The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an increase in an array of mental health problems. Previous research has shown that media exposure to stressful situations is often related to anxiety and stress. However, given that most existing work has used cross-sectional designs, less is known about the interplay of media exposure and worry as they unfold during sustained exposure to a collective stressor. The current study examined bidirectional associations between COVID-related worry and media consumption over (...) a three-month period. Participants were 87 community adults, the majority of whom were recruited from communities heavily impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. For three consecutive months, participants asked to indicate how much time they spent worrying and consuming news about the COVID-19 pandemic on a scale from 1 to 5. Cross-lagged analyses revealed that Pandemic Worry at Month 1 predicted increases in Pandemic Media Consumption at Month 2, which in turn predicted increases in Pandemic Worry at Month 3. Findings suggest that media consumption may be a maladaptive coping strategy that has the iatrogenic effect of increasing worry. Clarifying the causal associations between anxiety-perpetuating processes and media consumption may have important clinical implications for understanding and treating mental health during health pandemics. (shrink)

I recall an old man selling Paul Lafargue’s Right to be Lazy on a busy street in the Latin Quarter in the 1980s. At the time, I was writing then my first book on the history of work time and leisure and felt by seeing this strange and grumpy man so energetically promoting the nearly forgotten work of Marx’s son-in-law somehow vindicated in my efforts. Paul Lafargue’s pamphlet makes an interesting assumption: The “natural” state of human being was relaxation and (...) that only a century or so of propaganda convinced the naïve worker and labor movement to embrace the doctrine of the “right” to work. The industrial revolution had produced the craziness of workers’ overproduction and legions of savants and servants for the small utterly unbusy rich. Once freed from the illusion of the right to work, machines, Lafargue insisted, would liberate us all from the drudgery of labor and let us live as the ancient Greek philosophers had dreamed—but without the dependence upon slaves. Lafargue’s view was hardly unique for its day. Many in the late nineteenth century believed that overwork caused production gluts and the irrational excesses of the rich. Busyness was a false doctrine of modern capitalism that was devoted to endlessly extending and intensifying work. Before and after him, many fought to win freedom from busyness with the reduction of worktime. But Lafargue’s dream that mechanical progress would liberate humanity from labor hardly happened. Instead, the “overproduction” that ceaseless toil created was “absorbed” by mass consumption. Even the “wastefulness” of the rich and their minions came to be seen merely as indifferent contributions to the Gross Domestic Product. So what happened? (shrink)

Digital systems are reshaping how we engage with music as a sounding dimension of cultural life that is capable of being transformed into a commodity. At the same time, as we increasingly engage through digital media with each other and with virtual others, attributes of music that underpin our capacity to interact communicatively are disregarded or overlooked within those media. Even before the advent of technologies of music reproduction, music was susceptible to assimilation into economic acts of exchange. (...) What is new in the digital world is the way in which modes of engagement with music are themselves being absorbed into an economy built on the datafication of virtual acts and the digital shadows of casual preferences. But music is more than just sounds that are culturally sanctioned as musical. Music is manifested as behaviours, and in interactive behaviour. Music is participatory as well as presentational, and in the participatory mode—involving collective, non-specialist, interactive real-time music-making—has significant individual and social consequences. Yet music as real-time participation is largely absent from the virtual world, with potential social costs that remain to be understood. Moreover, our everyday, face-to-face communicative—conversational—interactions are imbued with patterns between interlocutors that are musical, in that they share features with what we are happy to describe as “music”. These features are presently lacking in digital systems designed to subserve communicative functions, and this paper will consider the significant implications for our interactions with machines to which their successful incorporation into voice–user interfaces would give rise. (shrink)

