Reader Comments Agentive Power in COVID-19 Digital News Articles: Challenging Parascientific Information?

The recent COVID-19 pandemic has triggered an enormous stream of information. Parascientific digital communication has pursued different avenues, from mainstream media news to social networking, at times combined. Likewise, citizens have developed new discourse practices, with readers as active participants who claim authority. Based on a corpus of 500 reader comments from The Guardian, we analyse how readers build their authorial voice on COVID-19 news as well as their agentive power and its implications. Methodologically, we draw upon stance markers, depersonalisation strategies, and heteroglossic markers, from the perspective of discursive interpersonality. Our findings unearth that stance markers are central for readers to build authority and produce content. Depersonalised and heteroglossic markers are also resorted, reinforcing readers’ authority with external information that mirrors expert scientific communication. Conclusions suggest a strong citizen agentive power that can either support news articles, spreading parascientific information, or challenge them, therefore, contributing to produce pseudoscientific messages.

Digital Disclosure of Delinquency: Online Peers and the Sharing of Offline Crime

Digital communication poses challenges for scholars interested in the link between peers and crime since youth are often less inhibited online and can more easily share their opinions and experiences with offline activities. Drawing on longitudinal data from middle and high school students, this study explores how online communication impacts the sharing of personal and peer delinquency. Criminogenic risk factors are largely unrelated to the digital disclosure of personal delinquency among those who offend; however, peer online disclosure is related to self-reported delinquency, independent of perceived peer delinquency. These findings suggest cyberspace may extend offline mechanisms of peer influence beyond providing a unique source of online influence.

Sexual Boundary Violations via Digital Media Among Students

As digital media becomes more central to the lives of adolescents, it also becomes increasingly relevant for their sexual communication. Sexting as an important image-based digital medium provides opportunities for self-determined digital communication, but also carries specific risks for boundary violations. Accordingly, sexting is understood either as an everyday, or as risky and deviant behavior among adolescents. In the affectedness of boundary violations gender plays an important role. However, it is still unclear to what extent digital sexual communication restores stereotypical gender roles and restrictive sexuality norms or, alternatively, enables new spaces of possibility. In this sense, current research points to a desideratum regarding adolescents’ orientations toward sexting as a practice between spaces of possibility and boundary violations. This paper discusses the possibilities, but also the risks, of intimate digital communication among adolescents. The main question is, how adolescents themselves perceive sexting practices and how they position themselves between both spaces for possibility and for the exchange of unwanted sexual content. For this purpose, orientations toward normalities and gender of students are reconstructed. To answer these questions, twelve single-sex, group discussions were carried out with students aged 16 and 17 at five different secondary schools in northern Germany. A total of 20 boys and 22 girls took part. The group discussions were structured by a narrative generating guideline. The analysis draws its methodology from the Documentary Method, regarding implicit and explicit forms of knowledge and discourse. It results in a typology of three types with different orientations. The study shows, that most of the students consider sexting to be a risky practice; only one type shows normality in the use of sexting. At the same time, some of the young people are interested in experimenting with image-based intimate digital communication. Further, gender differences in use and affectedness are also documented. In this way, orientations toward gender stereotypes “favor” both the attribution of responsibility to girls, and overlook the responsibility of students who perpetrated the boundary violation. The orientations of adolescents should be taken more into account in research as well as in educational programs for the prevention of sexual violence.

From Cafe to the Mosque: the Construction of Dakwah Digital Communication of Shift Community

