Digital Media Environment Research Articles

Interplay of agenda setters in the digital age: The associative issue network between news organizations and political YouTube channels

Two emerging questions in the current digital media environment are how socio-political issues are systematically circulated across various media platforms, including mainstream news organizations and social media platforms, and which media-driven issue networks influence the perceived issue networks of the public. This study addresses these questions by conducting computer-assisted content analysis and an online panel survey in South Korea in 2023. The results of the Quadratic Assignment Procedure (QAP) reveal that political issue networks reported by mainstream news organizations are positively associated with those circulated in YouTube channels. The results of Multiple Regression QAP (MRQAP) indicate that individuals are less likely to perceive issue networks that are emphasized by conservative YouTube channels than those of news media and liberal political YouTube channels.

Exposure and Consequences of Soft Advertising: Consumer Recognition and Insights into Advertising Strategies

The research question of this paper explores the consequences of soft advertising as recognized by consumers through surveys and text analysis. This includes the limits of consumer tolerance towards soft advertising, as well as their attitudes towards the companies initiating soft advertising and the advertisers themselves. The paper mentions that while advertising agencies know that deploying soft advertising may infringe upon consumers' interests, resulting in negative feedback, the limits of consumer tolerance and their direct attitudes toward advertising companies and advertisers still need to be clarified. Therefore, the goal of this study is to fill this information gap to reduce marketing decision errors. The research design includes two research methods: surveys and text analysis. Surveys collect consumer opinions and attitudes, while text analysis delves deeper into text data, such as comments and feedback on social media. Combining these two methods allows a more comprehensive understanding of the relationship between soft advertising and consumers. Overall, the research findings emphasize the importance of soft advertising in consumer interaction and attitudes, particularly in the digital media environment. The study indicates that maintaining an appropriate balance in advertising and adopting innovative approaches is crucial for the advertising industry to avoid angering potential customers. This provides valuable guidance for advertising decision-makers to meet consumer expectations better and provide valuable advertising content.

Digitalization amidst educational crises: A comparative study of the new media literacy (NML) levels of the Philippines and Myanmar

AbstractWhile traditional media literacy (TML) facilitates outdated patterns of digital media response, new media literacy (NML) frames the adaptation of literacy to the ever‐dynamic trend of media development. It then raises the cruciality of integrating NML concepts into national educational frameworks. The study aims to explore the case of Myanmar and the Philippines' NML capacity levels. Both countries have a digital media environment enveloped by information distortions mainly rooted in tumultuous political climates. The study leans to notions of educational crises in both countries as seen in terms of (1) sociopolitical contexts that lead to the irresponsive initiatives to improve individual criticality, (2) lack of emphasis on NML response, and (3) the implication of state and individual approaches against false information. Finally, the study presents a multifaceted response to educational paradigms derived from interpretive social‐scientific approaches in seeing the critical issues concerning digital media use.

Retraction Notice: Teaching Design and Practice Based on the Dissemination of Professional Knowledge in Digital Media Environment Art Design

Retraction Notice: Teaching Design and Practice Based on the Dissemination of Professional Knowledge in Digital Media Environment Art Design

미디어 교육의 국제적 흐름과 국내 교육과정 비교 연구

[Purpose] The purpose of this study is to examine the international trends in media education in the context of changes in the digital media environment, focusing on core topics outlined by international organizations such as UNESCO, OECD, and the EU. Through a comparison and analysis of domestic educational curricula, the study aims to derive insights for the development of media education in Korea.
 [Methods] To achieve this, researchers integrated and reclassified the core media education topics emphasized by UNESCO's MIL education curriculum, OECD's Education 2030, and the EU's DigComp. 2.2 through document analysis. Subsequently, the study explored how the core media education topics at the international level are distributed in the revised 2022 educational curriculum standards and individual subject achievement standards.
 [Results & Conclusion] The identified core topics of overseas media education include digital citizenship, digital utilization, new media technologies, media representation, information discrimination and confirmation bias, media industry and consumers, media creation, collaborative communication and responsible use, digital problem-solving, and digital safety—a total of 10 themes. It was confirmed that the 2022 revised curriculum notably reflects competencies related to digital utilization skills, understanding of new media technologies, and digital problem-solving. However, the study suggests a need for strengthening education on critical thinking and acceptance of content produced and shared in the digital environment, which appears relatively lacking in current educational content.

