Like a “Frog in a well”? An ethnographic study of Chinese rural women’s social media practices through the WeChat platform

2019 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 324-339 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yini Wang ◽  
Judith Sandner
Journalism ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (12) ◽  
pp. 2006-2024
Author(s):  
Hans K Meyer ◽  
Christy Zempter

Building a brand is key to a news organization’s successful social media strategy. But what if that brand is ‘boring’? Through an ethnographic study of C-SPAN, the cable network dedicated to covering the US House and Senate, this study examines conflicts between an organization’s espoused values and accepted social media practices. It finds that building a brand, even if it is seen as boring, effectively serves an audience on social media because audience members will align with the overall message rather than individual reporter’s attributes. The key is clearly communicating the journalistic benefits of living espoused values and how getting involved on social media fulfills the organization’s public service mission. When conflicts arise, the study also finds individual staffers provide key examples, which organizations should cultivate in the newsroom.


2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 578-591
Author(s):  
Christoph Bareither

This article develops the concept of emotional affordances, which is first used to describe the capacities of heritage sites to enable, prompt and restrict particular emotional experiences of their visitors. Secondly, the article asks how the emotional affordances of digital media, particularly those taking effect in digital photography and social media practices, allow visitors to mediate the emotional affordances of a particular heritage site. The argument builds on an ethnographic study of visitors’ digital image practices at the ‘Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe’ in Berlin and it demonstrates how visitors ‘capture the feeling’ of the memorial through such practices while also reshaping the experiences the place affords.


2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elisabetta Costa ◽  
Donya Alinejad

This article examines the ways in which experiences of homeland take shape through the use of social media among first- and second-generation Kurdish migrants living in Milan and surrounding areas in the Lombardy region of Italy. Drawing on a short-term ethnographic study of social media practices carried out in spring and summer 2018, the paper presents and compares the uses of social media among two migrant generations and conceptualizes homeland as a mediated experience that takes shape through people’s everyday social media practices. This approach to homeland can account for the multiple ways in which the affordances of digital platforms and the subjective aspects of homeland are interconnected with one another through social media practices. The paper is part of the Global Perspectives, Media and Communication special issue on “Media, Migration, and Nationalism,” guest-edited by Koen Leurs and Tomohisa Hirata.


2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 115-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roei Davidson

Abstract This study considers cultural crowdfunding as a heterogeneous system that allows money and attention to flow from backers to founders of cultural projects in diverse cultural sectors and focuses on the nature of the standards governing it. It analyzes Kickstarter’s corporate blog since the platform’s launch and finds indications that social media practices are increasingly naturalized as integral to crowdfunding and that social media architectures are increasingly adopted by the crowdfunding platform. This, I argue, has a potential exclusionary effect. At the same time, the analysis finds evidence that Kickstarter is striving to develop an independent capacity to set aesthetic standards, which might moderate that effect and help constitute crowdfunding as an alternative decentralized arena for the funding of culture.


Author(s):  
David A. Craig

Social media have amplified and accelerated the ethical challenges that communicators, professional and otherwise, face worldwide. The work of ethical journalism, with a priority of truthful communication, offers a paradigm case for examining the broader challenges in the global social media network. The evolution of digital technologies and the attendant expansion of the communication network pose ethical difficulties for journalists connected with increased speed and volume of information, a diminished place in the network, and the cross-border nature of information flow. These challenges are exacerbated by intentional manipulation of social media, human-run or automated, in many countries including internal suppression by authoritarian regimes and foreign influence operations to spread misinformation. In addition, structural characteristics of social media platforms’ filtering and recommending algorithms pose ethical challenges for journalism and its role in fostering public discourse on social and political issues, although a number of studies have called aspects of the “filter bubble” hypothesis into question. Research in multiple countries, mostly in North America and Europe, has examined social media practices in journalism, including two issues central to social media ethics—verification and transparency—but ethical implications have seldom been discussed explicitly in the context of ethical theory. Since the 1980s and 1990s, scholarship focused on normative theorizing in relation to journalism has matured and become more multicultural and global. Scholars have articulated a number of ethical frameworks that could deepen analysis of the challenges of social media in the practice of journalism. However, the explicit implications of these frameworks for social media have largely gone unaddressed. A large topic of discussion in media ethics theory has been the possibility of universal or common principles globally, including a broadening of discussion of moral universals or common ground in media ethics beyond Western perspectives that have historically dominated the scholarship. In order to advance media ethics scholarship in the 21st-century environment of globally networked communication, in which journalists work among a host of other actors (well-intentioned, ill-intentioned, and automated), it is important for researchers to apply existing media ethics frameworks to social media practices. This application needs to address the challenges that social media create when crossing cultures, the common difficulties they pose worldwide for journalistic verification practices, and the responsibility of journalists for countering misinformation from malicious actors. It is also important to the further development of media ethics scholarship that future normative theorizing in the field—whether developing new frameworks or redeveloping current ones—consider journalistic responsibilities in relation to social media in the context of both the human and nonhuman actors in the communication network. The developing scholarly literature on the ethics of algorithms bears further attention from media ethics scholars for the ways it may provide perspectives that are complementary to existing media ethics frameworks that have focused on human actors and organizations.


2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-87
Author(s):  
Jenni Hokka

With the advent of popular social media platforms, news journalism has been forced to re-evaluate its relation to its audience. This applies also for public service media that increasingly have to prove its utility through audience ratings. This ethnographic study explores a particular project, the development of ‘concept bible’ for the Finnish Broadcasting Company YLE’s online news; it is an attempt to solve these challenges through new journalistic practices. The study introduces the concept of ‘nuanced universality’, which means that audience groups’ different kinds of needs are taken into account on news production in order to strengthen all people’s ability to be part of society. On a more general level, the article claims that despite its commercial origins, audience segmentation can be transformed into a method that helps revise public service media principles into practices suitable for the digital media environment.


2019 ◽  
Vol 173 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-52 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xinyu Zhao

This article investigates Chinese international students’ everyday transnational family practices through the use of social media. Specifically, the article highlights the relevance of two interlinked forms of disconnection in these students’ daily negotiations of ambivalent cross-border family relations in an age of always-on connectivity. The first form involves their disconnection from the general public via their creation of intimate spaces on social media that are exclusive to their family members. The second form involves the students detaching themselves from such intimate spaces, often temporarily, to escape and resist familial control and surveillance. I conclude the article by developing the notion of ‘disconnective intimacy’ to conceptualise contemporary Chinese transnational families. This article contributes to the literature on the transnational family by providing an insight into the micro-politics of mediated co-presence through the trope of ‘disconnective practice’.


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