{"title":"Strategic illiteracies: the long game of technology refusal and disconnection","authors":"E. Plaut","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac014","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-09-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43097381","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Global media ethics, the good life, and justice","authors":"Thomas Hove","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac016","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47373215","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Communication theory and application in post-socialist context","authors":"Marton Demeter, Andrea Bajnok","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac015","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-08-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47704822","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A right to memory and communication policy: safeguarding the capability of remembrance","authors":"Noam Tirosh, Amit M. Schejter","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac013","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-07-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44095443","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The problem of popular culture","authors":"D. Powers","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac011","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac011","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45311865","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mathematical models of message discrepancy: previous models and a modified psychological discounting model","authors":"Sungeun Chung, E. Fink","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac010","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41465959","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Media power and politics in framing and discourse theory","authors":"Mette Marie Roslyng, Camilla Dindler","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac012","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-06-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48829060","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Book Review: Outside the Bubble, by Cristian Vaccari and Augusto Valeriani","authors":"C. Wells","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42214321","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Theory and Method for Studying How Media Messages Prompt Shared Brain Responses Along the Sensation-to-Cognition Continuum","authors":"Ralf Schmälzle","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac009","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac009","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47365335","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Dismantling the Western Canon in Media Studies","authors":"W. F. Mohammed","doi":"10.1093/ct/qtac001","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtac001","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 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.","PeriodicalId":48102,"journal":{"name":"Communication Theory","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":3.7,"publicationDate":"2022-04-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43244719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}