This volume brings together for the first time a collection of studies that investigates how multilingual speakers construct emotions in their talk as a joint discursive practice. The contributions draw on the well established, converging traditions of conversation analysis, discursive psychology, and membership categorization analysis together with recent work on interactional storytelling, stylization, and multimodal analysis. By adopting a discursive approach to emotion in multilingual talk, the volume breaks with the dominant view of emotions as cognitive and intra-psychological (...) phenomena and their study through self-report. Through detailed analyses of original recorded data, the chapters examine how participants produce emotion-implicative actions, identities, stances, and morality through their interactional work in ordinary face-to-face conversation, computer-mediated interaction, institutional talk in medical, educational, and broadcast media settings, and in research interviews. The volume addresses itself to students and researchers interested in language and emotion, multilingual speakers and settings, pragmatics, and discourse analysis. (shrink)

This article examines the discursive construction of a specific letter-style multilingual crisis message released by local governmental institutions during China’s battle against the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a sociocognitive analysis of a collection of 33 English-language messages, the analysis revealed the structural features of the message and the discursive strategies in constructing and negotiating the identities of the message’s addresser and the addressee. It was found that the discursive relationship between the addresser and the addressee was established on an (...) ingroup-outgroup distinction mediated by neutralising strategies to reduce authoritative imposition and image-enhancing strategies to promote a responsible government. The findings suggest that multilingual crisis communication is a multivocal, complex social practice shaped by genre, textual, media and contextual factors. These findings will provide insights into the crisis discourse as an emerging topic of interest and help inform multilingual communication strategies in and beyond the context of a public health emergency. (shrink)

The paper presents the results of a study on the analysis of the perception of coronavirus disease 2019 by Spanish-, German- and Russian-speaking social media actors after the emergence of vaccines and attitudes toward vaccination. The empirical base of the study was corpus data, materials from online media, social networks, microblogging, blogs, instant messengers, forums, reviews, and video hosting data. The Spanish-language database included 6,640,912 tokens and 43,251,900 characters; the German-language database included 16,322,042 tokens and 109,139,405 characters; and (...) the Russian-language database included 16,310,307 tokens and 109,060,935 characters. With a neural network approach, a multilingual analysis was performed, which made it possible to analyze the topic structure and the semantic network with the allocation of the semantic core and the associative network. Differential and integral features of the identified structures based on the material of these three databases made it possible to determine the general and different characteristics of the perception by Spanish-, German-, and Russian-speaking users of the development of the pandemic, a number of social problems, attitudes toward various types of vaccines, observance of preventive measures, and readiness for vaccination. (shrink)

Resumen La globalización genera espacios multilingües de interacción donde existen conflictos en la interpretación de prácticas discursivas aceptables a nivel local, provocando una re-escalarización de lo local, nacional, regional y global. Este trabajo explora cómo en el fútbol internacional – en que interactúan jugadores, fanáticos y medios deportivos internacionales – se disputan estas prácticas discursivas y su significado. En un corpus de artículos periodísticos investigamos dos incidentes en los que enunciados en español fueron interpretados por hablantes de otras lenguas ­como (...) actos discriminatorios. Usando herramientas de análisis del discurso mostramos cómo se construyen comunidades axiológicas y posicionamientos ideológicos que legitiman marcos interpretativos regionales, relegando a un segundo plano la discusión sobre las prácticas discursivas discriminatorias a nivel local. Esta pugna por el derecho a la interpretación produce reflexiones metapragmáticas sobre la inestabilidad del significado a través de las diferentes escalas. Mostramos cómo lo que en una escala resulta inocuo, en otra es un índice de significados ideológicamente cargados que define a un individuo o grupo como racista u homofóbico. (shrink)

