Prior Media Research Articles

Winter Weather Whiplash: Impacts of Meteorological Events Misaligned With Natural and Human Systems in Seasonally Snow‐Covered Regions

Abstract“Weather whiplash” is a colloquial phrase for describing an extreme event that includes shifts between two opposing weather conditions. Prior media coverage and research on these types of extremes have largely ignored winter weather events. However, rapid swings in winter weather can result in crossing from frozen to unfrozen conditions, or vice versa; thus, the potential impact of these types of events on coupled human and natural systems may be large. Given rapidly changing winter conditions in seasonally snow‐covered regions, there is a pressing need for a deeper understanding of such events and the extent of their impacts to minimize their risks. Here we introduce the concept of winter weather whiplash, defined as a class of extreme event in which a collision of unexpected conditions produces a forceful, rapid, back‐and‐forth change in winter weather that induces an outsized impact on coupled human and natural systems. Using a series of case studies, we demonstrate that the effects of winter weather whiplash events depend on the natural and human context in which they occur, and discuss how these events may result in the restructuring of social and ecological systems. We use the long‐term hydrometeorological record at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire, USA to demonstrate quantitative methods for delineating winter weather whiplash events and their biophysical impacts. Ultimately, we argue that robust conceptual and quantitative frameworks for understanding winter weather whiplash events will contribute to the ways in which we mitigate and adapt to winter climate change in vulnerable regions.

Narrativas de ida y vuelta: apropiaciones, influencias y contaminaciones mutuas entre pintura, fotografía y cine

The following essay analyzes the phenomenon of mobile frontiers and the accompanying contamination that is produced across different visual media. The development of new visual technologies, between the 19th and 20th centuries, forced prior media (such as painting and drawing) to reinvent themselves fully. Concurrently, these emerging technologies have often taken inspiration from their predecessors. Many artists, having reflected on their creations and the interaction between different linguistic codes that permeate all mentioned disciplines, are able to continue to grow and innovate throughout their specific narratives. This article analyzes some of these historic milestones which, during these last two centuries, have enhanced cross-media proposals originating from painting, photography, or film industry, and have generated some hybridized poetics filling the gap existing between disciplines.

Empirical Scrutiny of the Usage and Impact of Facebook on the Electoral Process in India : A Concept of the State o f Punjab

This paper presents the analysis of the increasing use of Social Media and its participation during the electoral voting in India with context to Punjab. Besides that, to understand the meaning and impact of especially Facebook on elections, we take survey results collected from different people in Punjab and Facebook data related to different political parties. There are numerous challenges when it comes to engaging people during political campaigns. The current findings in literature show us that previous efforts to involve public participation with prior media tools did not meet the full expectations. With Social Media’s indulgence this could change, because engagementof people seems to be the major concept that explains the difference between the impact of old media and ‘new’ Social Media. The survey explains that Social Media seemed to significantly influence voting behavior during the last general elections (2014). And, during the elections (2019) too, politicians with higher Social Media engagement are expecting relatively more votes within most political parties and banking upon Facebook practices. To conclude, we hereby propose a future research framework which studies how political parties take benefit from Facebook to contrive and convalesce the methodologies they follow with their party members, volunteers and general public.

Copycat crime among non-incarcerated adults

ABSTRACTWith the emergence of copycat crime as a criminal justice concern, its prevalence is of current interest. This study estimates copycat crime’s prevalence among an adult non-incarcerated population. Face-to-face guided interviews were conducted with 601 respondents with measures of copycat crime consideration and attempts collected. Comparisons with prior copycat crime estimates and exploratory correlational and logistic regression analyses were conducted. The results show that the prevalence of copycat crime among non-incarcerated adults was significant but substantially lower than levels previously reported for incarcerated populations. About 1 in 10 non-incarcerated general population adults reported having considered committing a copycat crime and 1 in 20 reported having attempted one. Similar to prior research findings, females were significantly less likely than males to report copycat crime histories. Age was also predictive for copycat attempts, and prior victimisation and new media use were predictive for copycat crime consideration. Policy implications are discussed and the need for continued research into the dynamics of copycat crime across cultures and gender is indicated.

Meal-Concurrent Media Use is Associated with Increased Dietary Intake with no Evidence of Next Meal Compensation in Free-Living Adults.