The journalism-audience relationship in the digital age: A theoretical literature review

The journalism-audience relationship is a key research topic within communication and journalism studies. Digitalization, which has transformed the relationship, has made it even more relevant to both journalism practice and research. There is a large body of literature that examines how the relationship between journalism and its audience has changed, what the mutual expectations are, and how the audience can actively participate in journalism. However, profound theoretical conceptualizations of the journalism-audience relationship are scarce, especially in relation to a digital media environment. Based on a systematic theoretical review, we compare different theoretical conceptualizations of the journalism-audience relationship in the digital age that are currently in use, and how they can be characterized and classified. Our analysis identifies six main theoretical approaches: (1) discursive, (2) expectation-based, (3) network-oriented, (4) technological, (5) parasocial, and (6) strategic-organizational conceptualizations. The literature review provides insights into how the multifaceted relationship between journalism and its audience is captured and described, and raises important questions for future research.

Digital media, democracy and civil society in Central and Eastern Europe

ABSTRACT CEE countries faced significant political, economic, social, and technological transformations over the last four decades. Democratic processes, after relative stabilization, tremble again around polarizing values, populist leaders, or nationalistic ideologies. Online communication, especially social media platforms, play a vital role in shaping how citizens interact with the state, political actors, media, and other citizens. The collection of manuscripts focuses on some of the challenges democratic institutions in the region face, in transforming and sustaining civil society and attempts to capture how the digital media environments mitigate or exacerbate those challenges. Included manuscripts focus on the role that online platforms play in the satisfaction with democracy in the CEE region, the interactions between journalists and political actors, the strategic media coverage of elections, affective polarization and political antagonism, and discursive attempts to discourage young people from civic engagement.

Microlearning helps Alzheimer’s Disease Patients

Alzheimer's disease is one of the most common diseases in older adults, and as the disease progresses, the need for daily care increases. Caregivers of Alzheimer's Disease patients face a variety of stresses and work pressures. Receiving professional and continuous training is one of the effective ways to improve their skills and competencies. A new approach to education is microlearning, where microeducational content is provided to learners. Microlearning as a pedagogical technique focuses on designing learning modules through micro-steps in a digital media environment. These activities can be integrated into learners' daily lives and tasks. Unlike "traditional" e-learning methods, microlearning often favours technology delivered through push media, thus reducing the cognitive load on the learner. Microlearning educational methods have been shown to be effective and efficient in educating and delivering materials to caregivers of older adults with Alzheimer's disease. This paper begins with a brief introduction to microlearning. And it details the key features and benefits of microlearning. Microlearning offers potential benefits to Alzheimer's Disease patients and their caregivers with its concise and focused approach. Secondly, machine learning enhances the design and delivery of microlearning, helping to provide a more personalised and effective learning experience. Machine learning plays a role in the design of microlearning. To conclude, microlearning offers a promising avenue of support and care for Alzheimer's Disease patients. Microlearning also provides a valuable resource for carers and healthcare professionals to gain the knowledge and skills needed to provide effective care.

Strike and tangle: Crowd control in the digital media environment

To better understand crowds and crowd control practices in the digital media environment, this article briefly probes two institutions that practice ‘crowd control’ online: a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike and a social media analytics service called CrowdTangle. These two firms continue the discourses of crowd theory in the traditions of criminologist Scipio Sighele and crowd psychologist Gustave Le Bon, adjusted for the new affordances of digital technology. The digital media environment affords infrastructure for forensically individualizing and influencing mass behaviour in the styles of Foucauldian and Deleuzian discipline, control and ‘moulding’. The probe concludes by emphasizing the political stakes of increasingly sophisticated crowd control infrastructures made possible through digital media environments.

