Showing papers in "Communication Theory in 2022"

Disinformation as a context-bound phenomenon: toward a conceptual clarification integrating actors, intentions and techniques of creation and dissemination

Abstract: Although disinformation has become a popular concept, we lack an integrative conceptualization that connects the actors, intentions and techniques underlying deceptive information. In this article, we conceptualize disinformation as a context-bound deliberate act for which actors covertly deceive recipients by de-contextualizing, manipulating or fabricating information to maximize utility with the (targeted) outcome of misleading recipients. This conceptualization embeds fragmented accounts of disinformation in a networked and participatory information logic, and offers a comprehensive account of the conditions under which different actors may decide to deceive, how they deceive, and what they aim to achieve by deceiving recipients. Our conceptualization may inform (machine-learning) techniques to detect disinformation and interventions that aim to trigger suspicion by breaking through the truth-default state.

Not everything is changing: on the relative neglect and meanings of continuity in communication and social change research

Abstract: One of the central interests of media and communication research is how technologies and communication media are involved in social and cultural change. Often such studies are rather one-sided because they disregard questions of continuity, which can lead to inadequate analyses and exaggerated claims of change. Three categories of reasons for this bias towards change are identified through a literature review. Crucially, since continuity remains an undervalued concern, we lack sophisticated theorizations and analytical approaches to study it adequately. In response, this article presents a taxonomy of continuity based on a thematic analysis of 74 articles in leading communication journals. The five observed dimensions of continuity offer scholars the vocabulary and a conceptual framework to study continuity more systematically as a complex and multi-dimensional issue. This contribution serves as a starting point towards building a theory of change and continuity, and suggestions for necessary future work are given.

Dismantling the Western Canon in Media Studies

Abstract: Although there have been extensive discussions on decolonizing the field of media and communication(s), not much attention has been paid to the way that curricula reproduce colonialism, imperialism, and racism in the classroom. In this article, I draw on my experiences as an African graduate student in an American classroom to highlight the ways that systemic racism is replicated, reproduced and frames pedagogy. I argue that although many communication(s) scholars purport to theorize from a radical perspective, these politics are not represented in their pedagogy which means that students from marginalized communities are often erased in discussions on theory, research methods and even pedagogy. Not only are the epistemological experiences and realities of marginalized students erased, but the canon is further legitimized leading to the training of scholars and teachers who go on to (in)advertently uphold racism, White supremacy, colonialism, and imperialism in their research, teaching and service.

Theory and Method for Studying How Media Messages Prompt Shared Brain Responses Along the Sensation-to-Cognition Continuum

Abstract: When members of an audience are exposed to the same messages, their brains will, to a certain degree, exhibit similar responses. These similar, and thus shared audience responses constitute the recruitment of sensory, perceptual, and higher-level neurocognitive processes, which occur separately in the brain of each individual, but in a collectively shared fashion across the audience. A method called inter-subject-correlation (ISC) analysis allows to reveal these shared responses. This manuscript introduces a theoretical model of brain function that explains why shared brain responses occur and how they emerge along a gradient from sensation to cognition as individuals process the same message content. This model makes results from ISC-based studies more interpretable from a communication perspective, helps organize the results from existing studies across different subfields, and generates testable predictions. The article discusses how research at the nexus of media, audience research, and neuroscience contributes to and advances communication theory.

Narrating the Field of Communication Through Some Female Voices: Women’s Experiences and Stories in Academia

Abstract: The field of communication has been constructed through primarily masculinized stories, such as the myth of the “founding fathers,” a situation that has tended to exclude the views and figures of female researchers. This article tries to remedy this by recovering the voices of women via eight in-depth interviews among prominent researchers (second-generation, 1960s–1970s) from Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Italy, the UK, and the US. The results illustrate the inequality, sexual harassment, lack of legitimacy, and stereotypes faced by these women, and their strong emotional leadership. Their stories of success show how academia is a field of struggle where hegemony, domination, and resistance coexist. However, female experiences in academia are diverse and complex. That is why the article concludes with the need to continue tracking the stories of so many different women as knowing subjects, as well as the challenges of intersectionality in the epistemological construction of the field.

