Colorative Markers of Modernity in Contemporary Cultural Conflicts

Zoom-ing in on White Supremacy

PurposeWhile prior research provides interesting insights into the effect of social media use in enterprises, there is limited research on how use of different social media platforms affects employee job satisfaction and work efficiency. This study developed a research model to investigate how public and private social media platforms used for different motivations affect employee job satisfaction and work efficiency.Design/methodology/approachOnline surveys were conducted in China, generating 453 valid responses for analysis. Structural equation modeling is performed to test the research model and hypotheses.FindingsThe results suggest that (1) public social media used for both work- and social-related motivations positively affects employee job satisfaction, while private social media only used for social-related motivations can contribute to employee job satisfaction. (2) Public and private social media used for work-related motivations can contribute to employee work efficiency, while social-related motivations for use of public and private social media and employee work efficiency are not significant. (3) In the process of social media usage influencing employee job satisfaction and work efficiency, employees of different genders show significant differences.Originality/valueFirst, this paper contributes to information systems social media research by examining the joint effects of different motivations for public and private social media usage on employee job satisfaction and work efficiency in organizations. Second, it contributes to uses and gratification theory by clarifying the relationship between different motivations for enterprise social media use and its needs.

Public's social media use during the Kahramanmaraş earthquakes on 6 February 2023

The aim of this article is to expose the various strategies which are used by two of the most important dictionaries in the English and Spanish contexts, the Oxford English Dictionary and the Diccionario de la Real Academia Española, to focalise religious discourse in the main body of the definitions appearing in each dictionary. A theoretical framework on ideology and the dictionary will serve as the starting point from which to analyse these strategies and offer a classification with practical examples, dwelling on the notions of modification and focalisation. The results obtained from both dictionaries will be discussed in relation to the major strategies alluded to, highlighting the fact that the dictionary does not exist in a vacuum. As such, it is always affected by ideology in a certain degree, something which seems to support our thesis that religious discourse is one of the areas where a more pervasive presence of focalisation can be felt.

BackgroundSince its outbreak in January 2020, COVID-19 has quickly spread worldwide and has become a global pandemic. Social media platforms have been recognized as important tools for health-promoting practices in public health, and the use of social media is widespread among the public. However, little is known about the effects of social media use on health promotion during a pandemic such as COVID-19.ObjectiveIn this study, we aimed to explore the predictive role of social media use on public preventive behaviors in China during the COVID-19 pandemic and how disease knowledge and eHealth literacy moderated the relationship between social media use and preventive behaviors.MethodsA national web-based cross-sectional survey was conducted by a proportionate probability sampling among 802 Chinese internet users (“netizens”) in February 2020. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlations, and hierarchical multiple regressions were employed to examine and explore the relationships among all the variables.ResultsAlmost half the 802 study participants were male (416, 51.9%), and the average age of the participants was 32.65 years. Most of the 802 participants had high education levels (624, 77.7%), had high income >¥5000 (US $736.29) (525, 65.3%), were married (496, 61.8%), and were in good health (486, 60.6%). The average time of social media use was approximately 2 to 3 hours per day (mean 2.34 hours, SD 1.11), and the most frequently used media types were public social media (mean score 4.49/5, SD 0.78) and aggregated social media (mean score 4.07/5, SD 1.07). Social media use frequency (β=.20, P<.001) rather than time significantly predicted preventive behaviors for COVID-19. Respondents were also equipped with high levels of disease knowledge (mean score 8.15/10, SD 1.43) and eHealth literacy (mean score 3.79/5, SD 0.59). Disease knowledge (β=.11, P=.001) and eHealth literacy (β=.27, P<.001) were also significant predictors of preventive behaviors. Furthermore, eHealth literacy (P=.038) and disease knowledge (P=.03) positively moderated the relationship between social media use frequency and preventive behaviors, while eHealth literacy (β=.07) affected this relationship positively and disease knowledge (β=–.07) affected it negatively. Different social media types differed in predicting an individual’s preventive behaviors for COVID-19. Aggregated social media (β=.22, P<.001) was the best predictor, followed by public social media (β=.14, P<.001) and professional social media (β=.11, P=.002). However, official social media (β=.02, P=.597) was an insignificant predictor.ConclusionsSocial media is an effective tool to promote behaviors to prevent COVID-19 among the public. Health literacy is essential for promotion of individual health and influences the extent to which the public engages in preventive behaviors during a pandemic. Our results not only enrich the theoretical paradigm of public health management and health communication but also have practical implications in pandemic control for China and other countries.

