Visitor Meaning‐Making at Grand Canyon's Tusayan Museum and Ruin

Abstract Meaning‐making describes a process by which visitors transform museum experiences into new knowledge and memories. Meaning‐making is influenced by visitors' leisure motivations, prior knowledge, socio‐cultural context brought to the experience, personally‐guided interpretation, and events since the visit. In this study, visitors' long‐term recollections included contextual references to how and why they remembered what they experienced. Forty visitors were interviewed by telephone six months after attending a Native American interpretive program at Grand Canyon National Park's Tusayan Museum. Two patterns associated with a constructivist view of meaning‐making were discerned: a) visitors' integration of indoor and outdoor exhibits and b) visitors' comparisons of modern family and community with a more ancient culture. The presence of contextual indicators within visitor recall suggests that new knowledge may be constructed from factors carried forth from the meaning‐making process. Evidence within the data suggests that exhibits made more relevant to visitors' socio‐cultural identity may enhance on‐site experiences.     

The effects of health delivery systems and self‐efficacy on patient compliance and satisfaction

This study analyzed the satisfaction and compliance of 91 in‐clinic patients based on their affiliation with a Health Delivery System and the patient's self‐efficacy. Several significant results emerged from the study. A patient's Health Delivery System and the patient's self‐efficacy interact to predict communication satisfaction. It was also discovered that a patient's Heath Delivery System and the patient's self‐efficacy interact to predict compliance. Implications and limitations of this research are discussed.     

IEE professional magazines and networks

The Institution of Electrical Engineers (IEE) has changed its approach to member publications over a two‐year period with an increased focus on understanding the needs of its broad membership and structuring its portfolio of magazines and websites to meet members' needs and complement the organization's research publications. The process of market research and product development is outlined in this article and the resulting combination of online and print products described. The products have been well received by IEE members and the wider community and have been recognized within the publishing industry with important awards in the business‐to‐business and not‐for‐profit sectors.     

The Texas professoriate and public political discourse before and after 9/11

Robert Jensen's critique of the participation of academic intellectuals in Texas in public political discourse after the 9/11 terrorist attacks underestimates what professors have done to inform a politically apathetic public about warfare, American foreign policy, civil liberties, and cultural and humanitarian issues. Jensen undervalues non‐confrontational political strategies and broader forms of intellectual political engagement. Confrontational strategies mobilize citizens inclined to activism, but less overtly political strategies invite larger numbers of citizens to think seriously about politics. Jensen's locally famous post‐9/11 Houston Chronicle editorial is analyzed as rhetorically egocentric and alienating, and ultimately counter‐productive in the post‐9/11 political environment.     

News and notes

A set of audio‐taped systematic desensitization sessions for outside‐of‐class use was developed to reduce student's speech anxiety with minimum allocation of staff time. This automated treatment was as effective as treatment by therapists in reducing scores on McCroskey's PRCA.     

Cultural influences on consumers' processing of advertising: A structural equation approach

This study reports a structural equation approach to the cultural differences in consumers' processing of advertising. The study hypothesized a path model for advertising processing and tested it for three different groups: Koreans, Korean‐Americans, and Caucasian‐Americans. The findings revealed that the final path patterns were different according to consumers' cultural background. Even though the influences of ad content were significant across the three different groups, prior attitudes to the brand played a more important role in Koreans' advertising processing than in Caucasian‐Americans' processing. The impact of each demographic variable also varied according to culture. The results were discussed through Hofstede's four cultural dimensions and Hall's dichotomy of high‐context versus low‐context culture.     

The role of China's English‐language scientific journals in scientific communication

Between 1929 and 2002 over 200 English‐language scientific journals were founded in China. The number of China's English edition journals in each discipline is, however, not correlated to the corresponding output of China's articles listed in the ISI's Science Citation Index. Clearly, the goal of these journals is to be internationally recognized. It is shown that this goal is rarely achieved. We think that lack of good‐quality papers, low international visibility and a citation ‘Matthew effect’ are the main causes for the small role played by China's English‐language journals.     

