Careful attunements: the choreographing of care and affective witnessing through media practices during, and after, crisis

2021 ◽  
pp. 016344372110409
Author(s):  
Caitlin McGrane ◽  
Larissa Hjorth ◽  
Yoko Akama

This paper takes a design anthropology approach to understanding the learnings, challenges and opportunities Victorians adopted to choreograph practices of care in and through media practice during and after the Australian 2019–2020 bushfire crisis. In doing so, we frame our inquiry from a perspective of how individuals and communities care through media practice. The study weaves together experiences around informal and formal crisis communication media – such as the government’s VicEmergency App, Australian and international news media and social media sharing – to map what we call the careful attunements of choreographing care.

Psych ◽  
2022 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-70
Author(s):  
Melissa MacKay ◽  
Taylor Colangeli ◽  
Sydney Gosselin ◽  
Sophie Neumann ◽  
Andrew Papadopoulos

During the COVID-19 pandemic, key stakeholders have used social media to rapidly disseminate essential information to the public to help them make informed health-related decisions. Our research examined how the public responded to official actors’ Facebook posts during COVID-19 and examined the comment sentiment and post engagement rates. CBC News and CTV News received a greater proportion of negative comments and a lower average post engagement rate compared with Healthy Canadians. Additionally, the proportion of negative and positive comments varied over time for all sources; however, over 30% of the comments for all three actors were consistently negative. Key stakeholders should monitor the public’s response to their social media posts and adapt their messages to increase the effectiveness of their crisis communication efforts to encourage the adoption of protective measures.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (s1) ◽  
pp. 11-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
Axel Bruns ◽  
Brenda Moon

Abstract Previous research into social media platforms has often focused on the exceptional: key moments in politics, sports or crisis communication. For Twitter, it has usually centred on hashtags or keywords. Routine and everyday social media practices remain underexamined as a result; the literature has overrepresented the loudest voices: those users who contribute actively to popular hashtags. This article addresses this imbalance by exploring in depth the day-to-day patterns of activity within the Australian Twittersphere for a 24-hour period in March 2017. We focus especially on the previously less visible everyday social media practices that this shift in perspective reveals. This provides critical new insights into where, and how, to look for evidence of onlife traces in a systematic way.


Author(s):  
Lars Haahr

The purpose of this chapter is to explore the emerging social media practices of governments and citizens. The study takes on the status of an exploratory case study and draws on a grounded research approach. The case study shows an emerging social media practice that is embedded in and driven by a diversity of contradictions. The study identifies the following three contradictions as the most significant: communicative contradictions between service administration and community feeling, organizational contradictions between central control and local engagement, digital platform contradictions between municipal website and social media. The chapter presents a single-case study, which is a small contribution to the initial understanding of the social media practices of governments and citizens. The analysis indicates how a local municipality in its social media practices on Facebook is embedded in and driven by contradictions, and hence offers insights into a new way of understanding the challenges and opportunities of government social media.


2011 ◽  
Vol 12 (6) ◽  
pp. 552-559 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larissa Hjorth ◽  
Kyoung-hwa Yonnie Kim

In news media of late, much has been touted about the agency of social and mobile media in the events of political uprising or at times of natural disasters and crisis management. While these events did not become events because of social media, the media did affect how we experienced the situation. This leads us to ask, Just how helpful are social mobile media in maintaining relationships in times of crisis management, and how, if at all, do they depart from previous media and methods? Drawing from case studies conducted with participants living in Tokyo at the time of the horrific events surrounding Japan’s earthquake and tsunami disaster of March 11, 2011 (called 3.11), this article reflects on the role of new media in helping, if at all, people manage crisis and grief. The authors argue that while social media provide new channels for affective cultures in the form of mobile intimacy, they also extend on earlier media practices and rituals such as the postcard.