Enterprise social media usage: The motives and the moderating role of public social media experience

Keywords, Structures of Feeling, and the Novel

The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary Douglas A. Anderson (bio) The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary, by Peter Gilliver, Jeremy Marshall, and Edmund Weiner. . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. xvi, 240 pp. £12.99 / $25.00 (hardcover) ISBN 0198610696. Tolkien worked on the staff of what would later be called the Oxford English Dictionary from January 1919 through the end of May 1920. In J.R.R. Tolkien: A Biography, Humphrey Carpenter quotes Tolkien as saying that "I learned more in those two years than in any other equal period of my life" (101). The present slim volume, by three staff editors at the OED, considers not only Tolkien's time there but how that training as a working philologist, dealing in etymologies and the cognates of English words in various Germanic languages as well as in definitions and particular meanings, permeates his own writings—not just his academic [End Page 302] work but, more significantly, the literary writings of his vast imagined world of Middle-earth. The result is a curious book in a number of ways, but still a valuable one. The Rings of Words is divided into three parts: the first, "Tolkien as a Lexicographer," is a history of Tolkien's work at the OED; part two, "Tolkien as Wordwright," discusses the practice of philology in a broader and more historical sense, with Tolkien as the prime example; while part three, entitled "Word Studies," is made up of short individual entries, arranged alphabetically, of about a hundred words used by Tolkien in his writings. The respective contributions made by the three writers of this book are nowhere differentiated, but the entire first section is closely based on Peter Gilliver's lecture "At the Wordface: J.R.R. Tolkien's Work on the Oxford English Dictionary," published in the Proceedings of the J.R.R. Tolkien Centenary Conference 1992 (1995), edited by Patricia Reynolds and Glen H. GoodKnight. (Oddly, this previous publication is neither acknowledged nor cited.) Though the material added to the present version is not extensive, it is good to see this work reach a much larger audience than it had via its appearance in a volume of conference papers. This essay is based primarily on the OED's own records, including the handwritten slips kept for each word. Some of these slips are reproduced in facsimile, showing instances of Tolkien's etymologies being accepted or added to by Henry Bradley, his supervisor and one of the "Four Wise Clerks of Oxenford" (as Tolkien humorously described them in Farmer Giles of Ham—meaning the four successive editors of the OED). By the time of Tolkien's arrival, the staff was working on the letter W—one with many words of Germanic origins, so Tolkien's expertise was especially useful. For a few words not otherwise attested as Tolkien's work in the OED archive, Humphrey Carpenter is quoted as saying that Tolkien "was given the job of researching the etymology of warm, wash, wasp, water, wick (lamp), and winter" (9). Though the source of this quotation is not cited (proper sourcing is an occasional problem in the book), it comes from page 101 of the 1977 edition of Carpenter's biography. However, the quote is not reproduced accurately—Carpenter does not include the word wash. Fortunately, wash does not come up for any further discussion in The Ring of Words, and as it is not included in the authors' list of over fifty "Entries in the OED worked on by Tolkien" (42), the addition of it to the quotation from Carpenter may be ascribed to a simple error. "Tolkien as Wordwright" is a discussion of philological erudition and literary usage, particularly in terms of word invention (besides Tolkien, W. H. Auden, James Joyce and E. R. Eddison are mentioned) and the use of archaism (as found not only in Tolkien but also, more extensively, in William Morris). Tolkien's keen interest in the interrelationship of [End Page 303] language and history is described in terms of philological reconstruction ("the fundamental process in etymology" 51), an area previously explored by Tom Shippey in The Road to Middle-earth. The...