Mathematical models of message discrepancy: previous models and a modified psychological discounting model

Abstract: Formal modeling is rare in communication studies. Still, several mathematical models have been proposed regarding the persuasive effects of message discrepancy, the difference between a message’s advocated position and a message recipient’s initial position. With numerical simulations, we analyzed four formal models to identify their strengths and weaknesses. Based on analyses of previous models, we proposed a modified psychological discounting model by solving a differential equation regarding the rate of change of the probability of message acceptance with respect to psychological discrepancy. Whereas previous models predicted nonmonotonic relationships between message discrepancy and belief change, the new model predicts that as message discrepancy increases, belief change monotonically increases unless facilitating factors change due to extremely discrepant messages. We discuss differences between the previous models and the new model, and their significance and implications for theories of persuasion as well as the limitations of the new model.

A right to memory and communication policy: safeguarding the capability of remembrance

Abstract: Can a right to memory be counted among the rights society needs to safeguard, if so, what are its theoretical and conceptual foundations, and how do they relate to communications? We answer these questions by offering a new perspective regarding the right’s components, origin and justifications, the mechanisms needed to realize it and the legal framework required for such realization. We begin by first recognizing the fundamental role of memory in human life, in particular as it pertains to the creation, preservation, and endowment of identity, which justifies the need to protect it. We then discuss memory’s four elements—remembering, forgetting, being remembered, and being forgotten—and their dependence on communications. We follow by describing the nature of rights and the distinction between different types of rights. This helps us claim that recognizing the right to memory requires ensuring the capability to communicate by designing appropriate communication policies.

Media and Communication Studies. What is there to Decolonize?

Abstract: Following a decolonial perspective, I argue that there is a coloniality of representations that shapes our understanding of the world and our place in it and that perpetuates an ongoing system of domination and inequality that we have incorporated as a natural order.

Decolonizing Digital Methods

Abstract: The rapid growth of the Internet and social media platforms has increasingly made these central focus areas for media scholars around the world. Within the context of the broader framework of the movement towards decolonizing media and communication studies, this growth of digital methods raises key questions including: How are digital methods in these contexts currently being used and how might scholars begin to think about “decolonizing” these methods? What do digital methods look like in a context of the digital divide? This short commentary reflects on these questions to make an argument for the need to decolonize digital methods.

Strategic illiteracies: the long game of technology refusal and disconnection

Abstract: Disconnection and avoidance have been theorized various ways, e.g., by analyzing communicative and non-communicative affordances of devices and platforms; categorizing tactics and patterns of non-use; and through analogy with historical ways of seeking solitude and resisting technologies. This article, however, treats history not only as a source of analogies for momentary disconnections, but also as a timescale on which to understand slower undercurrents of resistance. I define “strategic illiteracies” as: purposeful, committed refusals to learn expected communication and technology skills, not only as individual people in specific moments, but also in communities over time. This concept connects technology refusal to historical lineages of resistance to linguistic and orthographic imperialism, analyzing examples including the Greek alphabet in antiquity, Chinese characters in Asia, and the Latin alphabet through European colonization. This new framework and genealogy of avoidance and technology refusal elucidates ways forward, slowly, for successive generations to reclaim their communicative futures.

The Many-Sided Franklin Ford and the History of a Post-Discipline

Abstract: Building on recent works emphasizing the “post-disciplinary” status of communication research, this article explores the implications of this thesis for the history of communication studies. While a portion of the existing historiography fits the disciplinary framework, the post-disciplinary thesis raises theoretical, methodological, and empirical challenges. In order to meet those challenges, we argue that historical research should also be directed toward intellectual and institutional projects that predated or transcended the institutionalization of communication as a discipline. To this end, we revisit the contribution of American journalist Franklin Ford (1849–1918) as an entry point into a historical moment when the study of communication was considered intellectually, socially, and institutionally relevant—for reasons that differ from the post-World War II institutionalization of communication as a discipline. Based on archival research, our approach emphasizes how Ford’s project diverges from the conventional disciplinary histories.

