Polarisation

Up next in this final ICA 2024 conference session is Niklas Venema, whose focus is also on counterpublics. These have become a key concept for analysing polarised and fragmented communication environments in hybrid media systems, with the focus initially mainly on empowering counterpublics that support marginalised communities, while more recently we have also needed to theorise far-right counterpublics that require a further adaptation of this concept.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Sarah Holland Levin, presenting on the politicisation of social justice discourse. This focusses on the uses of the term ‘woke’, which has been co-opted by bad-faith partisan actors even though it was originally created by Black community actors to encourage political attention and engagement. Today, it is used in conservative culture wars against social justice activism.

The next session at the ICA 2024 conference that I’m attending is presenting articles accepted for a special issue of Political Communication

And the final speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is the great Helena Rauxloh, exploring how conspiracy ideation explains general news consumption. This is part of the POLTRACK project led by Lisa Merten.

The third speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Claire Wonjeong Jo, whose focus is on the effects of cross-cutting exposure – these are seen as including both a better-informed citizenry and greater attitude and affective polarisation, and/or no effects at all. Past research draws largely on survey data, and measure a range of attributes; but perhaps there is a way to observe the actual news use behaviours of participants that provides more direct empirical data.

The next speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Antonis Kalogeropoulos, whose focus is on news avoidance practices in the context of recent elections in Greece and Brazil. Such News avoidance is often seen as negative for democracy, as it reduces users’ access to information; however, it may be consistent or occasional, with a focus on general news content, or selectively focussing only on specific news content or content types.

The next ICA 2024 conference session starts with Haodong Liu, whose interest is in reinforcing spirals of media selectivity. There are various approaches to media selection, and the reinforcing spirals model suggests that over time suggests that selective media use reinforces users’ beliefs, attitudes, and behaviours.

The fourth speaker in this ICA 2024 conference session is Ao Wu, presenting a moral spectrum analysis of the ‘carbon’ issue in the Global News Database. There is plenty of transnational communication about climate change-related issues, including the push for carbon neutrality, but the interests and positions of different countries vary widely, and exhibit complex value logics that might be analysed through moral foundation theory.