Merck's One Less Campaign: Using Risk Message Frames to Promote the Use of Gardasil® in HPV Prevention

In 2006, Merck introduced Gardasil® through its One Less campaign, highlighting how the vaccine protects against the transmission of human papillomavirus (HPV) and, potentially, cervical cancer. The purpose of this study was to determine how young women learned about Gardasil and if the One Less campaign influenced the patient's decision to receive/decline the vaccines. Participants primarily learned about Gardasil from television advertising, and felt the campaign addressed the psychometric paradigm hazard factors of control and dread associated with HPV. However, participants reported that physicians/physician's assistants and mothers remained the primary sources of influence when choosing to receive/decline the vaccine series.     

Manufacturing Authenticity: The Rhetoric of “Real” in Women's Magazines

Discourses of authenticity are symptomatic of an era of destabilized communication hierarchies, participatory media, and reality television programming. Women's magazines are an apt site to examine articulations of authenticity given the genre's traditional emphases on aspirational consumption and “making up” the external self. This study explores constructions of authenticity in the advertising and editorial content of two top-ranked publications, Glamour and Cosmopolitan. Drawing on a qualitative textual analysis of these magazines, the author conceptualizes three overlapping tropes of authenticity: (a) promoting natural, organic products; (b) the celebration of ordinary-looking women; and (c) the encouragement of inner-directed self-discovery. These striations of real products, real external beauty, and real internal beauty, respectively, allow authenticity to seep throughout the texts without fundamentally disrupting their traditional commercial function.     

The Strategic Rhetoric of an “At-Risk” Educational Identity: Interviewing Jane

This essay explores how communication research on “at-risk” students relies on under-theorized understandings of identity as seemingly stable traits and characteristics. In this sense, “at-riskness,” as a cultural identity, is dangerous precisely because it encourages researchers to link identity difference with failure, rather than to explore the presence and perpetuation of particular ideologies. We illuminate such ideological tensions through our analysis of a complex educational identity—an in-depth interview with an “at-risk” student—where we locate strategic rhetorics (i.e., discursive constructions that reify normalized assumptions about educational success and failure) that demonstrate how ideology constitutes the phenomenon of educational risk.     

“What Do You Want to Be … When You Grow Up?” Recollections of a Slavic Librarian Part I: The Cold War,Dartmouth, and University of Illinois Years, 1945–1987

In this article, the author describes his experience growing up in Washington, DC, during the Cold War, as an undergraduate at Dartmouth College, as a graduate student at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, and as a librarian in the Slavic and East European Library, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign.     

“People in Hell Want Slurpees”: The Redefinition of the Zombie Genre through the Salvific Portrayal of Family on AMC's The Walking Dead

AMC's popular, post-apocalyptic show The Walking Dead follows a clan of survivors as they endure the zombie apocalypse while struggling to maintain their humanity. The characters pursue temporal salvation through four social institutions: family, government, religion, and science/medicine, identified by a preliminary soak. Through content analysis of dialogueic, visual, and nonverbal references to these institutions across seasons 1–3 (N = 35), we find that each respective season proposed, and then rejected to some extent, the redemptive roles of science, religion, and the state—mirroring actual contemporary distrust. Simultaneously, through persistent, underlying storylines, the show reveals a traditional understanding of the centrality of familial relationships to maintaining a liberal society's survival—which we argue redefines the zombie genre away from its leftist roots.     

“I Wanna Be in the Room Where It Happens”…: Using Curriculum Mapping to Support the Information Literacy Goals of Online Programs

Embedding information literacy and instruction within an online program can be a difficult process to begin. Curriculum mapping guides librarians to the courses where their services can have the most impact. However, curriculum mapping can seem like an overwhelming and unwieldly process. This case study demystifies the process and shows how simple and effective curriculum maps can be designed and utilized. Particularly in environment with a single librarian dedicated to online outreach serving as a coordinator for other subject liaison librarians, curriculum mapping is a tool that allows for clear communication, outreach and systematic assessment. This paper will provide an overview of how the curriculum maps were developed, how they were used for communication and outreach both within and outside the Libraries, and ideas for programmatic assessment based upon the maps.     

There’s Going to Be an Evolution: The Subject Librarian Initiative in Review

The authors examine the effect the renovation and rebranding of a traditional reference department into a more modern Knowledge Commons has had on public services at a university. The authors also discuss how this physical transformation led to a philosophical shift in the service model and how that model continues to evolve. This article discusses the adoption of the Subject Librarian Initiative as a means toward creating a more proactive form of outreach that is more conducive to the environment of the Knowledge Commons. This case study examines the first year of a 5-year implementation plan and discusses how the remaining years of the plan will be implemented.     