Signe des temps, Cafebabel, est un webzine gratuit paneuropéen publiant quotidiennement en six langues . Il vise l’eurogénération, « la première génération qui vit l’Europe au quotidien ». S’appuyant sur un réseau de 31 rédactions locales dans 13 pays européens, coordonnées par une rédaction centrale à Paris, les articles partent de toutes ces rédactions, sont traduits par un réseau de traducteurs bénévoles, puis revus pour le travail final de secrétariat de rédaction par des journalistes professionnels, en fonction du lectorat de (...) l’aire linguistique à laquelle la traduction s’adresse sans nécessairement être juxtaposée sur l’original. La diversité des thèmes, la jeunesse du lectorat comme celle de la rédaction, l’amour des langues partagé par ses lecteurs, la diversité de son réseau et l’optique de proximité de Cafebabel en font un média européen original, différent de Courrier international, Euronews, Arte ou Presseurop.“Cafebabel” is a sign of the times, a free-access, pan-European webzine published every day in six languages . Its target audience is the “Eurogeneration”, “the first generation of people whose daily lives are European”. A network of 31 editorial committees in 13 European countries, coordinated by a central editorial board in Paris, sends out articles that are translated by a network of volunteer translators, before reaching the final copydesk stage where they are revised by professional journalists according to the linguistic area targeted by the translation, and not necessarily in juxtaposition with the original. The variety of topics, the youthfulness of both readership and writers and their shared love of languages, the diversity of its contributors and the “corner café” feel of “Cafebabel” have made it a highly distinctive Europe-wide media outlet, on a different register from “Courrier international”, “Euronews”, “Arte” or “Presseurop”. (shrink)

On a vu apparaître, avec la mondialisation, de nouveaux métiers de la traduction qui sont tous fondés sur une prise en compte du multilinguisme et du plurilinguisme, devenus caractéristiques des individus, des supports et des outils. Dans la course à l’intégration des médias et à la maîtrise de l’information diffusée dans toutes les langues du monde, le traducteur a ainsi gagné ses lettres de noblesse langagière en devenant un acteur stratégique au sein des institutions et des entreprises d’envergure internationale. L’extraordinaire (...) succès d’Internet n’a fait que conforter cette position stratégique en élargissant davantage l’éventail des compétences du traducteur et le champ de ses interventions. Désormais, il est tantôt « communicateur » en plusieurs langues, tantôt « médiateur » en zone de crise ou de conflit et, parfois, « veilleur multilingue » à la recherche d’informations stratégiques.With the advent of globalisation, translation has branched out into new professions that are all based on recognition of multilingualism as a characteristic of individuals, media and tools. In the race towards media integration and information management in each of the world’s languages, translators have gained status as strategic players within institutions and companies operating, or aiming to operate, on an international scale. The phenomenal success of the Internet has strengthened this strategic position by broadening the range of translating skills and their fields of application. Nowadays, translators may be “communicators” in several languages, “mediators” in crises or conflict zones and sometimes multilingual “intelligence gatherers” of strategic information. (shrink)

This book takes on current perspectives on transnationalism and children's relationships to media, childhood, and markets in converging global worlds. It introduces the idea of multi-sited imaginaries to explain how children's media and literacy performances shape and are shaped by shared visions of communities that we collectively imagine, including play, media, gender, family, school, or cultural worlds. It draws upon elements of ethnographies of globalization to examine the convergences of such imaginaries across multiple sites: early childhood and (...) elementary classrooms and communities in Puerto Rico and the Midwest United States. The analysis situates children's literacy and play practices in the intersections of local/global, rural/urban, Spanish/English/multilingual, and Latino multinational media/US multinational media, revealing how children use drama and pretense to relocate, take up, contest, and consume global media and consumer identities. (shrink)

