Societal Communication Research Articles

До проблеми визначення пройденого шляху для розрахування плати за проїзд автомобільними дорогами

Introduction. Various contactless vehicle identification systems on public roads are widely used in global practice. They solve a wide range of problems, from tracking traffic flows and collecting tolls for road usage to designating parking spots and digital identification. A key role in implementing the state's transportation strategy is played by the development of transport infrastructure, the most crucial component of which is the public road network of national importance. This network has suffered damage due to the full-scale invasion by the Russian Federation. The network is vital for the country's defense logistics, industrial and agricultural efficiency, and ensuring adequate societal communication. The main source of road infrastructure funding is the Road Fund, formed from revenues from excise duties and import tariffs on petroleum products, as well as excise duties and import tariffs on vehicles and tires imported into Ukraine.

Women's Communication Strategies in the Barbie Film

This study, conducted in a sociolinguistic setting, looks into the communication strategies utilized by female characters in the animated film "Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus." It looks at how these characters' verbal choices reflect and maybe perpetuate gendered norms and expectations, building on Coates' theory of conversational strategies. The study uses a qualitative analysis minimal responses, tag questions, questions, hedges, commands and directives, swearing and taboo language, as well as compliments used by the female characters in the film. This improves comprehension of the complicated connections between children's stories, language, gender, and social interaction. The goal is to provide a deeper understanding of the communicative preferences exhibited by these characters. Looking at women's words can reveal a lot about how gender identities are constructed and transmitted in animated storytelling. This study not only enriches the sociolinguistic academic discourse but also prompts a profound reflection on the role of language in shaping social norms. By providing a nuanced perspective on the communicative strategies of female characters, this research invites critical engagement with the dynamics of language, gender, and social interactions within the realm of animated narratives. This allows us to think more deeply about societal communication in movies. The results of this study indicate that women show characteristics of a gentler communication style with the use of limited gentle responses, subtle tag questions, and limited application of compliments. This preference prioritizes inclusion and brevity of communication over other techniques such as instructions, hedging, and taboo language. Keywords: Coates Theory, Communication Strategies, Female Characters

Digitale Öffentlichkeit(en). Linguistische Perspektiven

Abstract In this thematic volume we ask how digitalization and mediatization are transforming public communication and its conceptual understanding. This introductory text delves into the historical shift from oral and body media to written media in societal communication, highlighting the evolution through telecommunication mass media to the replacement of analog communication by digital forms. It addresses the lack of consensus on the definition of ‘publics’ and public communication, underscoring the multidimensional, heterogeneous, and fluid nature of these concepts. We ask how digitalization and mediatization processes raise questions about fundamental changes in publics due to new technological-communicative possibilities. Furthermore, we discuss the concept of publics as communicatively constructed and maintained, shaped by media and community ideologies. We propose a continuum model for digital/digitized publics, ranging from dyadic communication to multi-party communication. It emphasizes four key aspects for linguistic engagement with digital publics: communicative construction, technical and social affordances, multiplicity of addressing, and practices of digital community formation. With this model and the contributions following the introduction we contribute to a nuanced understanding of digital publics, considering their scale, complexity, and the dynamics of content creation and audience interaction.

The Rise of Thinking Machines: A Review of Artificial Intelligence in Contemporary Communication

Artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities in natural language processing are rapidly advancing and transforming communication practices across diverse contexts. This review provides a comprehensive analysis of AI's emerging roles in mediating and participating in direct communication to highlight key opportunities and research priorities around responsible innovation. The study surveys the extensive literature on major applications of AI, including virtual assistants, chatbots, smart replies, sentiment analysis tools, and automatic translation technologies. It also closely examines their current and potential usage and benefits across interpersonal, organizational, and societal communication. The analysis reveals these AI technologies promise enhanced efficiency, personali-zation, accessibility, and new modalities of expression in communication. The study found that if judiciously and ethically applied, they could incrementally improve communication speed, quality, relationships, and even therapists' capabilities over time. However, more rigorous research is still recommended to investigate longitudinal impacts on human well-being, increase accessibility for vulnerable demographic groups, advance multimodality AI systems, and develop tailored guidelines and user-centered studies to ensure ethical, socially responsible progress. Overall, this review synthesizes the current state of the science and pressing research needs in this rapidly emerging field.

