Terms of engagement: Facebook and Twitter use among nonprofit human service organizations

This study uses Lovejoy and Saxton's (2012) hierarchy of engagement to analyze how nonprofit human service organizations use Facebook and Twitter to engage stakeholders. Their framework has not been applied to this nonprofit subgroup, and most previous scholarship on this topic focuses on just one platform. We also contribute by drawing on organizational theory to better understand variation in the modes of engagement organizations emphasize. Based on our analysis, we add new subcategories to the hierarchy of engagement. In addition, we find that compared to other nonprofit subgroups examined in previous research, the organizations in our sample placed a greater emphasis on using social media messages to ask stakeholders to take action. We report only modest variations in how organizations were using Facebook and Twitter. Finally, according to our results, resource dependence and stewardship theories help explain the modes of engagement organizations prioritize.     

“Sassy Queens”: Stylistic orthographic variation in Twitter and the enregisterment of AAVE

Recent computational sociolinguistic analyses of social media have emphasized the potential of using orthographic variation as a proxy for speech, thereby permitting macro‐level quantitative studies of regional and social variation (e.g. Eisenstein, 2015). However, the extent to which stylistic variation may affect these analyses remains largely unexplored. In this paper, I explore how authors use variant spellings stylistically to deploy personae and characterological figures (Agha, 2003), by examining the presence of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) features in a corpus of 15,804 tweets extracted from the timelines of 10 gay British men. I argue that the stylization of AAVE signals the development of a very specific persona—the “Sassy Queen”—which relies on an essentialized imagining of Black women as “fierce” and “sassy.” Concluding, I emphasize the value of micro‐level analyses in complementing quantitative analyses of linguistic variation in social media.     

Visibly ageing femininities: women’s visual discourses of being over-40 and over-50 on Instagram

Abstract

This article explores visual discourses about over-40 and over-50 femininities that emerge from women’s own Instagram accounts. It analyses women’s visual and textual rhetoric of what over-40 and over-50 looks like, and whether it could interrupt the ageist, sexist, and body-normative discourses of female ageing and visibility. Intertextual visual discourse analysis of images, captions, and hashtags reveals two dominant themes (fitness and fashion) and two repeating rhetorical elements (motherhood and self-sufficiency) through which women make themselves visible as over-40/50. A few explicitly subversive discourses (i.e., over-40 fatshion account) exist, but a discourse of a healthy, fit, fashionable, independent, self-sufficient, and happy mother over-40/50 is prevalent. It easily lends itself to being interpreted as an insidious reproduction of post-feminist ideology, but I argue that there are moments of critique and subversion within. Thus, a reparative reading that acknowledges moments of disconnect from the discourse that normalizes ageing women’s limited or non-existent visibility is offered.     

互联网时代媒体融合发展的未来模式探索

以互联网技术为引领的新技术为传统媒体的发展带来了新的机遇与挑战.从历史的角度看,传播媒介的发展轨迹与技术变革的历史脉络相互印合.媒体融合的层次与内涵日渐丰富,产业实践中呈现出复杂的博弈与协作关系.传统媒体独特的版权资源与人才储备优势,与新兴媒体的传播渠道及传播效率优势相结合,互相推动,深入协作,通过媒介融合渠道,实现优秀的人才、优质的内容与优化的传播平台的整合,以形成迸发式的传播威力,推动传播层次的迭代发展.面向技术发展前景的媒体融合,应当秉承开放与共享的新思维、立体与互动的新路径,注重以用户为中心,充分利用技术的便捷性,实现媒介传播渠道的多层次性与互动性,超越阶段性的固有技术模式,以踏准未来的节拍.     

自媒体时代“网络话语权”的二元结构解析与规制

自媒体的出现修正了媒体资源分布失衡的弊端,促使个体身份发生角色转变,进而使话语权的行使形成了“话语权利”与“话语权力”两个维度.前者是言论自由在网络空间的体现,后者是个人言论衍生为媒体式表达后形成的超个体权力.“话语权利”的行使应当受国家对言论自由所设的界限限制,“话语权力”的赋予则使自媒体成为国家新闻管理体制下的“准媒体”,其作为互联网新闻信息服务提供者,应当受到约束与规制.     

