(2021). Mediated intimacy: sex advice in media culture. The Communication Review. Ahead of Print.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates the use of smartphone in older people everyday life and it is based on an empirical research involving 30 Italian smartphone users aged 62–76. The research drawn on the analysis of 75,089 log data, 3 collective and 20 face-to-face interviews. The paper describes the digital practices through which older users use smartphone to construct social relations within their

ABSTRACT The paper focuses on a specific form of activism – urban knitting – and analyses “Mettiamoci una pezza” (“Let’s patch it”), an initiative organized by a group of women activists from L’Aquila, Italy, for the 10th anniversary of the earthquake, not only to draw public attention to the state of the city but also to other social and political issues. To analyze the organizational infrastructure

ABSTRACT Incidental exposure, also called inadvertent exposure, has grown more important in recent years because it has the potential to engage news “dropouts” and expose partisans to the “other side” in political communication. Televised sports media are becoming an important venue for this type of unintentional exposure to political content, with the rise in the last decade of a new age of athlete

(2020). Communication: a post-discipline. The Communication Review: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 335-338.

(2020). Unwatchable. The Communication Review: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 342-344.

(2020). A place of darkness: the rhetoric of horror in early American cinema. The Communication Review: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 339-341.

ABSTRACT While recent research has explored influencers within the fashion, beauty, fitness, and travel industries, few studies have examined influencers within physique sports like bodybuilding. Drawing on observation, informal interviews, and semi-structured interviews with members of Gold’s Gym Venice, this study analyzes how bodybuilders, trainers, and influencers define labor and how they construct

ABSTRACT Mainstream US news coverage of #MeToo reprises some of the central limitations of news coverage of rape and sexual assault from prior decades. However, #MeToo coverage also includes some indications of the contributions of corporate culture and rape culture to the abuses of power that have taken place. Through a close analysis of New York Times and Washington Post coverage of two cases, those

ABSTRACT While the stereotypical older adult is one who is clueless about technology, research on this age group paints a different picture. Adding to the literature about older adults’ varying tech savvy, this paper focuses on the technological support-giving abilities of those in later stages of life based on interviews conducted in four countries. Far from being dependent bystanders, some older

ABSTRACT This small-scale study brings attention to the way the news media cover the enabling role of computer technology and social media in coalescing online communities focused on the hatred of women and the promotion of violence. While that aggression is ultimately and typically carried out against both women and men, it is specifically misogyny which underlies it. The way that the broader public

ABSTRACT This paper qualitatively analyzes tweets sent by India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi and responses to the tweets in the month leading up to his May 2019 electoral win. Several dominant rhetorical themes emerged from the analysis of the data, including Modi as omnipresent and Modi as an advocate for democracy who encourages voters to vote. The dominant theme that emerged from his supporter’s

(2020). Haunting hands: mobile media practices and loss. The Communication Review: Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 331-334.

Recently, there has been much bemoaning in academic circles about the shift in the Internet Architecture from the open-ended networks model to the walled-garden style platforms. The near global dom...

ABSTRACT Anita Hill’s testimony against Clarence Thomas in 1991 called attention to widespread sexual abuse in the US. Testimony from Christine Blasey Ford against Thomas Kavanaugh 27 years later underscored the lack of progress in its eradication. Using the cascading network activation model, this study identifies the episodic and thematic framing of both cases in relation to top-down influencers

ABSTRACT This paper reports on findings from an exploratory investigation about parents’ perceived role of the Facebook Like in sharenting (i.e., sharing about their children on social media) by drawing on the qualitative results of an online survey. Findings show that the majority of participants think that getting a Like on a picture of one’s child can encourage a parent to share more about him/her

Every year, scholars add a significant quantity of academic production to the already long list of publications on the Colombian conflict. For this reason, the media anthropologist Alexander Fattal...

