Search results for "Media and communication"
showing 10 items of 746 documents
Slacking Off or Winding Down? An Experience Sampling Study on the Drivers and Consequences of Media Use for Recovery Versus Procrastination
2016
Today's constant availability of media content provides users with various recreational resources. It may also challenge self-control, however, once media exposure conflicts with other goals and obligations. How media users deal with these self-regulatory chances and risks in their daily lives is largely unknown. Our study addressed the predictors and consequences of recreational and procrastinatory media use using experience sampling methodology (N = 215; 1,094 media use episodes). Results suggest that trait (self-control, performance goal orientation) as well as state variables (exhaustion) are significant predictors of media use for recovery versus procrastination. Whereas recreational m…
Intercultural Listening: Measuring Listening Concepts with the LCI-R
2016
Listening is an integral part of communication, yet more research is conducted on the speaker as opposed to the listener. Previous research established a general schema of listening as a concept-driven behavior with four factors (Imhof & Janusik, 2006). Further testing by Bodie (2010) confirmed the factor structure and reduced the number of items from 33 to 15 (LCI-R). What is not known is whether the constructs are consistent across cultures. This study investigates whether the LCI-R can fit independent data comprising samples from the United States, Europe, and Japan. Results show that the instrument can be used cross-culturally when listening concepts are of interest and need to be measu…
Learning Versus Knowing
2006
Many studies have shown that voters do learn about political issues from televised debates. Because debaters may not be interested in educating voters but in gaining votes, this does not necessarily mean that debate viewers improve their knowledge (i.e., learning something that is correct). Instead, they may become misinformed by watching a debate. Taking the second debate in the 2002 German general election as an example, we first compare people’s knowledge about economic facts before and after the debate with the actual situation as represented by official statistics. In a second step, we trace back the change or stability of their assessments of the state of the economy to candidates’ s…
Not Funny? The Effects of Factual Versus Sarcastic Journalistic Responses to Uncivil User Comments
2016
Incivility in user comments on news websites has been discussed as a significant problem of online participation. Previous research suggests that news outlets should tackle this problem by interactively moderating uncivil postings and asking their authors to discuss more civilized. We argue that this kind of interactive comment moderation as well as different response styles to uncivil comments (i.e., factual vs. sarcastic) differently affect observers’ evaluations of the discussion atmosphere, the credibility of the news outlet, the quality of its stories, and ultimately observers’ willingness to participate in the discussions. Results from an online experiment show that factual responses…
Organizational Media Affordances: Operationalization and Associations with Media Use
2017
The concept of affordances has been increasingly applied to the study of information and communication technologies (ICTs) in organizational contexts. However, almost no research operationalizes affordances, limiting comparisons and programmatic research. This article briefly reviews conceptualizations and possibilities of affordances in general and for media, then introduces the concept of organizational media affordances as organizational resources. Analysis of survey data from a large Nordic media organization identified six reliable and valid organizational media affordances: pervasiveness, editability, self-presentation, searchability, visibility, and awareness. Eight media scales base…
Communicating environmental science beyond academia: Stylistic patterns of newsworthiness in popular science journalism
2017
Science communication in online media is a discursive domain where science-related content is often expressed through styles characteristic of popular journalism. This article aims to characterize some dominant stylistic patterns in magazine articles devoted to environmental issues by identifying the devices used to enhance newsworthiness, given the fact that for some readers environmental topics may no longer seem engaging. The analytic perspective is an adaptation of the newsworthiness framework that has been applied in news discourse studies. The material is a sample of the 38 most-read environment-oriented articles in the online version of the international science magazine New Scientis…
Deep Impact? How Journalists Perceive the Influence of Public Relations on Their News Coverage and Which Variables Determine This Impact
2015
Journalists perceive 25% to 80% of their coverage to be influenced by public relations (PR). However, there is hardly any research on what factors determine where on this wide spectrum an individual journalist will fall. This study analyzed the extent and source of the perceived influence of PR on news coverage via a quantitative survey of German journalists. On average, participants perceived over one third of their work to be influenced by PR, and a number of variables were found to be associated with the degree of this impact. Role conceptions as populist mobilizers and newsroom conventions discouraging excessive reliance on PR decreased the influence of PR on news coverage. Secondary e…
Sophisticated humor against COVID-19 : the Polish case
2021
Abstract The analysis undertaken in the article focuses on a group of memes selected from the database which drew on culture-specific references. Specifically, they embrace the memories of socialist times and call on references to comic films and easily recognized characters in order to bring out the re-discovered absurdity of the current COVID-19 situation. This material seems ideal to revisit Raskin’s early notion of sophistication, which was broadly argued to derive from intertextuality as well complexity of references that function as sources of humor. In all the examples discussed we can observe the intertextual and metatextual elements, multiple levels and shifts in points of view and…
Framing disease, ageing and death in popular science journalism
2016
This paper characterizes the dominant frames in popular science-oriented reports devoted to disease, ageing and death. In popular science journalism, framing often consists in the discursive construction of newsworthiness, i.e., foregrounding features of events/issues considered by science editors to be relevant or attractive for audiences, despite the alienating nature of some types of news. A sample of most-read health-related articles from New Scientist (2013-2015) is subjected to content analysis, keyness analysis, concordance analysis and news value analysis to demonstrate how bioscience tends to be framed through consistent and strategic linguistic choices. The analyses reveal that mo…
Students’ Interpretations of a Persuasive Multimodal Video About Vaccines
2021
The present study investigated students’ (N = 404) interpretations of the main message and use of modes in a persuasive multimodal video on vaccines. It also examined whether students’ topic knowledge, language arts grades, and self-identified gender were associated with their interpretations. Students analyzed a YouTube video in which two entertainers demonstrated the importance of vaccinating children. Students’ interpretations of the usefulness of vaccines varied in terms of quality of reasoning, which was associated with students’ topic knowledge. Notably, many students’ interpretations of the use of modes were incomplete, or they did not even mention certain modes in their response. Th…