Regulating social media in Nigeria: A quantitative perception study

The advent of social networks as Blogs, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, among others, has revolutionized communications. The power of social media messages rests on its ability to instantly and simultaneously reach a wide, diverse audience, and transforming social life. While the public has overtime become accustomed to the regulation of conventional media like the Radio, TV and Print establishments by government regulatory agencies, the idea of regulating social media, a space which many users consider to be the major avenue to air their views, is one that has generated mixed feelings. This study seeks to understand the perception of everyday Nigerian social media users towards government's attempt to regulation social media, amidst the recently proposed Social Media Regulation Bill by the Nigerian lawmakers. The respondents randomly selected for this study were the University of Abuja students and the researcher adopted the survey research design to collect information from the population through questionnaires. The findings indicated that despite respondents' awareness of the possible demerits of an unregulated social media, majority of them (54%) kick against the idea of social media regulation, while a substantial (46%) support the move on the provision that it is not politicized. The study therefore recommends transparency and openness on the part of government officials for better cooperation by the public. Keywords: Media regulation, Social media regulation, Free speech, Social media bill.

TED Talks: A genre analysis

This research aims at investigating TED Talks as a genre. The analysis focuses on its rhetorical structure, characterized by moves and steps and the communicative purposes of the genre. The corpus comprises 10 talks selected from the website TED Talks. The data are discussed in the light of Bhatia’s (1996/2004) and Swales’ (1990/2004) theories of genre. Results demonstrate that, in terms of the analysis of the rhetorical structure, it reveals a constant pattern of moves and steps along the corpus, since every talk contained the five moves identified by the analysis. These cyclical and more frequent moves are: topic introduction, speaker presentation, topic development, concluding messages, and acknowledgments/gratitude. In terms of its communicative purpose, TED aims to celebrate ideas to a diverse audience worldwide, due to the variety of topics encompassed. This study also allowed us to develop a deeper view of this spoken genre, its features, and the way individuals may benefit from it in their lives.

RETHINKING THE ‘TRUTH’ OF IDENTITY: DISSECTING QUEERNESS AND EMO SUBCULTURE IN NETFLIX’S THE UMBRELLA ACADEMY

Over the years, the presence of LGBTQ+ community in the media has gone through noticeable change. It is a challenge for online streaming services like Netflix to represent as many communities and subcultures as they can, because accessibility comes with more diverse audience. While many LGBTQ+ characters have been put in the spotlight, those who identify beyond binaries are still arguably underrepresented, especially the ones that belong to socially degraded subculture like emo. The Umbrella Academy is a TV show rooted in emo subculture that feature LGBTQ+ superhero characters, Klaus Hargreeves and Vanya Hargreeves, who do not fully associate with the label “gay”, “lesbian”, or “bisexual”. This study employs what Judith Butler asserts, that gender expressions and practices of desire go beyond binaries, to see how emo subculture engages queerness as rejection to rigid classification of gender identities and sexual practices, as well as a tool to oppose conservatism, especially of previous generations. The discussion reveals that contrary to the popular belief that perceives emo as the culture of straight middle-class white boys, the show perceives emo subculture through the characters’ rejection to absolute identification. The characters show rejection through clothing, behavior, mannerism, and verbal statements. The characters also show opposition to conservatism, which include traditional gender roles, traditional superhero narratives, masculine-feminine polarity, and the ‘truth’ of identity.

Communicating climate change findings from IPCC reports: insights from outreach events in India

In recent years, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been collaborating with Indian institutions to organise outreach events. This essay draws on the perspective of participants, speakers and organisers of 17 in-person outreach events conducted across India in 2018 and 2020, to share insights and recommendations for future IPCC events in India and other developing country contexts. The formats analysed in this essay range from panel events with very large public audiences to more focused workshops, meetings and seminars. Target audiences covered both academic and non-academic audiences and included researchers, teachers, students, industry and NGOs. The events, while achieving their main objective of communicating the findings of IPCC reports, also provided a platform for open discussion of localised climate impacts and good practices in adaptation and mitigation. There are, however, notable challenges to public outreach in India, specifically in terms of attracting an adequate number of participants, experts’ availability, communicating to a diverse audience and translation into local languages. The biggest challenge faced by speakers was a lack of knowledge about the number of attendees and the composition of the audience prior to an event. It is our recommendation that future outreach events in India are designed to be interactive, tailored to the regional context and complemented by simplified communication materials. Speakers should be provided with audience information and background prior to the event, and greater reach into rural areas, including school children, could be achieved with material in local languages. Additionally, event organisers often require logistical and operational support to host outreach events.

