Carl Couch: Bridging Sociology and Communication

The article documents how Carl Couch used a sociological approach to conceptualize, analyze, and interpret the communication phenomena studied. It is argued that Couch's analyses offered a thorough sociological discussion and comprehensive understanding of communication issues by relating them to the study of social relationships. One major contribution of Couch's works in communication is his analyses of information technologies. Couch demonstrated the reciprocal relationships between information technologies and social structures. He corrected the technological deterministic flaw in Harold Innis' and Marshall McLuhan's work to demonstrate the interface between information technologies and social structures. To further illustrate the insights of Couch's theses, a study of the experiences of college students with Walkman listening and another study of the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers' Club are considered.     

Couch the Bricoleur: Using Ethnographic and Laboratory Traditions to Establish Data Careers

Carl Couch reinvigorated the Iowa School of Symbolic Interaction by combining the theoretical and methodological tenets of ethnography and laboratory science. He thus resembled a bricoleur, or researcher who masters several seemingly diverse practices in order to create a seamless whole. Couch's new Iowa School also produced a bricolage, or a sum total of research findings, that I call a data career. This article pays tribute to Couch the bricoleur and his bricolage by elaborating on his data career and discussing how he created ethnographies in the laboratory. I further link the notions of bricoleur, data careers, and ethnographies in the laboratory with Couch's democratic vision. I contextualize this vision in light of a particular representative-constituent study (RCS) which served as a metaphor for Couch's pragmatic outlook.     

Exceptions to the Rule: Chabad-Lubavitch and the Digital Sphere

This article explores the tension between the inside and the outside in Chabad practice as represented by the digital sphere. Drawing on a close reading of Chabad Web sites, as well as archival and theoretical sources and biblical and rabbinic analysis, Chabad's relationship to media generally and the Internet specifically is explored. I find that Chabad's institutional use of the Internet is as a space to disseminate information rather than create community. The Internet is, for Chabad, a temporary space designed to bring people together in the real world rather than to create a virtual community. The Web site is designed to encourage people to seek out in-person encounters with Chabad Rabbis, whose recruitment techniques rest largely on personal charisma and interactions.     

Bitch,slut, skank,cunt: patterned resistance to women’s visibility in digital publics

Resistance to women’s public voice and visibility via street harassment and workplace sexual harassment have long constrained women’s use of and comfort in physical public spaces; this gender-based resistance now extends into digital arenas. Women face extreme hostility in the form of digital sexism in discussion rooms, comment sections, gaming communities, and on social media platforms. Reflecting on two years of in-depth interviews with women who have been on the receiving end of gender-based digital abuse (n?=?38), conversations with industry professionals working in content moderation and digital safety, the extant literature, and news stories about digital attacks against women, I offer a lens to think through the prominent patterns in digital sexism, showing (1) that aggressors draw upon three overlapping strategies – intimidating, shaming, and discrediting – to limit women’s impact in digital publics, (2) the way femininity and femaleness are used to undermine women’s contributions, and (3) men call attention to women’s physicality as a way to pull gender – and the male advantage that comes with it – to the fore in digital exchanges. Finally, I argue that when digital sexism succeeds in pressing women out of digital spaces, constrains the topics they address publicly, or limits the ways they address them, we must consider the democratic costs of gender-based harassment, in addition to the personal ones.     

Blindspots and Blurred Lines: Dallas Smythe,the Audience Commodity,and the Transformation of Labor in the Digital Age

Dallas Smythe's notion of the audience commodity provides a starting point for much work within the political economy of communication. First advanced when commercial television was the dominant medium, the controversial idea has proven to be an increasingly useful way of conceptualizing media economics in the digital age. Originally posited as a critique of Western Marxism's concern with ideology over materiality, two generations of media scholars have elaborated upon the idea. First, scholars offered it greater specificity and utility by connecting the political economy of media to more general concerns regarding labor, gender, and race. More recently, the audience commodity has become an increasingly useful theoretical tool, demonstrating how digital technologies enable new forms of economic exploitation. Rather than binding media studies to a rigid structuralism, the audience commodity helps illuminate the fluidity of media economies and culture under neoliberalism. I conclude that scholars may productively utilize and expand upon the audience commodity to answer contemporary questions about media and alienation, the state, and social movements.     