In spring 2020, COVID-19 and the ensuing social distancing and stay-at-home orders instigated abrupt changes to employment and educational infrastructure, leading to uncertainty, concern, and stress among United States college students. The media consumption patterns of this and other social groups across the globe were affected, with early evidence suggesting viewers were seeking both pandemic-themed media and reassuring, familiar content. A general increase in media consumption, and increased consumption of specific types of content, may (...) have been due to media use for coping strategies. This paper examines the relationship between the stress and anxiety of university students and their strategic use of media for coping during initial social distancing periods in March-April 2020 using data from a cross-sectional survey. We examine links between specific types of media use with psychological well-being concepts, and examine the moderating roles of traits as buffers against negative relationships between stress and anxiety and psychological well-being. Our findings indicate that stress was linked to more hedonic and less eudaimonic media use, as well as more avoidant and escapist media-based coping. Anxiety, on the other hand, was linked to more media use in general, specifically more eudaimonic media use and a full range of media-based coping strategies. In turn, escapist media was linked to negative affect, while reframing media and eudaimonic media were linked to positive affect. Avoidant coping was tied to poorer mental health, and humor coping was tied to better mental health. Hedonic and need-satisfying media use were linked to more flourishing. Hope, optimism, and resilience were all predictive of media use, with the latter two traits moderating responses to stress and anxiety. The findings give a nuanced portrait of college students’ media use during a pandemic-induced shutdown, showing that media use is closely intertwined with well-being in both adaptive and maladaptive patterns. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo apply a socioecological approach to identify risk and protective factors across levels of the “sports-ecosystem,” which are associated with mental health outcomes among athletes in para-sports and non-para sports. A further aim is to determine whether para athletes have unique risks and protective factor profiles compared to non-para athletes.MethodsA cross-sectional, anonymous online-survey was provided to all categorized athletes aged 16 years and older, registered with the Australian Institute of Sport. Mental health outcomes included mental health symptoms, general psychological (...) distress, risky alcohol consumption and eating disorder risk. Risk and protective factors across multiple levels of the socioecological model, including individual, microsystem, exosystem and macrosystem level factors were assessed via self-report.ResultsA total of 427 elite athletes participated in the study. No significant differences in the rates of mental health problems were observed between para and non-para athletes. Both differences and similarities in risk and protective factor profiles were found across the multiple levels of the sports-ecosystem. Weak evidence was also found to support the hypothesis that certain risk factors, including experiencing two or more adverse life events in the past year, sports related concussion, high self-stigma, inadequate social support and low psychological safety conferred a greater risk for poorer mental health outcomes for para athletes in particular.ConclusionRisk factors occurring across various levels of the sports ecosystem, including individual, interpersonal and organizational level risk factors were found to be associated with a range of poorer mental health outcomes. The association between mental ill-health and certain risk factors, particularly those at the individual and microsystem level, appear to be greater for para athletes. These findings have important implications for policy and mental health service provision in elite sports settings, highlighting the need for more nuanced approaches to subpopulations, and the delivery of mental health interventions across all levels of the sports ecosystem. (shrink)

The novel coronavirus disease has become a global pandemic, causing substantial anxiety. One potential factor in the spread of anxiety in response to a pandemic threat is emotion contagion, the finding that emotional experiences can be socially spread through conscious and unconscious pathways. Some individuals are more susceptible to social contagion effects and may be more likely to experience anxiety and other mental health symptoms in response to a pandemic threat. Therefore, we studied the relationship between emotion contagion and mental (...) health symptoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. We administered the Emotion Contagion Scale along with a measure of anxiety in response to COVID-19 and secondary outcome measures of depression, anxiety, stress, and obsessive-compulsive disorder symptoms. These measures were completed by a large student sample in the United States. Data were collected in the months of April and May of 2020 when the fear of COVID-19 was widespread. Results revealed that greater susceptibility to emotion contagion was associated with greater concern about the spread of COVID-19, more depression, anxiety, stress, and OCD symptoms. Consumption of media about COVID-19 also predicted anxiety about COVID-19, though results were not moderated by emotion contagion. However, emotion contagion did moderate the relationship between COVID-19-related media consumption and elevated OCD symptoms. Although limited by a cross-sectional design that precludes causal inferences, the present results highlight the need for study of how illness fears may be transmitted socially during a pandemic. (shrink)

In recent research, the concept of “media diets” has received increased attention. However, the concept remains vague and not fully developed, and rarely, if at all, do researchers ask citizens about their perceptions of their own and others’ media diets. With the ongoing transformation of the media landscape, there has never been a more pertinent time to explore these perceptions, which this research intends to do. The main goal of this paper then is to identify recommendations addressing (...) recently voiced concerns about news consumption patterns in contemporary society to relevant stakeholders. Empirically, the study is based on a series of focus group interviews with younger (18–25 years old) and older (over 55) adults in five European countries (Germany, Poland, Romania, Spain, and the UK). Our results show important cohort differences as well as cross-country similarities, which are pertinent insights for the formulation of stakeholder recommendations. (shrink)

