Who Gets to Be in The Guild?

While media studies have frequently assessed the importance of representation, research in this area has often been siloed by institutional and methodological norms that define academics as “gender”, “race”, or “class” scholars, rather than inclusive scholars of all these and more. This paper thus responds to recent calls for more intersectional work by simultaneously addressing the overlapping representations of race, gender, and gamer identity, and their relation to Lorde’s concept of the mythical norm, in the popular webseries, The Guild (YouTube, 2007-2013). Via a detailed, inductive thematic analysis of the show’s two characters of color, Zaboo and Tinkerballa, we find a doubly problematic intersection between standard “gamer identity” tropes and gendered Asian/American stereotypes. The show forecloses on its potential to be truly diverse and reinforces the oppressive, marginalizing practices it tries to mock, suggesting that gaming culture will not change until we address its intersecting axes of power and exclusion. This research also demonstrates how the constructed identity of media audiences-- in this case, stereotypical “gamer” identity-- can exacerbate and reaffirm existing power disparities in representation. We suggest that media scholars remain attentive to the intersecting articulations of media consumer and individual identities in considering how representation can influence systems of inclusion and exclusion, as well as viewers’ lived outcomes.

Streamlining statistical reproducibility: NHLBI ORCHID clinical trial results reproduction

Reproducibility in medical research has been a long-standing issue. More recently, the COVID-19 pandemic has publicly underlined this fact as the retraction of several studies reached out to general media audiences. A significant number of these retractions occurred after in-depth scrutiny of the methodology and results by the scientific community. Consequently, these retractions have undermined confidence in the peer-review process, which is not considered sufficiently reliable to generate trust in the published results. This partly stems from opacity in published results, the practical implementation of the statistical analysis often remaining undisclosed. We present a workflow that uses a combination of informatics tools to foster statistical reproducibility: an open-source programming language, Jupyter Notebook, cloud-based data repository, and an application programming interface can streamline an analysis and help to kick-start new analyses. We illustrate this principle by (1) reproducing the results of the ORCHID clinical trial, which evaluated the efficacy of hydroxychloroquine in COVID-19 patients, and (2) expanding on the analyses conducted in the original trial by investigating the association of premedication with biological laboratory results. Such workflows will be encouraged for future publications from National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute-funded studies.

Comparative Study on Transmedia Awareness of Traditional Media Audiences and Social Media Users in Turkey and Ukraine

The theory of mediatization focuses on discussions on the intertwining of the media with social institutions such as politics, family and religion, influencing and being affected by these structures. In general, mediatization refers to the social and cultural process in which a field or institution becomes to some extent dependent on the logic of the media (Hjarvard, 2011). Hjarvard draws attention to the processes of mediatization as a concept by cultural and social phenomena through the media, and their symbolic content is more or less under the influence of the media. The media is determinative on the fictional world with it produces and, on its audience (consumers). It influences, directs and shapes them through the discourse it produces. Mediatization is an important issue in the context of media literacy and especially transmedia methods. Because transmedia content practices and methods increase the mediatization effect and affect the orientations of the individual and society, especially when it comes to inadequacy in the context of media literacy. Therefore, this study focused on the awareness of the audience (consumers) about transmedia applications. It is seen that the studies conducted in the field of transmedia have developed in terms of content production methods, strategies and audience engagement. It is understood that there are not enough studies on subjects such as audience impacts or audience awareness. In this context and in this study, the competence of multimedia viewers who use social media and follow a traditional media tool to understand and be aware of the content transitions between different media tools has been examined. The television channel was chosen as the traditional media medium for the research study due to its widespread viewing.

Disinformation and gendered boundarymaking: Nordic media audiences making sense of “Swedish decline”

This article examines how Russian geostrategic communication is entangled in global gender politics. The aim is to understand the resonance of disinformation in relation to culturalized, ethnicized and racialized narratives of gender, or “gendered boundarymaking.” The analysis is based on focus group discussions with Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian individuals, asked to share their impressions of news articles from the Russian media agency Sputnik, which all depicted Sweden as a warning example of multiculturalism and feminism gone “too far.” In the discussions, participants opposed a gender equal “self” to a patriarchal immigrant “other,” narrated Sweden as a country exceptionally concerned with gender, and tapped into competing temporalities of progress and decline. The article contributes to research on geostrategic communication by showing how disinformation efforts draw upon gendered national identities and debates about gender and immigration. More importantly, the article demonstrates that such gendered boundarymaking shapes audiences’ interpretations in crucial ways. Rather than viewing disinformation only from a state-centered lens of national security, in isolation from racism, Islamophobia, anti-feminism, and queerphobia within Western societies, research should acknowledge the interconnections between geostrategic communication and everyday boundarymaking. This will be pivotal to developing counterstrategies to disinformation, whether Russian or homegrown.