This study aimed to determine the effects of concurrent and prior media use on dietary intake and dietary compensation over 3 days in a free-living population. Participants recorded food intake and media use for a 3-day period. The US Department of Agriculture multiple-pass method was used to ensure completeness of food records. Energy, protein, fiber, carbohydrates, sugar, added sugar, fat, saturated fat, trans fat, and sodium intake were assessed. Meals consumed while participants used media included 149.3 more calories on average than meals consumed without media. Media meals were higher in protein, carbohydrates, fat, and saturated fat. There was no evidence of dietary compensation at the meal following the media meal. Energy and macronutrient intake increased during media-paired meals. Dietary compensation at the subsequent meal did not occur, suggesting that the effects of media-paired meals are additive over the short term.

The Influence of Place Attachment, Ad-Evoked Positive Affect, and Motivation on Intention to Visit: Imagination Proclivity as a Moderator

Integrating the theoretical foundations of symbolic interactionism, parasocial interaction, direct affect transfer, push and pull motivational framework, and narrative transportation, this study investigates the determinants of tourists’ intention to visit a destination using Heidi, a famous literary and television series persona, as a stimulus. Place attachment, ad-evoked positive affect, and motivation were theorized as antecedents of intention to visit and imagination proclivity as a moderator. The model was tested using data collected from 410 prospective Spanish tourists. Results show motivation and place attachment as key determinants of intention to visit among individuals with higher imagination proclivity, while positive affect was most relevant for individuals with low imagination proclivity. Findings expand our understanding of travel intention toward unvisited destinations, providing empirical support that place attachment, positive affect, and motivation are engendered by prior media exposure and moderated by tourists’ imagination proclivity.

Shades of Gray: Internal Control Reporting by Chinese U.S.-Listed Firms

SYNOPSISChinese firms listing in the U.S. via reverse mergers (CRMs) have dominated prior media, regulator, and research attention. Yet CRMs have effectively ceased, leaving Chinese firms listing via initial public offerings (CIPOs) as the relevant remaining class of Chinese firms listing on U.S. exchanges. This study documents salient differences between CIPOs, CRMs, and U.S.-domiciled U.S.-listed firms by examining Sarbanes-Oxley Act Section 302 and 404(b) ineffective internal control (IIC) and related disclosures that underlie financial reporting quality, with three main sets of findings. First, both CIPOs and CRMs are more likely to report IICs than U.S.-domiciled counterparts. Second, both CIPOs and CRMs are more likely to under-report IICs than U.S.-domiciled counterparts (CIPO for only 302 disclosures). Third, CIPOs are both less likely to report and less likely to under-report IICs than CRMs. These findings clarify and recast prior characterizations of the internal controls underlying the reporting quality of Chinese U.S.-listed firms.JEL Classifications: G18; G34; G38; M41; M42; M48.Data Availability: All data are available from public sources.

Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television ed. by Jorge Marí