Social construction of the health of modern Russianyouth: the main vectors of domestic discourse

The article presents a systematic analysis of trends and trends in the field of research of health problems in the youth environment, which relate to the attitude to health in general, the field of preserving and strengthening health.The author identifies significant risk factors that significantly affect both the health level of the younger generation and the life expectancy of its representatives, shows the ambivalence and inconsistency of data on the attitude of young people to their health obtained by various researchers. Based on the analysis of various sociological studies, including the author’s study conducted in July 2023, the results of the discussions conducted by domestic scientists addressing the health-saving problems of the younger generation of Russia are summarized.The first group includes macro-social problems related to the general state regulation of public health. Among them are the lack of health care of the population among the state priorities; inadequate social policy of the Russian Federation in the field of healthcare; the activities of institutions included in the management of the health sector, including its regulatory regulation. The second group of problems is related to the conceptualization of the concept of “health” and “healthy lifestyle”, the interpretation of which is usually ambiguous. It is obvious that the normative definition of a “healthy lifestyle” has medical, physiological, psychological and social structural components, which include various external factors — the influence of family and social environment, fashion on social habits, as well as the nature of media exposure.The data obtained by the author indicate that the greatest influence on the formation of young people’s ideas about health problems and practices for its maintenance is exerted by their own experience, social networks, family and the opinion of friends. They also confirm the prevailing trend: although the overwhelming majority of respondents (85%) are sure that people need to lead a healthy lifestyle, one in four believes that their lifestyle is unhealthy rather than healthy, and 5% of them do not consider their lifestyle healthy at all.The author refers to a special group of problems the impact on the health of the digital media environment, into which the younger generation is actively integrated today, first of all, about the so-called “new media”, which include: internet portals of online media, blogosphere, social networks, virtual communities, virtual games and other Web resources. By broadcasting ideas, behavioral models, new media in modern society become “legislators” in various spheres of social life. To a certain extent, they participate in the construction of an individual’s behavior in relation to health, which is both constructive and destructive in nature.

초등학생의 미디어 활용 및 학교 교육 실태연구

This study examined the perceptions and attitudes of elementary school students in Korea facing a generative artificial intelligence environment in the digital media environment. At the level of the national curriculum in Korea, this study looked at the current status of software education encountered by elementary school students, and analyzed surveys on smartphone use, YouTube and online/mobile games for 4th, 5th, and 6th graders. As a result of the study, there was more time spending to watch YouTube related to non-learning than learning, and the trust in the information encountered on YouTube was high. As a result of a survey on media education experience, the proportion of students who received “education on how to distinguish whether information provided online is true or not” was lower than that of other media education. Therefore, the ability to understand and evaluate the media does not arise by itself as time increases, and it requires a critical perspective and conscious effort to acquire and use information. Finally, it is important to raise awareness of the education students received.

Gateway Visuals: Strategies of Climate Photographers in the Digital Age

Visual climate change communication has seen increased scholarly attention in recent years, with a strong focus on science communication. However, less is known about the producers of climate imagery. The current article presents results from interviews with 20 photographers engaged in climate change on the challenges they see for climate photography today and the key strategies they use to achieve reach and impact in the digital media environment. Results indicate that practitioners gravitate toward variations of a “gateway strategy,” in which motives and forms of visual presentation are chosen as gateways to bypass the potential resistance or indifference to climate change messages. The article proposes a typology of such visual gateway strategies.

