Re-Conceptualizing Solitude in the Digital Era: From “Being Alone” to “Noncommunication”

This article revisits the theoretical terrain surrounding solitude to address conceptual, methodological, and practical challenges manifest in the digital era. First, solitude has been approached from a number of different research traditions, resulting in disconnected streams of theory. Furthermore, these streams were developed before the rise of the Internet and mobile media. As a result, solitude is commonly, if not most commonly, conceptualized and measured as a matter of being physically alone. This article re-conceptualizes solitude as “noncommunication” to offer a more contemporary and inclusive perspective, one that uproots it from ideations of physical aloneness and replants it in social aloneness. Whereas previous theory in this area often ignores mediated interaction, we recognize it as a meaningful way for people to connect, with important implications for solitude. Our framework also calls for interrogation of key contextual factors that condition whether and how solitude is experienced in the digital era.

Incivility as a Violation of Communication Norms—A Typology Based on Normative Expectations toward Political Communication

Research on incivility in political communication usually defines uncivil communication as a violation of established norms. Few studies, however, have specified these norms and corroborated them using relevant theoretical concepts. This article aims at strengthening the foundations of incivility research by analytically reconstructing the potential normative expectations of communication participants toward the behavior of others in offline and online political communication. We propose that these expectations can be considered as communication norms, which enable cooperative communication in political debates and conflicts. We use action theory, evolutionary anthropology, and linguistics to propose a norm concept that differentiates five communication norms: an information norm, a modality norm, a process norm, a relation norm, and a context norm. Drawing on these norms, we propose new definitions of incivility and civility. We also provide a comprehensive typology of norm violations that can be used as a heuristic for empirical research.

Digital Discipline: Theorizing Concertive Control in Online Communities

Concertive control (CC) theory has primarily been applied to traditional offline, work-based, closed membership teams. New organizational forms such as online communities have opened up additional sites in which CC processes may operate. This article makes several contributions to CC theory and research. First, it increases the applicability of CC theory by extending it from offline to online, work to non-work, and closed to open membership contexts. Second, it increases our understanding of CC processes by elaborating on three mechanisms of CC (group autonomy, group identification, and generative discipline) and how they operate differently in online work/non-work and closed/open contexts. Third, it develops propositions about how these mechanisms interact with three prominent media affordances (visibility, persistence and editability) within those contexts. Extending CC theory to online communities helps to explain individuals’ responses to normative group pressures online, which is highly relevant in our increasingly culturally and politically polarized society.

Rethinking the Rhetorical Epistemics of Gaslighting

Gaslighting is defined as a dysfunctional communication dynamic in which one interlocutor attempts to destabilize another’s sense of reality. In this article, we advance a model of gaslighting based in an epistemic rhetoric perspective. Our model directs attention to the rhetorics used to justify competing knowledge claims, as opposed to philosophical models that tend to rely on objective truth-value. We probe the discursive manifestations of gaslighting in logocentric, ethotic, or pathemic terms. We then apply our model to explain sexist and racist gaslighting that derives power from normatively instantiated discourses of rape culture and White supremacy. Specifically, our analysis identifies the appeal structures used to legitimate such gaslighting in response to disclosures of sexual violence and testimony about racial injustice.

On the Construction of Indigenous Chinese Communication Theories: An Analysis of the Cultural Roots

This study aims to look into the cultural roots in the active construction of indigenous Chinese communication theories. Theoretically guided by the paradigmatic cultural assumptions between China and the West and the Chinese cultural discourse system and research, and via qualitative content analysis, this study has found: First, there are three general categories of indigenous Chinese communication theories: (a) tapping the essence of the traditional Chinese culture embedded in terms, concepts and events, (b) visualizing and modeling the Chinese cultural factors like wind, grass, and water, and (c) integrating the advantages of Chinese and Western cultures, with each category illustrated by three representative samples. Second, the three categories are the three adopted approaches to fulfilling the three goals of the Chinese cultural discourse system and three missions of the Chinese cultural discourse research. The findings can bring about complimentary and mutual benefits to the communication studies within China and beyond.