Citizen journalism reduces the credibility deficit of authoritarian government in risk communication amid COVID-19 outbreaks

During the outbreak of an epidemic, the success in risk communications to make the public comply with disease preventive measures depends on the public’s trust in the government. In this study, we aim to understand how media audiences update their trust in the government during the COVID-19 outbreak depending on the information they received. We conducted an online survey experiment in February 2020 in Hong Kong (n = 1,016) in which respondents were randomly provided with a government press release and an endorsement either from an official or a non-official source. This study shows that the information from a non-official source enhances the credibility of official government messages. Our findings imply that dictators can actually “borrow credibility” from their citizen journalists and even nondemocratic leaders can make themselves more trustworthy to potential dissenters through citizen journalism. Allowing information flow from non-official sources can be a practical measure for governments to address the problem of a credibility deficit during a pandemic.

Exploratory Study on Audience Perception of Information Credibility on Media Platforms in Ghana

Using a focus group discussion, this study sought to understand how media audiences perceive information in the media environment in Ghana. The study found out that the prevalence of fake news on social media platforms serves as a disincentive to consumers of media messages from giving attention to information from some media platforms. Legacy media, radio and television, for many of the participants, present credible information on its platform with the belief that rigorous scrutiny is done by the media organisation before information is shared with their audiences on air. Though participants in the group discussions are often dismissive of media information they have doubts about, they occasionally, not routinely, verify information from news portals they deem credible. Participants also rely on their intuition to assess the truthfulness or otherwise of a story.

The Zoom solution: Promoting effective cross-ideological communication online

The rise of ideological polarization in the U.S. over the past few decades has come with an increase in hostility on both sides of the political aisle. Although communication and compromise are hallmarks of a functioning society, research has shown that people overestimate the negative affect they will experience when viewing oppositional media, and it is likely that negative forecasts lead many to avoid cross-ideological communication (CIC) altogether. Additionally, a growing ideological geographic divide and online extremism fueled by social media audiences make engaging in CIC more difficult than ever. Here, we demonstrate that online video-chat platforms (i.e., Zoom) can be used to promote effective CIC among ideologically polarized individuals, as well as to better study CIC in a controlled setting. Participants (n = 122) had a face-to-face CIC over Zoom, either privately or publicly with a silent ingroup audience present. Participant forecasts about the interaction were largely inaccurate, with the actual conversation experience found to be more positive than anticipated. Additionally, the presence of an ingroup audience was associated with increased conflict. In both conditions, participants showed signs of attitude moderation, felt more favorable toward the outgroup, and felt more informed about the issue after the CIC. These results suggest that face-to-face CIC’s are generally positive and beneficial for partisans, and that greater effects may be achieved through private conversations, as opposed to more public social media interactions. Future researchers studying ideological conflict may find success using similar Zoom paradigms to bring together ideologically diverse individuals in controlled lab settings.

From audiences to data points: The role of media agencies in the platformization of the news media industry

Media agencies have become one of the key actors in the contemporary media industry: by channelling marketing budgets to some media and some platforms and not to others, media agencies play an important role in creating the digital media infrastructure and laying the tracks of the public sphere. Yet we know very little about these commercial middlemen between advertisers and audiences, what they do, and how we should understand their role in the digital media ecology. This article discusses the role of media agencies in relation to platformization with a focus on the news media sector. Based on interviews, publicly available material and trade journals, the article depicts an industry deeply engaged in digitizing, tracking and commodifying media audiences, while at the same time aware of ethical challenges of the digital media infrastructure. This leads to a call for more political attention and critical research on the democratic implications of the new value chains between platforms, advertisers, audiences, media agencies and news media as well as the many tech companies providing derived digital services and products.