Since the beginning of the 21st century, sentiment analysis has been one of the most active research fields in natural language processing. Now sentiment analysis technology has not only achieved significant results in academia, but also has been widely used in practice. From business services to political campaigns, sentiment analysis is used in more and more fields. Sentiment analysis is essentially to dig out the user’s emotional attitude from the massive emotional natural language text data, and analyze the emotional dynamics (...) of the text author through certain technical means. At present, there is almost no sentiment analysis in cross-media writing content, and it can rarely help cross-media writing vision to advance with the times and comprehensive improvement of writing ability to adapt to the current rapidly developing information society; the commonly used text media in the digital age are not. Then there is the only composition tool. Various new media appearing with the development of the ages continue to intervene in writing, and it is the general trend to cultivate media literacy in writing. The main content of this paper is the research on the emotional intensity of students’ Internet public Aiming at the shortcomings of the topic feature word selection in the sentiment tendency analysis of the students’ Internet public opinion, improvements have been made to facilitate the research on the sentiment intensity of the sentiment analysis of the students’ Internet public opinion. Sentiment analysis of students’ cross-media written text through an improved MapReduce combinator model. (shrink)

La distinción entre transmedia y cross-media con frecuencia resulta confusa en los estudios sobre la comunicación. Esta investigación tiene como objetivo revisar el uso de ambos conceptos en la literatura científica publicada en Web of Science y SciELO Citation Index. La investigación parte de una muestra de 895 artículos a los que se les aplica un análisis bibliométrico y un análisis de redes para descubrir las relaciones entre textos. Los resultados del estudio son útiles para conocer la configuración (...) del campo de conocimiento desde una perspectiva que integra las diversas disciplinas implicadas y abren el espectro para entender la comunicación transmedia y cross-media como objetos de estudio afines que deben ser estudiados de forma interdisciplinar. (shrink)

In contemporary society, childhood is characterized as mediatized and commercialized. Media consumption worlds (MCWs) are a phenomenon that mirrors both aspects. They are narratives that are presented through various media platforms, games, and merchandising products. In this paper, the concept of children’s MCWs is developed theoretically and investigated empirically using the case of primary school children’s appropriation of MCWs as well as parental mediation and attitude in Austria and Germany. A mixed-methods design was applied, starting with qualitative (...) interviews with children and their parents and followed by an online survey for parents (N=327). The study revealed that children find individual ways to deal with MCWs, some of which foster creativity and self-expression but also consumerism. The parents’ attitude is ambivalent. They view MCWs as beneficial in terms of creativity, positive values, and as peer group experience. However, parents observe critically that MCWs lure children to the media and to consumption. (shrink)

The confinement of the population into their homes as a result of COVID-19 has entailed a notable increase in the consumption of diverse media. This exploratory study aimed to examine how the increase in media consumption was related to subjective happiness and psychological well-being. For this purpose, a questionnaire was administered to a sample of Spanish adults to assess their consumption of different media before and during confinement. Moreover, participants were evaluated for hedonic, eudaimonic, (...) social, and experienced happiness by using the Pemberton Happiness Index. The results underlined the great increase in the consumption of TV for entertainment and social networking sites during confinement. Furthermore, it was found that higher consumption was negatively correlated with the level of happiness, so that, people who reported greater well-being, both subjective and psychological, spent less time watching TV and using SNS. In contrast, no association was found between the level of happiness and the consumption of news and radio. Therefore, it seems that far from cultivating greater happiness, those who engaged in heavy consumption of TV entertainment and SNS during confinement were less happy than those who did so more moderately and spent more time using other media or performing other activities. (shrink)

Food media have become a formidable part of adolescents’ food environments. This study sought to explore how and why adolescents use food media by focusing on selectivity and motives for consumption. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 31 Flemish adolescents aged 12 to 16. Food media were both incidentally consumed and selectively sought for education, social utility, and entertainment. The levels of selectivity and motives for consumption varied among the different food media platforms. Incidental (...) consumption was more prevalent with TV cooking shows compared to online food media. The dominant motives for TV cooking show consumption were companionship and entertainment, while online food media were used for a more diverse range of motives dominated by information/inspiration and social interaction. Some participants consumed food media to get motivation and inspiration to improve health and fitness while others consumed food media to watch appetizing and aesthetically pleasing food content. The social environment in the form of friends and family as well as existing food preferences were dominant psychosocial factors for both traditional and online food media use. Future research is warranted to explore how incidental exposure and the identified motives for use relate to food media effects. (shrink)

