Digital natives and social media

Digital natives (also known as “Generation Y” and “Millennials”), a generation born during of after introduction of digital technologies, 1980s and after, have mixed preferences for media use in personal and professional lives. A study by Friedl and Tkalac Ver?i? (2011) showed that even though digital natives prefer digital media in their personal lives, this is not necessarily reflected in their business lives. This study addressing preferences of “traditional” vs. “the new media” in a university setting found an opposite result.     

REREADING THE PASSING OF TRADITIONAL SOCIETY

This paper employs a proposed alterity discourse analysis (ADA) framework to argue that The Passing of Traditional Society – the bible of the modernization paradigm of development communication research – exemplifies far less a discourse on the relationship between empathy and development, as it does on the political/ideological imperatives governing the construction of the Other (i.e. the Middle East) by the Self (i.e. the US). To substantiate this claim, the paper debunks the book's claim to social scientific objectivity by pinpointing the methodological shortcomings of the empathy model and of the Middle East project from which the model was derived, and highlights the paradigm's dogma by revealing the religious metaphors with which the book's narrative is infused.     

CHAPTER 2: Background Forces in Policies for Care and Treatment of Disability

No abstract available for this article.     

Making Strategic Communications Work to Prevent Elder Abuse

ABSTRACT

With more and more noise hitting the public, more tasks to accomplish, and limited resources, elder abuse prevention organizations must speak with one voice and act in solid partnership. This article touches on processes, systems, procedures, and resources necessary to develop strategic communications plans that are single in strategy and consistent in objectives and image. While the problem of elder abuse has been primarily covered in the academic and health professional press, this article focuses on the usage of mainstream marketing and communications principles to offer suggestions on how to achieve broad national awareness of the issues.     

Embedding and disembedding of political elites: a filter system approach

This article looks at the issue of political disengagement in mature democracies and the growing tendency towards disconnect between citizens and their political representatives. It locates itself in relation to ‘demand‐side’ (external to politics) and critical ‘supply‐side’ (focused on the political centre) explanations of disengagement. It concentrates on the latter and, accordingly, builds on critical, post‐Marxist and elite‐oriented work. As such it follows on from earlier calls in the journal for a return to elite‐based research (Savage and Williams, 2008). Drawing on general concepts in economic sociology (Polanyi, Granovetter) the article presents an alternative embedding‐disembedding paradigm for explaining and evaluating this tendency towards political elite disengagement. The propensity for politicians to disembed from wider society is explained by way of a series of eight ‘filters’. Such filters work, alone or cumulatively, both to socially embed political elites within the institutions and networks of formal politics and also to disembed them from wider society and the populace they represent. The interpretive framework outlined here draws on a combination of secondary literature and ongoing interview‐based research with some 150 political actors (politicians, journalists, officials) working at Westminster. As such, the filters and embedding‐disembedding paradigm focuses primarily on the UK case. However, the framework is easily adaptable to other nations and systems.     

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.     

Information geodesics for gamma models of communication clustering

Recently, Akyildiz called for further work on non-Poisson models for communication arrivals in distributed networks such as cellular phone systems. The basic ‘random’ model for stochastic events is the Poisson process; for events on a line this resuits in an exponential disiribuuon of intervals between events. Network designers and managers need too monotor and quantify call clustering in order to optimize resaurce usage; the natural reference state from which to measure departures is that arising from a Poisson, process of calls. Here we consider gamma distributions, which contain exponential distributions as a special case. The surface representing gamma models has a natural Riemannian information metric and we obtain some geodesic sprays for this metric. The exponential distributions form a 1-dimensional subspace of the 2-dimensional space of all gamma distributions, so we have an isometric embedding of the random model as a subspace of the gamma models. This geometry may provide an appropriate structure on which to represent clustering as quantifiable departures from randomness and on which to impose dynamic control algorithms to optimize traffic at receiving nodes in distributed communication networks. In practice, we may expect correlation between call arrival times and call duration, reflecting for example peaks of different users of internet services. This would give rise to a twisted product of two surfaces with the twisting controlled by the correlation. Though bivariate gamma models do exist, such as Kibble's, none has tractabie information geometry nor sufficiently general marginal gammas,but a simulation method of approach is suggested.     

分布式并行服务器中的高性能通信研究

基于快速以太局网中分布式并行服务器通信特点和对网络协议栈的分析,设计并实现了一种分布式操作系统传输协议。该协议在维持通用编程接口的同时,精简网络协议栈底层的冗余操作,减少操作系统干预和协议自维护开销。在8个节点的服务器系统上的测试结果表明,分布式操作系统传输协议获得比用户数据报协议更小的往返延迟和系统开销,应用环境下有约20%的增益,能有力地支持系统扩展和大并发访问服务。     

个人与组织匹配对工作绩效影响的实证研究——以通信企业为例

通过对不同省份通信企业的问卷调查,运用结构方程模型,实证研究了个人与组织匹配、自我效能对工作绩效的影响。结果表明,个人与组织匹配和自我效能都对工作绩效有着显著的正向作用,其中,自我效能在个人与组织匹配对工作绩效的作用过程中起着中介作用。继而根据研究结果对通信企业的人力资源管理提出了相关的建议。     

跨文化交际中的汉语流行语翻译探索

汉语流行语是一种特殊的语言变体,具有超越语义特征之外的文化内涵。从跨文化交际的角度,对汉语流行语的翻译策略进行探析,认为在汉语流行语的汉英翻译中应考虑以下因素:一是明确汉语流行语汉英翻译的首要目的;二是预判由文化差异所带来的受众反应;三是熟悉源语和目标语的语体风格与规范。