ABSTRACT This paper analyzes a locally bound and hybridized form of civic engagement through digital media. Based on an explorative case study of a Slovak Facebook page called Zomri, engaged mostly in both mockery and denunciation of societal and political actors, the paper aims to challenge existing conceptual definitions of social media-based civic engagements, pointing to its hybridization. Through

ABSTRACT In January 2018, a feminist blog, babe, detailed an anonymous woman’s date with comedian Aziz Ansari, ending with her accusation that he had sexually assaulted her by escalating his sexual advances despite her verbal and nonverbal objections. Online reaction to the babe article was swift and plentiful, including a New York Times editorial written by conservative provocateur Bari Weiss entitled

ABSTRACT In this paper, we address algorithmic imaginary, perception and tactics of Italian dating apps users. Little attention has hitherto been devoted to the ways in which the algorithms employed by mobile dating platforms (to rate users, to manage user visibility, to arrange results) might contrast, or enhance, people’s homophily. Our goal is to explore whether and how mobile dating algorithms

ABSTRACT This research offers a “helicopter view” of the Israeli pay-television market eighteen months after Netflix’s global expansion to complicate the narrative of intractable conflict between subscription video on-demand (SVOD) platforms like Netflix and national television industries. Using data from qualitative interviews with ten industry executives, this article argues that relationships between

ABSTRACT Academic interest in what has been termed “infotainment” has grown considerably since the term was coined in the 1980s. Today, the burgeoning field of infotainment research has become an important interdisciplinary field of study producing numerous political, cultural, and social insights. Nevertheless, infotainment remains highly contested, multifaceted, and incoherent, both as a term and

ABSTRACT The goal of this article is to illustrate how an existing sociological methodology “institutional ethnography” (IE), coined by Canadian sociologist Dorothy E. Smith, can inform qualitative research projects in communication and media studies. In introducing IE to our field, I hope to equip communication and media studies researchers with a qualitative methodology that opens up opportunity

ABSTRACT This article discusses how young Muslim women negotiate their multiple identities within the context of a predominantly Muslim, secular nation. It focuses on female members of the Association des Élèves et Étudiants Musulmans au Burkina Faso (AEEMB), a nationwide Muslim youth organization, and especially those commonly referred to as “Adja,” in reference to their sartorial choice. Although

ABSTRACT This study investigates the site of intersection between legacy and social media, whereby it asks how local legacy media (St Louis Post-Dispatch and Richmond Times-Dispatch) invoked social media (Facebook and Twitter) discourse within their coverage of the Ferguson (2014) and Charlottesville (2017) events. It thus explores how gatekeeping is manifested and, consequently, how the protest paradigm

ABSTRACT The 2017 Equifax data breach left 144.5 million users digitally vulnerable to identity theft and future hacks. The organization’s failure to provide ongoing communication and information regarding the attack, motivated users to form crisis communities within the Twitter platform. This study examines the discourses present within the platform as users discussed the data breach. Digital crisis

ABSTRACT This article discusses the mediatization of politics and its theorization as a process of transformation in the making of (political) meaning through three different theses, presented as evolutionist, intended, and imagined transformation. These theses differ from each other not as much on what they describe as meaning-making transformation – the personalization, conversationalization, and

ABSTRACT In this paper, I discuss audience reactions to stand-up clips by Amy Schumer, Wanda Sykes, and Margaret Cho. Women’s comedy is arguably at the height of its popularity, but there is a seeming lack of research on audience interpretations of humor produced by women. This research builds on and extends current notions of “referential viewing” in audience research. Utilizing focus group analysis

ABSTRACT During election campaigns, candidates, parties, and media share their relevance on Twitter with a group of especially active users, aligned with a particular party. This paper introduces the profile of “party evangelists,” and explores the activity and effects these users had on the general political conversation during the 2015 Spanish general election. On that occasion, the electoral expectations

ABSTRACT This study examines how the issue of game regulation has been discussed and influenced public perception by exploring ideologically differing media outlets’ distinct uses of frames by analyzing news contents (N = 1,217) and public opinion survey of the national sample of Korean gamers (N = 1,362), who play games currently. The analyses include the influence of media on attitudes toward game

ABSTRACT The present essay comparatively explores and reflects on popularizing the environment in a changing media ecology wherein content is no longer exclusive to traditional television viewing or distributed for cinematic release. Specifically, the aim of this essay is to illustrate how screened presentations such as film, television, and recently digital media, promote environmentalist ideals in

ABSTRACT This paper follows the news routine of the daily evening news broadcasts of the two Israeli commercial TV channels. It is about a very particular and significant moment in national TV news—the making and gatekeeping process of the national TV news filler, also known by the Israeli news people as the shelf item. Based on a thematic analysis of in-depth interviews with several Israeli TV news