The use of digital media: To support and enhance vulnerable children’s perspectives,voices and choices

The article reports findings from a study that explored the potential of digital media to create new possibilities for professional caregivers to encounter 10 vulnerable children (7–17 years old) as subjects (rather than objects) and participants in their own lives. Five professionals received training in media pedagogy and experimented with new ways to communicate with children. Digital communication was found to expand the children's ability to engage in dialogue. Professionals need to find the courage to engage in digital communication on a child's terms as it helps generate a relationship that offers children new opportunities for raising their voices.     

In the shadow of the coal breaker: cultural extraction and participatory communication in the Anthracite Mining Region

What stories do ruins tell? What is the legacy of the extractive coal industry? When is extraction complete in a single-industry area? Tied to global capital, fuelling the Industrial Revolution on the labour immigrants, the legacy of extraction in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region in Northeastern Pennsylvania extends into local notions of heritage, memory, community welfare, and place. Tracking (de)industrial life scenes in the Anthracite Coal-Mining Region, this ethnographic work follows traces of the past as they emerge and the day-to-day practices that sustained them noting intensities and flashpoints as they arise in daily life. As a particular flashpoint, Coal Region residents processed the demolition of the ruins of Saint Nicholas Coal Breaker, the last anthracite coal breaker built before 1960 and once the largest coal breaker in the world. Residents rapidly produced and shared digital media of the Breaker with and through a large public digital humanities collaboratory that I created and maintain through an active Facebook page (https://www.facebook.com/AnthraciteCoalRegion) of more than 8000 members and a corresponding website (http://anthracitecoalregion.com). Engaging in community dialogue, participatory communication, and offering critical interpretations, residents wrote accounts about the demolition of the Breaker including its historical and mnemonic relevance, the cultural politics surrounding it, and the ethical dimensions of its extraction from the landscape by a mining company engaged in strip-mining on the surrounding land. These connections and dislocations between situated pasts show affective intensities arising suddenly even though dominant or more official narratives may have overwhelmed them. The sanitizing of the landscape of Saint Nicholas Breaker tries to empty the physical place of the material cultural traces of mining people/mined people to re-extract more coal through strip-mining operations, thereby rendering superfluous the underground miners’ labour by removing the last sign of it - the Breaker - from the landscape.     

SAMHSA pushes back against ‘political ploy’ criticism

Last week, the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration (SAMHSA) struck back against “members of the media and even other federal agencies who purportedly exist to protect the health of Americans,” charging that children's mental health is the agency's main reason for promoting school reopenings. The Sept. 29 statement by SAMHSA ( https://www.samhsa.gov/newsroom/press‐announcements/202009290204 ) came the day after the New York Times article ( https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/28/us/politics/white‐house‐cdc‐coronavirus‐schools.html ) revealing the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's (CDC's) concerns about reopening schools.     

Not necessarily a place: How mobile transnational online workers (digital nomads) construct and experience ‘home’

This article adds to current research on mobile transnational online workers (digital nomads) who travel the world in search of a holistic lifestyle that balances work and leisure. Using Kannisto's (2014) and D'Andrea's (2007) work on ‘global nomads’ as a theoretical lens and Nowicka's (2007) research on mobile professionals as a guide, I discuss the multiple meanings of ‘home’ for digital nomads who stayed in Chiang Mai, Thailand, in 2019. I will show that people feel at home when travelling with a loved one or by surrounding themselves with objects of emotional value. Furthermore, digital nomads create a feeling of being at home by connecting with their family via social media and video calling apps, while at the same time keeping them at a comfortable distance. Finally, some digital nomads envision an idealized ‘home base’ that is defined by social relations and not necessarily by the geography or amenities of a place.     

Facebook Bras and #digitalharems: Fantasies of Mimesis and the Transgressions of Aliaa Elmahdy and Amina Sboui

Abstract

This article presents a horizontal reading of Aliaa Elmahdy's and Amina Sboui's corporeal interventions alongside the efficacy of digital platforms in order to consider how algorithmic and normative protocols related to content filtering on social media amplify certain forms of political communication while prohibiting others. I argue that readings of Elmahdy's and Sboui's bodily politics through the lens of liberal feminism rely on what I call discourses of mimetic networking, where particular mediated events become reterritorialized as part of an archival knowledge of ‘Arabness’. This is done through the organization of data via hashtagging and content moderation, and through rhetorics of techno-optimism that mirror ‘first contact’ narratives which gender, racialize, and flatten complex and fluid engagements with new media in non-US/European contexts. The article concludes with a consideration of how the persistence of their corporeality relays with both normative and programmatic parameters online to make alternative visions of communication possible.     