This study investigates the cross-media repertoires of news consumption of young adults in today’s fragmented multi-media environment, and examines the interactions between those repertoires and the consumers’ civic engagement and political participation. By using a Q-sort method, the respondents were asked to sort a number of elicitation cards on a relational scalar grid, which allowed for subsequent statistical factor analysis of these qualitative data and the generation of a sub-typology of media consumption repertoires as (...) well as the discursive practices of the respondents. We also used a questionnaire which included questions about news consumption, political participation, and civic engagement. The findings revealed that most young adults used repertoires of digital and new media news consumption. The interviewees were highly conscious of their choices of news sources, and some young adults explicitly stated that they preferred to consume news from sources which reflected their own political views. In this study we were able to map news media repertoires of young adults in Israel and found that young adults do participate, and are largely involved, in activism and protests. (shrink)

IntroductionIn recent years, with the popularity of many social media platforms worldwide, the role of “virtual social network platforms” in the field of cross-cultural communication has become increasingly important. Scholars in psychology and neuroscience, and cross-disciplines, are attracted to research on the motivation, mechanisms, and effects of communication on social media across cultures.Methods and AnalysisThis paper collects the co-citation of keywords in “cultural psychology,” “cross-culture communication,” “neuroscience,” and “social media” from the database of web (...) of science and analyzes the hotspots of the literature in word cloud.ResultsBased on our inclusion criteria, 85 relevant studies were extracted from a database of 842 papers. There were 44 articles on cultural communication on social media, of which 26 were from the perspective of psychology and five from the perspective of neuroscience. There are 27 articles that focus on the integration of psychology and neuroscience, but only a few are related to cross-cultural communication on social media.ConclusionScholars have mainly studied the reasons and implications of cultural communication on social media from the perspectives of cultural psychology and neuroscience separately. Keywords “culture” and “social media” generate more links in the hot map, and a large number of keywords of cultural psychology and neuroscience also gather in the hot map, which reflects the trend of integration in academic research. While cultural characteristics have changed with the development of new media and virtual communities, more research is needed to integrate the disciplines of culture, psychology, and neuroscience. (shrink)

Using an international sample of firms from 32 countries, we study the relation between media independence and corporate tax aggressiveness. We measure media independence by the extent of private ownership and competition in the media industry. Using an indicator variable for tax aggressiveness when the firm’s corporate tax avoidance measure is within the top quartile of each country-industry combination, we find strong evidence that media independence is associated with a lower likelihood of tax aggressiveness, after controlling (...) for other institutional determinants, including home-country tax system characteristics. We also find that the effect of media independence is more pronounced when the legal environment is weaker, and when the information environment is less transparent. We contribute to the business ethics literature by documenting the role of independent media as an external monitoring mechanism in constraining corporate tax aggressiveness. (shrink)

With the spread of cross-cultural communication and the expansion of multinational brands the semantic boundaries of signs is being transcended in various ways. The contemporary global and transnational construction of signs has a different impact on consumer behaviour across the world. Easter consumers have some unique national psychology and purchasing behaviour to Western consumers. This study explores different the characteristics and motivations behind the cross-cultural exchange of signs, their reception, the specific symbolic value, and consumer behaviour in China.

Previous studies have reported that general or photo-specific social media use was associated with women’s body dissatisfaction and body image disturbance. The current study replicated and expanded upon these findings by identifying the positive association between social media influencer viewing and intentions to change appearance. This study surveyed a sample of 7,015 adult female TikTok users in China regarding their social media influencer viewing frequency, self-objectification, social comparison tendencies when watching short videos, intentions to change appearance, and (...) demographics. The results showed that female TikTok users’ self-objectification mediated the association between their influencer viewing frequency and their intentions to change appearance. Furthermore, social comparison tendencies moderated the association between influencer viewing and intentions to change appearance in that the proposed association was stronger for female TikTok users who had lower social comparison tendencies when watching short videos, compared to female TikTok users who had higher social comparison tendencies. The counter-intuitive finding on social comparison tendencies indicated that women who have higher social comparison tendencies may be more aware of the negative influences and adjust their expectations. The observed association between social media influencer viewing and intentions to change appearance was statistically significant but trivial in terms of effect size. Although the result could warn policymakers and practitioners to design media and health literacy campaigns to cultivate body positivity, caution should be exercised when evaluating the practical implications. (shrink)