Reviewed by: Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television ed. by Jorge Marí María C. Fellie Marí, Jorge, ed. Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television. Routledge, 2017. Pp. 281. ISBN 978-0-415-34863-8. Jorge Marí's collection of essays entitled Tracing the Borders of Spanish Horror Cinema and Television does just what the title promises, within the timeframe of 1995-2015. The introduction outlines prior media scholarship on Spanish horror and points out the lack of existing work on "the renaissance of the horror genre in Spain" since 1995. The goal of this volume, then, is to explore "at length and in proper detail" significant cinematic and television productions within this period, emphasizing elements that are particularly Spanish, as well as those that are international (2). Part 1, "The (Postmodern) Gothic," contains two essays that examine the gothic characteristics of three films. First, in "Trapped in the House of Mirrors: The Others as a Transnational Gothic Thriller," Santiago Juan-Navarro reads Alejandro Amenábar's film as "more concerned with the formal mastery of a new hybrid genre (the postmodern gothic thriller) than in making political, moral, or historical statements" (18). Hence, Juan-Navarro analyzes the concepts of space, superimposed realities, and "self-conscious" fiction (29) that make The Others an example of the "female gothic," questioning the boundaries between real and fictional worlds through "restraint, innuendo, and suspense" (22). Next, in "Contemporary Spanish Gothic Heroines," Ann Davies studies how Julia in Los ojos de Julia (Guillem Morales) and María in Hierro (Gabe Ibáñez) continue to assert subjectivity in their quest for "contingent meaning" (37). In opposition [End Page 647] to both postmodern and patriarchal "grand narratives" (38), both heroines utilize their senses (sight, touch) to persist in finding out the truth. Both essays in Part 2, "Mothers, Children, Patriarchy, and the Biopolitics of Reproduction," propose new readings of social roles in popular films. Sohyun Lee's compelling and detailed argument in "Monstrous (Re)productions: Mothering Patriarchy on the Spanish Horror Screen" reads the "mother figure" as "(re)productions of female monstrosity [ … ] as a means to convey and maintain a patriarchal discourse" (53). Her examination of Andrés Muschietti's Mama and J. A. Bayona's El orfanato reveals that, although both films incorporate newer models of family social structure, they ultimately portray the mother as a mere "accessory for the father-ruled nuclear family" whose inferior, even "monstrous" status is perpetuated. Following Lee, in "Suspendido en el tiempo: Children and Contemporary Spanish Horror," Maria Pramaggiore considers three films: La habitación del niño (Álex de la Iglesia), No-Do (Elio Quiroga), and La casa muda (Gustavo Hernández). She asserts that the child is an instrument used to scrutinize "dark moments" in twentieth-century Spain and Uruguay, serving to criticize how reproduction was/is used as a political tool (68). In Part 3, entitled "Sound, Vision, Media, and Intermediality," the authors focus on spectators in relation to sight and sound. Samuel Amago's aptly named "Dude, Where's my Phallus?!: Locating the Horror of La piel que habito," starts with a review of horror elements in films leading up to Pedro Almodóvar's horror-centered work (93). In engaging detail, Amago then shows how the main character him/herself becomes a media creation symbolizing male domination and desire, as well as "a metaphor for the future uncertainty of masculinity" (101). Anne Hardcastle's "Why They Film" investigates why fictional filmmakers in "found footage" films continue to record in the face of serious danger. The author concludes that, as with documentaries, the shooting continues in order to "produce documentation, evidence, and testimony," as well as entertainment (119). Martin Barnier's "Sound of Fear in Recent Spanish Films" describes various audio phenomena that heighten fear in the audience and characters in several films: acousmêtre (an unseen voice, 125), computers, video, and other "supernatural" sounds. Barnier suggests that "new technologies" of the 1990s are perceived as audio threats that shift into images in the 2000s. As the longest section with four essays, Part 4, "The [REC] Phenomenon," is itself a testament to the popularity of the series. Several essays...

What’s Black, White, and Read All Over? Media Coverage of Serious Organizational Errors as 'News'

In this paper, we study what constitutes a 'newsworthy event.' That is, we investigate which errors by firms are deemed sufficiently serious to warrant coverage in major business daily newspapers. We argue that media determination of an error as 'news' is due as much to perceptions of the actor who commits it as to the error’s underlying characteristics. Specifically, we theorize that the media categorizes firms as either 'sinners' or 'saints' and that this filter affects the decision to report, holding the magnitude of the error constant. We test this theory in the context of major oil spills in the U.S., defined as an amount greater than 50 barrels (approximately 2,000 gallons), from 1985 to 2016--a period during which 1,125 of these serious errors occurred. Results support our theory that, while larger spills are more likely to be covered, spills committed by saints are more likely to warrant coverage than similar spills committed by sinners. Rather than a free pass, we suggest positive perceptions cause the media to hold a firm to a higher standard, increasing the chance an error will be perceived as 'serious,' and thus newsworthy. These main effects are moderated by the firm’s prior media coverage. Implications for theory about the effects of serious errors are discussed.

Effects of offline ad content on online brand search: insights from super bowl advertising

Individuals watch TV shows while simultaneously and/or immediately searching online. Thus, the content of offline TV ads can affect online brand search, a key predictor of sales. Yet there are few insights on the effect of offline ad content on online brand search. We develop hypotheses relating the informational and emotional content of TV ads on online brand search, independently, and in conjunction with two attentional content elements of the ad campaign, prior media publicity and brand website prominence in the TV ad. We test the hypotheses using a quasi-experimental study, the telecast of TV ads on the annual Super Bowl event between 2004 and 2012 (n = 293 observations). We measure online brand search by online brand search lift, i.e., the growth in online brand search following the telecast of the brand’s ad on Super Bowl. The findings indicate that the informational content of the TV ad increases online brand search, while both attentional content elements decrease this effect. We find no support for the effect of emotional content of the TV ad on online brand search. Our findings extend marketing theory on online search and generate managerial implications for designing TV ads to increase online brand search.