Digital access,political networks and the diffusion of democracy

We examine the effects of digital access on the prevalence of democracy and its diffusion via trade, geographical and migration networks across 189 countries between 2000 and 2010. We find that different digital technologies may have varying impacts on freedom while affecting its diffusion via different political networks, and that related changes in civil liberties can be affected by both media freedom and internal political institutions. Our analysis suggests three key mechanisms linking information technology with democratic change and highlights the importance of a country's “susceptibility” to political influence that is triggered by greater digitally induced visibility.     

Curation: a theoretical treatment

Curation is a key mechanism of sociality in a digital era. With an abundance of information, sifting, sorting, selecting, hiding, and standing out become laborious tasks. While researchers have diligently documented people’s curatorial strategies, digital curation remains undertheorized in its own right. I therefore theorize digital curation by disentangling productive curation from consumptive curation, addressing how people curate content that they share, and that which they consume. I embed these agentic curatorial practices within structural bounds, both social and technological. In doing so, I offer a basic theoretical model that captures a dynamic relationship between individual curators, their social networks, and technological design.     

Coming Up…

The conference of The American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (this theme is “Out of the Shadows: Managing the Opioid Epidemic through the Continuum of Care,” will be held October 19‐23 at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Florida . For more information, go to https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/AATOD/     

Coming Up…

The conference of The American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (this theme is “Out of the Shadows: Managing the Opioid Epidemic through the Continuum of Care,” will be held October 19‐23 at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Florida . For more information, go to https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/AATOD/     

Digital media and cultural institutions in Russia: online magazines as aggregates of cultural services

ABSTRACT

Focusing on online magazines, this article sheds light on Russian cultural institutions from the perspective of digital media. My analysis concentrates on urban lifestyle magazines, a sub-category of consumer magazines and a media genre, which emerged in Russia in the glossy magazine format and is now experiencing a powerful ‘second rising’ on the internet. My article asks how the adaptation to the digital communication environment by lifestyle publications re-defines the very concept of a magazine and reorganizes the institutional ties between media and cultural industries. This focus enables me to analyse lifestyle magazines as a dynamic field of interaction in which cultural meanings are produced and negotiated. Based on new media studies, I see the cultural transcoding (Manovich 2002) of the networked and automatized information transmission into the magazines’ content as being a significant factor in the development of contemporary culture and media. Ultimately, my article introduces an attempt to analyse new media titles combining qualitative media analysis with the developing theory of ‘algorithmic culture’ (Striphas 2015). My argumentation is based on two case publications: Afisha, established in 1999 as a weekly glossy magazine introducing all cultural events in Moscow, and Inde, a digital-born regional lifestyle magazine focusing on urban culture in the Republic of Tatarstan. Urban lifestyle magazines are important for the institutional organization of Russian culture, as they direct their readers’ attention to a broad selection of arts, products and events; strengthen the link between consumers and cultural entrepreneurs and build on a long tradition of print journalism, thereby transmitting the values of reading and literacy to a popular public. Moreover, my analysis shows that, through their multi-platform publication strategy, online magazines (re)organize as aggregates of digital resources helping to manage cultural decision-making in a consumerist setting.     

Coming Up…

The conference of The American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (this theme is “Out of the Shadows: Managing the Opioid Epidemic through the Continuum of Care,” will be held October 19‐23 at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Florida . For more information, go to https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/AATOD/     

Coming Up…

The conference of The American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (this theme is “Out of the Shadows: Managing the Opioid Epidemic through the Continuum of Care,” will be held October 19‐23 at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Florida . For more information, go to https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/AATOD/     

Coming Up…

The conference of The American Association for the Treatment of Opioid Dependence (this theme is “Out of the Shadows: Managing the Opioid Epidemic through the Continuum of Care,” will be held October 19‐23 at Disney's Coronado Springs Resort in Florida . For more information, go to https://www.eventscribe.com/2019/AATOD/     

The Reality of Social Inclusion Through Digital Government

SUMMARY

Over the past few years, there has been much debate over the effectiveness of digital government. This paper addresses the strategic value and the effectiveness of digital government where it concerns enhancing citizen participation and social inclusion. It involves examining four specific facets of “effectiveness”–including: the view of management and ICT strategists; social and cultural implications; the implications of digital inclusion/exclusion and e-readiness upon social inclusion; and the citizens' view of the success of digital government in enhancing public access to information and transparency–based on a pilot study of digital government initiatives by local government in New Zealand.