Media Engagements Research Articles

Vital Media: The Affective and Temporal Dynamics of Young Cancer Patients’ Social Media Practices

This article presents results from a research project investigating young cancer patients’ general use of social media and their lived experience of the choices and dilemmas involved in using social media in relation to moments of existential crisis. This article’s key finding—based on an extensive survey with 205 young cancer patients and 25 qualitative interviews—is that social media becomes increasingly important for young people after a cancer diagnosis and that these young people engage with social media as—what we will call— vital media. The analysis in this article focuses on affective and temporal media experiences in the empirical material collected and argues that three dimensions of “media vitality” are salient: (1) that young people engage with social media to actively produce vitality in terms of generating a sense of wellbeing or balance by sharing, seeking out, or avoiding particular types of cancer-related content; (2) that young people experience social media as a vital or “lively” technology that introduces unpredictable and sometimes unwanted material into their lives; and (3) that young people feel they are expected to perform or share vital approaches to illness on social media, such as positive or life-affirming—as opposed to negative or pessimistic—accounts of their illness. In this way, the concept of “vital media” addresses strategic, ecological, and cultural aspects of young cancer patients’ social media engagements.

Brands as a nation: An analysis of overseas media engagement of top Chinese brands

Exposure and engagement to the media coverage of Chinese brands among average consumers outside of the domestic Chinese market can serve as an important measure of China’s global influence. In this study, we analyzed the audience engagement of online articles about the top 20 Chinese brands from over 5000 web publishers around the world in a period of 5 months from October 2017 to February 2018. Specific results from our analyses point to a lack of sustained effort, careful coordination, and proper control in these companies’ public relations and crisis communication. The study also reveals a larger problem in China’s public diplomacy efforts. The top Chinese firms, despite their high market value, are yet to establish soft influence internationally. The global media engagements of Chinese companies are largely driven, passively, by special events and crises. Moreover, our study offers a new way of studying China and global media by leveraging large sets of industry data and adopting a set of audience matrices commonly used by media publishers to examine social science research questions.

No more excuses for all-male panels

Diversity Biases, both implicit and explicit, impede the participation of women in STEM. Recent studies show that men are invited to speak on scientific panels at twice the rate that women are. McCullagh et al. describe the success of the “Request a Woman Scientist” database, part of the 500 Women Scientists organization, which works to build an inclusive scientific community. The database is composed of more than 7500 women from multiple disciplines and countries and provides anyone looking for scientific expertise with an extensive and multidisciplinary network of vetted women in science. To date, 11% of women scientists included in the database have been contacted to participate in media engagements, peer review, panel participation, educational outreach, and professional and research connections, further promoting the profile and participation of women in STEM. PLOS Biol. 17 , e3000212 (2019).

What is mental fatigue in elite sport? Perceptions from athletes and staff

Mental fatigue is a psychobiological state caused by prolonged periods of demanding cognitive activity shown to negatively influence physical performance. Variation exists across the literature regarding the manifestations and impact of mental fatigue; with little knowledge of the domain-specific manifestations in elite sport. The difficulties in defining mental fatigue may explain why it is not consistently assessed by coaching or support staff. The aim of this study was therefore to investigate athlete and staff understandings of mental fatigue in elite sport. Nine focus group discussions were conducted involving a total of 32 athletes (n = 17) and staff (n = 15) from elite sporting organisations. Athletes and staff believe mental fatigue negatively impacts sporting performance. Analysis revealed perceived associations between mental fatigue and changes in behaviour including, disengagement, decreased motivation and enthusiasm, increased displays of emotion and withdrawal. Changes in concentration, decreased discipline and attention to detail also emerged as descriptors of mental fatigue. Media engagements, study and work commitments were reported to induce mental fatigue. Repetitive tasks, over-analysis, thinking about the sport in question and environmental instability were further reported perceived causes. Experience and personality emerged as factors contributing to individual susceptibility. Mental fatigue is perceived to not only develop acutely but also build in a cumulative manner in the elite sporting environment. The present findings inform the design of future studies examining MF in elite athletes; they also hold the potential to improve how best to monitor and manage the condition in applied practice.

