Reactive and Asymmetric Communication Flows: Social Media Discourse and Partisan News Framing in the Wake of Mass Shootings

Marked by both deep interconnectedness and polarization, the contemporary media system in the United States features news outlets and social media that are bound together, yet deeply divided along partisan lines. This article formally analyzes communication flows surrounding mass shootings in the hybrid and polarized U.S. media system. We begin by integrating media system literature with agenda setting and news framing theories and then conduct automated text analysis and time series modeling. After accounting for exogenous event characteristics, results show that (a) sympathy and gun control discourses on Twitter preceded news framing of gun policy more than the other way around, and (b) conservatives on Twitter and conservative media reacted to progressive discourse on Twitter, without their progressive counterparts exhibiting a similar reactiveness. Such results shed light on the influence of social media on political communication flows and confirm an asymmetry in the ways partisan media ecosystems respond to social events.

Reimagining the Face of HIV/AIDS

Chapter 5 features a discussion of the queer biopic’s relationship to PWA photography and media representation, looking finally to contemporary media practices to reflect upon the current AIDS media landscape. The queer biopic does not function outside of other modes of photography and video; instead, questions of portraiture are foundational to any understanding of the biopic form. The chapter moves through the history of PWA photography, providing readings of photography by Therese Frare, Nicholas Nixon, David Wojnarowicz, and Nan Goldin. The chapter’s turn to contemporary HIV + multimedia artist Kia LaBeija examines the legacies of black queer performance that emerge in her video and photographic work.

Emotionalisation of contemporary media discourse: A research agenda

This special issue continues the discussion of the role of emotion in discourse (see Russian Journal of Linguistics 2015 (1) and 2018, 22 (1)) which, as testified by the burgeoning body of literature in the field, has become more prominent in different spheres and contexts of public life. This time we focus on emotionalisation of media discourse. We highlight the intensification of emotions in media and, showcasing contributions from international authors, critically reflect on constructions, functions and pragmatic purposes of emotions in media discourse. Our aim is to investigate emotions in the media from semiotic, pragmatic and discursive perspectives against the contemporary socio-political background in which traditional notions concerning the role of media are being noticeably changed. In this introductory article, we also put forward an agenda for further research by briefly outlining three main areas of exploration: the logics of media production and reception , the boundaries of media discourse, and the semiotic resources deployed to construct emotionality . We then present the articles in this issue and highlight their contributions to the study of linguistic representations of emotions. We then summarise the main results and suggest a brief avenue for further research.

Media Culture as the Information Age Phenomenon

The article raises the issues of scientific reception of such a phenomenon as media culture. The authors offer their interpretation of media culture as a special type of culture of the information society in the broadest understanding of this phenomenon. The authors consider the concepts of media and culture and establishes their functional corresponddence. The contemporary stage of media development is characterized by a combination of communication and information intentions: classical media and mass communication media, including new media, blogs, social networks, as well as digital copies of non-network artifacts and their network modifications. The result of these media communications is a media text in the broadest interpretation of this concept. According to the authors concept, contemporary media culture realizes itself in two main aspects. In the applied sense, a media culture is a form of representation and digitalization of classical and network cultural units. In the global sense, media culture is understood as an aesthetic and axiological sphere of societys life, in which culture combines the value and artistic heritage, using the information and communication channels of the media for its representation in politics, education, and culture itself.

Remembering Haludovo: The Penthouse Years and What Came Later

This paper contributes to a growing area within memory studies which explores individual and collective memories as communicated in the contemporary media. The “nexus of memory” in this case is the tourism complex Haludovo on the Croatian island of Krk. What made Haludovo exceptional in the context of the growing tourism industry in socialist Yugoslavia was its short-lived partnership with the adult magazine Penthouse. This paper looks at the history and subsequent fate of Haludovo in the postsocialist period, focusing on the episode dedicated to Haludovo in the Croatian documentary TV series Slumbering Concrete (2016). A collaboration between a media scholar and an architectural historian, who was also one of the scriptwriters and hosts of the series, the study makes use of these multiple perspectives to situate the Haludovo case in a wider framework—the mediated communication of history and memories of the Yugoslav Adriatic coast in television and cinema.

Power and satire in the front-page images of Mariano Rajoy: visual motifs as political humour

This article explores the use of photography and visual motifs as forms of political humour in contemporary media. By studying the representation of former Prime Minister of Spain Mariano Rajoy in the front pages of three Spanish newspapers (El Mundo, El País and La Vanguardia) between 2011 and 2017, the paper identifies and questions the liaisons between power and satire present in the so-called “serious” press, focusing on how different photographic traits concerning layout, composition and gestures reflect ideological choices. This photographic satire developed by printed media is then framed within a figurative tradition that goes back to Spanish royal portraiture, from Velázquez to Goya, which employs common strategies for the visual depiction of power, including satirical and humorous attributes to push specific political agendas. This examination, based on the quantified study and the visual analysis of more than 7,500 front pages, is part of the national research project Visual Motifs in the Public Sphere: Production and Circulation of Images of Power in Spain, 2011-2017. In order to determine a useful procedural approach to satirical expressions in photographs, defining which front pages invoke a remarkable satirical content, this article also presents a comparative study and a categorisation based on formal (im)balances related to the concepts of visual motif and humour.

The TV recap as paratext: Energizing, contextualizing, and modifying The Bachelor Australia

The TV recap has become one of the most ubiquitous forms of criticism in contemporary media culture, proliferating across multiple media spheres and domains. At its simplest, it provides an opportunity for people to catch up with what they have missed. However, it is also a space for engaging with reactions to a program: an inherently affective and social experience. This article seeks to theorize the TV recap, its uses, and its pleasures. It considers the recap as a form of paratext, and seeks to unpack its relationship to textuality. Specifically, it considers the practice of reality TV recapping, which often positions both recapper and reader/viewer as consuming the text ironically. This article uses a corpus of recaps of the 2020 season of The Bachelor Australia – including recaps by the author – to answer three questions: how does the recap energize, contextualize, and modify textuality?

СЕМАНТИЧНАТА ДЕРИВАЦИЯ КАТО ЕДИН ОТ НАЙ-ВАЖНИТЕ ВИДОВЕ ЕЗИКОВИ ИНОВАЦИИ (ВЪРХУ МАТЕРИАЛ ОТ СЪВРЕМЕННИ МЕДИЙНИ ТЕКСТОВЕ) / SEMANTIC DERIVATION AS A MAJOR TYPE OF LANGUAGE INNOVATION (BASED ON CONTEMPORARY MEDIA TEXTS)

The study focuses on the most productive patterns of semantic derivation, namely metaphorical and metonymic transfer, exemplified by contemporary Russian media texts. The metaphorical and metonymic patterns outlined in the study are based on the principle of anthropocentrism, which is realized in two interrelated directions highlighting the cognitive nature of semantic relations: 1) person → surrounding world (external personalization); 2) surrounding world → person (description in view of the extralinguistic reality). Specific micro patterns are based on the concrete → abstract macro pattern. It can be argued that semantic derivation functions as a means of linguistic ex-pression of ideas about intangible entities, thus creating the respective images in the mind of the addressee. The results of the study are of relevance to lexical semantics, cognitive linguistics, media linguistics, etc. Keywords: semantic derivation, metaphor, metonymy, Russian, media texts, anthropocentrism