Anthropomorphism in human–robot interactions: a multidimensional conceptualization

Abstract: With robots increasingly assuming social roles (e.g., assistants, companions), anthropomorphism (i.e., the cognition that an entity possesses human characteristics) plays a prominent role in human–robot interactions (HRI). However, current conceptualizations of anthropomorphism in HRI have not adequately distinguished between precursors, consequences, and dimensions of anthropomorphism. Building and elaborating on previous research, we conceptualize anthropomorphism as a form of human cognition, which centers upon the attribution of human mental capacities to a robot. Accordingly, perceptions related to a robot’s shape and movement are potential precursors of anthropomorphism, while attributions of personality and moral value to a robot are potential consequences of anthropomorphism. Arguing that multidimensional conceptualizations best reflect the conceptual facets of anthropomorphism, we propose, based on Wellman’s (1990) Theory-of-Mind (ToM) framework, that anthropomorphism in HRI consists of attributing thinking, feeling, perceiving, desiring, and choosing to a robot. We conclude by discussing applications of our conceptualization in HRI research.

Back to Bandung for the Future: The Never-Ending Project of De-imperialization

Abstract: As intellectuals in modern education systems, “we are all foreigners,” foreign to our histories, local conditions, and commoners living next to us. The proposal for a global Bandung School (BS) has been on the table, with the mission to transform existing modes of thought and carry on the de-imperializing spirit of Bandung. By establishing Mandarin-World Bandung School (MBS), we propose to rediscover the spirit of anti-imperialism through locally grounded praxis and renewed intellectual trusteeship. De-imperialization is possible. The communication field shall be a critical site for global transformation beyond “coloniality.”

Approaching evolutionary communication

Abstract: The determining roles played by communication in the ongoing evolution of our species remain largely unexplored in communications-related disciplines. An unhelpful controversy that raged over E. O. Wilson’s sociobiology last century contributed to the problem and is reconsidered here in terms of the fault lines that run between natural science, social science, and politics. The article describes paths for future theoretical development by focusing first on the link between human communications behavior and evolutionary psychology. With an emphasis on understanding the crisis of community facing the world today, evolutionary communication is proposed as a theoretical alternative to limited proximate perspectives afforded by cultural analysis alone. The inherent interdisciplinary nature of communication makes the field a prime candidate for conducting research grounded in the deep-time explanatory framework of evolutionary theory and the epistemological assumptions of scientific humanism.

Global media ethics, the good life, and justice

Abstract: One of the challenges for global media ethics is to define a theoretical perspective from which to adjudicate cross-cultural value conflicts. Early work in this field attempted to identify a universal norm from which the specific, applied norms of media professions and practices could be derived. However, postcolonial and pluralist critiques have revealed potential problems with this approach. To avoid such problems, neo-Aristotelian critiques have proposed focusing less on defining universal norms of obligated action and more on acknowledging local variations in conceptions of the good life. These critiques rightly stress the goal of understanding the diversity of ethical values both within and across cultures. However, when the goal of media ethics is to provide guidance for cooperative resolutions of value conflicts, the generalizability of norms remains an important issue. This article reframes this debate more as a division of labor than as a rivalry in approaches.

Book Review: Outside the Bubble, by Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani

Abstract: Outside the bubble: Social media and political participation in Western democracies. Vaccari, C. & Valeriani, A. (2021). New York: Oxford University Press, $27.95 paperback, 287 pages. Social media as moderating forces in political communication? You may be forgiven for finding the idea outlandish, following years of hate speech and harassment, the polarizing effects of engagement-seeking algorithms, and mis- and disinformation circulating on social media platforms. Yet in Outside the Bubble, Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani offer a powerful case—and present compelling multinational evidence—that when it comes to political participation, social media may do more to mitigate differences than reinforce them. The book’s motivating observation is that for most citizens, most of the time, social media are not media of political communication. Moreover, for the preponderance of citizens, it is the lifeworld-rooted Facebook, and not the more explicitly political Twitter, that forms the core of social media experience. This...

