Feminist Self-Imaging and Instagram: Tactics of Circumventing Sensorship

Instagram is an IB-MSN with strict and contradictory rules about its uploaded content. Despite its censorship mechanisms, users are finding creative tactics to maintain their imaging practices to circumvent this sensorship—censoring of the senses. This article focuses on the tactics employed by three women engaging in self-imaging practices. These tactics include, but are not limited to, privatizing accounts, abstracting and/or obscuring the body, and timed removals of photos. These tactics are analyzed in order to make sense of how they typify new forms of mobile image production, distribution, and circulation. These women's reactions to the censorship policies with which they must negotiate provide a new conceptual framework—sentio-aesthetics—challenging the normative values and ideologies surrounding sensorship.     

A Case Study of the Photographic Principle

Using The Philadelphia Inquirer as a case study, this article examines the visual behaviors of news professionals as they pertain to the importance and function of the social construction of news photos. The author posits the concept of the photographic principle to explain the process by which news professionals maintain photographic integrity—especially given the latest technology and its potential for misuse in constructing news photos. The photographic principle is defined as the guiding standard photo editors use to preserve the inherent value of news photographs. As the article shows, photo editors at the Inquirer provided the model on which the author based the concept of the photographic principle—a positive example of news workers who strive to protect the veracity of news photos.     

The Staging of Agency in Girls Gone Wild

This paper addresses the ambivalence produced by Girls Gone Wild (GGW) as both text and social practice by interrogating the ways in which it functions hegemonically by staging an effect of agency. I draw on Bakhtin's notion of the carnivalesque as a means to examine how contradictory spatio-temporal contexts of GGW function as spaces that offer the opportunity to momentarily transgress—yet simultaneously reify—white, bourgeois norms of femininity. The videos reinforce a neoliberalist mentality of personal responsibility through the inclusion of the consent—and dissent—processes on camera. After analyzing how postfeminist discourses emphasizing “individual choice” justify GGW as a mode of female empowerment, I turn to a complementary textual analysis of GGW's role-reversal counterpart, Guys Gone Wild (2004), in an effort to show the ways in which this “mirror image” text ultimately reinforces the structure of exploitation in the original.     

Gregory Bateson,Niklas Luhmann,and Ecological Communication

Cognizant of the evolving academic discipline of ecological communication (EC), I offer this essay as a follow-up to my previous publication—a critical exegesis of Niklas Luhmann's Ecological Communication (1989)—in this journal. Hoping to throw more light on Luhmann's formulations, I introduce and interpret those writings of Gregory Bateson that apparently influenced the former—and/or attempted to link ecology with communication. While I do not necessarily advocate either of these two thinkers' overall philosophical frameworks, I believe that they deserve attention—at the least insofar as they provide a measure of contrast to the contemporary academic discourse of EC (which remains shallow, intellectually parochial, and nonrigorous). That aside, many specific ideas developed by these two thinkers will interest a wide range of constituencies—especially those devoted to the study of information, communication, and ecology.     

In it for the Long Run?

While previous research has focused on the uses of a variety of online services—such as Web pages and, more recently, Twitter—by media organizations and their audiences, a rather limited amount of empirical inquiry has been directed towards the often more and broadly used Facebook platform. The current paper contributes to the research field by providing a longitudinal study of journalist and audience engagement on the Facebook pages of Sweden's four major newspapers—Aftonbladet, Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Svenska Dagbladet. Employing state-of-the-art methods for data collection, the results indicate that while audiences appear to be increasing their engagement with news organizations on Facebook—albeit mostly through so-called “likes”—the media organizations themselves are decreasing their engagement with audiences.     

Unfolding narrative meaning over time: The contributions of mother–daughter conversations of difficulty on daughter narrative sense-making and well-being

Recent narrative theorizing suggests that humans process their difficult experiences by not only creating stories—called individual narrative sense-making (NSM)—but also by telling those stories with others—called communicated narrative sense-making (CNSM). The present study investigated the relationship between individual and communicated NSM to understand the effects of interpersonal communication on intrapersonal meaning-making and well-being. In this longitudinal, laboratory-based study, 62 mother–daughter pairs wrote and discussed stories of daughters’ difficulty. Findings revealed that CNSM—particularly turn-taking, coherence, and daughters’ perspective-taking—predicted increased positivity in daughters’ stories over time, suggesting that CNSM contributes to “re-authoring” of individual stories. Limited effects emerged for CNSM and well-being. Findings expanded knowledge about the interconnections between intrapersonal and interpersonal communication, and well-being.     