Wrangling in the Marketplace or Bartering in the Bazaar? Adapting Metaphors for Public Relations’ Societal Role

ABSTRACT The marketplace of ideas metaphor has long influenced how scholars and practitioners understand public relations’ role in U.S. discourse and democratic society, yet it is rarely questioned. We argue that the unacknowledged aspirations and Western, capitalist values embedded in the marketplace of ideas could cloud understandings of public relations in society and absolve practitioners of certain consequences of the discourses they put forth due to the function of the invisible hand symbolism operating within it. This work draws mostly from rhetorical and marketplace theory in public relations, including fully functioning society, to present five central limitations of the marketplace metaphor. A case example of U.S. discourse about trans women in sports showcases the shortcomings of the marketplace metaphor in practice. We introduce the bazaar and other compatible metaphors to inspire alternative, figurative thinking about societal communication and address some of the limitations we present, though we also ask questions about the marketplace of ideas to improve its fit with contemporary public relations. This essay offers theoretical and practical contributions by extending metaphors to explain practitioner responsibility in societal discourse and outline the importance of suiting metaphors to particular public relations contexts.

ChatGPT, LaMDA, and the Hype Around Communicative AI: The Automation of Communication as a Field of Research in Media and Communication Studies

The aim of this article is to more precisely define the field of research on the automation of communication, which is still only vaguely discernible. The central thesis argues that to be able to fully grasp the transformation of the media environment associated with the automation of communication, our view must be broadened from a preoccupation with direct interactions between humans and machines to societal communication. This more widely targeted question asks how the dynamics of societal communication change when communicative artificial intelligence—in short: communicative AI—is integrated into aspects of societal communication. To this end, we recommend an approach that follows the tradition of figurational sociology.

Von der Mensch-Maschine-Interaktion zur kommunikativen KI

AbstractThe objective of this article is to define more precisely the field of research into the automation of communication, which is currently only vaguely discernible. The central thesis is that, in order to be able to grasp the transformation of the media environment associated with the automation of communication, the view must be broadened from the “direct interaction of humans and machines” to “societal communication”. Broadening our perspective as such allows us to ask how the dynamics of societal communication as a whole change when “communicative AI” becomes part of societal communication. To support this thesis, the article first takes a closer look at the automation of communication as a phenomenon. Against this background, the concept of communicative AI is then developed in more detail as a “sensitizing concept” that sensitizes to both the breadth and depth of the phenomenon. On this basis, the bridging concept of the “hybrid figuration” is developed in order to grasp the agency of communicative AI and to be able to connect to “definitive concepts” of social science and media and communication research. It becomes apparent that with communicative AI as a field of research, the basic concepts of communication and media research—“communication” and “media”—are themselves challenged. The article is concluded by a conclusion that shows the research perspectives resulting from such an approach.

Effect of Coronavirus Disease (COVID-19) Pandemic on Different Aspects of Human Life: A Review Article

The COVID-19 pandemic is a major health crisis that has affected the lives of millions worldwide. This article aimed to assess the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the different aspects of human life. Throughout the pandemic, the worldwide lockdown has led to economic crises in many nations, resulting in a huge number of people losing their jobs and livelihoods. 
 Societal communication decreased and mental status was affected; as fear of the pandemic spread, many people developed sleep disturbances. Mental illnesses, anxiety, and depression were prevalent among the population. However, young people reported increased periods of sleep, Sleep disturbance was high among pediatric and healthcare workers. During covid-19, was shown that the use of electronic media by people near bedtime increased. During lockdown due to COVID-19, increased nutrition intake reduced bodily activity, and hence increased body mass index, especially among children was observed. Food delays have also occurred, particularly among young people.

