“As ugly and painful as it was,it was effective:” Individuals' unique assessment of communication competence during aggressive conflict episodes

Communication competence plays a role in several problematic relational issues such as conflict management, interpersonal aggression, loneliness, and sexual coercion. This study examined the relationship between communication competence and aggression. Thirty‐one individuals (26 females, 5 males) experiencing aggression during conflict episodes with romantic partners were interviewed, generating 967 pages of transcribed data. The qualitative data analysis revealed that many of the participants assessed their use of aggression according to social customs, finding it inappropriate and ineffective. However, many noted their aggression was appropriate and effective given the circumstances of their relationship. These findings suggest a unique relational culture where aggression is perceived in ways that deviate from social norms. The theoretical and practical implications are discussed.     

“It’s Not Okay”: FX’s Starved and Eating Disorders as Entertainment

In 2005, cable channel FX made the risky decision to air Eric Schaeffer’s Starved, a bold experiment that challenged preconceived notions about eating disorders, anorexia, bulimia, and compulsive eating. The show poses interesting questions about illness, forcing the viewer to consider whether eating disorders can ever be considered funny. The show ultimately received mixed reviews and was cancelled after just seven episodes. Through an exploration of this challenging show, the author examines what happens when eating disorders are explored through comedy rather than the more typical tragic narrative. By comparing the show to similar sitcoms such as Fat Actress as well as serious reality programming such as Intervention and made-for-television movies, it becomes clear that while Starved may push the viewer to confront the horror of the disease, it fails not only to create empathetic characters and situations but also is unable to make audiences laugh.     

“Everybody’s hard times are different”: country as a political investment in white masculine precarity

Recognizing the complex interplay between country music, lifestyle, and identity, and the disparate nature of these texts and their producers, we center our analysis of the politics of contemporary “country” in the accounts of country music listeners. Through this lens, “country” foregrounds a portrait of precarious labor and white rural economies. Precarity is held up as aspirational, facilitated by the relative structural support of whiteness and masculinity that simultaneously leverages economic hardship to obfuscate these privileged positions. “Country” elides experiences of class marginalization, white rurality, and masculinized labor with mythologized narratives that position simplicity and work as “the good life.”     

Give thanks for a little and you will find a lot: The role of a support seeker’s reply in online support provision

This experiment examined reciprocal communication among support seekers and support providers in online support forums. An interactive online support forum web page was employed where comments to a support-seeking post and a support seeker’s reply to previous comments were manipulated, and participants could post their responses on the interactive web page. Results showed that support seekers received more supportive responses from subsequent viewers when they expressed appreciation for earlier comments. Compared with an appreciative reply to supportive comments, the same reply to unsupportive comments elicited more positive expectancy violations and thus higher levels of action-focused supportiveness in viewers’ responses. This study extended the application of expectancy violations theory to the context of online support forums.     

Master of “Complex and Ambiguous Phenomena”: The ERL’s Role in a Library Service Platform Migration

ABSTRACT

Library Services Platforms (LSPs) offer academic libraries the ability to integrate the management of print and electronic resources in one centralized platform. This article will examine the role of electronic resources librarians (ERLs) in a large-scale, consortial LSP implementation relative to NASIG’s Core Competencies for Electronic Resources Librarians. The speakers, Conor Cote and Kirsten Ostergaard, hail from Montana, where the Treasure State Academic Information and Library Services Consortium, comprised of seventeen academic libraries, is implementing Ex Libris’s Alma LSP in conjunction with the Primo discovery layer. The aim of this presentation and article is to examine how the skills and competencies of an ERL can be leveraged for an effective and minimally disruptive LSP implementation.     

She’s Hot,for a Politician: The Impact of Objectifying Commentary on Perceived Credibility of Female Candidates

The way female politicians are discussed in traditional and new media may contribute to the way individuals evaluate those candidates. Objectification theory suggests that framing individuals in a way that reduces them to their physical characteristics is detrimental to perceived agency. To that end, an experiment was designed to determine the impact of objectifying comments on the evaluation of female candidates. Researchers created two Facebook feeds discussing a hypothetical female candidate. For both feeds, the discussion focused on the candidate’s policy credentials, with one feed containing commentary on the female candidate’s body. Aspects of credibility and suitability for office were impacted by objectifying commentary, implying the need for future research directed at the specific impact objectification has on candidate evaluation.     

