Visualising the ends of identity: pre-birth and post-death on Instagram

This paper examines two ‘ends’ of identity online – birth and death – through the analytical lens of specific hashtags on the Instagram platform. These ends are examined in tandem in an attempt to surface commonalities in the way that individuals use visual social media when sharing information about other people. A range of emerging norms in digital discourses about birth and death are uncovered, and it is significant that in both cases the individuals being talked about cannot reply for themselves. Issues of agency in representation therefore frame the analysis. After sorting through a number of entry points, images and videos with the #ultrasound and #funeral hashtags were tracked for three months in 2014. Ultrasound images and videos on Instagram revealed a range of communication and representation strategies, most highlighting social experiences and emotional peaks. There are, however, also significant privacy issues as a significant proportion of public accounts share personally identifiable metadata about the mother and unborn child, although these issue are not apparent in relation to funeral images. Unlike other social media platforms, grief on Instagram is found to be more about personal expressions of loss rather than affording spaces of collective commemoration. A range of related practices and themes, such as commerce and humour, were also documented as a part of the spectrum of activity on the Instagram platform. Norms specific to each collection emerged from this analysis, which are then compared to document research about other social media platforms, especially Facebook.     

Does compassion go viral? Social media,caring, and the Fort McMurray wildfire

ABSTRACT

In May 2016, an enormous wildfire threatened the city of Fort McMurray, Alberta and forced the evacuation of all of the city’s residents. Outpourings of support teemed in from all across Canada and over the world, prompting the largest charitable response in Canadian Red Cross history. This paper examines Albertans’ response to the wildfire by exploring caring and helping behaviors as well as the role of social media in facilitating these remarkable charitable efforts. The paper uses mixed methods including an analysis of the most popular Tweets related to the wildfire and an Alberta survey collected months after the disaster. The analysis of tweets reveals that care, concern, and invitations to help were prominent in social media discourse about the wildfire. The analysis of survey data demonstrates that those who followed news about the wildfire on social media express higher overall levels of care and concern for those affected, which led to helping those impacted by the wildfire. The findings provide important insights about the role of social media in disaster relief and recovery as well as citizens’ civic engagement.     

#IAmNotAfraidToSayIt: stories of sexual violence as everyday political speech on Facebook

ABSTRACT

The debate about the power and influence of networked publics often focuses on large-scale political events, activist campaigns and protest activity – the more visible forms of political engagement. On the other hand, digitally mediated activism is often questioned and sometimes derided as a lesser form of dissent, as it is easier to engage in, highly affective, and offers few assurances of sustainability of the change it calls for. But what about everyday political speech online, where social media platforms can contribute to a personalisation of politics? Can social media users express their views online and make a difference? This paper analyses around 3500 Facebook posts stemming from the #ЯНеБоюсьСказати (Ukrainian for #IAmNotAfraidToSayIt) online campaign that was started in the Ukrainian segment of Facebook in July 2016 by a local activist to raise awareness of how widespread sexual violence and sexual harassment are in the Ukrainian society. The paper argues that networked conversations about everyday rights and affective stories about shared experiences of injustice, underpinned by the affordances of social media platforms for sharing and discussing information and participating in everyday politics, can emerge as viable forms of networked feminist activism and can have real impact on the discursive status quo of an issue, both in the digital sphere and beyond it.     

新媒体影响力对雾霾风险感知的作用机制

基于“2017年中国城市化与新移民调查”随机调查数据，通过已有文献构建新媒体影响力和雾霾风险感知指标，采用中介效应模型验证并探索新媒体影响力对雾霾风险感知的影响及其作用机制。研究发现:提高新媒体影响力，能有效降低雾霾风险感知，而政府环保评价起着显著的中介效应的作用；并且新媒体影响力可划分为官方媒体影响力和非官方媒体影响力；官方媒体影响力不仅直接影响雾霾风险感知，而且通过政府环保评价间接对其产生影响；而非官方媒体影响力仅通过政府环保评价对雾霾风险感知产生间接影响。因此，媒体融合时代下，提升公众对官方媒体使用频率，拓宽官方媒体信息发布喋道，完善公开透明的信任机制，同时加强对非官方媒体的信息监督和信息反馈机制，完善政府风险沟通机制，对现阶段中国环境风险的源头治理具有现实意义。     

Reconceptualizing the generation in a digital(izing) modernity: digital media,social networking sites,and the flattening of generations

As digitalization binds society to an apparently perpetual acceleration, questions about the nature of time and speed have gained new urgency in the social sciences. Yet, theorizations of these issues have neglected their implications for social life and generations. Linking these lacunae, this article articulates how digital media and social networking sites (SNS) shape social life through cultural transformations in the generation. This article rationalizes predominant patterns of SNS user behaviors in the context of social theoretical and philosophical frameworks informed by Mannheim, Simmel, Adorno, Benjamin, Arendt, social presence, action, and acceleration theories to offer a relational reconceptualization of the generation as a set of social relations and processes for visualizing changing conceptions of time and speed in a digital (izing) modernity. This article introduces the concept of general and local generationing processes to articulate the processual nature of the generation and to assert that trends in SNS use and content production are underwritten by grammatical logics that collectively “flatten” separate traditional generations to form a cross-demographic and cross-temporal digital generation.     