Researching LGBT+ Youth Intimacies and Social Media: The Strengths and Limitations of Participant-Led Visual Methods

This paper draws on data from an exploratory study into the social media engagements of LGBT+ young people aged 16 to 20 years old, in the United Kingdom, and considers how participant-led visual methods generated insights into different modalities of digitally mediated intimacy. It outlines the methodological paradigms dominating current research on LGBT+ young people’s digitally mediated practices of intimacy and argues that visual methods have been underemployed to date. The participatory visual methods used in this study, including map-making and digital tours of participant’s digital worlds along with visual elicitation interviews, are documented and explored in relation to Berlant’s work on intimacy and theories of networked affect. It also reflects upon the ethical implications of re-presenting social media images and troubles interpretive imperatives within qualitative research.

The impact of the digital storytelling rubrics on the social media engagements

The impact of the digital storytelling rubrics on the social media engagements

The impact of the digital storytelling rubrics on the social media engagements

Digital storytelling plays a vital role in passing information via attractive and interactive digital media. Therefore, there are several methods that help in assessing the quality of the Digital Stories (DSs) and classifying them into successful or failed stories, rubrics can be a solution. This paper introduces an assessment method for numbers of DSs that have been collected (for a specific year, which is 2014) from the social media site YouTube to determine if they are interesting or boring. The aim of this study is to analyse the impact of some aspects upon the developed DSs, such as how much the developer followed the story regulations (e.g. the story seven elements), and the developer/narrator gender effect. Furthermore, to discover how much such aspects are effective. All this will be reflected in the number of every DS's viewers. As results, three main elements have been revealed and discussed.

Abstract 17065: Final Results of the AHA Guideline Transformation Optimization Initiative

Background: Although guideline directed care has been shown to improve outcomes of Non-ST Elevation Acute Coronary Syndrome (NSTE-ACS) patients, dissemination and implementation of updated guideline recommendations are variable and often delayed. Methods: In 2014, the American Heart Association (AHA) launched the Guideline Transformation Optimization (GTO) initiative, designed to decrease the time to implementation of guideline recommendations by increasing knowledge and awareness for three target audiences: healthcare professionals, patients, and hospital systems. Guideline content was delivered using rapid formats via mobile applications intended for point-of-care provider and patient use, web-based content and media campaigns. The first guidelines to undergo this new organizational paradigm shift were the 2014 NSTE-ACS Guidelines and the 2016 Dual Antiplatelet Therapy Focused Update. We determined the reach to our target audiences and hospital-level achievement of NSTE-ACS quality measures using 2016 data from ACTION Registry-Get-With-The Guidelines. Results: Over 3 years (2014-17), there were 83,000 downloads of the healthcare professional mobile application and 4,365 attendees at 4 AHA professional education webinars. As a result of attending the webinar, 87% of learners said their practice would change. The patient campaign achieved over 2.7 billion media impressions, 32.6 million unique visitors to AHA’s heart attack webpages, and 26.2 million social media engagements. My Cardiac Coach mobile application for NSTE-ACS was downloaded by 8,500 patients. Among the 797 participating AHA “Mission: Lifeline” hospitals, 42 achieved early adopter recognition in 2015, defined as achieving all 5 target quality measures: cardiac rehabilitation referral, ACE/ ARB prescription at discharge, dual antiplatelet prescription, evaluation of left ventricular systolic function and smoking cessation education. Recognition was achieved by 296 hospitals in 2017. Conclusion: Three years after launch of the GTO initiative, AHA was able to meet its 2020 goals of decreasing time to translation of scientific guidelines, increasing provider and patient education and awareness, and increasing guideline adherence in almost 300 U.S. hospitals.

Transported: New Zealand non-profit organizations, digital platforms and the limitations of metaphor

Digital communication has become ubiquitous to the non-profit sector, globally, and non-profit organizations (NPOs) have adopted multiple digital media channels and platforms in attempts to connect with and influence external stakeholders. This article examines how non-profits in New Zealand (NZ) are using metaphoric language around their deployment of digital media channels. Since its inception, digital information technology has been explained in terms of transport metaphors such as information superhighway and digital traffic. These metaphors have become largely invisible. A combination of empirical and interpretative analyses was deployed to examine the metaphorical framework at work in NPO discussions of their digital media engagements. The analysis uncovered rhetoric that valued movement over destination, de-emphasized the stakeholder perspective and narrowly restricted the power to contribute to organizational meaning.