The article is devoted to popular sociolinguistic event ‘A Word of the Year’, which takes place annually on web-sites of famous dictionaries (Oxford English Dictionary, Collins English Dictionary, Merriam-Webster’s English Dictionary, Cambridge Dictionary of the English Language) and well- known linguistic institutions (American Dialect Society, Global Language Monitor, Australian Na- tional Dictionary Centre, Society of the German Language). In English-speaking environment Oxford English Dictionary as one of the first dictionaries to launch ‘A Word of the Year’ list chooses a word or expression which have attracted a particular interest of its readers over the last twelve months. Every year hundreds of candidates are discussed online and a particular word is chosen to reflect the mood and preoccupations of a specific year as well as signify its potential as a word of cultural significance. The adjective toxic, chosen by Oxford English Dictionary as key word of 2018, is under linguistic analysis in present research. Firstly, we study lexical and semantic peculiarities of word of the year. Secondly, we investigate the most frequently-used patterns of its lexical combinability with nouns. According to online version of Oxford English Dictionary, among nouns, which regularly collocate with the target adjective toxic, the following should be paid attention to: chemical, substance, waste, algae, air, masculinity, environment, relationship, culture. Finally, we exemplify the contextual usage of adjective toxic in modern English. Moreover, we dwell on the mechanisms of influence of key spheres of life in English-speaking world (politics, economy, ecology, social and interpersonal relations) on users’ choice in 2018.

The author examines in detail the phenomenon of value conflict in the mass media space. With the advent of mass media, political conflict has acquired a new scale and role, developing on several planes: in reality, in the media, in social media and in the minds of the audience. Modern society is oversaturated with information, which leads to the question of the effective use of media resources and their uneven distribution. In the context of the information society, new types of conflicts arise related to the relationship of factual and necessary information, which emphasizes the importance of studying the mediatization of political conflicts and their impact on public relations. The media space is an environment where political conflicts are formed and resolved, thereby defining many aspects of social life and interaction. The article focuses on the role of values in the political process, reveals the influence of the media on the formation of attitudes and behavior in conflict conditions. The object of the study is a political conflict in the media space. The subject of the study is the mediatization of political relations in the context of the value characteristics of society. The purpose of the study is to determine the role and place of media in the processes of managing political and value conflict in modern society. The research uses activity-based, axiological and systematic approaches that allow us to penetrate into the essence of the phenomenon of the mass media space and trace the transformation of values in it that are the subject of conflict relations. The theoretical and practical significance of the study lies in the fact that it substantiates the need to revise classical approaches to the consideration of such categories as: information war, political and value conflict in the media space. As part of the conflict agenda, the media can chronicle events, mediate and make forecasts. They influence the formation of attitudes and behaviors of social groups in conflict conditions, have the potential to form stereotypes of constructive (or not) behavior. The study of the mediatization of political conflict in a value-based way allows us to identify the features and patterns of formation of models of "conflict behavior" in the information field (participating and observing parties), the choice of motives, strategies and opportunities in the conflict, goals and ideas about the development of the conflict.

The Kids Are Alt-Right: How Media and the Law Enable White Supremacist Groups to Recruit and Radicalize Emotionally Vulnerable Individuals

The present study explores spelling variations of translingual words of Korean origin which are used in the English context across the globe. Four sets of English-language databases including the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the CNN website, Google Search and Google Trends were employed to locate and examine examples of such words. Variations in the spelling of Korean-origin words listed in the OED and on the CNN website were examined and compared with examples from the official Romanization of the Korean language published by the National Institute of Korean Language (NIKL). The popularity and frequency of use of these words was investigated using Google Search and Google Trends. The findings suggest that there are several English spelling variations of Korean-origin words and that amongst such variations, the OED spelling variation is the most overwhelmingly popular version used by Google and by the CNN website. This finding is discussed in the context of spreading popularity of Korean pop culture.