Relationship building and message planning: An exploration of media challenges and strategies used during school crises at the P-12 level

Schools at the P-12 level increasingly face crises related to school shootings, violence, and other tragedies. Understanding the communication challenges schools face is paramount to assisting schools with communication before, during, and after crisis events. The current study focuses on the challenges created by media interest in such crises and the strategies implemented to overcome these challenges and provide responsible information to stakeholders. Interviews conducted with 21 school crisis teams at the P-12 level revealed that sensationalism, seeking alternative routes to information, and framing were key challenges in working with the media. In light of these challenges, administrators focused on creating media plans, building relationships with the media, being accurate but guarded, and communicating reassurance and reunification. Implications are discussed for school districts nationally.     

Tweeting about emergency: A semantic network analysis of government organizations’ social media messaging during Hurricane Harvey

While social media like Twitter have been increasingly adopted by public-sector organizations, it remains less explored as to how government and emergency management (EM) organizations use these platforms to communicate with the public in response to emerging natural disasters. Extending the Situational Crisis Communication Theory (SCCT) to the realm of social media, this study examines the emerging semantic networks from 67 government and EM organizations’ official tweets during Hurricane Harvey over a three-week period. It identifies how multiple crisis response strategies—including instructing information, adjusting information, and bolstering—are constituted of different issues, actions, and organizational actors before, during, and immediately after the disaster event. Results suggest that government agencies use the strategy of instructing information predominantly before and during the disaster, whereas adjusting information and bolstering strategies are utilized more during post-disaster recovery. The study offers theoretical and practical implications of using a semantic network approach to studying organizational crisis responses.     

Examining multiplicity and dynamics of publics’ crisis narratives with large-scale Twitter data

The new reality of networked publics on social media calls for crisis communication practitioners and researchers to understand the narratives generated by publics on social media during organizational crises. As social media publics possess diverse, unique characteristics and communicative needs during a crisis, they form interpretative communities and co-create various symbolic interpretations of the crisis. Extending the public-centric and narrative perspective to the context of social media crises, we examined what crisis narratives were constructed by social media publics (i.e., multiplicity) and how these narratives changed by crisis stages (i.e., dynamics). Using topic modelling based on large-scale Twitter data of the Chipotle E. coli crisis (N?=?40,610), we identified ten narratives subsumed under two themes (i.e., sharing-based and conversation-based) based on publics’ social constructions of their perceived risks and crisis experience. On the one hand, sharing-based narratives, heavily impacted by publics’ shared media coverage, reflected media crisis narratives and salient risk perceptions aligning with the news agenda. On the other hand, conversation-based narratives, fueled by publics’ opinion expression and emotional venting, demonstrated publics’ interpretations of their experience with the organization in the crisis with less salient but more diversified risk perceptions. Crisis managers are recommended to produce and deliver compelling narratives resonating with different groups of social media publics during crises.     

Revisiting gendered assumptions of practitioner power: An exploratory study examining the role of social media expertise

The purpose of this exploratory study was to expand upon previous literatures in public relations power, and fill the need for more scholarship regarding practitioners’ perceptions of social media work, power, and gender. Findings from a survey of PRSA members showed that there is a gendered difference in power perception between males and females regardless of their PR roles or level of experience, but social media expertise was perceived equally between both genders. We argue that while social media expertise may serve to reduce a gendered power divide in public relations, continued critical exploration of social media and gender inequality is necessary.     

Focusing on Focusing Events: Event Selection,Media Coverage,and the Dynamics of Contentious Meaning‐Making

Despite the prevalent assumption among scholars of social movements and contentious politics that transformative contentious events are also the focus of public attention and discussion, there has been little attempt to substantiate this. After making a case for why to focus on focusing events and suggesting that these events should be thought of as products of a dialogical contentious meaning‐making process, we develop a coverage attribute‐based method for identifying focusing events. For illustrative purposes, we apply our method to the coverage of contentious events during the “first” intifada by Israeli‐Jewish, Jewish settler, and Palestinian newspapers. Findings from analyses of 11,868 news items reveal that newspapers are likely to strategically quiet contentious events that are strategically amplified by newspapers affiliated with opposing or targeted parties, and vice versa, depending on their interpretation of these events as political opportunities or threats. Analyses of variations across and within contending parties reveal the role of structure and agency in the dialogical seesaw‐like dynamics of contentious meaning‐making.