Communication to Reduce Dependency and Enhance Empowerment Using ‘New’ Media: Evidence from Practice in UK Flood Risk Areas

Sharing of risk knowledge for extreme events is taking place against a backdrop of changing societal communication patterns, in which the flow of information is increasingly multi-directional, within and between individuals, wider communities and a variety of authorities using online media. We present qualitative findings from the CASCADE knowledge exchange project and a case study, from a flood risk area, on the role of social networks using such ‘new’ media as engagement tools in building resilience to flooding. The data emerged from a workshop held in 2018, together with a study into changing communication practice in the Thames Valley near Windsor, UK. It was found that engagement is occurring both during events, as an emergency management tool, and between events, often linked to strategic management such as flood defense and related planning. The qualitative findings were analyzed to investigate whether knowledge and information sharing in emergencies may lead to co-operative sharing between emergencies. According to evidence from workshop discussions across the seminars, and empirical evidence from the flood risk zone, social networks formed and/or enhanced using new media can help promote consensus but also have the potential to accentuate distrust and divide managers and the community at risk. Relevant factors were the nature of the risk faced, nature of event-related protection activity, whether extreme weather events were occurring or had occurred in the recent past, and sociocultural aspects such as the degree of general engagement of civil society, linked to location. There is a possibility that new media may thus reinforce existing power structures, including acknowledged paternalistic attitudes by management authorities and pre-conceived ideas from at-risk communities. In terms of the contribution that social media can make toward the goal of social learning for resilience, the specific role of online social media as a communication tool continues to evolve. It was noted from the workshop that there is a potential for producers of information to act also as consumers (the ‘prosumer effect’), but gaining benefit from this trend requires some changes to existing interaction patterns within and between risk management authorities and communities. More investment may be required in forms of engagement that build relationships of trust, using ‘traditional’ (face-to-face) approaches.

The societal communication of the Q&A community on topic modeling

The societal communication of the Q&A community on topic modeling

Dynamic communication and perception of cyber risk: Evidence from big data in media

Cyber risk is consistently viewed as a threat to the proper function of commercial and societal activity. Regardless of whether this risk is real or perceived, understanding how societal communication and perception of it change over time has important implications for both regulatory authorities and insurers. This contribution analyzes Chinese media news over the years 2009–2018 to identify the dynamics of cyber risk sources and associated societal assessment. Taking the psychometric paradigm as its point of departure and applying combination of computational and statistical methods, we identify 34 sources of cyber risk. The actions of government turn out to have a significant impact on public attention to the different sources of cyber risk, an influence that has been neglected in past research. The dynamics of societal aversion against most cyber risk sources are found to present inverted-U shapes. Adaptation and learning effects are found to explain this dynamic. Another finding is that news sentiment has a strong correlation with cyber risk perception, an insight of importance for regulators and insurers.

Covid-19 as an Immune Event. Multiple Irritation Scenarios beyond Western Modernizations

