Violence,murder, and fallen women: prostitution in the works of Vsevolod Garshin

This article investigates the theme of prostitution in two stories by the Russian writer Vsevolod Garshin (1855–88). Like many authors of the nineteenth century, Garshin utilizes the symbolic figure of the prostitute to question social and medical beliefs about commercial sex. Focusing on Garshin’s “Proisshestvie” (“An Occurrence”, 1878) and “Nadezhda Nikolaevna” (1885), the article traces the use of melodrama and violence in the depiction of prostitution. Particular attention is paid to Garshin’s use of St. Petersburg to add heightened meaning to the fallen woman’s plight. Connected through the Petersburg myth and the character of Nadezhda Nikolaevna, the stories complicate the traditional redemption plot associated with prostitutes by focusing on the inner life of the fallen woman and her impact on the male characters that she encounters.     

Illegal Aliens,Criminals, and Hypersexual Spitfires: Latin@ Youth and Pedagogies of Citizenship in Media Texts

This article aims to broaden the ways we conceptualize citizenship and implement citizenship education in social studies. To do so, the authors explore media texts as a curricular and pedagogical site for teaching lessons about citizenship. Specifically, the authors investigate how media drafts the boundaries of citizenship for Latin@ youth, and influences how young people come to understand who is and who is not perceived as a citizen entitled to rights and freedoms. Media texts, like formal social studies curricula, are powerful and enduring educators that shape how students know the world and imagine their place in it. Therefore, this article addresses how social studies teachers can integrate media texts into the classroom to explore representations of Latin@s and the impact that media has on our citizenship identities and experiences.     

Apathy and Antipathy: Media Coverage of Restrictive Immigration Legislation and the Maintenance of Symbolic Boundaries

Although the government no longer explicitly establishes boundaries of whiteness, it continues to play a central role in shaping symbolic boundaries between immigrants and nonimmigrants through immigration lawmaking. However, the salience of these boundaries may depend on how the media disseminate them to the public. In this study, we investigate media framing of immigration lawmaking using an original data set of news coverage of six of the most widely recognized exclusionary immigration bills and laws at different levels of government. Two patterns emerged from an iterative frame analysis. First, in their coverage of frames critical of these bills and laws, outlets devoted more attention to the effects of exclusionary legislation for nonimmigrants. Second, in their coverage of frames supportive of the restrictive legislation, outlets provided more space to those who openly associated immigrants with criminality and terrorism. Regardless of outlets’ seemingly neutral stance toward restrictive legislation, their disparate coverage of exclusionary lawmaking demonstrates apathy and antipathy toward immigrants, which has repercussions for the maintenance of inequality.     

Heteroglossia in text‐messaging: Performing identity and negotiating relationships in a digital space

This article uses Bakhtin's concept of heteroglossia to explore how linguistic repertoires are exploited in the performance of identity and management of relationships through text‐messaging. The study focuses on text‐messages sent and received by ‘Laura’, a middle‐class woman who has returned from university to her family home in rural England. Qualitative analysis of Laura's texted exchanges, informed by quantitative corpus data and ethnographic interview, details the role of heteroglossia as Laura and her interlocutors position themselves in relation to each other and negotiate differences in gender, class, education, past experience, and personal aspiration. The study shows how heteroglossia can emerge even in interactions between individuals from similar backgrounds with largely shared language resources, and highlights the need for sociolinguistic studies of linguistic repertoire to consider the part that digitally‐mediated linguistic resources play in individuals’ wider identity projects.     

Internet literacy and digital natives’ civic engagement: Internet skill literacy or Internet information literacy?

This study aims to show the role of Internet literacy in empowering digital natives’ civic engagement. Using a survey of 10th graders, we analyzed the effects of digital media use and Internet literacy on adolescents’ political and social interest, participation, and efficacy, controlling for their home and school environments. In doing so, we try to highlight the following points. First, we emphasize that there are two separate dimensions of Internet literacy: Internet skill literacy and Internet information literacy. Second, we adopt a broader concept of civic engagement reflecting the changing youth practices observed in the contemporary media environment. The study empirically found that Internet information literacy, not Internet skill literacy, is intricately related to adolescents’ civic engagement. It was also shown that adolescents’ Internet use contributed only to new and alternative forms of participation. Overall, the findings show that an adolescent who can critically understand and effectively evaluate online information is more likely to become an active civic participant than one who lacks such skills. The study concludes with a few policy suggestions.     