‘Orgies of the upper gallery’: Preliminary reflections on nineteenth-century theatre fans

Since the very beginning, fan studies have challenged common assumptions about media fans, gradually opening the research field onto different aspects and dimensions of fan culture. So far, however, little has been done regarding both fandom history and theatre fandoms, which would significantly enrich the landscape of fan studies. This article assesses the current state of research on historical audiences, and how historical knowledge on theatre audiences and methodologies, developed within these studies, can be further explored from a fan studies perspective. It is an attempt to look at nineteenth-century theatre through the lenses of the most engaged spectators, whom I call simply ‘theatre fans’, and recover their experiences, behaviours and practices. Broadly speaking, this article seeks to discuss the challenges and opportunities of fan history research by investigating some examples of historical fan practices in Warsaw Theatres and focusing on the early case of ‘fandom war’ between the czakiści and wisnowczycy, as the groups of fans of two actresses – Jadwiga Czaki and Maria Wisnowska – identified themselves. The aim is to re-evaluate fan practices and media engagements in the nineteenth century to recover the then emerging matrix of meanings essential to the understanding of fandom.

Social media diaries and fasts: Educating for digital mindfulness with pre-service teachers

With social media access nearly ubiquitous, teachers and students must explore how to mitigate distractions and unhealthy uses. In this mixed methods study, the authors invited 60 pre-service teachers across two universities to cultivate mindfulness around social media beliefs, habits, and behaviors by completing a social media survey, diary, and fast. Participants identified reasons for regular social media use, including unconscious impulses, and made new realizations about what is gained and lost in social media engagements. Participants were optimistic about teaching similar lessons. The authors recommend pedagogical guidelines for social media mindfulness that allow for complexity, variance, and idiosyncrasy.

Anne Gjelsvik & Rikke Schubart : Women of ice and fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and multiple media engagements, New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2016

Anne Gjelsvik & Rikke Schubart : Women of ice and fire: Gender, Game of Thrones, and multiple media engagements, New York/London: Bloomsbury, 2016

How do Saudi youth engage with social media?

With the global growth of social media platforms, there are questions as to how regional cultural factors shape online engagement. Focusing on young Saudi Arabian users of some of the more popular platforms such as Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat, this article uses Hofstede’s cultural dimensions to assess how cultural and religious factors are shaping and constraining online social media engagements. Using interviews, questionnaires, and analysis of individual profiles, this paper discusses some of the intertwined cultural and religious factors that influence how Saudi youth negotiate their use of social media platforms that are developed in completely different cultural contexts. In particular, this article highlights gendered concerns and the strong influence of the social collective on how these sites are used and how users manage the information they share. Through the development of “personas” as representative young Saudi users, this article concludes with some recommendations for platform developers as to how to meet the needs of this growing market.

‘Lost in Thailand’: the popular geopolitics of film-induced tourism in northern Thailand

The recent blockbuster hit ‘Lost in Thailand’ had more than USD $200 million in ticket sales in China in 2012, and quickly became the nation’s highest-grossing homegrown film ever. Set in northern Thailand, the film has since contributed to the prodigious growth of Chinese tourism in the region. Among other experiences, film-induced tourism in northern Thailand includes the re-enactment of scenes from the film on university campuses, in temples and around the city of Chiang Mai. These intertextual performances have made headlines in national and international media for how they reflect various articulations of cultural dissonance. This paper draws on structured interviews among Thai residents and Chinese tourists, as well as a discourse analysis of English- and Thai-language media reports to argue that popular responses to the impact of film-induced tourism in the region are strongly embedded in historical and contemporary Sino-Thai political-economic relations and corollary geopolitical imaginaries of place. These imaginaries are frequently reconstituted through the ambivalent economies of tourism encounters. This paper contributes to emerging research on how geopolitical assemblages are co-constituted by a range of popular discourses, tourism practices, media engagements, and political-economic relations and how they inform popular geopolitical experience of and in place.

Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick

Body and Nation: The Global Realm of U.S. Body Politics in the Twentieth Century, edited by Emily S. Rosenberg and Shanon Fitzpatrick. Durham, Duke University Press, 2014. viii, 331 pp. $94.95 US (cloth), $26.95 US (paper). The essays collected in Body and Nation approach twentieth-century depictions of bodies within the United States through a transnational lens. The relationship of the human body to the body politic has emerged in recent decades as a prominent node of historical and interdisciplinary analyses of national identity, and this volume provides a necessary but often-overlooked global context for US discourses of the body. Exploring the ways in which US body politics have been translated and refracted through political, military, and media engagements abroad, as well as the ways in which US national identity has been defined over and against the bodies of alien others, the essays illustrate the transnational vectors along which twentieth-century representations of bodies have moved. Along with an introduction and epilogue by the editors, Body and Nation contains twelve essays, ten of which have not been previously published. The essays are arranged simply in chronological order, although they focus broadly on three themes articulated in the introduction: the challenges of defining a national body in an age of imperialism and global migration; the relationship of the body to discourses of national security; and the depiction of the modern, national body in transnational mass media. Most if not all of the essays take up more than one of these themes. For example, the first essay in the collection, Paul A. Kramer's study of US military and domestic understandings of prostitution during the Philippine-American War, addresses the perceived dangers that the prostitute body presented to the US empire, to American military forces, and to the domestic nation and its citizens. The presence of regulated prostitution in the US-occupied Philippines only came to the attention of the American public through the efforts of journalists in the anti-colonialist, social purity, and suffragist presses, who saw in the practice a risk of miscegenation and immigration that would pollute the US population, disease that would weaken the US military, and sexual license that would soil US morality, among other concerns. Kramer's essay deftly establishes the myriad ways in which discourses of disease penetrating the body are intermingled with those of foreign customs and institutions invading the nation and empire, a focus thoughtfully mirrored in the final essay of the collection, Kristina Shull's history of the Mariel Boatlift from Cuba to Key West in 1980, following which fears regarding security, disease, and sexual deviance helped to give rise to the modern US immigration detention system. …

From Intrusion to Engagement – Understanding Acceptance of Mobile Marketing through Smartphones in India

With the emergence of wireless technologies and high penetration of mobile phones, companies are interested in utilising this medium for marketing communications. In India, marketers are in early stages of exploring this great potential of developing marketing campaigns via mobile devices. The increasing proliferation of smartphones is also empowering customer with wide possibilities for rich media interactions and engagements. Thus, mobile marketing and its acceptance using smartphones are core issues that marketers have yet to fully explore. The present study attempts to bridge this gap and empirically examine the factors affecting consumers’ attitude towards acceptance of mobile marketing via smartphones. The study develops a research model and estimates the influences of antecedent factors on attitude to participate in modern mobile marketing practices. The data are analyzed through ANOVA and regression analysis and findings are drawn with implications related to acceptance theories and marketing practices. The paper concludes with predictions on the future form of mobile marketing and some areas of further research.

Social media, professionalism and higher education: a sociomaterial consideration

Within debates about student professionalism and how to develop it in higher education (HE), increasing focus has turned to students' uses of social media. While social media skills are promoted by some HE educators, most emphasis is still given to perceived hazards and abuses of social media in practice. These are typically framed as a matter of professional ethics; some have argued for new codes of ‘e-professionalism’. This article problematizes the dynamics being conflated in these debates, drawing from three theoretical sources: current debates about professionalism; critical digital media studies that provide nuanced analyses of social media engagements; and sociomaterial concepts that reconfigure the issues to suggest new possibilities. The argument is theory-based and exploratory, not empirical. The aim is to pose new directions for research and teaching that open, not foreclose, new issues and enactments of professionalism.