The virtual community under consideration is called theNigerian Village Square, ‘…a marketplace of ideas’. As an online discussion forum, NVS combines the features of listservs and newsgroups with a more elegant and user-friendly interface. While computer-mediated communication technologies augment political discourse in established democracies, new media and mobile technologies create avenues for a virtual sphere among Nigerians. Therefore, the ideal virtual sphere guarantees equal access to all connected netizens, equal right for all languages in netizens’ linguistic repertoire, and it (...) fosters democratic deliberation through policy debates, public dialogues and ‘online polylogues’. By linguistic marketing is meant discourse as a vehicle for ‘promotional acts’ and for ‘selling’ particular cultures and ideologies to multicultural and multilingual readers/audiences. One interpretation of this is in terms of asserting language rights and linguistic equality. The use of Nigerian languages with Nigerian Pidgin online is promotional and forexistential negotiation. This results in language mixture which is an instantiation of freedom of speech, freedom of switch and freedom to switch. The underlying pragmatic motivation for top-down language mixture and alternation in Nigerian virtual discourse is attention-getting with the aim of inducing an interdiscursive writer-reader cognitive as well as communicative interaction. Other pragmatic functions of code switching discussed in the paper include allusive textuality, amusing phaticity, anticipated interactivity, affective expressivity and audience affiliation or alienation, among others. Thus, intertextuality is an explanatory technique for investigating previously unexplored phenomena in digital code switching. (shrink)

This article introduces the concept of the polymedia repertoire to explore how social meaning is indexed through the interplay of communicative resources at different levels of expression in digitally mediated interactions. The multi-layered polymedia repertoire highlights how people move fluidly between media platforms, semiotic modes and linguistic resources in the course of their everyday interactions, and enables us to locate digital communications within individuals’ wider practices. The potential of our theoretical contribution is illustrated through analysis of mobile phone messaging (...) between participants in a large multi-sited ethnography of the communicative practices of multilingual migrants working in linguistically diverse UK city neighbourhoods. Our analysis of mobile messaging exchanges in a day-in-the-life of these networked individuals reveals the importance of device attention in shaping interpersonal interactions, as well as the complex ways in which choices at different levels of a polymedia repertoire are structured by social relationships, communicative purpose and identification processes. (shrink)

Media argumentation is a powerful force in our lives. From political speeches to television commercials to war propaganda, it can effectively mobilize political action, influence the public, and market products. This book presents a new and systematic way of thinking about the influence of mass media in our lives, showing the intersection of media sources with argumentation theory, informal logic, computational theory, and theories of persuasion. Using a variety of case studies that represent arguments that typically occur (...) in the mass media, Douglas Walton demonstrates how tools recently developed in argumentation theory can be usefully applied to the identification, analysis, and evaluation of media arguments. (shrink)

Global Media Ethics is the first comprehensive cross-cultural exploration of the conceptual and practical issues facing media ethics in a global world. A team of leading journalism experts investigate the impact of major global trends on responsible journalism. The first full-length, truly global textbook on media ethics; Explores how current global changes in media promote and inhibit responsible journalism; Includes relevant and timely ethical discussions based on major trends in journalism and global media; Questions existing (...) frameworks in media ethics in light of the impact of global media; Contributors are leading experts in global journalism and communication. (shrink)

In this work, the significance of combining the evidence from multitaper mel-frequency cepstral coefficients, linear prediction residual, and linear prediction residual phase features for multilingual speaker identification with the constraint of limited data condition is demonstrated. The LPR is derived from linear prediction analysis, and LPRP is obtained by dividing the LPR using its Hilbert envelope. The sine-weighted cepstrum estimators with six tapers are considered for multitaper MFCC feature extraction. The Gaussian mixture model–universal background model is used for modeling (...) each speaker for different evidence. The evidence is then combined at scoring level to improve the performance. The monolingual, crosslingual, and multilingual speaker identification studies were conducted using 30 randomly selected speakers from the IITG multivariability speaker recognition database. The experimental results show that the combined evidence improves the performance by nearly 8–10% compared with individual evidence. (shrink)