Anglo-American Fan Studies and Their Impact on the Development of Popular Culture in the Twenty-First Century

The aim of the article is to reveal the main stages of the research of fans in fan studies discourse and analyse the evolution of fan culture development that took place in the 21st century. Results. The article demonstrates that a separate scientific direction is dedicated to the study of fan communities in the Anglo-American academic environment — fan studies, which went through three distinct periods in their development: deviation, resistance (20th century), and mainstream (21st century). In the cultural aspect, the concepts of “fanatic/fanaticism” and “fan/ fandom” are distinguished. It is shown that Anglo-American fan studies define fan culture as an expressive lifestyle of fans of a certain cultural phenomenon or of a bearer of a certain cultural tradition, and in the last two decades, the fan studies direction, where fan culture is connected with fandom, has been intensively developing. It is stated that fandom is a self-organised community built around shared pleasure from a certain product of cultural industries in the digital media environment, and a fan is considered as a person who invests his time, energy, and money in interaction with a media product that is the object of his interests. The scientific novelty consists in determining the methodological status of the concept of “fan culture”, revealing the role of fan communities in the creation of popular culture in the 21st century. Conclusions. Fans began to play an active role in the processes of cultural creation, thanks to their creative work, there was a transition from passive consumption of mass culture products to active production of works of popular culture. Fan culture as a special community and environment of joint creative work among fans of literary works, television series, comics, and computer games, blurs the difference between consumption and production, becoming a vivid phenomenon of popular culture.

A short-form drama series created for the digital media environment: A randomised controlled trial exploring effects on girls’ body satisfaction, acceptance of appearance diversity, and appearance-related internalised racism

‘Edutainment’ micro-interventions are a scalable public health strategy that can challenge media-related body image pressures and race- and weight- based stigma. This study evaluated the impact of viewing a brief, theoretically-informed, short-form drama episode on Black and non-Black adolescent girls’ body image, acceptance of diversity of appearance (assessed by acceptance of an individual in a larger body and a Black individual), and appearance-related internalised racism (among Black girls only). The fictional drama depicted characters of diverse body sizes and race/ethnicities, with each episode focusing on a risk or protective factor for body image concerns among adolescent girls (e.g., appearance-related teasing and conversations). Participants (N = 686; 50.4 % Black, 49.6 % non-Black) aged 13–18 (Mage = 15.72 years) were randomly allocated to view either the first episode of this series (focused on social media’s unrealistic appearance ideals and strategies to resist pressures) or a non-body-image-related control video. Findings revealed no significant differences in body satisfaction between conditions but significant improvements in the acceptance of appearance diversity among all girls who viewed the body image episode. Black girls who viewed this episode experienced significant improvements to appearance-related internalised racism. Edutainment micro-interventions constitute a promising avenue for promoting acceptance of appearance diversity and reducing appearance-related internalised racism.

Parents’ concerns about the negative effects of television viewing on children’s behavior and school performance in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia

Very little is known regarding parents’ concerns about the undesirable effects of unsupervised TV viewing on children’s development in Ethiopia. This study investigated the extent and areas of parents’ concern about the harmful effects of TV viewing on children’s behavior and school performance. A mixed-methods study design was employed. Quantitative data were collected from 390 parents of schoolchildren aged 7–15 in Addis Ababa using a standardized measure of parental concern. Qualitative data were also collected from Parent-Teacher-Student Association (PTSA) members using FGDs. Results showed a moderate-to-high level of parental concern about the adverse effects of viewing on children’s behavior and school performance. The findings further indicated that children’s learning of offensive language, premature exposure to sexual content, engagement in violent activities, and drug use were reported as parents’ areas of concern in relation to children’s behavior. In the same way, disengagement in academic activities, mainly not doing homework, not studying, and getting poor exam results have been reported as parents' areas of concern in relation to school performance. Statistically significant differences in level of concern across parents’ and children’s socio-demographic characteristics were observed. As children’s screen and digital media environment is fast-changing in Ethiopia, future studies in the area by child developmentalists, educationalists, and health professionals are highly warranted.