<div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><div class="page" title="Page 1"><div class="layoutArea"><div class="column"><p><strong><em>La Covid-19 como evento inmune. Múltiples escenarios de irritación más allá de las modernizaciones occidentales</em></strong></p><p><strong>Abstract</strong></p><p>This contribution formulates theses on the ongoing interpretation of the self-irritation of societal communication and membership in social systems that are triggered by the observable pandemic. The article reconceptualizes immune events of societal communication from a sociological membership point of view. This is a feature of the continuation of the third research program of multiple modernities (Eisenstadt) in sociological theory. Based on the Covid-19 virus as an immune event, five theses are put forward that address relevant aspects of contemporary society. They concern: 1) the criticism of the traditional semantics of the concept of “crisis” and its replacement by the immune events of membership systems; 2) the global solution to the virus problem that cannot be expected and what follows from it; 3) the consequences of the different solutions of the virus problem, especially for Germany; 4) the struggle of nation-states regarding the availability of the vaccine; and 5) the consequence for the sociology of membership, as well as the function of protest communication. The conclusion and the outlook address fundamental problems that sociological theory should take into account. It is central to point out that without limited negations (immune events) social evolution cannot be restabilized.</p><p><strong>Resumen</strong></p><p>La presente contribución formula una serie de tesis sobre la interpretación, aún en curso, de la autoirritación de la comunicación social y la membresía en sistemas sociales desencadenadas por la pandemia observada. Reconceptualiza eventos inmunes de comunicación social partiendo de la membresía sociológica. Esto es una característica de la continuación del tercer programa de investigación de múltiples modernidades (Eisenstadt) en la teoría sociológica. Con base en el virus Covid-19 como evento inmune, se presentan cinco tesis que tratan aspectos relevantes de la sociedad contemporánea. Éstos son: 1) la crítica a la semántica tradicional del concepto de “crisis” y su sustitución por los eventos inmunes de los sistemas de membresía; 2) la solución global al problema del virus que no puede esperarse y las conclusiones que proceden; 3) las consecuencias de las distintas soluciones al problema del virus, especialmente en Alemania; 4) la lucha de los Estados nación para obtener la vacuna, y 5) las consecuencias para la sociología de la membresía y la función de la comunicación de protesta la conclusión y la perspectiva tratan problemas fundamentales que la teoría sociológica debe considerar. Es indispensable señalar que sin negaciones limitadas (eventos inmunes) no se puede reestabilizar la evolución social.</p></div></div></div></div></div></div>

Environmentally Sound Agriculture Between Transformation and Conformation: The Changing Portrayal of the Growing Organic Farming Movement in Austria's Newspaper Coverage

ABSTRACT Possible contributions of organic farming to solve the current environmental crisis in industrialized agriculture can range from greening the existing agrofood system to being a driver for systemic change. The growth of organic farming has led to debates over whether organic is still a driver of societal transformation or whether it has become a slightly greener version of conventional agriculture. We investigate the changing roles that are ascribed to the growing organic farming movement by societal communication processes in the context of transformations towards more sustainable food systems. We analyze how organic is portrayed in six Austrian newspapers during its time of growth (1990–1999) and in more recent years. Results from media frame analysis show that already in the 1990s organic was not portrayed as a radical driver of change, and the emergence of new product-centered frames indicate an increasing representation of organic farming as simply a green production method.

Human Action Recognition Using A Novel Deep Learning Approach

Behavior human analysis is always a significant aspect in societal communication. The human behavior analysis is developed based on few factors like human activity and action recognition. Human action recognition is an significant feature in different safety fields. The assessment of the action recognition algorithm depends on the appropriate extraction and the learning data. In the human action recognition, classification plays the major role so in order to this effectively Gated Recurrent Neural Network is used with an increased computation level. Feature extraction is one of the essential factor in human action recognition it will influence the performance and computation time of the algorithm. This paper presented an approach for human action recognition based on new mixture deep learning model. The proposed method is evaluated on the different data sets like UCF Sports, KTH and UCF101. On UCF Sports data set the proposed method has given an average of 96.8%.

COVID-19s Impact on the Hispanic Community: How Understanding Culture Can Improve Outcomes

Background 
 A disproportionate burden of SARS-Cov-2 infection, or coronavirus disease 2019 (Covid-19), and death are highest among racial and ethnic minority groups. Based on data available on June 12, 2020, Hispanic people are more likely to acquire COVID-19 and have higher incidence of hospitalization and death compared to their white, non-Hispanic counterparts. While this issue is complex, many have hypothesized that the difference is due to societal factors and communication methods. The aim of this project was to evaluate information related to how the Hispanic population is affected by COVID-19 and how communications about the disease should be designed based on past research, physician input, and cultural sensitivities. 
 
 Methods 
 We conducted a thorough literature search on COVID-19 articles, both peer reviewed and grey literature, evaluating race and ethnic differences in disease prevalence and severity. Additionally, we conducted interviews with a small number of Indiana doctors who treat Hispanic patients to obtain a doctor’s perspective on the Hispanic community’s needs during the pandemic and ways to help reduce prevalence. 
 