The present study aims at analyzing the role of nativeness, the amount of input in L1 acquisition and the multilingual competence in the performance of Italian-German bilingual speakers. We compare novel data from the performance of adult L2 learners (L1: Italian; late L2: German) and that of heritage speakers (heritage language: Italian; majority language: German) to previous data from monolingual speakers of Italian. The comparison deals with the produced word order at the syntax-discourse interface in sentences containing New Information (...) Subjects in answers to questions that prompt the identification of the clausal subject. Overall, adult L2 speakers and heritage speakers perform alike but crucially differently from Italian monolinguals. These data reveal that multilingual proficiency determines an increased variety in the adopted answering strategies; in particular, the German-like strategy is active in Italian. Nativeness alone is thus no guarantee for a homogeneous performance across groups, nor do we find similar patterns of performance in speakers who grew up as monolinguals. Data also show heritage speakers’ sensitivity to verb classes, with answering strategies varying in accordance with the verb argument structure. Participants’ productions reveal an interesting relation in sentences with transitive verbs between subject position (pre-/postverbal) and object form (lexical DP/clitic pronoun). (shrink)

Providing high-quality education for students with emergent proficiency in the language of instruction (referred to here as multilingual students) presents a challenge to inclusion for educational systems the world over. In Austria, a new German language support model was implemented in the school year 2018/19 which provides language support in separate classrooms up to 20 h a week. Since its implementation, the model has been strongly criticized for excluding multilingual students from the mainstream classroom, which is argued to (...) reinforce the educational disadvantages that they face. The study presented here provides unprecedented qualitative insight into how schooling for students within the so-called German language support classes (GLSC) was organized during the COVID-19 pandemic. It builds on results of a previous large-scale quantitative study (n= 3,400 teachers), which was conducted during the first lockdown (spring 2020) and indicated a high risk of exclusion for marginalized students, especially for multilingual students in GLSC. To gain deeper insights into the situation of these students during school closures, 37 teachers who work in these classes at both primary and lower-secondary schools in Vienna were interviewed, of which 18 interviews were considered for analysis. The interviews focus on the situation during the first and second school closures in the city of Vienna. A thematic analysis of the interview data reveals teachers’ perceptions of aspects which harmed or promoted inclusion for students in GLSC during these periods of school closure. Teachers’ perceptions of the most harming factors for students included strong language barriers between teachers and students, restricted access to technical equipment and supportive learning spaces, and low parental engagement. A development that promoted inclusion of these students was the option to allow them to come to school during the second school closure. Since existing studies on the schooling of students during school closures have hardly addressed the situation of students in GLSC, this study contributes to closing this research gap. (shrink)

Media argumentation is a powerful force in our lives. From political speeches to television commercials to war propaganda, it can effectively mobilize political action, influence the public, and market products. This book presents a new and systematic way of thinking about the influence of mass media in our lives, showing the intersection of media sources with argumentation theory, informal logic, computational theory, and theories of persuasion. Using a variety of case studies that represent arguments that typically occur (...) in the mass media, Douglas Walton demonstrates how tools recently developed in argumentation theory can be usefully applied to the identification, analysis, and evaluation of media arguments. He draws upon the most recent developments in artificial intelligence, including dialogical theories of argument, which he developed, as well as speech act theory. Each chapter presents solutions to problems central to understanding, analyzing, and criticizing media argumentation. (shrink)

How social media impacts the autonomy of its users is a topic of increasing focus. However, much of the literature that explores these impacts fails to engage in depth with the philosophical literature on autonomy. This has resulted in a failure to consider the full range of impacts that social media might have on autonomy. A deeper consideration of these impacts is thus needed, given the importance of both autonomy as a moral concept and social media as (...) a feature of contemporary life. By drawing on this philosophical literature, we argue that autonomy is broadly a matter of developing autonomy competencies, having authentic ends and control over key aspects of your own life, and not being manipulated, coerced, and controlled by others. We show how the autonomy of users of social media can be disrespected and harmed through the control that social media can have over its users’ data, attention, and behaviour. We conclude by discussing various recommendations to better regulate social media. (shrink)