“Are We There Yet?”: Searching for Springfield and The Simpsons’ Rhetoric of Omnitopia

The Simpsons’ visual and textual depiction of Springfield as a typical American city provides an insightful critique of the modern project. We demonstrate how America's longest running sitcom depicts urban life as a mutable environment whose disparate locales convey their inhabitants to a ubiquitous, ever-present continuum that we term “omnitopia.” In depicting Springfield as omnitopia, the show offers a cartoon version of public life marked by dislocation, conflation, fragmentation, mutability, mobility, and commodification. The study of these components provides a means to interpret and critique the increasing decline of locales in the urban environment.     

Amazon’s Day One in China: The Role of Amazon’s Kindle in China

After the long-standing effort and negotiations, Amazon finally released its two Kindle products in China since it entered China 9 years ago. Some say Kindle as it plays as a Catfish would stir up China’s e-book reading market, while the others say Kindle has missed the best timing to enter the market. The article describes the Kindle’s current status in China digital publishing arena, exploring the consistent Amazon strategies in China e-commerce market, and analyzing its threats and opportunities coming from four aspects in the long run, policy, content, willingness-to-pay and competition.     

“I still go ask someone I enjoy talking to”: The use of digital and human sources by educational stage and context

How does educational stage affect the way people find information? In previous research using the Digital Visitors & Residents (V&R) framework for semi-structured interviews, context was a factor in how individuals behaved. This study of 145 online, open-ended surveys examines the impact that one's V&R educational stage has on the likelihood of attending to digital and human sources across four contexts. These contexts vary according to whether the search was professional or personal and successful or struggled. The impact of educational stage differs based on context. In some contexts, people at higher educational stages are more likely to attend to digital sources and less likely to attend to human sources. In other contexts, there is no statistically significant difference (p < 0.10) among educational stages. These findings provide support for previous V&R research, while also demonstrating that online surveys can be used to supplement and balance the data collected from semi-structured interviews.     

Daring to Be Weird: Exploring the Invocation of the “Company Freak” in Vonage’s New Advertising Campaign

A textual analysis was performed on the first five advertisements from Vonage’s “Crazy Generous” campaign. The ads ask the audience to consider what happens when co-optation is itself deployed as a promotional tool. Three primary themes emerge: the main character is Vonage’s “house hippie”; interacting with him is a “sanitary act”; and that by coaxing the main character to take a job with Vonage, the company has has restored social order.     

“Authentic” talk in broadcast news: The construction of community

Some recent assessments of public communication have demonstrated a concern for “authentic” forms of discourse in public life. This article uses a methodology derived from conversation analysis to examine different forms of public discourse in news interviews. Previous studies taking this approach have outlined the protocols for formal news interviews, but this article also looks at some types of “conversational” news interviewing that are increasingly prevalent in contemporary broadcasting. The modes of address (to the overhearing audience) in these types of interview can be usefully compared to the inclusive, sociable address associated with some genres of popular entertainment. It is suggested that the effect of “communality,” constructed by these conversational forms of talk, might be one factor in the development of new forms of participatory “public‐ness,” around some types of news events.     

“Try to Walk With the Sound of My Footsteps”: The Surveillant Body in Contemporary Art

While the prevailing artistic response to surveillance has been sousveillance, the turning of surveillance against itself, this paper suggests that the usefulness of such responses depends upon granting power to the surveillance video camera as the roving eye of an elusive disciplinary body. This paper analyzes contemporary art works where the surveillant eye is met not with the returned gaze, but with interpersonal and embodied responses that challenge the dichotomized relationship between viewer and viewed.     

Seeing “Straight” through Queer Eye: Exposing the Strategic Rhetoric of Heteronormativity in a Mediated Ritual of Gay Rebellion

Bravo's hit series Queer Eye for the Straight Guy has garnered much popular and critical acclaim. While from a Queer theory perspective, Queer Eye's openly gay stars and their easy fraternization with straight men can be celebrated, there are reasons for critical concern. In interrogating the series as an expression of the strategic rhetoric of heteronormativity, we examine how Queer Eye functions as a mediated ritual of rebellion that domesticates Queers, contains Queer sexuality, and places straight men at the sociosexual center. The series thus supports the very heteronormative order it seems to challenge.     

One “Nation,” Under Stephen? The Effects of The Colbert Report on American Youth

This study examines the effect of The Colbert Report, Comedy Central's mock conservative talk show, on young adults. By fashioning his character as a hyperbolic ideologue, Colbert is mocking personalities such as Bill O'Reilly. However, this study finds that when young adults are exposed to The Colbert Report's humor, they are not led to be more critical of the far right. Instead, the opposite happens, and there is an increased affinity for President Bush, Republicans in Congress, and Republican policies. Ironically, Colbert's attempts to poke fun at conservative commentators may be helping those same commentators spread their message.