Organizational assimilation and communication technology use

Studies of organizational members' assimilation information seeking have focused on traditional channels for uncertainty reduction (e.g., face‐to‐face communication and traditional technologies like employee handbooks) and on the experiences of newcomers. This investigation extends organizational assimilation research by examining a variety of socialization experiences (not just those of newcomers) and by considering Advanced Communication and Information Technologies (ACITs) as an additional channel for obtaining assimilation‐related information. Data from 405 employees of four organizations were utilized to explore the relationship between three channels for information seeking (face‐to‐face communication, traditional media, and ACIT) and perceived socialization effectiveness. Predictors of employee selection and use of ACITs also were examined, including perceptions of media richness and social presence, and user responses to their experiences using ACITs for assimilation. Results indicate that face‐to‐face communication is the most important predictor of assimilation effectiveness, followed by ACIT use. Least important are traditional technologies. Media characteristics, as elucidated in two prominent theories of organizational communication technology use, predicted individuals' selection and use of ACITs. Finally, a typology of members' behavioral responses to feedback regarding their ACIT use was derived, which revealed that users respond by continuing current practices, supplementing the channel, discontinuing use, expanding use, learning new uses, or by implementing a variety of these strategies.     

Villains and heroes of the great depression: The evolution of Father Coughlin's fantasy themes

This article traces the development of Father Charles E. Coughlin's rhetoric as it evolved over a six‐year period during the height of his popularity, from 1930 to 1936. Bormann's Fantasy‐Theme method was used to evaluate Coughlin's rhetoric. The findings offer insight into Symbolic Convergence Theory by demonstrating how Coughlin attempted to integrate his political and personal agenda with changing social context and audience needs. The implication is that fantasy themes are open systems, which are circumstantially constructed and thus evolve and change over time.     

Effects of a speech training program upon semantic compatibility

The relationship between one's attitude toward self‐disclosure in interaction and the complexity of his system of dimensions for construing the behavior and character of others was examined within a cognitive‐developmental framework in which development was hypothesized to be a function of the range and intensity of one's social experiences. Significant correlations involving three indices of construct usage reflecting the differentiation and integration of the motivational constructs in a perceiver's cognitive system suggest that it is one's motivational constructs which are elaborated through self‐disclosing interactions and which, in turn, allow for the formation of the kind of subjectivity satisfying impressions that favorably orient one toward the mutual disclosure of self‐attributions.     

Author's version vs. publisher's version: an analysis of the copy‐editing function

This report describes an informal study carried out by Blackwell Publishing to assess whether the copy‐editing and proof‐correction process alone results in a significant difference between the author's version and the publisher's version of an article accepted for publication. One hundred and eighty‐nine articles were reviewed from 23 journals. The results indicate that a substantial number of changes are made. It is suggested that copy‐editing has an equal role to play in both the printed and online environments, and that in the latter it contributes substantially to the accuracy of the electronic version. Copy‐editing is therefore an important function within the publisher's overall responsibility towards the integrity of the article of record.     

Film shots and expressed interest levels

According a central role to context‐relevant beliefs in the operation of attitudinal saliency is advocated through contrasting Delia et al.’s cognitive‐constructivist analysis with Cronen and Conville's operant conditioning and aggression displacement accounts.     

Cultural Curating and the Practices of Light: Speculating Diffractively

Drawing inspiration from New Materialist philosopher Karen Barad's challenge to read “diffractively” by experimenting with different patterns of relationality, this article sets out a course of speculative inquiry inspired by the contemporary fascination with digital light‐based installations. Taking the UN's designation of 2015 as the “International Year of Light and Light‐based Technologies” as its point of departure, a subset of mediated environments are identified that transcend the distinction between physical and digital; materiality and immateriality; invisibility and presence. Employing new technologies to create deeply sensorial and highly participatory forms of aesthetic engagement, the selected examples offer a compelling indication of the post‐digital aesthetics that arise from the interrelationship of art, design and computation. Its investigation is structured as a montage of two parts: following an introduction that surveys an illustrative sub‐set of contemporary digital light‐based art works drawn from the 2014 INST‐INT conference, the second half of this text will speculate upon the “dynamic‐constructive” relationship between digital media and the form‐making processes associated with “practices of light” (Cubitt 2014 ). The implications of “post‐screen media” for curatorial practice is explored in relation to the mediating function played by modes of exhibition and other program architectures.     