Rapidly developing information and communication technologies have an influence on the whole world and have become an ordinary part of everyday life. Not only people, but businesses and governments are affected by these changes. In this respect, governments use several online media platforms as their own digital face and thus keep pace with the developing technology. Considering the lacks in previous researches, the aim of this paper is to investigate the critical factors influencing the citizens' trust in public sector websites and social media and also the relationship among trust in the public sector, citizen satisfaction and trust in public sector websites and social media. By studying 607 citizens who are users of the website or social media service belonging to the municipalities in Turkey, we found that: (i) perceived quality, perceived usefulness, and facilitation conditions are the factors that affect the citizens' trust in public sector websites and social media, (ii) trust in the public sector websites and social media affects trust in the public sector and, (iii) trust in the public sector affects citizen satisfaction.

The increasing popularity of multimedia messages shared through public or private social media spills into diverse information dissemination contexts. To date, public social media has been explored as a potential alert system during natural disasters, but high levels of noise (i.e. non-relevant content) present challenges in both understanding social experiences of a disaster and in facilitating disaster recovery. This study builds on current research by uniquely using social media data, collected in the field through qualitative interviews, to create a supervised machine learning model. Collected data represents rescuers and rescuees during the 2017 Hurricane Harvey. Preliminary findings indicate a 99% accuracy in classifying data between signal and noise for signal-to-noise ratios (SNR) of 1:1, 1:2, 1:4, and 1:8. We also find 99% accuracy in classification between respondent types (volunteer rescuer, official rescuer, and rescuee). We furthermore compare human and machine coded attributes, finding that Google Vision API is a more reliable source of detecting attributes for the training set.

BackgroundCollege students are at a high risk of being infected with COVID-19, and they are one of the key population clusters that should be vaccinated. The present study aimed to investigate the knowledge, attitudes, and practices (KAP) toward COVID-19 vaccination among Chinese college students, and to determine the relationships among social media use, eHealth literacy, and KAP toward COVID-19 vaccination among Chinese college students.MethodsA cross-sectional survey was conducted by administering questionnaires to evaluate KAP toward COVID-19 vaccination, social media use, and eHealth literacy in one of the groups of Chinese college students. Multiple linear regression analysis was performed to determine the association among social media use, eHealth literacy, and KAP regarding COVID-19 vaccination.ResultsAmong the 3,785 validated questionnaires collected from Chinese college students, male students accounted for 59.74%, and the mean age of the college students was (20.90 ± 3.14) years. More than four-fifths (83.43%) of the college students spent <2 h a week on social media, and the official and public social media were most common social media types. Additionally, the scores for KAP toward COVID-19 vaccination ranging from 0 to 48 among college students were high (39.73 ± 5.58), lowest for knowledge domain (3.07 ± 0.76), and the highest for practice domain (3.47 ± 0.63). Female college students who were in good health status and who spent more time browsing social media, frequently used official and public social media, rarely used aggregated social media, and had a relatively strong self-perception of eHealth literacy and information acquisition of eHealth literacy were more likely to have high levels of KAP regarding COVID-19 vaccination.ConclusionsOverall, Chinese college students have excellent KAP toward COVID-19 vaccination. Based on the findings of this study, we recommend that health counseling regarding COVID-19 vaccination should target male students and those with inferior health status. Dissemination of health education regarding COVID-19 vaccination should be purposely conducted, and cooperation with official and public social media platforms should be promoted. Finally, eHealth literacy, which is one of the predictors of the level of KAP regarding COVID-19 vaccination, should be emphasized.