房价波动影响结婚决策的研究

中国房地产市场经历20多年发展,与人民生活形成了紧密联系,房价波动对青年的结婚决策产生影响。该文将房价纳入即将结婚男女的效用方程,并运用面板数据模型对我国2004—2008年31个省、自治区、直辖市的房价增长速度和初婚率进行分析,计量分析结果表明,在房价快速增长的近几年,房价增长速度提升1个百分点,初婚率下降约0．02个千分点,且我国初婚率对房价增长速度的变动敏感。我国房价的快速上涨确实对青年的结婚决策产生了明显压力。因此,政府适当控制房价。尤其是住宅性商品房价格的增长速度,这对于实现家庭稳定、社会和谐具有重要的现实意义。     

‘Show me the money and the party!’ – variation in Facebook and Twitter adoption by politicians

Our study explores the adoption of Facebook and Twitter by candidates in the 2013 German Federal elections. Utilizing data from the German Longitudinal Election Study candidate survey fused with data gathered on the Twitter and Facebook use of candidates, we draw a clear distinction between Facebook and Twitter. We show that adoption of both channels is primarily driven by two factors: party and money. But the impact of each plays out differently for Facebook and Twitter. While the influence of money is homogenous for Facebook and Twitter with the more resources candidates have, the more likely they are to adopt, the effect is stronger for Facebook. Conversely, a party’s impact on adoption is heterogeneous across channels, a pattern we suggest is driven by the different audiences Facebook and Twitter attract. We also find candidates’ personality traits only correlate with Twitter adoption, but their impact is minimal. Our findings demonstrate that social media adoption by politicians is far from homogenous, and that there is a need to differentiate social media channels from one another when exploring motivations for their use.     

TWITTER AS A TECHNOLOGY FOR AUDIENCING AND FANDOM

Amongst the most prominent uses of Twitter is its role in the discussion of widely televised events: Twitter's own statistics for 2011, for example, list major entertainment spectacles (the MTV Music Awards and the BET Awards) and sports matches (the UEFA Champions League final and the FIFA Women's World Cup final) amongst the events generating the most tweets per second during the year. During such major media events, Twitter is used most predominantly as a technology of fandom: it serves as a backchannel to television and other streaming audiovisual media, enabling users offer their own running commentary on the universally shared media text of the event as it unfolds live. This article examines the use of Twitter as a technology for the expression of shared fandom in the context of a major, internationally televised annual media event: the Eurovision Song Contest. Our analysis draws on comprehensive data sets for the ‘official’ event hashtags, #eurovision, #esc, and #sbseurovision. Using innovative methods that combine qualitative and quantitative approaches to the analysis of Twitter data sets containing several hundreds of thousands, overall patterns of participation to discover how audiences express their fandom throughout the event are examined. Such analysis is able to provide a unique insight into the use of Twitter as a technology for fandom and for what in cultural studies research is called ‘audiencing’: the public performance of belonging to the distributed audience for a shared media event. The work points to Twitter as an important new medium facilitating the connection and communion of fans.     

Time and Television News Work*

Combining theoretical and ethnographic material, this paper outlines why time is an important vehicle for analyzing the social organization of television news work and the social construction of television news. The paper investigates major events with problematic features—unscheduled “hard news”—as a means of understanding basic beliefs and organizational practices of news assemblers in a local television news station. Based on participant observation and interviews with photographers and reporters, the evidence shows that time is a key independent variable in the selection and assembly of hard news. Time is often more than a variable, it is a constituent feature of television news work—a contingency which must be attended to if the work is to produce what news workers consider to be “good television news.” The problematic elements of news work are magnified under the pressures of perishable hard news stories where adjustments to unfolding work demands cannot be predetermined or programmed. Some implications of the analysis are discussed in terms of the content of local news, the biases of news coverage, and the importance of considering time as a dynamic process in the study of work.     