Social Control of Intellect: Four Features of the Academic–Media Nexus

Intellect in social theory is often presented as an ideal type—the critical, iconoclastic side of the mind—but it must anticipate an audience in mediated contexts, unlike in the Kantian realm of transcendent reason. The terrain in which academia and media meet, consequently, is ripe for exploration into the fate of intellect when transgressive. This article explicates four features of the academic–media nexus that contribute to social control of intellect: instrumental rationalism of faculty, strategic management of university communication, journalistic appropriation of the “public intellectual” role, and surveillance of academic discourse. The article situates the features in a framework to recognize whether they originate primarily in academia or media, and whether the controlling process occurs through internalized norms or calculated practice. While social control is understood as recursive and reinforcing, reflexivity induced in an inter-field dynamic implies the possibility of reconciling intellect with news work.

Book Review: Recovering the Voice in Our Techno-Social World: On the Phone

Recovering the Voice in Our Techno-Social World: On the Phone serves as an exemplar and timely work that calls attention to several consequences of our techno-social world, most notably, the loss of voice. Eicher-Catt argues that the field of human communication study is largely preoccupied with the textual and visual realms of communication, and thereby neglects the vibrant medium of the voice. Upon review, Recovering the Voice proves to be an innovative and detailed call of attention to the auditory, sonorous voice in a world of technology, new media, and cyberspace. The book’s clear and persuasive exigency points to a re-enchantment with the voice in a world that seems to be becoming more and more voiceless.

Theodor Adorno, Paul Lazarsfeld, and the Public Interest Mandate of Early Communications Research, 1935–1941

Through detailed archival analysis of personal letters, this article examines how the “public interest” mandate of the Communications Act of 1934 inspired the formation of the Princeton Radio Research Project (PRRP), and influenced Paul Lazarsfeld’s development of two-step flows and media effects research. Buried in federal records, a post-Act Federal Communications Commission (FCC) Pursuant that mandated analysis of educational broadcasting additionally turns out to be the causative reason that Theodor Adorno was brought to America by the Rockefeller Foundation. Crucial to the intellectual history of media and communication theory, Lazarsfeld invited Adorno not only to develop techniques to inform educational music study, but to strategically formulate advocacy language for the media reform movement to help noncommercial media obtain frequency licenses. The limits and pressures exerted by the FCC Pursuant influenced the trajectory of the PRRP research, and consequently, the methodological investments of Communication Studies.

Multiperspectival Normative Assessment: The Case of Mediated Reactions to Terrorism

This article provides a model for how communication phenomena can be normatively assessed using multiple normative perspectives simultaneously. We exemplify the procedure of multiperspectival normative assessment (MNA) using mediated reactions to terrorism as our case in point. We first identify the normative challenges related to the speed and substance of terrorism communication and the ways in which relations of solidarity are communicatively constructed in reacting to terrorism. We link these challenges to four distinct normative theories that prioritize competing values for public discourse (freedom, community values, empowerment of the marginalized or constructive debate). The resulting set of competing normative expectations, which help assess the performance of terrorism communication, are eventually translated into recommendations for professional and non-professional communicators. In conclusion, we show how MNA can help ground empirical scholarship in firmer theoretical foundations while simultaneously demonstrating the usefulness of normative theory in analyzing a wide range of issues.

An Empirical Procedure to Evaluate Misinformation Rejection and Deception in Mediated Communication Contexts

Although misleading health information is not a new phenomenon, no standards exist to assess consumers’ ability to detect and subsequently reject misinformation. Part of this deficit reflects theoretical and measurement challenges. After drawing novel connections among legal, regulatory, and philosophical perspectives on false, misleading or deceptive advertising and cognitive-process models of persuasive communication, we define deception and misinformation rejection. Recognizing that individuals can hold beliefs that align with a persuasive message without those beliefs having been influenced by it, we derive empirical criteria to test for evidence of these constructs that center on yielding or not yielding to misinformation in mediated contexts. We present data from an experimental study to illustrate the proposed test procedure and provide evidence for two theoretically derived patterns indicative of misinformation rejection. The resulting definitions and empirical procedure set the stage for additional theorizing and empirical studies on misinformation in the marketplace.