ABSTRACT This study aims to increase our understanding of the dynamics of the Palestinian media and the conditions and circumstances in which they work, including both the conflict with Israel and the internal political strife within Palestinian society. It is based on the use of qualitative research methods and was conducted in two stages. First, we performed a mapping of Palestinian media outlets

ABSTRACT The notion of media logic is one of relevance in the recent debates around mediatization theories. Fundamentally applied to macrolevel, institution-focused analysis, this notion has not often been applied to narrower domains of cultural practice nor used as a conceptual point of departure in this regard. This article puts forward a three-pronged analytical scheme for the discussion of the

ABSTRACT This article proposes a new appraisal of Brazil’s alternative media. By investing in the concept of the periphery, this study draws on past literature, semistructured interviews, and data collected from across the country (n = 50) to propose a repertoire analysis of media producers’ views of the country’s popular notion of the periphery. Evidence shows that they have shown nuanced views of

ABSTRACT Drawing on Buckingham’s observation that academic research either has to become public knowledge or its originators must have a high visibility in the public realm before their research can find inclusion into policymaking processes, this article offers a variety of examples of how academics have managed to bridge the gap between media and communication policy scholarship and policymaking

ABSTRACT This article argues for the analysis of public engagement as an essentially mediated activity. Although recent studies note that academic knowledge is increasingly available for consumption by nonacademic audiences, they tell us little about how it gets recontextualized while passing through the hands of media professionals on its way toward such audiences. In Burawoy’s (2005) influential

ABSTRACT One of the key questions addressed by the study of online social media is whether or not they facilitate cross-cleavage communication between users of different nationality, ethnicity, religiosity, and other group affiliations. This study contributes to the literature by addressing communication across religious cleavages, which has scarcely received attention. The study is based on 97 semistructured

ABSTRACT The digital divide refers to the differential patterns of Internet access adoption and usage across different segments of populations. The digital divide has been linked to demographic variables such as age and gender, and socioeconomic characteristics such as education and income. Using a nationally representative Canadian survey (N = 27,223) conducted in 2013, this paper investigates whether

ABSTRACT What does it mean to represent insect sexualities? What are the technologies that one uses to make insect bodies visible? In this article, I examine two series in order to examine representations of insect sexualities. In the documentary Life in the Undergrowth, famed British broadcaster and naturalist Sir David Attenborough’s hushed tones tell us that new technologies of seeing are making

ABSTRACT Although research has examined demographic predictors of the presence of technology rules during childhood, results are mixed, and no known research has considered whether the presence of and reasons for technology rules might relate to individuals’ future academic achievement. We used survey data collected from a diverse sample of 1,115 college students. Although the total number of reasons

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the Digital Millennium Copyright Act as a refinement of governmental techniques developed for technologies such as piano rolls, reprography, DAT, and VCRs. The technological history recontextualizes legal transitions in copyrights during the 20th century and builds on poststructuralist work on law, technology, and government. Building on Kittler’s understanding of symbolic/technical

Losing Pravda is a groundbreaking study of the transformation of journalism ethics and culture in post-Soviet Russia. It brings light to an underresearched history on how Soviet journalists underst...

ABSTRACT This study examined the frames used in the news coverage of the U.S. immigration debate during election years. Stories from four major U.S. newspapers, the Los Angeles Times, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the St. Petersburg Times, and The New York Times, were content analyzed. The analysis revealed that the conflict frame was the most dominant frame in the news coverage of the U.S. immigration

ABSTRACT This survey-based study explored the mediated social attraction that a sample of Modern Family viewers had for Gloria Pritchett. Statistically speaking, viewers generally liked Gloria Pritchett, but her intersected social identity characterizations (e.g., harlot-spitfire prototype) guided her likability. Moreover, how viewers felt toward their ethnic, gender, and social class (not their membership

ABSTRACT This study questions how religious webmasters view the objectives of their webcasting in relation to pilgrimage. Findings uncovered four facets: (1) mediation of the holy sites and experience; (2) bonding between Holy Land communities and global believers; (3) cultivating agents; (4) media experiences as a pilgrimage surrogate. Drawing on Walter Benjamin, the study elucidates how online videos