Many individuals have experienced a multitude of chronic stressors and diminished psychological functioning during COVID-19. The current study examined whether biases towards positive social media or positive autobiographical memories was related to increases in psychological functioning during COVID-19. Participants were 1071 adults (Mage = 46.31; 58% female; 78% White) recruited from MTurk. Participants reported on their social media consumption and autobiographical recall, positive and negative affect, and dysphoria symptoms. Results indicated that, at the first assessment collected in (...) the spring and summer of 2020, positively biased social media consumption was cross-sectionally related to higher levels of positive affect, and positively biased autobiographical recall was cross-sectionally related to lower levels of negative affect and dysphoria symptoms. Sensitivity analyses examined cross-sectional relations from a second assessment collected in fall 2020, and prospective cross-lagged analyses. The findings point to potential psychological benefits of positive biases during chronic stressors. (shrink)

It has been proposed that the social networking site Facebook is suitable for building communities and strengthening customer relationships, and also many organizations that promote ethical consumption have established online communities there. However, because of the newness of ethical online communities, little is known about the extent to which consumer participation in them produces positive outcomes. The present study aims at exploring such outcomes: first, we identify consumer-perceived benefits from ethical community participation, and second, we explore whether these benefits (...) influence the activity promoted, as well as consumer loyalty toward the ethical Facebook community. The results of an online survey of ethical community participants reveal that informational benefits reinforce consumers’ ethical consumption behavior. Social and entertainment benefits, in turn, have a positive influence on loyalty to the community. The present study further reveals that the consumers’ prior commitment to ethical consumption influences the perceived benefits: the affective commitment to ethical consumption has a positive, and the continuance commitment a negative influence on the benefits. Thus, the more consumers feel they engage in ethical consumption because of an emotional attachment, the higher the perceived benefits from online community participation are. The more consumers perceive that their ethical consumption is driven by lack of choice, the fewer the benefits. Overall, the perceived benefits were at a relatively low level, which is somewhat alarming and highlights the need to manage the communities more efficiently. (shrink)

In this paper, I defend the view that it is wrong for us to consume only, or overwhelmingly, media that broadly aligns with our own political viewpoints: that is, it is wrong to be politically “partisan” in our decisions about what media to consume. We are obligated to consume media that aligns with political viewpoints other than our own – to “diversify our sources”. This is so even if our own views are, as a matter of fact, (...) substantively correct. (shrink)

Social commerce has produced enormous economic benefits as well as challenges for organizations, individuals, and industries. However, social media usage does not necessarily generate users’ intention to purchase on social commerce websites. How social media usage influences users’ purchase intention on social commerce websites still deserves more scholarly attention and this seems particularly important when social commerce transcends borders and countries. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, the current study adopted a survey research method and identified the roles of social (...) media usage in arousing users’ purchase intention on social commerce websites in a culturally diversified environment. The data was collected from 2,058 international students coming from 135 countries and was analyzed using MPLUS based structural equation modeling. The research unveils the pathway whereby social media usage serves to generate users’ purchase intention on social commerce websites. Importantly, users’ cultural intelligence has been found to play a significant role mediating the effects of social media usage on users’ intention. Further, cultural distance was found to attenuate the effects of social media usage on cultural intelligence. Based on the research findings, the study suggests that social commerce practitioners should be fully aware of the enabling roles of social media and cultural intelligence as well as the deterring role of cultural distance when arousing customers’ purchasing intention in cross-cultural business operations. Any measures facilitated by social media usage to improve international consumers’ cultural intelligence and mitigate the negative effects of cultural distance are supposed to be effective to enhance their purchasing intention. Accordingly, the study confirms the mutually melt and integrative relationships between information technology advancement and business prosperity in cross-cultural environment, which eventually contribute to sustainable development of society. (shrink)