M/C Journal ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marjorie Kibby

With John Berger’s death 45 years after publishing the pioneering work, Ways of Seeing, it is timely to reflect on what is it that we bring to seeing and knowing in the 21st century. The act of seeing has many layers, one of which is the practice of depiction. Our cultural and social environment, including the accessibility and ideology of new technology, has contributed to changes in the way that environment is depicted and interpreted. The traditional Western ways of representing, seeing, and knowing the world have given way to hybrid roles which have been described as that of a produser (Bruns), a combination media user and producer. Consumer-generated content and converging representational contexts create new texts and new ways of interpreting texts.The politics of representation in the digital age raise the notion of “filtering” (Walker Rettberg) where filtering refers to both the digital tools that aid in producing texts, and the cultural filters that have shaped how we interpret those texts. Depiction is a distinctive kind of representation, where accounts of the process attempt to specify the relationship something must bear to an object to depict it, however the various filters within processes of depiction complicate this relationship.This issue of M/C Journal explores the processes of depiction that underpin seeing, knowing, doing, and being in the 21st century, and how such acts of representation contribute to changing perspectives on the ways of seeing.A feature article by Lesley Proctor examines what John Berger's insights on "seeing" might mean in new contexts where sight is the major, or the only, sense available to the user. Using avatars in Second Life as an example, Proctor explains how visual primacy both supports and subtly challenges Berger’s analysis of the ways of seeing.Lelia Green, Richard Morrison, Andrew Ewing, and Cathy Henkel adopt Berger’s premise that “every image embodies a way of seeing” (Berger 10) in analysing how an individual creative worker can re-present themselves within evolving contexts. Their article investigates how The Morrison Studio, a London-based media services producer, re-imagines and re-images its brand in a changing media environment.Nora Madison’s article identifies how cultural norms ideologically shape representation, in exploring how bisexuals use digital media to construct self-representations and brand a bisexual identity. Analysing online social spaces created by and for bisexuals, Madison addresses how users adapt visual, textual, and hyperlinked information to create self-representations that can be culturally recognized.Bryoni Trezise considers the relationship between the cultural figure of the infant child and the visual-digital economies in which it currently operates. Through a consideration of the compositional qualities of the emerging genre of the baby selfie, Trezise builds on Berger’s discussion of the materiality of pictures, and describes a way of seeing the world that is tied to new forms of capital and exchange.Philippe Campays and Vioula Said propose the idea that, in the context of de-territorialisation, to paint, to describe, to portray, and to re-imagine the qualities of place is critical for one to be in the world.  Their article examines how drawing architectural representations plays a part in such visual reconstruction to re-imagine home.Paul Ryder and Daniel Binns examine the battle-map as depicted in Patton (1970) and Midway (1976), two films about the Second World War, concluding that they operate as an expression of both martial and cinematic strategy. Ryder and Binns argue that the battle-map functions within traditional readings of the map, but also acts as a sign of command’s profound limitations.Nicholas Hookway and Tim Graham undertook a big data analysis of the Twitter hashtag #Mission22, used to raise awareness of the high suicide rates among military veterans. Their article analyses how people depict, self-represent and self-tell as moral subjects using social media campaigns, and speculates on why this campaign was successful in mobilizing users to portray their moral selves.Neil O'Boyle examines the mediated depiction of travelling Irish football fans at the 2016 UEFA European Championship. Noting that the behaviour of Irish fans at this tournament attracted considerable international news attention, O’Boyle reveals the coverage to be a co-construction of international news media practices and the self-representational practices of Irish fans themselves.Elizabeth Ellison explores how research outcomes can be depicted as images and how the visually focused platform Instagram may be used as a tool for sharing research concepts and findings. Ellison’s article provides a self-reflective case study of Instagram use as a research dissemination tool, situating the #AustralianBeachspace project within the context of academic social media use.ReferencesBerger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin Books, 1972.Bruns, Axel. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. New York: Peter Lang, 2008.Walker Rettberg, Jill. Seeing Ourselves through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.


Author(s):  
Kheder Omar Lawa

This paper reviews challenges and opportunities for news media and journalism in today's changing media environment. It documents that we are moving towards an increasingly digital, mobile, and social media environment with more intense competition for attention. More and more people get news via digital media, they increasingly access news via mobile devices (especially smartphones), and rely on social media and other intermediaries in terms of how they access and find news. In this environment, a limited number of large technology companies enable billions of users across the world to navigate and use digital media in easy and attractive ways through services like search, social networking, video sharing, and messaging. As a consequence, these companies play a more and more important role in terms of (a) the distribution of news and (b) digital advertising.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document