Psychiatrists Tapped to Lead Psych News Helped Make ‘Good Newspaper Better’

Psychiatrists Tapped to Lead <i>Psych News</i> Helped Make ‘Good Newspaper Better’

Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film by Andreas Huyssen

Reviewed by: Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film by Andreas Huyssen Adalberto Müller Andreas Huyssen. Miniature Metropolis: Literature in an Age of Photography and Film. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2015. xiii + 346 pp. Since 2003’s Present Pasts, Andreas Huyssen has been counted among the group of humanities scholars whose texts and ideas flourish naturally across the world thanks to the way they diffuse through many different fields of knowledge, from literature to media studies, architecture, and the visual arts. The reason for this adaptability and widespread interest is probably due to the way Huyssen’s essays reflect a shift in German scholarship since the mid-1920s, when modernist thinkers and writers such as Walter Benjamin, Siegfried Kracauer, and Theodor W. Adorno developed a new approach to understanding culture. Instead of focusing just on specific objects—as science often does—they started to create a kaleidoscopic view grasping multiple objects, including novels, films, architecture, music, and even everyday phenomena such as street signs or tiller girl dances. In doing so, their attitude resembles that of Joseph Knecht, a character from Herman Hesse’s novel The Glass Bead Game. The game Knecht mastered was connecting different arts with fields of knowledge, such as music and physics, in order to attain a broader understanding of existence. Unlike Hesse’s character, however, who is in search of a transcendental meaning for life, these scholars would dive deeper into the dark waters of the cultural and technological aspects of late capitalist societies. Having read their works, Huyssen, a German scholar who has lived in the US for many years, is somehow affiliated with them. The reason for this resemblance is no coincidence, however, but is rather an intentional movement toward a reinterpretation of high modernity after the waning of postmodernist theories that exploded in the humanities during the early 1980s. Miniature Metropolis’s subtitle, “Literature in an Age of Photography and Film,” is seemingly a reference to Benjamin’s famous essay [End Page 181] on technical reproduction. Huyssen includes writers, philosophers, and artists such as Charles Baudelaire, Franz Kafka, Benjamin, Adorno, Hannah Höch, and Irmgard Keun, among others. Huyssen does not consider their works in general but rather dissects some works he calls miniatures, a genre of short prose texts on urban life created by Baudelaire in Le Spleen de Paris and practiced by German language writers in the first half of the twentieth century. In his book, Huyssen clearly demonstrates that this is probably a key genre within high modernity for two reasons: first, in their miniatures modernists were searching for a “reverse remediation” for technical media such as film and photography, influenced by these new possibilities of grasping the world (7), and second, due to their agile and protean form, miniatures had a tendency toward interpenetration (Durchdringung, a concept created by Siegfried Giedion that Huyssen often employs) with urban life in the metropolis. Miniatures could describe the city’s movements in its own terms much more than conventional genres such as novels and poems. In other words, Huyssen is arguing that this “minor literature”—a term he uses in accordance with the Deleuzian concept—is a privileged standpoint of life in the metropolis (9). To accept this challenging idea, we must first understand what is at stake when Huyssen assembles so many different texts, including Benjamin’s philosophical fragments in One Way Street, Musil’s reflections from Posthumous Papers of a Living Author, and Adorno’s microessays from Minima Moralia. What they all have in common, according to Huyssen, is not only their brevity but the way they remediate optical media such as film and photography into a new literary form in order to describe life in the metropolis. Miniatures are like literary silent movies or poetic snapshots composed exclusively of words. This is why Huyssen is right to call it reverse remediation, since Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept seems more appropriate to describe how prior media such as the novel can be remediated by later media such as cinema, television, the internet, and so on. Therefore, on one hand, miniatures are produced as a result of the awareness that modern authors like Kafka...

The materiality of digital media: The hard disk drive, phonograph, magnetic tape and optical media in technical close-up

Popular discourses surrounding contemporary digital media often misrepresent it as immaterial and ephemeral, overlooking the material devices that store and generate our media objects. This article materially ‘descends’ into a selection of prior media forms that make up the genealogy of the hard disk drive (HDD) to challenge our reliance on conceptual misrepresentations. This material analysis is used to situate digital media in a genealogy of prior media forms, to enrich our understanding of how media’s affordances arise from the interplay of both formal and forensic materiality and to demonstrate the value of reintegrating materiality back into the study of media.

The Scared, the Outraged, and the Anxious: How Crisis Emotions, Involvement, and Demographics Predict Publics’ Conative Coping

ABSTRACTThrough a nationally representative survey of 1,840 U.S. adults, this study examined fright, anger, and anxiety as emotional predictors of how publics respond to organizational crisis communication and communicate with each other during a hypothetical terrorist attack. The study also examined the influences of age, gender, and publics’ involvement with prior media coverage of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings through hierarchical regression analyses. Crisis emotions, involvement, and demographics are significant predictors of different communication behavioral outcomes. Insights and implications for practice and theory development are discussed.