ABSTRACT This paper presents an illustrative analysis of amateur You Tube videos portraying a specific style of natural births called hypnobirths, which make use of relaxation and hypnosis techniques during labour and birthing, and offer an alternative to birthing in interventionist, obstetrics-led settings. Moving forward from the visible advantages of relaxation and hypnosis related birthing support

ABSTRACT A number of voices have emerged in U.S. political discourse questioning the legitimacy of American exceptionalism, suggesting we are in a “post-American world.” Our research examines the effects that political messages that explicitly challenge American exceptionalism can have on U.S. public opinion. Drawing upon social identity theory, we find that explicit challenges to American exceptionalism

ABSTRACT This article considers the implementation of the life history approach in the study of media professionals, based on an analysis of the occupational life histories of 77 active and former Israeli journalists. The article first discusses the decisions made throughout execution of the project. Next, it explores three key features of the dynamics of life history interviewing. Finally, the article

ABSTRACT Through the lens of political economy of communication and sports, this article examines the role of Bollywood’s sports movies in promoting patriotism and constructing an Indian national identity. Focusing on three popular movies premiered in the last decade, Dil Bole Hadippa (2009), Chak De! India (2007), and Lahore (2010), we explicate how Bollywood mobilized patriotic codes through these

ABSTRACT This study explores the ways in which social media platforms are used by East Jerusalem Palestinians to mobilize religious practices and political activism in the struggle over one of the central issues of contestation in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict: al-Aqsa Mosque. A data set containing 166 posts and 485 comments from five major Facebook pages was qualitatively analyzed, thus revealing

ABSTRACT Digital-networked images of torture, abuse, and humiliation are increasingly used by nonstate agents to form online communities based upon prejudice and bigotry and/or to propagate violent vigilante justice. This article discusses the circulation, impact, and permanence of digital-networked images that perpetuate nonstate hegemony and function as mechanisms for exercising power, disciplinary

ABSTRACT Hypermedia space—the notion that discrete media technologies connect to create a communicative space with multiple access points and socio-political uptakes—has now become a commonplace to the extent that it is a naturalized, hence unproblematic assumption, in research on the social and political impact of digital media. Inspired by the work of the Canadian international relations theorist

ABSTRACT The term soft war (jang-e narm) has become a common phrase within the ruling establishment of the Islamic Republic of Iran. During the 2009 presidential election and its aftermath, state broadcast media and members of the country’s conservative political factions used the term as a euphemism for the spread of foreign ideas, culture, and influences through information communication technology

ABSTRACT This article draws on the concepts of narrative interactivity and closure to investigate three World War II-era print media characters. The analysis details how Al Parker’s Mary & Jane and Norman Rockwell’s Willie Gillis developed a perceived authenticity that invited fans to envision the propaganda drawings as having lives beyond their artistic origins. The essay concludes that the narrative

ABSTRACT This article reviews digital methodologies in the context of digital religion. We offer a tripod model for approaching digital methods: (a) defining research within digital environments, (b) the utilization of digital tools, and (c) applying unique digital frames. Through a critical review of multiple research projects, we explore three dominant research methods employed within the study of

ABSTRACT Based on long-term ethnographic research on global nannies in Paris, this study explores the possibilities and limitations of digital media use for minorities, given that more and more young women from the global south engage with digital media. It will argue that transnational relations and practices are not necessarily and inevitably a progressive process, but pose new yet often risky opportunities

ABSTRACT This article extends reasoning about social policy, as a response to basic human need, to the treatment of communication policy. The idea of communication as a basic human need is of vital importance in a contemporary world in which so much social interaction of a private and public nature occurs through technological mediation. Through an examination of arguments in social and political theory

ABSTRACT This article explores both how local social committees may contribute toward generating collective actions, leading local communities to empower their environment, and how new information communication technologies (ICTs) may alter the collective action. It focuses on a case study, represented by the “No al Progetto Eleonora” local committee that operates in the Arborea district of Oristano

ABSTRACT In 2009, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) employed a multipronged communications campaign to encourage Arab Americans in Detroit, MI, to apply for employment. Adapting Althusser’s notion of interpellation, this article examines how this government agency’s communications exacerbated the conditional, incomplete status of Arab American citizenship in post-9/11 America. At this precarious