The Color Pile: Equitable Self-Expression Through Color and Abstraction

The Color Pile is a visual tool transported from the author’s art-student context, and builds on the teaching model of Connie Smith Siegel and the Color Contrast work of Johannes Itten. As re-positioned, it offers a novel path to eliciting student narratives and point of view in language-dependent learning settings. Can this playful exercise support the clear articulation of complex ideas and help generate descriptive language? The Color Pile process moves from prompt to reflection to abstract visual composition, and resolves in a verbal, written or drawn reflection. Color and abstraction may help students gain access to their full capacities for complex thought and self-expression. Could this approach provide differently equitable support for student-produced narratives and descriptive language than is afforded by viewing representational imagery? Direct observations of middle school students using the Color Pile suggest the method could be meaningful to a diverse audience of teachers and learners. Its usefulness in a broad spectrum of language-oriented learning settings is considered.

The AI-Atlas: Didactics for Teaching AI and Machine Learning On-Site, Online, and Hybrid

We present the “AI-Atlas” didactic concept as a coherent set of best practices for teaching Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Machine Learning (ML) to a technical audience in tertiary education, and report on its implementation and evaluation within a design-based research framework and two actual courses: an introduction to AI within the final year of an undergraduate computer science program, as well as an introduction to ML within an interdisciplinary graduate program in engineering. The concept was developed in reaction to the recent AI surge and corresponding demand for foundational teaching on the subject to a broad and diverse audience, with on-site teaching of small classes in mind and designed to build on the specific strengths in motivational public speaking of the lecturers. The research question and focus of our evaluation is to what extent the concept serves this purpose, specifically taking into account the necessary but unforeseen transfer to ongoing hybrid and fully online teaching since March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Our contribution is two-fold: besides (i) presenting a general didactic concept for tertiary engineering education in AI and ML, ready for adoption, we (ii) draw conclusions from the comparison of qualitative student evaluations (n = 24–30) and quantitative exam results (n = 62–113) of two full semesters under pandemic conditions with the result of previous years (participants from Zurich, Switzerland). This yields specific recommendations for the adoption of any technical curriculum under flexible teaching conditions—be it on-site, hybrid, or online.

The bad environmentalism of ‘nature is healing’ memes

What can memes teach us about shifting popular-cultural understandings of nature? While a certain form of environmentalism with proclivities for dour, self-righteous, sentimental, or apocalyptic tones is often taken to be hegemonic, Nicole Seymour argues that a more irreverent ‘low environmental culture’ should not be occluded. Humor and irony can serve as emotional registers for environmental media that provide openings for the emergence of playful environmentalisms perhaps more amenable to a diverse audience. Such ‘bad environmentalism’ mobilizes humor by transgressing the emotional norms of piety within environmentalism. This article deepens the concept of bad environmentalism through an examination of the emergence of ‘nature is healing’ memes during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Implicitly critical of nefarious arguments that the death-dealing pandemic would provide a ‘pause for nature’ and thus that ‘humans were the real virus’, the formal and easily reproduced ‘nature is healing’ genre subverts conventional understandings of ‘the natural’ as well as the naturalization of social order and political economy. In particular, I extend Seymour’s argument – and pop cultural studies of the environment – by parsing five modes through which the ‘nature is healing’ genre plays ironically on differing understandings of the natural. These are the out-of-place in nature; nature out-of-place; drawing attention to a naturalized social order; naturalizing social transformation; and absurdity in the natural world. Close attention to different modes of humor provides insight into the ambivalence of affect within ecological and political movements; ‘bad affect’ can, after all, produce careful and critical aesthetics. Such research demonstrates the utility of a widened and potentially counterhegemonic repertoire of affective responses to environmental and political crisis.

The Accessibility of Museum Websites

Tourism accessibility has emerged as a topic to be discussed and studied by both academics and professionals. In this line, museums have started to adapt their offer to their diverse audience, including people with disabilities and people with special needs. In this regard, museum websites, as a powerful information channel to promote visitation, must also be adapted to make its information accessible. Therefore, this chapter aims at exploring accessibility and accessible information of museums' websites using a holistic approach. As a case study, 45 museums in the city of Barcelona are considered and accessibility of tourism websites is assessed by means of content analysis, taking as reference four categories and 36 items that have emerged from previous literature review. Findings reveal that museums websites are still far from being considered accessible, and improvements in several areas are required.