The value and price of digital media commodities

Focusing on the fact that digital media commodities are easily reproduced once initially produced, this paper explains, against the backdrop of Marxist insights, just how these commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed in the current digital media environment. Working with Marx’s definition of the value of commodities as the social labor time required for their production, we can thereby define the value and price of reproduced digital media commodities as zero, but the market price of these commodities as in fact constituting the Marxist monopoly price. These determinations are then supported by a review of the ways valueless digital media goods are commodified in a monopolistic real world. The approach here, borrowing from Marx’s research methods, starts from commodity analysis to explain comprehensively the wider political and economic system of capitalism. This viewpoint of the inherent value of media products is foreign to neoclassical economics as well as to mainstream media and communication studies embracing the utility theory of value.

Semantic Search Engine Optimization in the News Media Industry: Challenges and Impact on Media Outlets and Journalism Practice in Greece

In today’s digital media environment, search engines constitute a significant gateway to news and an important source of traffic for online news outlets worldwide, identifying the significance of top rankings in search results. In this context, search engine optimization (SEO) has entered newsrooms as an essential element of disseminating the content of online media organizations, creating new practices and challenges for media professionals. However, the transition to the Semantic Web (SW) and the development of major search engines in recent years have led to the emergence of Semantic SEO as a new approach to old SEO practices, creating at the same time new challenges for the news media industry. This study investigates the application of Semantic SEO inside newsrooms and its impact on journalism and news media organizations. Drawing upon a series of semi-structured interviews with Greek SEO experts and a systematic review of the notion of semantic search and the corresponding semantic SEO technologies, the objective of this work is to present an analysis of how Semantic SEO affects news media and journalism content as well as to identify some of the technological practices that could contribute to enhancing the discoverability of news content in the changing context of online search.

Uninformed or Misinformed in the Digital News Environment? How Social Media News Use Affects Two Dimensions of Political Knowledge

ABSTRACT This article examines how the use of social media for news affects citizens’ knowledge about politics and current affairs. We employ a two-dimensional perspective on political knowledge and investigate how factual political knowledge, confidence in that knowledge, and misinformation, understood as the mismatch between factual political knowledge and confidence in knowledge, are related to social media news consumption. While earlier studies have suggested a negative relationship between social media news consumption and factual knowledge, there are indications that social media use may give people a general sense of being informed, even when they are not. Such general subjective knowledge might, however, differ from confidence in retrieved facts. Drawing on a two-wave panel study from Norway, we find evidence of a negative relationship between social media news consumption and both dimensions of knowledge. Notably, however, we do not find that social media news use leads to confidence in incorrect beliefs, suggesting that the digital media environment produces an uninformed, but not an overconfident, misinformed news audience.

아동 독서를 위한 파라텍스트의 활용 연구

This study aims to find a reading method that can apply youtube reading contents for children, treating a new type paratext that appeared in the digital media environment. Through this, it is intended to confirm the new value and utility interacting between paratext in the digital media environment and reading behavior. As a result, youtube reading contents for children interacts with the maintext and constructs the meaning of the text, provides scaffolding to the reader's reading behavior, and becomes a literacy sponsor in the reading process. Therefore, the results of this study are meaningful in that they recognized media and reading behavior as a complementary relationship and suggest that it is necessary to study the various interactions between the digital media and the reading behavior.

From Public Reason to Public Health: Professional Implications of the “Debunking Turn” in the Global Fact-Checking Field

The global field of fact-checking organizations has experienced a dramatic shift in focus since 2016, from checking claims by politicians and other public figures to policing viral misinformation on social networks. What practitioners call “debunking,” once a minor focus, now dominates the agenda of leading outlets and accounts for the bulk of fact-checks produced worldwide, driven in part by commercial partnerships between fact-checkers and platform companies. This study investigates what this sudden realignment means for fact-checkers themselves, drawing on interviews and meta-journalistic discourse to examine the impact on how these organizations assign value and draw boundaries in their growing transnational field. We highlight different discursive strategies fact-checkers use to explain the debunking turn, depending on their own field position, and show how shifting boundaries reflect wider concerns about autonomy from platform partners. We suggest that debunking discourse illustrates an incipient shift away from the “public reason” model implicit in journalism’s professional logic, to a more instrumental, “public health” model of newswork adapted to a digital media environment dominated by platform companies.