Mass media play an important role in changing body image. This study aimed to determine the role of media (magazines and television) in body weight concern among university females in five Arab countries. A total sample of 1134 female university students was selected at convenience from universities in five Arab countries: Bahrain, Egypt, Jordan, Oman and Syria. The females' ages ranged from 17 to 32. A pre-tested questionnaire was used to assess the exposure to mass media regarding (...) weight concerns. For the variables on exposure to mass media, girls were divided into two groups: infrequently exposed and frequently exposed. In general, the females who were exposed to mass media had a greater risk of having dieted to lose weight and changing their ideas of a perfect body shape than those who were not exposed or infrequently exposed. The association of exposure to magazines with having dieted to lose weight was only significant among females in Bahrain (p<0.044), Egypt (p<0.001) and Jordan (p<0.001). Exposure to television had a weaker association than exposure to magazines with body weight concerns of females. The association of exposure to television with females' idea of a perfect body shape was only statistically significant in females in Egypt (p<0.019) and Oman (p<0.019). The pressure from mass media on the body weight concern of female university students may lead these women to practise unhealthy weight control diets. (shrink)

Research Ethics, Volume 18, Issue 1, Page 24-38, January 2022. Are social science, cross-border research projects, where recruitment and data collection are carried out remotely, required to follow similar ethical and data-sharing procedures as ‘on-the-ground’ studies that use traditional means of recruitment and participant engagement? This article reflects on our experience of dealing with this question when we had to switch to online data collection due to the restrictions posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, such as the inability to travel (...) or work in person with local communities and collaborators. Using social media platforms and online data collection when conducting research brings many advantages, such as being able to communicate remotely but directly with gatekeepers and collaborators, and in reaching potential participants on a global scale. However, neither the guidelines and advice for conducting ethically sound internet-based research, nor the academic literature focussed on building equitable research partnerships between the Global North and the Global South, offer much information regarding the ethical concerns, or address the grey areas, posed by this type of digital and distanced transnational research. In our experience, conducting research remotely made negotiations of access very challenging due to the politics of positionality between Global North and South researchers, lack of clarity on ethical processes and perceptions of gatekeepers who we could not meet in person. We hope the reflections on, and discussion of, our experience encourage deliberation on the present ethical challenges posed by online and social-media-disseminated data collection, particularly in cross-border circumstances. (shrink)

This study contributes to the emerging literature on the negative effects over consumption that social media users may develop as a consequence of being engaged on social media platforms. The authors tested materialism’s direct and indirect impacts on compulsive, conspicuous, and impulsive buying, adding two novel mediators: attitudes toward social media content and social media intensity. The study uses a convenience sample of 400 Thai social media users analyzed using structural equation modeling. The results (...) confirmed the well-established positive relationships between materialism and each of the three-negative consumption behaviors also in the social media domain. A novel finding showed the important role played by SMI which was found to be a strong predictor of each of the three negative consumption behaviors and it was also found to significantly mediate the relationship between materialism and the three-negative consumption behaviors. An additional contribution of the study was found on the role of attitudes which, contrary to what is commonly believed, were often not significant in predicting any negative behavior. (shrink)

The cultural consumption research landscape of the 21st century is marked by an increasing cross-disciplinary fermentation. At the same time, cultural theory and analysis have been marked by successive ‘inter-’ turns, most notably with regard to the Big Four: multimodality (or intermodality), interdiscursivity, transmediality (or intermediality), and intertextuality. This book offers an outline of interdiscursivity as an integrative platform for accommodating these notions. To this end, a call for a return to Foucault is issued via a critical engagement (...) with the so-called practice-turn. This re-turn does not seek to reconstitute venerably Foucauldianism, but to theorize ‘inters-’ as vanishing points that challenge the integrity of discrete cultural orders in non-convergent manners. The propounded interdiscursivity approach is offered as a reading strategy that permeates the contemporary cultural consumption phenomena that are scrutinized in this book, against a pan-consumptivist framework. By drawing on qualitative and mixed methods research designs, facilitated by CAQDAS software, the empirical studies that are hosted here span a vivid array of topics that are directly relevant to both traditional and new media researchers, such as the consumption of ideologies in Web 2.0 social movements, the ability of micro-celebrities to act as cultural game-changers, the post-loyalty abjective consumption ethos. The theoretically novel approaches on offer are coupled with methodological innovations in areas such as user-generated content, artists’ branding, and experiential consumption. (shrink)

Cross-sector relationship building is an important strategy in corporate social responsibility initiatives, and communicating cross-sector relationships on social media can help raise the visibility of collaborative relationships. A noticeable gap in the literature is how social media enables and constrains the formation patterns of cross-sector connections. To understand how businesses communicate their relationships with government agencies and nonprofits about social issues on social media, we propose a theoretical framework that centers public attention as a (...) critical resource and considers different sectors' interests in the COVID-19 issue. We tested this framework with a nationally representative sample of 1,980 organizations on Twitter. The analysis reveals that the increase in public attention to the COVID-19 issue was accompanied by a greater likelihood of cross-sector ties. Specifically, firms severely affected by COVID-19 were more likely to build ties with government agencies, and the increase in public attention also drove firms to build more ties with nonprofits, especially advocacy nonprofits. Our findings suggest managers of social media communication should observe the volatile public attention and design communicative strategies accordingly. (shrink)