Media and Moral Education demonstrates that the study of philosophy can be used to enhance critical thinking skills, which are sorely needed in today’s technological age. It addresses the current oversight of the educational environment not keeping pace with rapid advances in technology, despite the fact that educating students to engage critically and compassionately with others via online media is of the utmost importance. -/- D’Olimpio claims that philosophical thinking skills support the adoption of an attitude she calls (...) critical perspectivism, which she applies in the book to international multimedia examples. The author also suggests that the Community of Inquiry – a pedagogy practised by advocates of Philosophy for Children – creates a space in which participants can practise being critically perspectival, and can be conducted with all age levels in a classroom or public setting, making it beneficial in shaping democratic and discerning citizens. -/- This book will be of interest to academics, researchers and postgraduate students in the areas of philosophy of education, philosophy, education, critical theory and communication, film and media studies. (shrink)

Media ecology is not the theoretical stream of communication studies and it is not limited to Marshall McLuhan´s work and thinking; however, we focus on McLuhan’s approach to media ecology for this special issue on the philosophy of Marshall McLuhan. Media ecology is a complex and systemic metadiscipline whose object of study is the changes and effects that have occurred in society as a result of the evolution of technology and media throughout history.

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 3, Page 210-225, July 2022. Interview-based research in multilingual situations can present researchers with specific ethical challenges relating to language-based power play, data handling and presentation. Studies indicate favouring the L1 as an interviewing language may produce better quality data, but external pressures can favour English as the dominant research language. This article examines researcher perceptions and experiences of the ethical consequences of language choice and the practical issues involved. Interviews were conducted with five (...) European researchers working on an interview-based project with experiences of diverse interviewing scenarios. The four moral principles of respect for autonomy, justice, beneficence and non-maleficence were used as a framework for analysis. The analysis revealed a nuanced picture of ethical issues in both L1- and English-oriented scenarios. This included potential misrepresentation and deculturalisation of the data in the former, and language-based power asymmetries in the latter. The findings highlight the importance of documenting ethics-related methodological details of language use, and advocates publication practices favouring the inclusion and foregrounding of L1 data. (shrink)

This volume explores the construction of an ethics for news media that is global in reach and impact.

The Court of Justice of the European Union and the way in which it works can be seen as a microcosm of how a multilingual, multicultural supranationalisation process and legal order can be constructed—the Court is a microcosm of the EU as a whole and in particular of EU law. The multilingual jurisprudence produced by the CJEU is necessarily shaped by the dynamics within that institution and by the ‘cultural compromises’ at play in the production process. The resultant (...) texts, which make up that jurisprudence, are hybrid in nature and inherently approximate. On the one hand, that approximation can lead to discrepancies between language versions of the Court’s case law and thus jeopardise the uniform application of EU law. On the other hand, that approximation and hybridity define EU law as a distinct, supranational legal order. This paper analyses the operation of the CJEU and considers whether a linguistic cultural compromise exists within that institution which exercises a formative influence on the character of its ‘output’—i.e. its jurisprudence—and what that may mean for our understanding of the development of EU law. (shrink)

The process of elaborating EU legislation includes the activity of translation. Drafting and translation cannot be considered separately but are rather two complementary activities whose aim is the quality of legislation. In order to achieve the required quality of legislation, one guiding principle is consistency of terminology. This study examines the particular case of two terms in German that appeared in the EC Treaty: Entscheidung and Beschluss. The inconsistent use of the two terms was the source of interpretative problems, as (...) observed in Case C-370/07 Commission v Council. A comparison of the contested provisions in the EC Treaty and the provisions in the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union shows that the terminological inconsistency has been corrected. After the examination of this case, we elaborate on the impact of terminological consistency on interpretation as reflected in requests for preliminary rulings. (shrink)

Provides guiding principles and values for practising responsible global media ethics.