“It’s kind of like an assault,you know”: media resisters’ meta-decoding practices of media culture

ABSTRACT

Stuart Hall’s “Encoding/decoding” essay sparked an on-going focus in media studies on reception and audience studies that remains theoretically robust today. Hall’s insight that audience members decode media content in multiple ways, some in line with the dominant cultural ideology and some resistant to that ideology, illuminates the phenomenon of media resistance. Media resisters significantly limit their media consumption and they do so based on their decodings of media culture—decodings, or readings, that resist normative messages about commercialism and consumption, about the natural diffusion and inherent benefits of mobile technologies and social media, and about the political landscape depicted and generated by news media. Hall’s encoding/decoding model is expanded here to include not only audiences’ decodings of specific content, but of media culture broadly. Concerns about media culture in the aggregate lead to media resisters’ practices of limiting media engagement, practices themselves that are counter hegemonic.     

The Alternative Platform: Kenya’s Television Stations Navigation During the Switch Off of Raila Odinga’s “Swearing-In”

ABSTRACT

The role of communication technologies in Kenyan newsrooms particularly from print media perspective has been investigated. However, how these technologies aid television journalism practice in Kenyan context is understudied. Using the government ban of selected television stations in Kenya during and after the symbolic “swearing-in” of opposition presidential candidate in the 2017 general election, this study investigated the influence of communication technologies by the affected television stations to circumvent government crackdown. Interview was used as the primary method for data collection. The findings of the study revealed that throughout the switch off period the newsrooms remained operational but forced to develop alternative strategies fundamentally buoyed by new media technologies to disseminate contents. Though the strategies produced unintended and unexpected effects as the findings indicated. The main challenge with technology, was news verification, since the stations were using guerrilla tactics to source news which was not easily forthcoming. In addition, there was economic implication, some advertisers demanded for a refund and potential advertisers refused to patronise the stations which according to one of the editors was hinged on fear of being targeted by government.     

The Importance of “Focusness”: Focus Groups as a Means of Collection Management Assessment

ABSTRACT

In order to assess the Library's collection, the Collection Development Assessment Team at Cleveland State University used focus groups to complement the information gathered in LibQUAL+?. Groups of undergraduates, graduates, and faculty participated in four separate focus groups. All groups reported they were essentially satisfied with the collection but also wanted better local collections and used OhioLINK to supplement their research; fewer users also utilized the rich resources of the public library systems. In keeping with previous surveys, all groups wanted more full-text available electronically, faster access to materials, and a more navigable website. It appeared that the more sophisticated the user, the more satisfied they were with the collection. The Special Collections focus group would like to have more materials digitized, improved accessibility to the collection and website, and increased interaction with the community to heighten awareness of the collection and in order to gather more primary materials for the collection.     

The Relationship between Traditional Mass Media and “Social Media”: Reality Television as a Model for Social Network Site Behavior

Social cognitive theory suggests a likely relationship between behavior modeled on increasingly popular reality television (RTV) and user behavior modeled on social networking sites (SNSs). This study surveyed young adults (N = 456) to determine the extent to which RTV consumption explained a range of user behavior in the context of social network sites. Results show a consistent relationship between RTV consumption and the length of time spent on these sites, the size of users' networks, the proportion of friends not actually met face to face, and photo sharing frequency while controlling for age and gender.     

“I’m a Library Hugger!”: Public Libraries as Valued Community Assets

Public library value is often ascertained by outlining the economic, social, and cultural benefits public libraries generate for the greater community. While researchers have focused on the concepts of social capital, civic engagement, and the role of libraries in promoting democracy, fewer studies have explored the public’s perceptions of libraries in an effort to determine library value. Furthermore, library nonusers are rarely included in these studies. In Alberta, Canada, 1,201 Albertans from across the province, including both urban and rural areas, were asked a series of questions about their perceptions of public libraries and library use. Findings reveal characteristics of library users and nonusers, what services and resources are used most often at public libraries, what value the public places on public libraries, and the role that libraries play in supporting communities.     

The evolution of the operational earthquake forecasting community of practice: the L’Aquila communication crisis as a triggering event for organizational renewal

The scientific community of earthquake experts has long grappled with how to communicate earthquake probabilities successfully to non-scientific publics. Perhaps most central to their concern is the widely held belief that scientists can actually predict earthquakes when, in fact, they cannot. The potential consequences of this miscommunication problem were appallingly realized as a result of the 6 April 2009 earthquake in L’Aquila, Italy. Failed risk communication among scientists, a public official, and L’Aquila residents prior to the earthquake resulted in 309 deaths, 1500 injuries, and 65,000 people displaced from their homes, as well as the sentencing of six scientists and one public official to six years in prison for manslaughter. This paper examines how and why the L’Aquila Earthquake communication crisis ultimately redefined the international scientific earthquake community of practice and its discourse beyond that of community resilience to organizational learning and renewal.     

“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.