Hybrid social and news media protest events: from #MarchinMarch to #BusttheBudget in Australia

Public protest events are now both social media and news media events. They are deeply entangled, with news media actors – such as journalists or news organisations – directly participating in the protest by tweeting about the event using the protest hashtag; and social media actors sharing news items published online by professional news agencies. Protesters have always deployed tactics to engage the media and use news media agencies’ resources to amplify their reach, with the dual aim of mobilising new supporters and adding their voice to public, mediatised debate. When protest moves between a physical space and a virtual space, the interactions between protesters and media stop being asynchronous or post hoc and turn instantaneous. In this new media-protest ecosystem, traditional media are still relevant sources of information and legitimacy, yet this dynamic is increasingly underpinned by a hybrid interdependency between traditional news and social media sources. In this paper we focus on an anti-austerity government movement that arose in Australia in early 2014 and was mobilised as a series of social media driven, connective action protest events. We show that there is a complex symbiotic interdependency between the movement and the traditional media for recognition and amplification of initial protest events, but that over time as media interest wanes, the movements’ network becomes disconnected and momentum is lost. This suggests that the active role traditional media play in protest events is being underestimated in the current research agenda on connective action.     

Crowding‐in: how Indian civil society organizations began mobilizing around climate change

This paper argues that periodic waves of crowding‐in to ‘hot’ issue fields are a recurring feature of how globally networked civil society organizations operate, especially in countries of the Global South. We elaborate on this argument through a study of Indian civil society mobilization around climate change. Five key mechanisms contribute to crowding‐in processes: (1) the expansion of discursive opportunities; (2) the event effects of global climate change conferences; (3) the network effects created by expanding global civil society networks; (4) the adoption and innovation of action repertoires; and (5) global pressure effects creating new opportunities for civil society. Our findings contribute to the world society literature, with an account of the social mechanisms through which global institutions and political events affect national civil societies, and to the social movements literature by showing that developments in world society are essential contributors to national mobilization processes.     

Sparking debate? Political deaths and Twitter discourses in Argentina and Russia

The big question that pervades debate between techno-optimists and their detractors is whether social media are good for democracy. Do they help to produce or accelerate democratic change or, alternatively, might they hinder it? This article foregrounds an alternative perspective, arguing that individual social networking applications likely do not fulfil a single political function across national contexts. Their functionality may be mediated instead by language and by pre-existing relationships between the state and offline domestic media. We arrive at this conclusion through examining reactions on Twitter to two fatal events that occurred in early 2015: the death in suspicious and politically charged circumstances of the special prosecutor Alberto Nisman in Argentina, and the murder in Russia of opposition activist Boris Nemtsov. Several similarities between the two deaths provide the conditions for a comparative analysis of the discourses around them in the Spanish-language and Russian-language Twitter spheres, respectively. In Russia, a hostile social media environment polluted by high levels of automated content and other spam reduced the utility of Twitter for opposition voices, who work against an increasingly authoritarian state. In Argentina, a third-wave democracy, Twitter discourses appeared as predominantly coextensive with other pro-government and opposition online, print, and broadcast information and opinion sources, thus consolidating and amplifying a highly polarized and repetitive wider public political conversation. Despite the potential for social media to help citizens circumvent formal and informal restrictions to discursive participation in national public spheres, in the cases that we compare here domestic political structures play a key role in determining the uses and limitations of online spaces for recounting and expressing opinion on current affairs stories involving the state.     

Agricultural Journalists' Assessments of Print Coverage of Agricultural News1

Abstract Critics of agricultural news claim farm media and mass media coverage of agriculture is systematically distorted, a condition that could seriously affect the agricultural information system. A national survey used agricultural journalists as expert judges to assess how well three types of print journalists cover agricultural news. Their assessments indicated that mass media reporters who do not regularly cover agricultural news tend to write agriculture stories that are superficial and stereotyped but not biased toward agricultural interests. Farm magazine writers' stories are not superficial or stereotyped, but writers are uncritical of agriculture, biased toward agroindustry, and overlook important social and environmental issues. Newspaper farm beat reporters are closer to farm magazine writers in not trivializing agriculture and closer to general newspaper reporters in avoiding close ties with industry. Both farmers and public thus receive biased and fragmented reporting that may polarize their views on current agricultural issues. Even if reporters are aware of critical shortcomings in their coverage, improvement may require reduction in structural constraints on story choice.     