Doing research in a globalized context – regardless of the discipline – requires language decisions at different stages of the research process. Many of these language decisions have ethical implications. Existing literature and ethical guidance tend to focus on ethical concerns that arise in communication with participants who use a language different from the main research language. As this article shows, language decisions with potential ethical implications can occur in many additional ways. Two questions guided this work: how do language (...) decisions and research ethics intersect at different stages of the research process, and what potential harm is related to language decisions and how can such concerns be mitigated? Relevant literature – combined with practical research experiences – show that language decisions can potentially result in harm at the conception stage of research projects, when working with participants, during data analysis, interpretation, and dissemination, as well as when managing a research project. Thus, the article highlights that the role of language-related ethical dilemmas is not only organizational (e.g., ensuring participants can understand what the research is about), but also social (e.g., developing trust and relationships in research teams) as well as ideological (e.g., awareness of power structures and diverse worldviews). In order to support researchers in globalized contexts, this article offers a reflective framework that complements regulatory guidance issued by ethical bodies and facilitates a deeper awareness of ethical implications related to language decisions in a multilingual world. (shrink)

A multilingual disaster information system (MLDI) has been developed to overcome the language barrier during times of natural disaster. MLDI is a web-based system that includes templates in nine languages so that translated texts can be made available immediately. Mobile phone e-mail with graphic text is a useful tool for delivering multilingual disaster information. The visibility of graphic text on mobile phones was measured and found to be equivalent to the built-in font. However, visibility deteriorates as the character (...) size becomes smaller, especially, on displays with poor resolution. This article also discusses the necessity of multilingual information and measures for a safe and barrier-free society. (shrink)

Accounts of language evolution have largely suffered from a monolingual bias, assuming that language evolved in a single isolated community sharing most speech conventions. Rather, evidence from the small-scale societies who form the best simulacra available for ancestral human communities suggests that the combination of small societal scale and out-marriage pushed ancestral human communities to make use of multiple linguistic systems. Evolutionary innovations would have occurred in a number of separate communities, distributing the labor of structural invention between populations, and (...) would then have been pooled gradually through multilingually mediated horizontal transfer to produce the technological package we now regard as a natural ensemble. (shrink)

Social media sites offer a huge data about our everyday life, thoughts, feelings and reflecting what the users want and like. Since user behavior on OSNS is a mirror image of actions in the real world, scholars have to investigate the use SM to prediction, making forecasts about our daily life. This paper provide an overview of different commonly used social media and application of their data analysis.

The ninth edition of Media Ethics: Issues and Cases has been updated to reflect the most pressing ethical issues in media. Featuring 25 new cases on hot topic issues from fake news to drones and a new chapter on social justice, this authoritative case book gives students the tools to make ethical decisions in an increasingly complex environment.

Students often multitask with technologies such as computers, laptops, tablets and smartphones during class. Unfortunately, numerous empirical studies firmly establish a significant drop in academic performance caused by this media multitasking. In this paper it is argued that cognitive studies may have clarified the negative consequences of this activity, yet they struggle to address the processes involved in it. A cognitive characterization of attention as a mental phenomenon neglects the interaction between bodies and technologies, and it is suggested that (...) a postphenomenological understanding is necessary to account for the materiality of practice. Notions of embodied habits and technical mediation are introduced, and an example of a postphenomenological account of media multitasking is introduced. It is argued that this approach enables researchers to investigate media multitasking as it occurs in everyday educational practice. (shrink)

This short piece draws on political philosophy to show how social media interference operations can be used by hostile states to weaken the apparent legitimacy of democratic governments. Democratic societies are particularly vulnerable to this form of attack because democratic governments depend for their legitimacy on citizens' trust in one another. But when citizen see one another as complicit in the distribution of deceptive content, they lose confidence in the epistemic preconditions for democracy. The piece concludes with policy recommendations (...) for how democratic governments should protect themselves. (shrink)