Affective Affinities, Embodiment, and the Political

Scholarship in media education has historically focused on the constructed character of media production and reception, examined politico-economic and ideological dimensions of youth media, and generally neglected those affective dimensions of children and young people's media engagements that go beyond the ideological. Contextualized in terms of and performativity, the subjective and sensory aspects of youth agency offer substantive analytic insights into the particular ways young people engage with and produce various media forms. To understand children and young people's media engagements in relation to their conception of the it is important to examine the subjective and sensory aspects of the experiences through which they produce various media forms. To this end, I will examine three youth media initiatives from Palestine and Israel to understand how children and young people appropriate and reconfigure old and new media in the process of creating personal and social narratives. These youth initiatives raise several difficult geopolitical challenges wrought by neoliberal globalization and the continuing Israeli-Palestinian conflict in Haifa and Ramallah. Palestinian youth live in a constant state of emergency in refugee camps surrounded by Israeli military barricades and borders, and as minorities inside Israel. Yet remarkably, their imagination is shaped not by despair, but, to borrow Raymond Williams's felicitous phrase, by resources of hope. (1) In the face of looming violence and suffering, young people develop media forms and narratives that address everyday life in the refugee camps, recuperation of individual and collective memories, identity, and belonging. Although the youth-produced media forms take up the question of the political, this paper explores two other important elements in specific detail: the role of affect and embodiment, and the issue of translocality, which point toward potential spaces for dialogue. Without delving into the extensive literature on affect, I will address the question of sensory by selectively drawing upon the writings of Paul Ricocur, Dipesh Chakrabarty, and Vivian Sobchack. Their analysis offers insight into the embodied nature of human subjectivity that is alert to the quotidian aspects of everyday life. is understood in terms of a set of embodied practices and is largely defined as an unreflective and unstructured feeling and that cannot be realized in language. According to Jen Skattebol, theories dispute separations between mind and body; and between the individual, their communities and political contexts. Affect is a tangible, embodied force that operates between people and as such it adds complexity to the way we think about relationships in learning. (2) For Sobchack, the notion of embodiment is a radically material condition of human being that necessarily entails both the body and consciousness, objectivity and subjectivity, in an irreducible ensemble where the meaning of is lived in context. (3) Postcolonial scholar Chakrabarty argues that academic knowledge privileges the analytic (reason) over lived and the senses, pointing out that experience is not always subjective in a psychological sense, if by psychology we refer to processes that go on only in the brain. The body also has experiences and remembers them. (4) Both Chakrabarty and Sobchack urge us to pay attention to the embodied nature of human subjectivity, belonging, and identity. Pursuing the key questions underlying his philosophical anthropology: What is the meaning of being human? and How does a 'subject' come to interpret itself?, Ricoeur posited that the meaning of subject is mediated through processes of interpretation--cultural, religious, political, historical, and scientific. For Ricoeur, hermeneutics, in addition to concerning itself with the interpretation of literary works and cultural artifacts, is about human action itself. …

The Bradshaw Debate: Lessons Learned From Critiquing Colonialist Interpretations of Gwion Gwion Rock Paintings of The Kimberley, Western Australia

The history of archaeology includes its colonialist roots and the development of conceptual frameworks (tropes) disassociating Indigenous peoples from their land and heritage. While these tropes were products of nineteenth century scholarship, in settler colonial contexts such as Australia these tropes continue to have currency and will be resurrected in the media during periods of political conservatism. During conservative government in Australia in the 1990s and 2000s, high profile media attention was given to amateur research on Gwion Gwion (Bradshaw) paintings of the Kimberley region and notions of non-Aboriginal authorship. The disassociation of Aboriginal people from the paintings played into the hands of conservatives wishing to undermine Aboriginal land claims. Hamstrung by limited empirical research, reactive criticisms by professional archaeologists to the colonialist underpinnings of these views had little traction in the media and were dismissed as political correctness. The ‘Bradshaw debate’ teaches us that strategies to successfully counter publically-contested colonialist archaeologies are underdeveloped. Minimally it requires the combined efforts of archaeologists (professional and amateur) and Indigenous peoples focusing more on empirical facts, and less on theoretical concepts, in proactive mass media engagements.

Social Psychology and Media: Critical Considerations

AbstractIn this paper, we argue that media saturate everyday living, and that people engage with and are engaged by media in diverse and complex ways. We suggest a need for an informed social psychology of media that conceptualises media as social practice, and attends to media practices as they occur. We propose that much media psychology research is limited because it: (i) focuses too strongly on documenting causal, and usually negative, media effects; (ii) continues to apply unsuitable research methodologies and theories to investigating media and ignores advances in media research and theory arising outside the discipline; and (iii) largely ignores the social contexts in which media engagements occur. These arguments are illustrated by studies that take a more social and critical approach to media research and that show possibilities for overcoming these limitations and developing insights into psychological concerns enmeshed in media practices.