BackgroundNowadays, social media have become central in the daily lives of people, including healthcare professionals. Fears arise that the accelerated growth of these social platforms was not accompanied by the appropriate training of the healthcare students and workers on the professional use of social media. This study primarily aimed to assess the awareness of the healthcare students at Beirut Arab University, Lebanon on the professional standards of social media. It also aimed to assess the presence of differences (...) in the practices and attitudes of healthcare students according to gender and major.MethodsA cross-sectional study was designed, and a paper-based questionnaire was distributed to healthcare students. Chi-Square test was used to analyse certain findings.ResultsOut of 1800 students approached, 496 participated in the questionnaire. All participants used social media. Only 19.5% (96/496) of them had received a structured education on the professional use of social media during their university study. The majority of students (349/488, 71.5%) thought that the professional standards on social media are distinct from those established in face-to-face interactions. Female students were more likely to get adequate answers in accordance with international guidelines. There were statistically significant differences in the practices and attitudes of students belonging to different majors (p value < 0.05).ConclusionThe line between what is professional on social media, and what is not, remains blurred for healthcare students. This study uncovered the need for clear and updated evidence-based guidelines assisting students in making the most appropriate decisions in the various online scenarios faced in healthcare practice. (shrink)

This paper focuses on a specific aspect of a Japanese rite of passage called Shichigosan. Although its origins go back to premodern Japan, its contemporary pattern truly reflects the modern living conditions of the Japanese. Today the ritual is one of the most popular family celebrations. Commercialization has significantly influenced the pattern of celebration in the postwar period and as a result, consumption practices have become inherent parts of the ritual. The paper examines this development from a historical perspective. (...) Furthermore, it discusses the process through which consumption practices contribute to the event’s significance, not diminishing but rather enhancing its importance in the observers’ eyes. Conspicuous consumption thus becomes a creative two-directional process, one which is sustained by families’ aspirations and desires, and one which is informed by forces emanating from the commercial sector and from the media. (shrink)

This research study was aimed to examine the cross-national coverage and framing patterns about Jamal Khashoggi’s murder in international media through focusing on newspapers. Khashoggi; an internationally acclaimed US based Saudi journalist was brutally assassinated at Kingdom’s consulate in Turkey which created the global outcry. As this issue made headlines worldwide for several months, the media from USA, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and Turkey; the most substantially and politically involved countries presumably used certain framing patterns in their (...) coverage. To find out the difference in coverage intensity and media frames, a content analysis based comparative study of US, Saudi and Turkish newspapers was conducted which is guided by the framing theory of Mass Communication. The results showed that the media from three selected countries dealt the same issue with significant differences in coverage and framing patterns. We concluded based on our findings that such differences in cross-national coverage patterns were influenced by the respective state’s ideology, interests, governance system, public narrative, or media settings. This study also explored some facts regarding freedom of expression and about journalists who have been targeted in reprisal of their professional work all over the world. The findings of the study elaborate that most of the newspapers used anti-Saudi frames in their coverage. So far as overall coverage is concerned Turkish and US papers provided a significant coverage to the issue while newspapers from Saudi Arabia provided least coverage to the issue as their media are highly state bound. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Refugees crossing the Mediterranean Sea in small boats has become a common sight in the media, particularly since the so-called ‘refugee crisis’ in 2015. The number of boats crossing the English Channel between the French and UK coasts has been increasing as other migration routes have been closed down. This article reports the findings of a discourse analysis of 96 UK newspaper articles published in December 2018 when the daily crossings were referred to as a ‘major crisis’. Adopting (...) a broadly critical discursive psychology perspective, we identify the use of three main interpretative repertoires used within the media reporting. Firstly, a ‘secure the borders’ repertoire which positions the UK’s borders as porous and easily breached, secondly, a ‘smuggling is immoral’ repertoire which works to position smugglers as to blame for the current ‘crisis’ and removes responsibility for the crisis from the Government, and finally, a ‘desperate people’ repertoire which worked to position the refugees themselves as vulnerable and in need of protection, but also as people who will engage in risky behaviours. We suggest that the use of these repertoires ultimately functions to obscure the need for safe and legal migration routes to the UK. (shrink)