Who is leading the campaign charts? Comparing individual popularity on old and new media

Attention in the mass media is seen as crucial for electoral success. However, most ordinary candidates hardly get any attention in the news. With social media outlets becoming ever more popular, the question is whether the overall asymmetry in attention for candidates still holds today. Do candidates who dominate the traditional media during the campaign also dominate the social media? Or can candidates make up for a lack of mass media coverage by attracting attention on these new media platforms? This paper aims to answer these questions by pairing Twitter activity and Twitter popularity with newspaper attention for a large number of individual candidates in the 2014 Belgian election campaign. We expand the normalization versus equalization debate by not only looking at how much a new medium is used, but also at its success in terms of popularity and audience reach. Our findings show that the two platforms are indeed related, mainly because a small political elite dominates both old and new media. Twitter popularity and Twitter activity (albeit to a lesser extent) are higher among powerful politicians. We elaborate on why these findings are so much in line with the normalization hypothesis.     

Twitter activism and youth in South Africa: the case of #RhodesMustFall

This article uses the South African student-led campaign known as Rhodes Must Fall, commonly referred to simply as #RMF, to explore youth activism and counter-memory via social networking site Twitter. The RMF campaign took place at the University of Cape Town and comprised student-led protests, which campaigned to remove the statue of British colonialist Cecil John Rhodes, as activists argued that it promoted institutionalized racism and promoted a culture of exclusion particularly for black students. Through a qualitative content analysis of tweets and a network analysis using NodeXL, this article argues that despite the digital divide in South Africa, and limited access to the internet by the majority of citizens, Twitter was central to youth participation during the RMF campaign, reflecting the politics and practices of counter-memory but also setting mainstream news agendas and shaping the public debate. The article further argues that the #RMF campaign can be seen a collective project of resistance to normative memory production. The analysis demonstrates how social media discussions should not be viewed as detached from more traditional media platforms, particularly, as in this case, they can set mainstream news agendas. Moreover, the article argues that youth are increasingly using social networking sites to develop a new biography of citizenship which is characterized by more individualized forms of activism. In the present case, Twitter affords youth an opportunity to participate in political discussions, as well as discussions of broader socio-political issues of relevance in contemporary South African society, reflecting a form of subactivism.     

Betting on Life: Associations Between Significant Life Events and Gambling Trajectories Among Gamblers with the Intent to Quit

Considerable evidence has suggested that problem gambling may be transitory and episodic, with gamblers routinely moving in and out of clinical thresholds. Findings in qualitative and quantitative studies have converged on identifying preliminary evidence for the role of life events as motivators and contributing factors for gambling changes over time. The aim of this study was to conduct an exploratory analysis of the relationship between life events, their respective experience as positive or negative, and gambling trajectories among problem gamblers intending to quit. Life event occurrence and ratings as positive or negative, and changes in gambling severity were analyzed over a 12-month period for 204 adult problem gamblers intending to reduce or quit their gambling. Overall, mixed effects models revealed several relationships between life events and both the magnitude and direction of gambling change over time. In particular, gamblers who experienced a greater number of positive events or specific events such as legal events, the adoption/loss of a child, or negative changes to their social relationships, finances, work environments or social/health activities were more likely to exhibit greater gambling reductions over time. Conversely, gamblers who experienced a greater number of negative events, such as family bereavement, the dissolution of a marriage, or negative changes to their residence exhibited smaller gambling reductions or increases in gambling severity. Possible mechanisms which may explain the findings and the importance of examining the subjective experience of life events are discussed. Recommendations for future studies examining associations between life events and gambling trajectories are provided.     

TRAUMA TRAINING AND THE REPARATIVE WORK OF JOURNALISM

This article examines discourses of trauma and affective labor in the emergence of trauma training in US journalism. In a body of training texts and films used in US journalism schools, crime and disaster journalism are being refigured as affective encounters between reporters and victims; in the process, training builds a language of trauma that describes and models the news making process as potentially reparative: as an epistemological meeting point between existing knowledge of social traumas and a training apparatus that enables constructs of trauma to do the cultural production of news differently. Rather than treat the emergence of trauma training initiatives as further evidence of the hegemony of therapeutic politics, I draw from Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's calls for reparative critique, in which transformations in the process of news production may reveal the work of affective labor and its emotional intensities as key, but often unacknowledged, features of cultural production. Analysis of training films and manuals in these curricula, on the one hand, shows their attachments to a medical discourse of trauma that borrows language and constructs from the trauma science literature, replicating forms of referentiality between wounded bodies and traumatized psyches. However, their translation into representational practices and modes of conduct for reporters – as witnesses to others' testimonies – also pose ways of understanding the burdens and affective responsibilities professions like journalism increasingly bear for displaying and interpreting social change and political upheaval.     