 Results 
 Physicians in Indiana believe the main approach to help the Hispanic community is by utilizing trusted community resources to communicate information and build relationships with patients over time. It is recommended to develop new methods to deliver essential information about COVID-19 through multiple mediums, in a clear way, and in Spanish with focus on the collective good of the family. In addition, it is important not to just translate resources from English to Spanish but to design materials addressing barriers specific to the Hispanic community. 
 
 Conclusion 
 More culturally tailored information should be released to educate the Hispanic community about COVID-19. This information will assist in the design of materials and initiatives for the Hispanic community that we hope will improve methods of communication and care delivery related to COVID-19.

THE LANGUAGE QUESTION AS A FACTOR OF INFLUENCE ON UKRAINE’S NATIONAL SECURITY

The purpose of the article is to analyze the linguistic situation in Ukraine and to discuss its relation to Ukrainian statehood. The current language situation mirrors the socio-political situation in Ukraine and interrelates with language legislation as practiced by Ukrainian institutions of state power. As of today, language legislation is one of the most powerful tools to strengthen the state and increase national stability.
 In Ukraine language was, is and continues to be a cornerstone of national unity and national security. At present, the Ukrainian language is widely believed to be essential for the persistence of the Ukrainian ethnos. It is an important tool for the consolidation of Ukrainian collective consciousness and the spiritual unity of society. Ukrainian society, which is faced with a number of serious problems, needs a revision of its state-building strategy for the sake of national security. A consolidation of Ukrainian society and a clear national idea is key for a prosperous future of Ukraine. The ethnos is the power of the nation. There is no state without a nation. Language plays a significant role for the conservation of the ethnic identity of a nation and its organization in a state. Namely, the civic society of a state has common interests, values, ideas, emotions etc., which are shared in the process of societal communication based on symbolic messages. These symbolic messages have to be codified in a state language, because, according to Wilhelm von Humboldt, language is the expression of the spirit of a people. Language reflects the level of the power of spiritual energy for the consolidation of national strength. All state mechanisms (the governmental apparatus, administrative and financial institutions) should guarantee the effective functioning of the Ukrainian state language in all spheres of societal life of Ukraine. As far as minority languages are concerned, the state can only guarantee their free development and their protection from suppression, but is not obliged to take on maximum obligations.
 In this study we discuss how linguistic and legal problems interrelate with basic human rights and freedom and how a consolidated language policy serves the national interests of Ukrainian society. The experience of the last decades, namely the period of Russian aggression against Ukraine, shows how different political forces use language legislation, e.g., the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages, with manipulative intentions. National identity is constructed by such crucial parameters as language, historical experience and faith. According to current surveys, the majority of Ukrainians share distinctly pro-European views, although modern Ukrainian society is still shaken by disinformation and fake news. We offer a list of proposals that will help to consolidate national security in Ukraine.

Preferences regarding antibiotic treatment and the role of antibiotic resistance: A discrete choice experiment

To identify preferences of the Swedish public regarding antibiotic treatment characteristics and the relative weight of antibiotic resistance in their treatment choices. A questionnaire including a discrete choice experiment questionnaire was answered by 378 Swedish participants. Preferences of the general public regarding five treatment characteristics (attributes) were measured: contribution to antibiotic resistance, cost, side effects, failure rate and treatment duration. Latent class analysis models were used to determine attribute-level estimates and heterogeneity in preferences. Relative importance of the attributes and willingness to pay for antibiotics with a lower contribution to antibiotic resistance were calculated from the estimates. All attributes influenced participants' preferences for antibiotic treatment. For the majority of participants, contribution to antibiotic resistance was the most important attribute. Younger respondents found contribution to antibiotic resistance more important in their choice of antibiotic treatments. Choices of respondents with lower numeracy, higher health literacy and higher financial vulnerability were influenced more by the cost of the antibiotic treatment. Older respondents with lower financial vulnerability and health literacy, and higher numeracy found side effects to be most important. All attributes can be considered as potential drivers of antibiotic use by lay people. Findings also suggest that the behaviour of lay people may be influenced by concerns over the rise of antibiotic resistance. Therefore, stressing individual responsibility for antibiotic resistance in clinical and societal communication has the potential to affect personal decision making.