People with disability and new disaster communications: access and the social media mash-up

This article explores how a lack of access to increasingly complex and overlapping digital communications platforms in times of disaster for people with disabilities has the potential to make already life-threatening situations considerably more dangerous. As we are increasingly coming to rely on a social media mash-up of digital platforms to assist in communications during disaster situations, the issue of accessibility for people with disabilities is as dire as if it was high ground during a tsunami or transport during a typhoon. The contemporary social media environment is characterised by a complex and overlapping network of complementary platforms, populated by user-generated content, where people communicate and exchange ideas. In this environment, YouTube videos are posted to Facebook and embedded in blogs, and Twitter is used to link to these other sites and is itself embedded in other platforms. These networks are increasingly supplementing and supplanting more traditional communication platforms, such as the television and radio, particularly in times of disaster. The concern of this paper is that the elements from which this mash-up of communications channels is made are not always accessible to people with disabilities. This evolving network of social media-based communication exposes the limits of existing Internet-based universal design.     

Male dominance and sexism on YouTube: results of three content analyses

This study conceptually and empirically extends a study by Wotanis and McMillan in which the authors claimed that female video producers are underrepresented on YouTube and receive much more negative (including hostile and sexist) feedback than male YouTubers. Using quantitative content analysis, this study supported the claim of female underrepresentation. Among the top 100 most subscribed YouTube channels in nine different countries (N = 900 channels), with a statistically significant proportion of only 25%, female video producers were strongly underrepresented. Additionally, a second content analysis of N = 2,400 video comments directly replicated the original study’s main quantitative results. This analysis confirmed that the popular female US comedy YouTuber Jenna Mourey (“JennaMarbles”) received much more negative (including hostile and sexist) feedback than her male counterpart Ryan Higa (“nigahiga”). However, a third content analysis of N = 6,000 video comments from five other pairs of comparable comedy YouTubers did not reveal that women’s videos generally attract a larger number of negative video comments. Possibly, women attract more negative comments only if they display their sexuality (like Jenna Mourey) or address feminist topics, but not if they conform to gender role expectations. Future research directions and practical implications are discussed.     

Online crisis communication in a post-truth Chinese society: Evidence from interdisciplinary literature

Through a thematic content analysis of 118 journal articles from interdisciplinary fields, this study reviews the research trends of online crisis communication literature in a Chinese post-truth society, where objective facts play a diminishing role, and Chinese people are losing their trust, despite the best efforts of organizations to deal with fake news in crises. Results of this study disclose some unique crisis communication strategies (e.g., strategic distraction, rumor-rebuttal, fabrication, acting cute, and content censorship) in crises of China. Influential contextual factors such as the political system, cultural values, and media features are identified as well. Theoretical and practical implications of this study are discussed, and a greater picture of online crisis communication in contexts is posited for future research.     

How publics’ active and passive communicative behaviors affect their tornado responses: An integration of STOPS and SMCC

During imminent threat crises, such as natural disasters, publics have minutes to decide how to respond after receiving a warning. This study advances understanding of publics’ crisis communicative and noncommunicative behaviors in the context of tornadoes through combining and extending two theories: the social-mediated crisis communication (SMCC) model and the situational theory of problem solving (STOPS). Findings from a survey of Southeast U.S. residents (n = 1,585) indicate that STOPS is internally consistent and accurate at measuring its intended outcomes of communicative action in problem solving. However, the STOPS measures do not have a significant relationship with the desirable outcome for imminent threat crisis communication: individuals following government’s protective action guidance about tornadoes. In comparison, the expanded SMCC model predicts individuals’ self-reported compliance. Finally, variables from the SMCC model and tornado-specific variables were integrated into the STOPS model to explain individuals’ communicative engagement. Implications for theory and public relations practice are discussed.     

Functional and emotional traits of corporate social media message strategies: Behavioral insights from S&P 500 Facebook data

Drawing from literature regarding public engagement, the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), computer-mediated communication research, and emotion psychology, this study examines the effects of companies’ social media communication strategies on public engagement behaviors as indexed by post likes, shares, and comments. Specifically, it investigates how corporate Facebook posts’ functional traits (functional interactivity and vividness) and emotional traits (emotion presence, valence, and strength) impact public engagement online. Through data mining and computer-assisted sentiment analysis of 33,379 posts from 106 Standard & Poor 500 companies’ Facebook accounts, this study finds a negative effect of functional interactivity but a positive effect of vividness on engagement. It also shows that emotional traits overall yield stronger public engagement outcomes. Two-way interactions between emotional and functional features are also detected. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.