Shifting Terrain
Has the Message Defined the Medium?: Implications for Fake News and Sensationalism
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Evan Johnson, Nupoor Jalindre
“Fake news,” a term that gained traction during the 2016 United States Presidential Election, is “frequently used to describe a political story which is seen as damaging to an agency, entity, or person, and seems to have currency in terms of general news.” Fake news has made the search for reliable information on the web a precarious exercise as political and economic forces are working against would-be seekers of truth. Scholars have built models to detect the mechanistic propagation of fake news and identify its characteristics. Marshall McLuhan was famous for the phrase “The medium is the message,” which denotes the ways in which the medium influences how a message is perceived. However, there has been little research that looks at the inverse of this relationship--how the message affects the perception of the medium. Studying this perception can help technical communicators analyze and design the medium that they work with. Paradoxically, data from the 2017 Edelman Trust Barometer suggest that there is a growing distrust for sites generally accepted as being the most authentic, while non-traditional sources with higher risk of invalidity are gaining confidence. We plan to examine this trend in-depth using a controlled experimental design that tests participants’ reactions to five different news sources: traditional media, social media, owned media, search engines, and online-only media, in order to determine whether it is the message or the medium that the distrust is being directed toward.
Fear & (In)Action: The Emotional Manipulation of Dissent in Contemporary National Political Discourse
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cindy Dang
In light of the media toxicity of the recent presidential political process in the United States, it is imperative to recognize and understand the direct impact such negativity has on the health of our democracy. Political manipulation of fear in media promotes a dynamic wherein internal emotional reactions overwhelm both internal and external intellectual consideration, thus legitimizing, unleashing and exacerbating an unassailable marginalization mentality. By looking at President Trump’s public iterations that target non-white Americans, the fear associated with military actions in the media, and the psychological reasons Americans start to discredit and hate each other, not only can we better understand this trend, but also begin building effective tools to combat these political ploys and restore democratic conventions of thought and conversation to the American public. Considering Anat Shenker’s research on the inefficacy of using fear to combat fear and Gina Roussos’ research on how fear makes people react irrationally, we can see how the gridlock of public political discourse only appears to be solidifying. Therefore the explicit use of emotive anchors as entry points for intellectual responses by responsible members of the media, in direct opposition to the traditional ‘objectiveness’ of the journalistic field, may set a standard by which both politicians and citizens may resume in a single “conversation” rather than two, loud competing monologues.
Digital Humanities in the Military Domain: Thick Data Approach to Military Facebook Fan Pages
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Tsung-Lin Lu
A total of 6,695 posts on the fan pages of six military units under the Ministry of National Defense (MND) in 2017 were considered the “digital field” in this study. Mixed research methods were conducted to cultivate this digital field. CORPRO, a corpus of Chinese text, developed by National Taiwan University was used as a data analyzing tool that was integrated into thick description of anthropological method. In addition, grounded theory method was also employed to deepen data description; in-depth interviews were conducted with six administrators of the fan pages and one military general who was responsible for public affairs policy. The four theoretical perspectives of public relations, crisis communication, gatekeepers, and agenda-setting were verified in this research. The corpus analysis results derived from using CORPRO show that ROC Armed Forces, established the ideology of qin xun jing lian (diligent drill and robust training) through Facebook. Besides, analysis of the phrase guan bing (military personnel) indicated that the cognition of qin xun jing lian exhibited personnel-oriented and strength-demonstration-oriented transitions. Furthermore, the frequent use of “today” and “earlier” does not merely show temporal differences. When examined under social contexts, the phrases contain connotations of differences in organizational management capacities. Through open, axial, and selective coding in grounded theory, the interview data were analyzed to discern four contexts in ROC Armed Forces digital humanities, verifying the digital footprints of ROC Armed Forces. The results were subsequently named as “The Model of Facebook Fan Page Constructed for Armed Forces of ROC.”