How we understand, protect, and discharge our rights and responsibilities as citizens in a democratic society committed to the principle of political equality is intimately connected to the standards and behaviour of our media in general, and our news media in particular. However, the media does not just stand between the citizenry and their leaders, or indeed between citizens and each other. The media is often the site where individuals attempt to realise some of the most (...) fundamental democratic liberties, including the right to free speech. -/- Media Ethics, Free Speech, and the Requirements of Democracy explores the conflict between the rights that people exercise in, and through, the modern media and the responsibilities that accrue on account of its awesome and increasing power. The individual chapters—written by leading scholars from the US, UK, and Australia—address several recent events and controversial developments in the media, including Brexit, the rise of Trump, Lynton Crosby, Charlie Hebdo, dog-whistle politics, fake news, and political correctness. This much-needed philosophical treatment is a welcome addition to the recent literature in media ethics. It will be of interest to scholars across political and social philosophy, applied ethics, media and communication studies, and political science who are interested in the important issues surrounding the media and free speech and democracy. (shrink)

Democratic conceptions of politics are tacitly or explicitly predicated upon a functioning arena for the formation of public opinion in an associated media-space. Policy-making thus requires a reliable connection to processes of ‘public’ will formation. These processes formed the focus for Habermas’s influential study on the public sphere. This contribution presents a look at more recent ‘structural transformation’, the causes of which are by no means limited to social media communication, and examines its consequences. It proceeds in three (...) steps: 1) in some proximity to Habermas, but also by means of the theory of resonance, it seeks to determine the kind of public sphere that a democratic polity requires; 2) an analysis of problems within the contemporary public sphere will feed into 3) a discussion of the conditions for the restoration of a ‘functioning political public sphere’. These include changes in the realms of participation, representation and spaces of encounter. (shrink)

Self-control, the capacity to resist temptations and pursue longer-term goals over immediate gratifications, is crucial in determining the overall shape of our lives, and thereby in our ability to shape our identities. As it turns out, this capacity is intimately linked with our ability to control the direction of our attention. This raises the worry that perhaps social media are making us more easily distracted people, and therefore less able to exercise self-control. Is this so? And is it necessarily (...) a bad thing? This paper analyzes the nature of attention, its vices and virtues, and what currently available evidence has to say about the effects of social media on attention and self-control. The pattern that seems to be emerging is that, although there is an association between higher use of social media and lower attentional control, we do not yet know whether it is social media use that makes people more distracted, or whether those who use social media the most do so because they are more easily distracted. Either way, the rise of the ‘Web 2.0’ does raise questions about whether the virtues of attention will change in the future, and whether this will bring with it a transformation in the way we shape our selves. (shrink)

This paper explores how the social and affective lives of people with marginalized social identities are particularly affected by digital influences. Specifically, the paper examines whether and how social media enables LGBTQ+ people to experience feelings of belonging. It does so by drawing on literature from digital epistemology and phenomenology of the digital, and by presenting and analyzing the results of a qualitative study consisting of 25 interviews with LGBTQ+ people. The interviews were conducted to explore the social (...) class='Hi'>media experiences of LGBTQ+ people through an empirical framework informed by both phenomenology and social epistemology, particularly feminist standpoint theory. The paper emphasizes the importance of positionality and the epistemic value of research that centers marginalized perspectives and employs an anti-oppressive research approach, and focuses on understanding the digital experiences of LGBTQ+ people from within their marginalized perspective. (shrink)

The concept of free will has been heavily debated in philosophy and the social sciences. Its alleged importance lies in its association with phenomena fundamental to our understandings of self, such as autonomy, freedom, self-control, agency, and moral responsibility. Consequently, when neuroscience research is interpreted as challenging or even invalidating this concept, a number of heated social and ethical debates surface. We undertook a content analysis of media coverage of Libet’s et al.’s :623–642, 1983) landmark study, which is frequently (...) interpreted as posing a serious challenge to the existence of free will. Media descriptions of Libet et al.’s experiment provided limited details about the original study. Overall, many media articles reported that Libet et al.’s experiments undermined the existence of free will, despite acknowledging that several methodological limitations had been identified in the literature. A propensity to attribute greater credibility than warranted to neurobiological explanations could be at stake. (shrink)