The architecture of post-cinema

Abstract Open Montage (OM) is an interactive video project problematizing the position of the moving image in contemporary network culture. Digital communication systems afford the possibility for user experience designers to reflect on a weakening of hierarchical narratives of power and representation; yet, the tendency towards an unthinking remediation of prior (televisual) media types and hierarchies persists. As a consequence of new, yet often aesthetically primitive communication design formations manifesting online, it is argued that tactics of image assembly and montage must be developed to afford users a wider and more expressive range of visual language building communication tools. If the interaction design imperative is not to suspend but encourage disbelief as a condition in the user, how can this be approached as a design problem?

Refusing to Tolerate Intolerance: An Experiment Testing the Link Between Exposure to Gay-Related Content and Resulting Attitudes and Behaviors

This article describes a 2 × 2 factorial design experiment with 334 undergraduates testing the influence of exposure to gay-related photographs on endorsement of tolerant gay attitudes and likelihood to interact with the photograph within a social media context. Individuals were more likely to interact with and be attitudinally influenced by pro-gay rather than anti-gay content. Prior media exposure to gay-related content was positively associated with likelihood to interact with the photographs. The experimental condition moderated this association. Our results provide support and extension for social cognitive theory, cultivation, and the heuristic processing model, as well as offer new information related to the study of social media, particularly those current conversational trends related to gay men and lesbians.

Effects of media multi-tasking with Facebook on the enjoyment and encoding of TV episodes

The study examined the consequences of media multi-tasking involving Facebook and TV sitcoms. Experiment 1 had participants watch TV episodes of their choosing while interacting with Facebook, or on their own, and assessed their enjoyment of the episodes, their overall mood, as well as memory for the episodes. It also examined how these variables were affected by the participants’ prior media multi-tasking experience. Experiment 2 manipulated the degree to which participants had to interact with Facebook while watching TV episodes. We found that participants enjoyed the episodes more under single task conditions than under dual task conditions, and they recalled more details of the episodes under single task conditions. Moreover, the participants who had to engage in more interactions with Facebook had less enjoyment and worse memory than those with less Facebook interactions. Finally, those participants that reported frequently engaging in media multi-tasking outside of the experiment benefitted the most from watching the TV episodes under single task conditions.

Playing With Politics: Online Political Parody, Affinity for Political Humor, Anxiety Reduction, and Implications for Political Efficacy

The current study examines the relationships between exposure to partisan political parody, affinity for political humor given a desire to reduce anxiety, and internal political efficacy. Analyzing data from a spring 2013 experiment (N = 269), the results suggest that prior media exposure, an affinity for political humor given the desire to reduce anxiety, and a preference for humor that attacks the opposition are significant predictors of political efficacy. In addition, a three-way interaction between partisan identification, humor type, and affinity for political humor (AFPH)–anxiety relative to the dependent variable of internal political efficacy was significant. In particular, high AFPH–anxiety Republicans who viewed Democrat-directed humor were more likely to feel politically efficacious. The significance of the findings is discussed along with suggestions for potential theoretical mechanisms that can guide future academic research on the democratic impacts of politically entertaining media.

The Subjective Group Dynamics of Inter- and Intragroup Criminality in the News

Participants read a crime news story featuring two perpetrators. Building on subjective group dynamics, we predicted that a perpetrator would be evaluated differently depending on the partner’s ethnicity and participants’ prior media use. Results show that heavy news consumers were more likely to (a) give a harsher sentence to a white perpetrator acting with a white (vs. Latino) partner, and (b) develop more negative attitudes toward Latinos when members of that group were portrayed in intergroup criminal partnerships. The implications of intergroup portrayals for perceptions of the ingroup, as well as the outgroup, and the moderating effects of news viewing on such effects, are discussed.

WRITING ABOUT WAR: MAKING SENSE OF THE ABSURD IN MILETA PRODANOVIĆ'S NOVEL &lt;em&gt;PLEŠI, ČUDOVIŠTE, NA MOJU NEŽNU MUZIKU (DANCE, YOU MONSTER, TO MY SOFT MUSIC&lt;/em&gt;)

In the narrative of a mass conflict, the human experience of its effects may be subsumed into the rationalizing contours of history, or they may fall completely outside our comprehension. This article examines the intertextual strategies employed in Prodanovic's novel about the war in former Yugoslavia. The text conveys the reality of the conflict by relating it through events and characters located in prior media constructions. The historical, documentary, mythic, and fictional sources focus on the signifying systems which drag the war into the horizon of expectations of those who were not there, closing the gap between reality and representation, life and art.