Wiki-worthy: collective judgment of candidate notability

The use of socio-technical data to predict elections is a growing research area. We argue that election prediction research suffers from under-specified theoretical models that do not properly distinguish between ‘poll-like’ and ‘prediction market-like’ mechanisms understand findings. More specifically, we argue that, in systems with strong norms and reputational feedback mechanisms, individuals have market-like incentives to bias content creation toward candidates they expect will win. We provide evidence for the merits of this approach using the creation of Wikipedia pages for candidates in the 2010 US and UK national legislative elections. We find that Wikipedia editors are more likely to create Wikipedia pages for challengers who have a better chance of defeating their incumbent opponent and that the timing of these page creations coincides with periods when collective expectations for the candidate's success are relatively high.     

Internet risks and expert views: a case study of the insider perspectives of youth workers in Hong Kong

This study collects and analyses the viewpoints of front-line youth workers regarding the notion of ‘Internet risks’. Previous studies have examined and discussed various dangers of the Internet. Parental, school, and governmental interventions are often called for by those concerned. The implicit assumption is that these are the people who possess the expertise to tackle the problems at hand. Through participation in three forums focusing on ‘Internet risks’, and in-depth interviews with 10 such ‘experts’ in Hong Kong, the study examines if this is a valid assumption. It finds that experts perceive Internet risks rather differently. In addition to the more conventional views about content, contact and conduct risks, our interviewees are aware that a new order is quickly emerging in the new media environment. Despite being considered as ‘experts’, they do not necessarily know how to tackle the so-called ‘youth-at-risk’. Rather, they are exploring how they would capitalize on the opportunities offered by the developments. The key findings highlight the need to critically review the notion of ‘Internet risks’. As with other risk frameworks, the ultimate aim is to develop intervention programmes. In this regard, risks are often treated as concrete problems that can be solved. Youth experts, however, find that the changing scope, speed and persistence of communication in today's information society present the biggest challenge in youth work. The existing framework of risks was unable to describe and account for such risks. In response, Internet risk has to be reconceptualized so that more updated, relevant and imaginative intervention can be introduced.     

Making Sense of Neoliberal Subjectivity: A Discourse Analysis of Media Language on Self-development

The influence of neoliberalism on culture and subjectivity is well documented. This paper contributes to understanding of how neoliberal ideology enters into the production of subjectivity. While subject formation takes place in multiple and contradictory ways and across multiple social sites, we focus on the increasingly popular media discourse of self-development, and examine it as a technology of neoliberal subjectification. Drawing on Foucauldian understandings, we analyze data from two different newspapers from two different national contexts, both of which are heavily influenced by neoliberalism. Based on our analysis, we detail four interrelated discourses—rationality, autonomy and responsibility, entrepreneurship, and positivity and self-confidence—demonstrating how these discourses constitute the neoliberal subject in ways consonant with neoliberal governmentality. There is no observable resistance to subject positions offered within these discourses. Self-development discourse instills stronger individualism in society, while constraining collective identity, and thus provides social control and contributes to preserving status quo of neoliberal societies.     

Regarding the Protests of Others

While much social movement research focuses on how activists actively cultivate affect and how social movements benefit from shared emotions, these ideas rarely intersect with research examining how race constructs emotional responses in a white settler society. I bridge this theoretical divide by examining the 2009 Tamil diaspora protests in Canada to study dimensions of suffering and apathy through the construction of the racialized protest(er). Drawing upon illustrations from a critical discourse analysis of 153 mainstream news articles and interviews with activists and journalists, this paper explores how racial logic frames media and public discourse through (1) the expression of protesters’ suffering and (2) the construction of racial apathy by the Canadian public. The paper theorizes why and how race frames the production of suffering and apathy, and offers considerations for social movement theory.     

Watching online videos interactively: the impact of media capabilities in Chinese Danmaku video sites

In China, the implementation of a Danmaku social media system to sustain and raise user interest in online video sites is an increasingly widespread phenomenon. Danmaku technology is used to display users’ messages in written text on the online video stream. Little is known about the effects of this form of interactive enhancement. The aim of this empirical study is to evaluate the evolving media capabilities of the Danmaku system and their effects on users’ perceptions of interactivity and their intentions to continue using Danmaku. We draw on media synchronicity theory and apply it to a stimulus-organism-response model. Using this framework, we hypothesize that the media capabilities of the Danmaku system, namely its transmission velocity, parallelism, symbol sets, rehearsability, and reprocessability, elicit increased interactivity, which influences users’ instantaneous intentions to share and to continue the use of the Danmaku system. The results showed that both users’ instantaneous intention to share and their intention to continue to use were significantly affected by the perceived interactivity. Unlike the results of previous studies, our findings showed that all five media capabilities positively affected the users’ perceptions of interactivity. The potential theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.