Gross Intrusions

This essay closely analyzes the 1936 British film Sensation, directed by the eccentric queer filmmaker Brian Desmond Hurst. The film participated in an extensive and heated debate about intrusive and ‘sensational’ press practices that erupted in the 1930s. In his cinematic version of events, Hurst made sensational journalism seem like an exciting, if morally dubious, part of modern life—a news form that satisfied a basic human desire to learn about the private lives and hidden secrets of other people. This essay shows how Sensation, in its ambivalent relationship to this fraught cultural issue, reveals some of the complexities of interpreting queer filmmaking before the advent of a self-aware and politicized ‘queer film.’ It argues that intrusive journalism was of interest to Hurst precisely because it engaged with issues at the core of queer identity—exposure, revelation, privacy, and criminality—before the decriminalization of homosexual acts.     

The Relationship of Competition and Financial Commitment Revisited: A Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis in European Newspaper Markets

The Cincinnati Post published its last edition on New Year's Eve 2007, leaving the Cincinnati Enquirer as the only daily newspaper in the market. The next year, fewer candidates ran for municipal office in the Kentucky suburbs most reliant on the Post, incumbents became more likely to win reelection, and voter turnout and campaign spending fell. These changes happened even though the Enquirer at least temporarily increased its coverage of the Post's former strongholds. Voter turnout remained depressed through 2010, nearly three years after the Post closed, but the other effects diminished with time. The authors exploited a difference-in-differences strategy and the fact that the Post's closing date was fixed 30 years in advance to rule out some noncausal explanations for their results. Although their findings are statistically imprecise, they suggest that newspapers—even underdogs such as the Post, which had a circulation of just 27,000 when it closed—can have a substantial and measurable impact on public life.     

Marketing the recreational sublime: Jumbo Wild and the rhetorics of humans in nature

Since Carleton Watkins and Ansel Adams captured the sublime landscapes of Yosemite, immense technological changes have occurred that demand we revisit discourses about the sublime. Panmediation combined with ever-reaching capitalist practices have shifted the ways in which the sublime is imaged, conceptualized, and utilized. In this paper, we turn to DeLuca and Demo’s (2000. Imaging nature: Watkins, Yosemite, and the birth of environmentalism. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 17(3), 241–260.) and Stormer’s (2004. Addressing the sublime: Space, mass representation, and the unpresentable. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21(3), 212–240.) essays on the sublime to trace the trajectory of the sublime’s domestication and the ways in which its use in contemporary environmentalist discourses, led by corporations like Patagonia, have reinforced human–nature binaries and anthropocentric discourses. To do so, we examine the 2015 documentary Jumbo Wild, which represents one example of a new turn in depictions of the sublime—what we term the recreational sublime—and how it is rhetorically grounded in visual discourses.     

The Bathroom Boogeyman

In 2015, Houston, Texas voters defeated a bill that would have expanded civil rights to previously unprotected groups, including transgender people. Using a critical framing analysis, this paper investigates how the city’s daily newspaper, the Houston Chronicle, covered the debate over the bill. As such, this study found that the newspaper used almost exclusively elite sources, provided almost no in-depth context, and employed four frames—Equality, Bathroom Boogeyman, Bureaucratic Process, and Religious Freedom—in its Houston Equal Rights Ordinance (HERO) coverage. Together, these elements aligned to form a daunting challenge to an effort to protect one of society’s most vulnerable groups: the transgender community.     

EBSCO's Communication & Mass Media Complete: An Appreciable Improvement Over Previous Communication Studies Indexing?

ABSTRACT

In a prior edition of this study, we examined whether the established online communication studies indexes—Communication Abstracts, ComIndex, and ComAbstracts—provided a good avenue of access to the journal literature that researchers in the field cite and whether, where the current journal literature was concerned, that avenue of access might be equal or superior to that provided by large, multisubject online indexes. In this iteration of the study, we similarly address EBSCO's new product for communication studies, Communication & Mass Media Complete.     

“Life Between Fingers”: A Response to News Photography of an “Urban Ghetto”

This photo essay updates research previously presented in Visual Communication Quarterly about news characterizations of a “Black neighborhood” in Iowa City, Iowa. Shot by preschoolers in the city's Southeast Side, the images in this essay—peppered with the inadvertent appearance of the photographers' fingers—added to an artistic value that cast life there being other than dangerous, dark, and devious. Whereas hands can often be used to conceal, the fingers in these photographs frame special and specific glimpses of life, ultimately presenting a counternarrative to neighborhood characterizations constructed by news photographs.     

Creating a Research Center: Space for Collaborations and Conversations

This report describes the creation of a library research center, where a team of librarians provide flexible, convenient, and personalized research assistance to students. A research center creates a positive user experience for students and places collaboration—both among librarians and students—at its core. Next-generation reference models must provide spaces and environments for students and librarians to engage in meaningful and deep information literacy conversations as outlined in the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.     