YOUTUBE,TWITTER AND THE OCCUPY MOVEMENT

Videos stored on YouTube served as a valuable set of communicative resources for publics interested in the Occupy movement. This article explores this loosely bound media ecology, focusing on how and what types of video content are shared and circulated across both YouTube and Twitter. Developing a novel data-collection methodology, a population of videos posted to YouTube with Occupy-related metadata or circulated on Twitter alongside Occupy-related keywords during the month of November 2011 was assembled. In addition to harvesting metadata related to view count and video ratings on YouTube and the number of times a video was tweeted, a probability sample of 1100 videos was hand coded, with an emphasis on classifying video genre and type, borrowed sources of content, and production quality. The novelty of the data set and the techniques adapted for analysing it allow one to take an important step beyond cataloging Occupy-related videos to examine whether and how videos are circulated on Twitter. A variety of practices were uncovered that link YouTube and Twitter together, including sharing cell phone footage as eyewitness accounts of protest (and police) activity, digging up news footage or movie clips posted months and sometimes years before the movement began; and the sharing of music videos and other entertainment content in the interest of promoting solidarity or sociability among publics created through shared hashtags. This study demonstrates both the need for, and challenge of, conducting social media research that accommodates data from multiple platforms.     

How journalists engage in branding on Twitter: individual,organizational, and institutional levels

In a social media age, branding is an increasingly visible aspect of identity construction online. For media professionals generally and journalists especially, branding on spaces such as Twitter reveals the complicated set of forces confronting such public-facing actors as they navigate tensions between personal disclosure for authenticity and professional decorum for credibility, and between establishing one’s own distinctiveness and promoting one’s employer or other stakeholders. While studies have begun to reveal what journalists say about branding, they have yet to provide a broad profile of what they do. This study takes up that challenge through a content analysis of the Twitter profiles and tweets of a representative sample of 384 U.S. journalists. We focus on the extent of branding practices; the levels at which such branding occurs, whether to promote one’s self (individual), one’s news organization (organizational), or the journalism profession at large (institutional); and how other social media practices may be related to forms of journalistic branding. Results suggest that branding is now widely common among journalists on Twitter; that branding occurs at all three levels but primarily at the individual and organizational levels, with organizational branding taking priority; and that time on Twitter is connected with more personal information being shared.     

Media Constructions of Risk and Safety: Differential Framings of Hazard Events*

The media play an important role in the social construction of risk and safety. In this article, we analyze how reports in a New Orleans newspaper defined the risk and safety associated with a series of four events during the summer of 1988: a drought, low water levels in the Mississippi River, a saltwater intrusion, and toxic pollution in local bodies of water. The newspaper reports defined some of the events as hazards by assessing their negative consequences and, in turn, defined them as specific kinds of hazards by identifying their causes. Specifically, we found that the reports defined the nonlocal consequences of an event as more varied and severe than its local consequences. Further, the reports consistently defined each of the events as natural events rather than attributing their causes to social or technological events or conditions. Our results suggest the importance of news sources, economic and political power, and a preference for monocausal frames in the social construction of news. Our results also suggest the importance of local cultural world views in defining hazards and risks. We use the findings to suggest avenues for future research and theory.     

Can World System Theory predict news flow on twitter? The case of government-sponsored broadcasting

Social media platforms provide world governments with the opportunity to distribute news content from their broadcast channels directly to foreign publics [Wallerstein, I. (1974). The modern world system. New York: Academic Press] World System Theory, which has successfully explained and predicted the structure of international news flow, is now being challenged. Specifically, these social platforms undermined assumptions regarding the one-way flow of information toward audiences and the exclusive institutional nature of the players in the international system. This study examines the unique case of government-sponsored news media and its international news flow. It finds that while the structure of the international news flow on Twitter exhibits a hierarchical core–periphery structure, non-institutional actors (e.g. bloggers) conformed less than institutional players (e.g. governments and news media) to that structure. This study also found that non-institutional actors assumed the role of bridging news sources and audiences, a role traditionally reserved for a small minority of elite news media. The growing and diversified pool of information mediators resulted in a more fragmented network of news flow, siloed, rather than interconnected. Research findings are synthesized and analyzed in the context of international broadcasting and social media scholarship.     