Keberhasilan dakwah sangat ditentukan oleh strategi yang dipilih oleh da’i. Dakwah aktual dan kontekstual merupakan salah satu cara yang dapat dipilih agar pesan efektif mempengaruhi kesadaran dan perilaku masyarakat. Artikel ini bertujuan untuk mengkonstruksi strategi dakwah digital dalam konteks generasi milenial. Melalui pendekatan antropologi digital, artikel ini mengeksplorasi salah satu aktifitas yaitu komunitas Shift yang dipimpinan Hanan Attaki dimana ia melakukan dakwah digital dengan sasaran utama generasi milenial. Dalam studi ini ditelusuri beberapa media sosial yang sering digunakan oleh Hanan Attaki, yaitu Youtube dan Instagram. Studi ini menunjukkan terdapat sejumlah model komunikasi yang bisa dibangun melalui dakwah digital yang menjangkau sasaran dakwah baru yaitu komunitas milenial. Aktualitas tema dakwah dan kontekstual dakwah yang relevan dengan karakteristik generasi milenial yaitu IT minded dan memiliki mobilitas yang tinggi sehingga membentuk moda komunikasi dakwah yang berciri representasi budaya sebagai penentu efektivitas dalam menjangkau kesadaran dan perilaku sasaran dakwah.The success of da'wah is largely determined by the strategy chosen by the Islamic preacher. Actual and contextual da'wah is one of ways that can be chosen by Islamic preacher so that messages can effectively influence people's awareness and behavior. The aim of this study is to construct a digital da'wah strategy in the context of the millennial generation. Through a digital anthropological approach, this study explores one of the activities, namely the Shift community led by Hanan Attaki where he conducts digital da'wah with the main target of the millennial generation. In this study, several social media are often used by Hanan Attaki, namely Youtube and Instagram. This study shows that there are a number of communication models that can be built through digital da'wah that reach new da'wah targets, namely the millennial community. The actuality of the da'wah theme and contextual da'wah that is relevant to the characteristics of the millennial generation, namely IT minded and it has high mobility and make a form of da'wah communication which characterized by cultural representation as a determinant of effectiveness in reaching awareness and behavior of da'wah targets.

Smart Place Making Through Digital Communication and Citizen Engagement

The disruptive growth of new information technologies is transforming the dynamics of citizen communication and engagement in the urban context. In order to create new, smart, inclusive, and transparent urban environments, the city governments of London and Madrid have implemented a series of innovative digital applications and citizen communication channels. Through a case study approach, this research assesses the best practices in the field of digital communication and citizen engagement implemented by London and Madrid, with a particular focus on the profile, content, and functions of these new channels. The results of this research are intended to identify relevant new dynamics of interaction and value co-creation for cities and their residents.

Digital Citizenship and Its Dimensions

Digital citizenship is a concept that has gained importance, especially after the 2000s, with the increasing prevalence of digitalization. This study aimed to examine the thoughts of the students who took the Digital Citizenship and Society course at Gaziantep University, Faculty of Communication, Department of Journalism in the 2020-2021 academic year. The statements taken from the students reveal what the digital citizenship sub-dimensions mean in students' lives, which sub-dimension is more important to them, how they perceive the problems they encounter most in digital life, and the relationship between digitalization and participatory democracy. According to the results of the research, students have a positive attitude towards the concept of a digital citizen. Digital commerce and digital communication are the dimensions they are most associated with in their daily life. The most problematic dimensions are digital security, digital ethics, digital commerce, and digital law. Increasing digital citizenship qualities will facilitate participatory democracy.

The Chilling Effects of Digital Dataveillance: A Theoretical Model and an Empirical Research Agenda

People's sense of being subject to digital dataveillance can cause them to restrict their digital communication behavior. Such a chilling effect is essentially a form of self-censorship in everyday digital media use with the attendant risks of undermining individual autonomy and well-being. This article combines the existing theoretical and limited empirical work on surveillance and chilling effects across fields with an analysis of novel data toward a research agenda. The institutional practice of dataveillance—the automated, continuous, and unspecific collection, retention, and analysis of digital traces—affects individual behavior. A mechanism-based causal model based on the theory of planned behavior is proposed for the micro level: An individual's increased sense of dataveillance causes their subjective probability assigned to negative outcomes of digital communication behavior to increase and attitudes toward this communication to become less favorable, ultimately decreasing the intention to engage in it. In aggregate and triggered through successive salience shocks such as data scandals, dataveillance is accordingly hypothesized to lower the baseline of free digital communication in a society through the chilling effects mechanism. From the developed theoretical model, a set of methodological consequences and questions for future studies are derived.

Health Literacy and Digital Communication

The SARS-COV-2 pandemic has placed the entire planet under a global health threat, but it has also provided a golden opportunity for us to make the digital transition. With the successive confinements and restrictions on circulation and communication to which we were subjected, we had to look for other models of relationships, work, and learning. In a few months, the Portuguese went from an essentially playful and informative use of information and communication technologies (ICT) to an intensive work, academic, and communicational use.