At Hospitality's Threshold: From Social Inclusion to Exilic Education

Abstract Describing actual museum‐wide events developed for the culturally charged arena of the Brooklyn Children's Museum, this article explores the philosophical and pedagogical double binds that have brought multiculturalism to a political impasse. Museums have strived to be valued resources in an increasingly diverse society. In aspiring to broaden their audience base, their work has shifted from developing educational policies that are “object‐centered” to those that are “community‐centered” — a change of strategy affecting everything from programs to exhibit design. Children's museums — distinct (if not marginalized) from the serious work of the traditional art or ethnographic or natural history museum — know and indeed say in their very name — “children's museum” — that they are for the sake of someone and not about something. They have always already been attuned to the visitor at the threshold.     

“Now We Can Talk”

This paper explores debate within Puerto Rico's journalistic community regarding the journalistic role of La Comay, a full-sized puppet host of the popular information and entertainment show SuperXclusivo, which faced a boycott in late 2012 and cancelation in early 2013. Calls to boycott and shutter the daily TV show came from the island's LGBT advocates because of comments made by La Comay that they considered homophobic. This analysis of 58 texts from four of Puerto Rico's island-wide news outlets provides an opportunity to examine how a region's dominant cultural archetype—that of the motherly and controversial comadre, after which La Comay is named—appeared in boundary work conducted by local journalists as they determined whether La Comay should have been awarded journalistic status. This paper is not meant to be yet another examination of satirical journalism as much as it is a chance to explore the appearance of a region's culture in the construction or maintenance of its journalistic community.     

The Role of Perceptions of Media Bias in General and Issue-Specific Political Participation

Despite a large body of literature documenting factors influencing general political participation, research has lagged in understanding what motivates participation regarding specific issues. Our research fills this gap by examining the interplay of perceptions of media bias, trust in government, and political efficacy on individuals' levels of general and issue-specific political participation. Using survey data with indicators related to general political participation, our results demonstrate that perceptions of media bias overall are negatively related to general political participation. Moreover, this relationship is an indirect one, mediated by trust in government and political efficacy. Using survey data with indicators of issue-specific political participation in the context of stem cell research, our results show that—contrary to the relationship found for general political participation—perceptions of media bias are directly and positively associated with issue-specific participation. Implications for political participation and media bias theories are discussed.     

Digitally Empowered

In January 2013, Peter Bradshaw, a film critic for The Guardian, said that Twitter users had become the favourite “critics” of the film industry. The implicit concern in this article on a subject dear to cultural journalism—“Would be criticism bankrupted when we are all ‘critics’ on the Web?”—became evident in the following years. It is pertinent, then, to explore the media answer not only to this subject but both to sourcing and expertise in general in the culture section. Did they embrace these new news sources (and which) that emerged in the digital environment, such as the reader, blogs or artists tweets? Assuming the first hypothesis, how did they include them in their editorial model, alongside with the “traditional” experts and sources? We conducted a content analysis to the culture section of an international media—The Guardian—between 2014 and 2016 (n?=?992), identifying the role of what we would like to call digitally empowered sources and the presence of new “experts” in cultural criticism. We concluded that these digitally empowered sources play an important role in the overall editorial, business and engagement media's strategy and are deeply engaged with a new digital feature: hypertextuality. New patterns of expertise also reflect an editorial positioning supported in an engagement strategy and in the recognition of the readers’ added value to content.     

Producing an information leaflet to help patients access high quality drug information on the Internet: a local study

Objectives: To develop a patient information leaflet (PIL) to help local patients meet their drug information needs using the Internet, and to perform a preliminary evaluation of this tool. Methods: Development—a cross‐sectional survey of the drug information needs of local patients using a semi‐structured questionnaire; assessment of websites offering free, consumer‐orientated medicines information using set criteria; identification of consensus criteria to evaluate the quality of health‐related on‐line information; evaluation—views on a draft patient information leaflet from a focus group. Results: Those surveyed felt that being directed to high‐quality websites and being provided with assessment criteria for on‐line information would be useful. The three websites fulfilling most of the set quality criteria were Surgery Door ( www.surgerydoor.co.uk ), InteliHealth ( www.intelihealth.com ) and medline plus ( www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus ). The six most frequently cited assessment criteria were currency, authorship, commerciality, relevance, links and attribution. A draft leaflet was constructed listing the above three websites and six criteria along with tips on how to search the Internet effectively. A focus group reacted favourably. Conclusion: The Internet is a source of drug information—an information leaflet may help to guide local patients through its variable information quality.     

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo: A Cautionary Tale Starring White Working-Class People

Depictions of white working-class people are steadily on the rise in reality television. To understand this phenomenon, and the ways in which it articulates white working-class people in the United States today, I analyze Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a popular reality series on TLC featuring a self-described “redneck” family. I argue that this series highlights the family's inability—because of their working-class status—to conform to “ideal whiteness,” a whiteness that displays dominant cultural standards bolstered by neoliberalism, such as wealth, rationality, personal responsibility, and self-control. The family members consequently become exemplars of “inappropriate whiteness,” a marginal identity presented as humorous and, through the use of surveillance and spectacle, authentic.