How to Do Things With Words

It comes as something ofa surprise to reflect that the New York Review ofBooks is now over twenty years old. Even people of my generation (that is, old enough to remember the revolutionary 196os but not young enough to have taken a very exciting part in them) think of the paper as eternally youthful. In fact, it has gone through years of relatively quiet life, yet, as always in a competitive journalistic market, it is the controversies that attract the interest of the reader and to which the history (especially an admittedly impressionistic survey that tries to include something of the intellectual context in which a journal has operated) must give some attention. Not all the attacks which the New York Review has attracted, both early in its career and more recently, are worth more than a brief summary. What do we now make, for example, of Richard Kostelanetz's forthright accusation that 'The New York Review was from its origins destined to publicize Random House's (and especially [Jason] Epstein's) books and writers'?1 Well, simply that, even if the statistics bear out the charge (and Kostelanetz provides some suggestive evidence to support it, at least with respect to some early issues), there is nothing surprising in a market economy about a publisher trying to push his books through the pages of a journal edited by his friends. True, the New York Review has not had room to review more than around fifteen books in each issue and there could be a bias in the selection of

http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3507774.pdf

The New York Review of Books

Projections of Power: Framing News, Public Opinion, and U.S. Foreign Policy

Ellen Mickiewicz has done an excellent job of presenting the key elements of our argument and empirical analysis about why the mainstream press proved incapable of independent news framing at critical junctures in the Iraq War. She then raises a series of excellent broader questions: What about the responsibility of government institutions to hold those in power accountable? What about the independent force of public opinion? Were earlier administrations as able to spin the press as successfully as the Bush administration? Each of these questions might well fuel a book. I can only address them briefly in this response.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S153759270999171X

Response to Ellen Mickiewicz's review of When the Press Fails: Political Power and the News Media from Iraq to Katrina

Password reuse is widespread, so a breach of one provider's password database threatens accounts on other providers. When companies find stolen credentials on the black market and notice potential password reuse, they may require a password reset and send affected users a notification. Through two user studies, we provide insight into such notifications. In Study 1, 180 respondents saw one of six representative notifications used by companies in situations potentially involving password reuse. Respondents answered questions about their reactions and understanding of the situation. Notifications differed in the concern they elicited and intended actions they inspired. Concerningly, less than a third of respondents reported intentions to change any passwords. In Study 2, 588 respondents saw one of 15 variations on a model notification synthesizing results from Study 1. While the variations' impact differed in small ways, respondents' intended actions across all notifications would leave them vulnerable to future password-reuse attacks. We discuss best practices for password-reuse notifications and how notifications alone appear insufficient in solving password reuse.

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3243734.3243767

"What was that site doing with my Facebook password?": Designing Password-Reuse Notifications

Data breaches have become a seemingly unavoidable aspect of the information age for both consumers and organizations. Breaches have tangible consequences, including the increased possibility of identity theft for consumers who see their personally identifiable information (PII) compromised. Organizations also face particular issues from data breaches, including damage to organizational reputation. In the United States, organizations are required to notify consumers in the event of a data breach. These notifications feature some aspects that are mandated by the state. However, organizations could control many aspects through the use of perspectives such as speech act theory and impression management techniques. In this article two studies examined the performance of language in letters sent to notify consumers whose PII had been affected by a security breach. Study 1, using a theoretical framework consisting of speech act theory, conditions of felicity, and visual presentation, analyzed 212 letters for spe...

‘All that Glitters is not Gold’: The Role of Impression Management in Data Breach Notification

Safeguarding consumers against identity-related fraud: examining data breach notification legislation through the lens of routine activities theory

How a democratic nation deliberates about war is one of the most important political questions that can be asked. This study examines how the American public sphere debated the attack on Iraq between August and October 2002, marking the time when the Bush administration began discussing a potential attack against Iraq and when Congress authorized the use of force for that purpose. The study specifically compares the pattern of argument in two different forums of the public sphere: (a) the opinion pages of 23 different U.S. newspapers from across the political spectrum and (b) online discussion groups. Of particular interest was the comparative weight given to moral argument. This particular war was preemptive and unprovoked. Hence, much of the world disapproved. In such a case, one might expect moral considerations to be an important aspect of the debate. This study found that, in comparison at least with opinion in the elite press, the pattern of opinion online was different. The online discussion resemb...

Moral Reasoning and the Online Debate About Iraq

Twitter has been an influential and often controversial strategy for disseminating, discussing, and sharing information about the COVID-19 vaccine during the pandemic. This study focuses on using Twitter as a data collection and analysis tool to understand the narrative surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine in the days after the first emergency-use authorization (EUA). We conducted a content analysis of tweets we collected over a 30-day period (n = 419,495) and developed an iterative codebook that contained six domains (tweet source, location, tweet characteristics, COVID-19 specific topics, demographic descriptors, and sentiment) and thirty-six codes. Despite the abundance of misinformation on Twitter about the vaccine, we found that more tweets were positive than negative in tone and contained mostly reliable and up-to-date information about the vaccine. Most tweets came from individuals though many came from organizations. We found little discussion of demographic descriptors such as race/ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status, nor did we see discussion of misinformation or mask-wearing. Additionally, few tweets came from politicians or political organizations, and we found little talk of politics. This article contributes to the growing body of evidence of using Twitter to understand the narrative surrounding health topics during public health crises such as COVID-19. 

Alexander Jenkins

Papers

‘All that Glitters is not Gold’: The Role of Impression Management in Data Breach Notification

Safeguarding consumers against identity-related fraud: examining data breach notification legislation through the lens of routine activities theory

Moral Reasoning and the Online Debate About Iraq

Tweeting about the COVID-19 vaccine: A content analysis