Blog

The next presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Jeremy Shtern, who begins by noting that the quantification of the influence of online and social media actors is a tricky problem – but it may not be as hard to qualify such influence. It is important in this context to understand online environments as working largely on the basis of a monetisation philosophy, too.

Online influencers are individual content creators in online and social media spaces who monetise their large followings to advertise particular products and services. Such influence can also go badly wrong, however, as influencers choose the ‘wrong’ …

The next presentation in this IAMCR 2019 session is by Elinor Carmi, whose interest is in the power behind spam, noise, and other disruptive behaviours. In most forms of creative media, there is a form of direction, often aimed at generating an emotive response from the audience. This is also true in online spaces, where we are directed by algorithmic rhythms. We might be able to understand these by borrowing concepts from sound.

The intentions of a theatre director and a social media executive are quite different, however; they seek to engender different audience responses. In social media, for instance …

The post-lunch session on this last day of IAMCR 2019 starts with Ibrahim Subeh, whose interest is in how Blockchain technologies are being framed in the Arabic Press (specifically Lebanon, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the UAE).

Blockchain is not a very intuitive technology, but it is also not necessary to understand everything about it. Much of the present research focusses on its financial applications or on the technical aspects, but the social implications of this technology should also be understood more closely. The technology is socially disruptive, and some suggest that it could eventually decentralise and replace the World Wide …

The fourth presenter in this IAMCR 2019 session is Lemi Baruh, who shifts our focus to election press coverage in Turkey. Turkey has undergone a gradual process of political transformation, with growing government influence on the media, but media in Turkey have often been researched using convenience samples, and short-term studies; the present study addresses this by covering four national election campaigns from 2002 to 2015, and by using newspaper readership data and content analysis for 15 newspapers in the country.

Press-party parallelism theory suggests that commercial media structures often parallel political structures; media partisanship is also a positioning strategy …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 is Anastasia Kazun, who follows on from the previous presentation by focussing specifically on the countries that Russian media cover. Media influence public opinion about countries and their leaders, of course, because ordinary people will not have any direct experience of geopolitics – this is especially important in Russia, in fact, because most Russians have never travelled abroad.

The present study focusses on Russian press, TV, and online media, which tend to have different thematic interests and reporting styles. It studies the mentions of some 193 countries in Russian media, focussing on the …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Anton Kazun, whose interest is in the global news flow around the G20 group of countries. International news are important to our perceptions of other countries and their leaders, but state politics, ideology, and news frames will affect this; further, news attention to different countries is never equal. Factors that increase attention to different countries include GDP, population size, and links through common borders, trade, tourism, and migration.

The personalisation of politics in each country also means that attention may be directed especially to a country’s leader, and this is also …

The next session at IAMCR 2019 is Cinzia Padovani, who is interested in the intersections between mainstream media and the ultra-right. Mainstream media have at times been accused of being complicit in the rise of the ultra-right, by amplifying their reach and normalising their ideologies and political communication styles; this may be especially pronounced for right-wing mainstream media. But is this perception supported by empirical evidence?

The present study explores the coverage of ultra-right political actors in the mainstream media, and of the topics associated with them, from a cross-country perspective involving the U.K. and Italy. Additionally, it also explores …

The final speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brian Goss, whose interest is in flak as a socio-political force. This is influenced by the propaganda model of news media in the contemporary United States at the end of the Cold War. Media at the time were free from formal censorship, but several factors conditioned the performance of news workers, and this led to their allegiance to an overall (then mainly anti-communist) ideological positioning.

One of these factors is flak: a set of disciplinary mechanisms exerted from outside of news organisations. Flak comes into play when internal filters are insufficient …

The next speaker in this IAMCR 2019 session is Brigitte Huber; her interest is in the motivations for engaging in politics. Such participation might be explained by demographics, political knowledge, news use and other factors, but also by inherent personality traits.

Of the commonly recognised ‘big five’ personality traits, extraversion might make the participation in interactive events such as demonstrations more likely, while voting may be less important to them; agreeableness might make people avoid political conflicts, but they may still be regular voters; conscientiousness is likely to mean that people are more likely to vote, but they may be …

The third speaker in this IAMCR2019 session is Zhieh Lor, whose focus is on coping strategies for dealing with news overload in social media. Such cognitive overload is becoming a problem because of the considerable increase in news dissemination and sharing through a complex multitude of channels. How do users manage this?

The limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing suggests that this volume of content encountered triggers symptoms of cognitive overload, and the hypothesis here is that the size of a user’s news repertoire will be positively associated with their level of news overload. Strategies for avoiding such …