An experimental analysis of emphasis

Eighty English‐Canadian subjects listened to a taped persuasive communication attributed to either an English‐Canadian or a French‐Canadian source and read with either an English‐Canadian or a French‐Canadian dialect. Both the speaker's dialect and the source's ethnicity affected the audience's reaction to the message. French‐Canadian subjects responded more favourably to a communication read with an English‐Canadian dialect than one read with a French‐Canadian dialect and responded more favourably to a communication attributed to an English‐Canadian source than one attributed to a French‐Canadian source. Furthermore, French‐Canadian sources were evaluated less stereotypically when communications attributed to them were read with an English‐Canadian dialect than when read with a French‐Canadian dialect. Methodological and theoretical implications of these results are discussed.     

Understanding social influence: Relations between lay and technical perspectives

This essay urges an appropriately complicated view of the relationship of the actor's and the researcher's perspectives on persuasion and social influence. As a foil for this project, it initially sketches an interpretive‐phenomenological approach that takes the researcher's central project to be that of describing the actor's point of view. It then argues that because commonsensical conceptions of how persuasion works contain beliefs that are not well‐founded, reproducing the actor's perspective will yield an inevitably inadequate account of social influence. For quantitative studies of persuasion, this points to the importance of assessing actual (as opposed to perceived) message effects; for qualitative investigations, this emphasizes the dangers of unreflective reliance on interview data.     

Whose interactive' channel? Exploring the concept of interactivity defined in Taiwan's 2000 presidential election online campaigns

This study bases on two theorized aspects of web interactivity, human‐to‐online‐media interaction, and human‐to‐human‐via‐online‐media interaction, aiming to explore how the concept of ‘interactivity’ was defined and realized by primary candidates' websites in Taiwan's 2000 presidential election. Measured by an Interactivity Index Scale developed in this study, the research findings indicate that candidates' websites performed better in offering human‐to‐online‐media interaction; however, the human‐to‐human interaction via online media was not realized as the primary objective of the online campaigns. Further analysis revealed that even in the perspectives of human‐to‐online media interaction, candidates tended to define web interactivity in terms of working towards their interest, not towards those of the voters. The implication of such findings is provided for future studies on online political communication.     

A bibliography of rhetoric and public address for the year 1968

This study briefly describes Karl Weick's approach to organizing and suggests its appeal to communcation scholars. Weick's model of organizing is then analyzed and clarified. Two hypotheses are proposed based on Weick's discussion of the relationship between the equivocality of information and the number of behavior cycles in organizing. The model is operationalized and tested experimentally. The results do not support Weick's suggested relationships. A reexamination of Weick's approach reveals an inconsistency between a White‐headian process perspective on organizing and a Newtonian process model of organizing. The implications of this dichotomy are suggested.     

Informatization,globalization, and privatization in the new Millenium

Informatization is the process through which the new communication technologies are used as a means for furthering socioeconomic development as a nation becomes more and more an information society. The informatization strategy in very recent years has provided an alternative to previous strategies of development communication. India is an example of such a shift, as the New Economic Policy of 1991 opened the nation's borders to global competition and encouraged a change from state‐owned institutions to private businesses. Several high‐technology cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad helped India become a major player in the computer software industry. The privatization of Indian television promoted consumerism, capitalism, and other Western values. One result of informatization is a growing digital divide between the majority of India's population versus the 100 million urban, elite information workers. Comparisons are made with Singapore's road to informatization.     

The federal communications commission and the regulation of children's television

This paper takes a specific issue, the regulation of children's television, and shows how that issue might best be examined. The method of analysis used is the Krasnow‐Longley‐Terry systems approach to broadcast regulation.