In Blogospheres: Comprehending Sociopolitical Implications

This article will focus on the ‘blogosphere’ in India as an emerging forum for critical readings of social and political events and issues. By concentrating on the blogosphere, read as a morphology of horizontal societal communication enabled through a network of blogs and social media sites on the internet, we have tried to offer a glimpse into the kind of issues and interactions that various groups and communities are engaging with and the scope for such online activism to usher in social transformation. For this study, we have limited our discussion to a close reading of contents on blogs as one confronts the positions and critiques offered by individuals and groups and gets a sense of the local concerns articulated in the blog entries. Our concern in this article is to fathom the potential of blogs in transformative politics and mass mobilisation, namely civic engagement against the framework of an emerging public sphere on the Internet by analysing case studies of select blogs, primarily—Kafila, an academic-activist blog, Youth Ki Awaaz (YKA ), a students’ blog and Round Table India, a Dalit blog.

Contextual determinants of CHILDREN\u2019S health care and policy in Europe

BackgroundThe main objective of this study was to explore the contextual determinants of child health policies.MethodsThe Horizon 2020 Models of Child Health Appraised (MOCHA) project has one Country Agent (CA) in all 30 EU and EEA countries. A questionnaire designed by MOCHA researchers as a semi-structured survey instrument asked CAs to identify and report the predominating public and professional discussions related to child health services within the last 5 years in their country and the various factors which may have influenced these. The survey was issued to CAs following validation by an independent Expert Advisory Board. The data were collected between July and December 2016.The data was qualitatively analysed using software Nvivo11 for data coding and categorization and constructing the scheme for identified processes or elements.ResultsContextual determinants of children’s health care and policy were grouped into four categories. 1) Socio-cultural determinants: societal activation, awareness, communication, trust, freedom, contextual change, lifestyle, tolerance and religion, and history. 2) Structural determinants which were divided into: a) external determinants related to elements indirectly correlated with health care and b) internal determinants comprising interdependent health care and policy processes. 3) International determinants such as cross-nationality of child health policy issues. 4) The specific situational determinants: events which contributed to intensification of debates which were reflected by behavioural, procedural, institutional and global factors.ConclusionsThe influence of context across European countries, in the process of children’s health policy development is clearly evident from our research. A number of key categories of determinants which influence child health policy have been identified and can be used to describe this context. Child health policy is often initiated in reaction to public discontentment. The multiple voices of society resulted, amongst others, in the introduction of new procedures, action plans and guidelines; raising levels of awareness, intensifying public scrutiny, increasing access and availability of services and provoking introduction of structural changes or withdrawing unfavourable changes.

DHIMA YA VITABU VYA FASIHI TAFSIRIWA YA KIGENI KWA FASIHI YA KISWAHILI

Before independence there was a dearth of publications in Kiswahili literature. Due to that scarcity, the education sector was greatly affected. During that period, Kiswahili had already grounded itself and was used as an important tool in the wider societal communication. So as to bridge the gap in the written Kiswahili literature, books written in other languages were translated into Kiswahili. Those translations contributed to the small collection of Kiswahili books that were available then. During this period, some Kiswahili enthusiasts such as Sheikh Shaaban Robert started composing poems, novels, short stories and plays in Kiswahili. At this time, more books written in other languages were translated into Kiswahili. This state of affairs has been going on in East Africa up to the present. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the contribution of this ‘foreign literature’ to Kiswahili literature. Also, the paper highlights thedevelopment, contribution and the future of translated literature in Kiswahili. Last but not least, the creative deficiency of these translations has been expounded by highlighting the way themes have been crafted in the context of the life and culture of the people of East Africa.