Tweeting India’s Nirbhaya protest: a study of emotional dynamics in an online social movement

Abstract

Previous research has recognized the role of emotions in protests and social movements in the offline world. Despite the current scenario of ubiquitous social media and ‘Twitter revolutions,’ our knowledge about the connections between emotions and online protests still remains limited. In this study, we examine whether online protest actions follow the same emotional groundwork for supporting and nurturing a social movement as in the offline world, and how these emotions vary across various stages of the social movement. Through a computer-assisted emotion analysis of 65,613 Twitter posts (tweets), posted during the Nirbhaya social movement (movement against the Delhi gang-rape incident) in India, we identified a strong resemblance between online emotional patterns and offline protest emotions as discussed in literature. Formal statistical testing of a range of emotions (negativity, positivity, anger, sadness, anxiety, certainty, individualism, collectivism, and achievement) demonstrates that they significantly differed across stages of the social movement; as such, they influenced the course of the online protest, resonating parallels with offline events. The findings highlight the importance of anger and anxiety in stirring the collective conscience, and identify that positive emotion was pervasive during the protest event. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

Breaking bad news with CONSOLE: Toward a framework integrating medical protocols with crisis communication

This paper develops the CONSOLE (Coherence, Orientation, Nuance, Support, Ongoing, Leadership, Emotions) framework to guide practitioners on how to break bad news effectively to stakeholders during crises. Arguably the first study integrating well-established medical protocols such as SPIKES (Baile et al., 2000) and COMFORT (Villagran et al., 2010) with crisis communication literature, the CONSOLE framework is applied on four aviation crises to examine the manner in which organizations communicate bad news on social media platforms, which are increasingly used to communicate with stakeholders (Siah, Bansal & Pang, 2010). Data was obtained during the height of the crises (Vasterman, 2005) from official Twitter and Facebook pages of Malaysia Airlines, AirAsia and Asiana Airlines. Findings showed that the airlines’ communication of bad news to stakeholders suffer from emotional deficit. Practitioners can use the CONSOLE framework to break bad news in a holistic and empathetic manner during crises.     

Legitimating journalistic authority under the state's shadow: a case study of the Environmental Press Awards in China

This study investigated the legitimation of journalistic authority in the form of journalism awards. The Environmental Press Awards, an unofficial but highly regarded news competition among Chinese environmental reporters, was selected as a case study. The case was examined from three interconnected dimensions: the creation and maintenance of moral and pragmatic legitimacies; the strategic processes of cognitive and social legitimation; and a dual process of symbolic legitimation of the market media ideology. Research conclusions were formed based on statistical analysis of 181 award submissions and 10 in-depth interviews with key personnel in the host organizations, the journalism community, and environmental non-governmental organizations. By looking into the establishment, dynamics, and results of the awarding process, the alliance between the market media and the green civil society was seen to have created and buttressed the legitimacy of the award. Without the blessing from the party-state, such legitimacy is vulnerable but can also be enabling.     

Live tweeting and building the digital archive; #NFQLR – who and what is it for?

This paper examines the temporal and ethical affordances of commercial social media platforms, such as Twitter, as tools for engaging in social research and knowledge exchange. Drawing on activity that took place during the New Frontiers in Qualitative Longitudinal Research seminar series, the article reports on using Twitter and other social media platforms to document, share and archive ‘data’ from a series of research events. It also experiments with new modes of research writing, using fragments of ‘data’ from Twitter to distil research knowledge and ideas, whilst also capturing the pace and form of this live method of social documentation and knowledge exchange. Bringing together conversations within digital sociology about how to ‘do’ time in digital research, with methodological debates among qualitative longitudinal researchers about how to research social and biographical continuity and change, the paper argues that the presentist focus in digital research is far from inevitable. Attending to time in digital media demands that we are alert to questions of authorship, audience and co-production, recognizing the labour of research and the provenance of research knowledge, ‘data’ and ideas.