Journal of Communication最新文献

In the following essay, I offer and explain the concept of wild public networks as a tool for social movement scholars interested in taking a network approach to contemporary protests via poststructuralism. Wild public networks offer scholars a means of approaching social movements that moves past binaries to productively incorporate affect. In so doing, the concept of wild public networks advances an ontological shift for social movement scholars that also alters what we examine and how. Wild public networks consider how the movement of the social can be witnessed in changes to relationships between actants and the configurations of networks. To explicate this new concept, I turn to contemporary environmental protests in Maoming, China.

Scholarship on media events has rarely considered how interpersonal interactions between participants mobilize collective feelings of solidarity. Drawing on a study of Big Brother Israel, we demonstrate how several structural-interactional features of the show encourage viewers to shift from a position of bystanders to one of confidants and companions of the contestants. We analyze this shift through the lens of mediated “public intimacy”—the staging of exclusive interactions in front of a third party. The emergent sense of collective complicity affects everyday interactions between viewers and public discourse on social media. We conclude that beyond the public staging of self, it is the staging and concretization of social relations in media events that serves to reaffirm the collective's solidarity.

This study analyzes whether the agenda-setting influence of traditional news media has become weaker over time—a key argument in the “new era of minimal effects” controversy. Based on media content and public opinion data collected in Sweden over a period of 23 years (1992–2014), we analyze both aggregate and individual-level agenda-setting effects on public opinion concerning 12 different political issues. Taken together, we find very little evidence that the traditional news media has become less influential as agenda setters. Rather, citizens appear as responsive to issue signals from the collective media agenda today as during the low-choice era. We discuss these findings in terms of cross-national differences in media systems and opportunity structures for selective exposure.

We hypothesize that generic frames influence what news people share on Facebook and Twitter through three different routes: emotions, motivations, and psychological engagement. Using a mixed-methods design, a content analysis of a representative sample of articles published in six Chilean outlets was combined with in-depth interviews with digital journalists. After controlling for issue, newsworthiness, informational utility, valence, and other confounds, results show that—across platforms—a morality frame increases news sharing, whereas a conflict frame decreases it. Emphasizing economic consequences also decreases sharing, but only on Facebook. Surprisingly, the human interest angle has no noticeable effects. These results show that news frames can have behavioral consequences, and confirm the existence of a gap between preferred frames of journalists and users.

For a well-functioning democracy, it is crucial that children consume news. However, news can elicit overly negative emotions and discourage engagement in children. The question, therefore, is how news can be adapted to children's sensitivities and needs but can still inform them. This study investigated whether constructive reporting (solution-based narratives including positive emotions) in news about negative events improved emotional responses and encouraged engagement (intention and inspiration to engage). In an experiment, 8–13-year-olds (N = 332) read a story containing either constructive elements or not. Constructive news elicited lower levels of negative emotional responses and provided more inspiration for engagement than nonconstructive news. These promising findings open doors for follow-up investigations regarding constructive news reporting, also among adult audiences.

This study explores activists as producers of strategic communication for social change, suggesting communication for development and social change (CDSC), activism, and public relations are not antagonistic but rather occupy a fluid space informed by cultural-economic forces. This article presents a model of cultural intermediation for social change, arguing that activism is a form of strategic communication embedded in micro, meso, and macro levels. Through a case study of transnational LGBT activism, this research demonstrates how activists function as cultural intermediaries, playing a mediating role that is often concerned with (re)producing and challenging cultural meaning.

In this article, we draw on ethnographic research to examine some key communication activism practices of Spain's indignados (15M) movement. The 15M radically transformed communication activism in Spain through its strong political-pedagogical orientation. Here lies the greatest 15M lesson for Communication for Social Change: Ordinary citizens in countries like Spain are rejecting traditional roles as “beneficiaries” of institutional communication campaigns. Instead, they have become active political actors who are able to generate their own processes of political pedagogy and communication. We conceptualize this lesson by positing the existence of three principles of 15M communication activism as a school of politics: the principles of pedagogical sovereignty, action, and networking.

Drawing from communication as design and the spirit of technology, this study investigated the political values embedded in consultative layer companies, with particular attention to the influence of normative deliberative democratic ideals in tech design. Interviews with the founders of consultative layer tech startups explored (a) founders' visions for their technologies and how they were incorporated, (b) the imagined user groups for these technologies, and (c) expected broader outcomes as a result of using their platforms. Six interrelated themes emerged in the analysis that illuminate ideologies, ideals, and pragmatic considerations embedded in the consultative layer, raising new theoretical and practical questions about the role of communication in understanding this emerging industry and its reimagining of government in the online space.