This book provides an overview of the recent research on saving and consumption, a field in which substantial progress has been made over the last decade.Attempts by economists to understand saving and consumption patterns have generated some of the best science in economics. For more than fifty years, there has been serious empirical and theoretical activity, and data, theory, and policy have never been separated as has happened in many branches of economics. Research has drawn microeconomists interested in (...) household behaviour, as well as macroeconomists, for whom the behaviour of aggregate consumption has always occupied a central role in explaining aggregate fluctuations. Econometricians have also made distinguished contributions, and there has been a steady flow of new methodologies by those working on saving and consumption, in time-series econometrics, as well as in the study of micro and panel data.A coherent account of these developments is presented here, emphasizing the interplay between micro and the macro, between studies of cross-section and panels, and those using aggregate time series data. (shrink)

It is common knowledge among people of Igbo descent that indigenous Igbo proverbs play vital roles in speech, communication and exchange of knowledge and ideas among them. However, what may be uncommon knowledge is the fact that philosophy is the basic ingredient that savours Igbo proverbs with the taste for fertilizing ideas across cultural divides. With philosophy inherent in them, indigenous Igbo proverbs readily present itself as a cross-cultural media for educating people of African and non-African descents on (...) the events, achievements, myths and realities of especially the people of Igbo descent. This paper examines the philosophy of some indigenous Igbo proverbs. The paper concludes that indigenous Igbo proverbs, rich in philosophy, is the surest way of educating people of other descents about the realities of the Igbo people. They are better ways of countering fallacies and rumors emanating from foreign historians and foreign media about Igbo land in particular and Africa in general. Hence, they are veritable cross-cultural media with inexhaustible resources which need to be further explored. (shrink)

Social media and Internet technologies present several emerging and ill-explored issues for a modern healthcare workforce. One issue is patient-targeted Googling, which involves a healthcare professional using a social networking site or publicly available search engine to find patient information online. The study’s aim was to address a deficit in data and knowledge regarding PTG, and to investigate medical student use of SNSs due to a close association with PTG. The authors surveyed final year medical students at the Otago (...) Medical School, University of Otago in January 2016. A subset completed focus groups that were analysed using thematic analysis to identify key themes relating to students’ attitudes towards PTG, and reasons why they might engage in PTG. Fifty-four students completed the survey, which showed that PTG was uncommon. Attitudes were varied and context dependent. Most participants saw problems with PTG and favoured more explicit guidance on the issue. SNS usage was high ; participants were concerned by the content of their SNS profiles and who they were connecting with online. Participants showing high SNS use were 1.83 times more likely to have conducted PTG than lower use groups. The diverse attitudes uncovered in this study indicated that teaching or guidelines could be useful to healthcare professionals considering PTG. Though ethically problematic, PTG may be important to patient care and safety. The decision to conduct PTG should be made with consideration of ethical principles and the intended use of the information. (shrink)

Volume 16, Issue 4, September 2019, Page 381-388.

Background Social media and Internet technologies present several emerging and ill-explored issues for a modern healthcare workforce. One issue is patient-targeted Googling, which involves a healthcare professional using a social networking site or publicly available search engine to find patient information online. The study’s aim was to address a deficit in data and knowledge regarding PTG, and to investigate medical student use of SNSs due to a close association with PTG. Method The authors surveyed final year medical students at (...) the Otago Medical School, University of Otago in January 2016. A subset completed focus groups that were analysed using thematic analysis to identify key themes relating to students’ attitudes towards PTG, and reasons why they might engage in PTG. Results Fifty-four students completed the survey, which showed that PTG was uncommon. Attitudes were varied and context dependent. Most participants saw problems with PTG and favoured more explicit guidance on the issue. SNS usage was high ; participants were concerned by the content of their SNS profiles and who they were connecting with online. Participants showing high SNS use were 1.83 times more likely to have conducted PTG than lower use groups. Conclusions The diverse attitudes uncovered in this study indicated that teaching or guidelines could be useful to healthcare professionals considering PTG. Though ethically problematic, PTG may be important to patient care and safety. The decision to conduct PTG should be made with consideration of ethical principles and the intended use of the information. (shrink)