The Perceived Convincingness Model: why and under what conditions processing fluency and emotions are valid indicators of a message’s perceived convincingness

Abstract: Persuasive messages aim to influence people’s behavior. Arguments in these messages typically refer to the positive consequences of the advocated behavior or the negative consequences of failing to do so. It has been claimed that people automatically generate a judgment about the message’s convincingness. We present the Perceived Convincingness Model (PCM) to explain how people generate this judgment based upon the fluency with which they process the message and the intensity of the resulting emotions. When these experiences are elicited by the processing of the message’s arguments, they can be crude, yet relevant indicators of the extent to which the arguments meet the normative criteria of acceptability, relevance, and sufficiency. Thus, under some conditions, trusting one’s feelings may be a rational strategy when deciding to heed an advice or not.

Virtual relationship memory: a conceptual model of mediated communication and relational dissolution

Abstract: Virtual Relationship Memory (VRM) is a conceptual model to explore the way people remember and socially construct their romantic relationships, with a focus on the breakup process and memories after a relationship has ended. The model is situated within the research exploring relationships, technology, and memory. We articulate three components—objects, networks, and stories—which independently and concurrently represent how communication technology affects relational and memory-making processes. We first review research into memory, relational dissolution, and mediated communication to situate the VRM at the nexus of those three domains of study. We define and describe features of the VRM (objects, stories, and networks) and build towards a comprehensive conceptual model. To conclude, we present several potential future research directions—management strategies, curation of emotion, and dualistic functions of memory—with implications for building, extending, and stretching the boundaries of VRM.

Media power and politics in framing and discourse theory

Abstract: Two widely applied entrances to critically analyze mediated political communication are framing and discourse theory. While media discourse and framing are used in close connection in academic literature, we examine how the approaches theorize media power and politics differently. Framing theory examines how issues are constructed interactively, represented in mediated form, and interpreted within an institutionalized policy sphere. Some framing studies critically examine structural or hegemonic power. However, the preoccupation with manifest interactions entails a diminished sensibility to systematic exclusion. Discourse theory provides a post-foundational conceptualization of politics as the political in which media discourses are antagonistic, contingent, and open to change. Discourse theory expands media power to include (subversive) positions beyond hegemonic politics. We argue that applying either discourse or framing theory in media studies has theoretical and analytical consequences and that theoretical sensitivity will strengthen the discriminatory power of framing and discourse theory as two distinct fields.

Communicative labor resistance practices: organizing digital news media unions and precarious work

Abstract: Unionization among newsworkers has increased in the U.S. since 2015. This article develops a relational theoretical framework to examine communicative labor resistance practices. It is grounded in critical organizational communication, social movement studies, sociology of work, and labor studies, responding to how newsworkers’ union resistance has been undertheorized in extant journalism and media studies research. It argues that communicative labor resistance practices should be based on three propositions: a dialectical process and continual cycle of organizing unions’ resistance and exploitative precarious work; the relationship among heterogenous alternative digital communication labor resistance practices; and a relational approach to digitally-mediated communicative material conditions and discursive forms of resistance rhetoric in social movement genres of organizational communication that mutually co-produce and constitute unions’ resistance practices and organizational self-structuring. This framework has implications for understanding precarious work, class, professional identity, and journalism’s democratic role in society, and for doing labor resistance-oriented communication research.

The problem of popular culture

Abstract: This article argues that concept of popular culture, as conceptualized within the media/cultural studies tradition in the Anglophone West, is in crisis. The idea of the “popular” that continues to be embraced by many critical media/communication and cultural studies scholars derives from postwar assumptions about mass media which no longer accurately fit present conditions. However, the resilience of these assumptions has created “the problem of popular culture,” a complicated and longstanding series of dilemmas for contemporary scholarship. This article documents several manifestations of this problem and proposes that scholars reserve the term popular culture for instances of popular practice.