Psychometrics firms such as Cambridge Analytica (CA) and troll factories such as the Internet Research Agency (IRA) have had a significant effect on democratic politics, through narrow targeting of political advertising (CA) and concerted disinformation campaigns on social media (IRA) (U.S. Department of Justice 2019; Select Committee on Intelligence, United States Senate 2019; DiResta et al. 2019). It is natural to think that such activities manipulate individuals and, hence, are wrong. Yet, as some recent cases illustrate, the moral concerns (...) with these activities cannot be reduced simply to the effects they have on individuals. Rather, we will argue, the wrongness of these activities relates to the threats they present to the legitimacy of political orders. This occurs primarily through a mechanism we call “emergent manipulation,” rather than through the sort of manipulation that involves specific individuals. (shrink)

This article explores the question of how to understand social media following the Habermasian theory of the structural transformation of the public sphere. We argue for a return to political-economic fundamentals as the basis for analysing the public sphere and seek to establish a characteristic connection between digital-behavioural control and singularised audiences in the context of proprietary markets. In the digital constellation, it is less a matter of immobilising the citizen as a consumer but rather of their political activation (...) – albeit in conditions under which commercial interests have primacy: privatisation without privatism. (shrink)

_Imagologies: Media Philosophy_ is no ordinary book. Provocative, irritating and stimulating, this is a work to be engaged, questioned and pondered. As the web of telecommunications technology spreads across the globe, the site of economic development, social change, and political struggle shifts to the realm of media and communications. In this remarkable book, Mark Taylor and Esa Saarinen challenge readers to rethink politics, economics, education, religion, architecture, and even thinking itself. When the world is wired, nothing remains the (...) same. To explore the new electronic frontier with Taylor and Saarinen is to see the world anew. A revolutionary period needs a revolutionary book. Get a head start of the 21st Century: Read _Imagologies: Media Philosophy_. (shrink)

Previous research has established that the success of strikes, and social movements more broadly, depends on their ability to garner support from the public. However, there is scant published research investigating the response of the public to strike action by healthcare workers. In this study, we address this gap through a study of public responses to UK nursing strikes in 2022–2023, using a data set drawn from Twitter of more than 2300 publicly available tweets. We focus on negative tweets, investigating (...) which societal discourses social media users draw on to oppose strike action by nurses. Using a combination of corpus‐based approaches and discourse analysis, we identified five categories of opposition: (i) discourse discrediting nurses; (ii) discourse discrediting strikes by nurses; (iii) discourse on the National Health System; (iv) discourse about the fairness of strikers' demands and (v) discourse about potential harmful impact. Our findings show how social media users operationalise wider societal discourses about the nursing profession (e.g., associations with care, gender, vocation and sacrifice) as well as recent crises such as the Covid‐19 pandemic to justify their opposition. The results also provide valuable insights into misconceptions about nursing, strike action and patient harm, which can inform strategies for public communication. (shrink)

New media are increasingly providing spaces and opportunities for media houses and activist groups engaged in socio-political reform in Africa. In Nigeria, social media are becoming platforms for communicating messages of resistance against oppressive political and exploitative economic power structures. This study analyzed Ogas at the top (OATT), an online puppetry series by Buni TV, as a way of examining new platforms and message content in Nigeria’s rapidly changing media sphere. Relying on semiotics and critical discourse (...) analysis perspectives, the study analyzed select episodes of the series, to gauge how producers constructed powerful visual and linguistic messages to boldly satirize social injustices perpetrated by Nigeria’s political elites. (shrink)