Detention, a Game More Than Just Games

This paper's main topic is how Taiwan's self-made video game Detention affects Taiwanese young people's understanding of their history and how this will affect the promotion of transitional justice in Taiwan. First, it summarizes its features and achievements of the international video game industry. Moreover, after briefing the story content, it explains its strategies for interpreting the White Terror, the performance of trauma, and how the Taiwanese learn more about their history while playing games. Finally, it demonstrates the uniqueness of games from other traditional media, which provides another possibility and imagination for young people to understand history.

Política pop online: nuevas estrategias y liderazgos para nuevos públicos

In the midst of entertainment society, that started off at the end of the twentieth century, pop politics developed as a new communication formula used by the political leaders to share their image and their messages to the citi- zens by means of features from the entertainment environment or celebritiza- tion. In a similar way, the traditional mass media act, including formats of politi- cal infoentertainment to share the political information to the citizens in a frivolous, superficial or satiric format, aiming to increase their audience. This dominant situation of politainment has been transferred to the Internet envi- ronment, where the trend multiplies its effect due to the power of social net- works. In that case, political parties, mass media and prosumers, find a new space to gain votes, increase their audience and achieve advantage. The mono- graph included in index.comunicación introduces several research projects re- lated to politainment, aiming to study its impact upon traditional media and social networks. The new formulas adopted by spectacularized political infor- mation, the kind of issuers that produce them and the consequences upon those who intake them, are the object of analysis of the investigation works published in this thematic number.

Social Media and Press Freedom

As internet penetration rapidly expanded throughout the world, press freedom and government accountability improved in some countries but backslid in others. We propose a formal model that provides a mechanism that explains the observed divergent paths of countries. We argue that increased access to social media makes partial capture, where governments allow limited freedom of the press, an untenable strategy. By amplifying the influence of small traditional media outlets, higher internet access increases both the costs of capture and the risk that a critical mass of citizens will become informed and overturn the incumbent. Depending on the incentives to retain office, greater internet access thus either forces an incumbent to extend capture to small outlets, further undermining press freedom; or relieve pressure from others. We relate our findings to the cases of Turkey and Tunisia.

Functions of Hybrid Media: How Parties and Their Leaders Use Traditional Media in Their Social Media Campaign Communication

Political campaign communication has become increasingly hybrid and the ability to create synergies between older and newer media is now a prerequisite for running a successful campaign. Nevertheless, beyond establishing that parties and individual politicians use social media to gain visibility in traditional media, not much is known about how political actors use the hybrid media system in their campaign communication. At the same time, the personalization of politics, shown to have increased in the media coverage of politics, has gained little attention in the context of today’s hybrid media environment. In this research we analyze one aspect of hybrid media campaign communication, political actors’ use of traditional media in their social media campaign communication. Through a quantitative content analysis of the Facebook, Twitter and Instagram posts of Finnish parties and their leaders published during the 2019 Finnish parliamentary elections, we find that much of this hybridized campaign communication was personalized. In addition, we show that parties and their leaders used traditional media for multiple purposes, the most common of which was gaining positive visibility, pointing to strategic considerations. The results have implications for both the scholarship on hybrid media systems and personalization of politics.

Expansion of the core business of traditional media companies in Spain through SVOD services

The strategic importance of the internet for television became evident in the early 2000s, even destabilizing its very concept and finally resulting in convergence towards a profound transformation of the sector. The introduction of global over-the-top (OTT) media services into local markets has led to strategic changes in multimedia groups. This study considers the subscription video-on-demand (SVOD) services of Atresmedia and Mediaset España, the two main traditional media organizations in Spain that form a duopoly in the country’s commercial television sector, with the aim of understanding and evaluating their positioning strategy in this market and the results obtained through the diversification of their core business. Based on an analysis of their content, price, and promotion policies and the results in terms of subscriptions and revenues, slight differences emerge regarding the strategy and scope of these two groups in their own environment in the sector. They compete for customers to achieve growth in the audiovisual market while seeking to retain a cross-media, multiplatform audience, as well as expand their core business of commercial linear television against a background of a reduction of advertising spend on television and the expected increase of hybrid financing models.

A Qualitative Exploration of Social Media Consumption and Use Among Everyday Women Who Participate in CrossFit

Introduction: Social media allows a user to be a content creator and consumer. This paper focuses on the social media engagement of everyday women who participate in CrossFit, exploring differences in how they consume and use social media content. CrossFit women are celebrated for their strength, power, and fitness in the social media community, which is not consistent for all women. Methods: This study used semi-structured focus groups with 47 participants between the ages of 18-54 who were everyday women who participate in CrossFit. The participants self-identified their level of CrossFit as recreational, semi-competitive, competitive, or high-level competitors. Results: Findings reveal two major themes: consuming corporate messaging and using social media for their own benefit, included the subthemes of social support and shifting perceptions. The findings, including supportive quotations from the participants, reveal that these women are critical consumers of social media who express disapproval of traditional media portrayals of women’s bodies. Conclusions: Women’s experiences with CrossFit seem to offer some protection from the negative outcomes associated with consumption of traditional media messaging about women’s bodies.

Mental Health in 3D

There is a wealth of research on the depiction and impact of mental health representations in traditional media; however, less is known about video games. As the dominant form of media in the 21st century, video games uniquely portray mental illness in traditional ways as well as in ways unique to video games, such as in-game mechanics (e.g., sanity meters) and player-driven decision making. This paper outlines the importance of cultural messages relating to mental illness as conveyed through video games in terms of content and influence and presents a multi-dimensional model of analysis for the representation of mental illness in digital games. The aim of this paper is to provide a foundation for understanding how mental illness is represented in digital games, provide a new perspective for thinking critically about representation of mental illness in games, and overview a new framework for assessing video game content in this area.

Addressing “Another” in the Aftermath of School Shootings Using Dance and Rhetoric

This chapter investigates dance and rhetoric as resources for sensemaking and discussing school shootings in their aftermath, such that people might speak to one another empathetically and respond as active agents of change. Inspired by the production process and performance of “Equipment for Living: An Artistic Exploration of School Shootings,” the 2019 dance concert choreographed by the author, community is proposed as an additional resource for addressing and healing from school shootings. Burke's dramatism is paired with his concept of “equipment for living” to discuss dance as an alternative to traditional media, such as print journalism, for addressing “another” in the aftermath of school shootings. Another refers to (1) people conjured in the act of performance, collaborators involved in the production process of media, and audience members invited to participate as active viewers and (2) the problem of rhetorically framing school shootings with the term “another.”