Tunisia. Given their low expectations, students were generally satisfied with the digital tools used in their institution, even though in some countries, the skills of the teachers were underdeveloped, and the infrastructure was lacking. The teaching staff, however, highlighted that they saw these changes as a move toward the modernization of their teaching. © 2022 Inas Abou Youssef and Carola Richter.