Technically Speaking
Asynchronous Session
How to Make Immersive Technologies More Equitable: Confronting the Medium’s Colonial Legacies and Role as an Empathy Machine View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Anna Gedal
Today, immersive technologies—like online reality—are celebrated as empathy machines, capable of fostering meaningful cross-cultural understanding. My MA thesis project interrogates this assumption. I analyze two historical case studies of immersive rides: “A Trip to the Moon,” from the 1901 World’s Fair, and “20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” from Coney Island, 1903. The rides complemented the ethnographic villages surrounding them. Taking on the role of anthropologists, the villages enabled white visitors to experience a speculative past and present and, from them, plot a global racial hierarchy. The rides, however, offered visitors a glimpse of the electrified future promised by American imperialism. Through the rides, visitors embodied the role of colonizer, “discovering” new frontiers. Though perhaps experienced simply as entertainment, the rides were consciously designed as a powerful pedagogical tool for cultural knowledge sharing that transmitted the imperial imaginary through a collective, multi-mediated performance. Their impact was profound, garnering mass American support for segregation and imperialism. Drawing lessons from my case studies, I argue that the rides were precursors to 21st-century immersive environments, thus it is imperative to critique the medium or risk reinscribing the imperial gaze into contemporary experiences. To move toward this goal, I offer the beginnings of a shared language to highlight the medium’s fraught legacies and carve out a path toward a more equitable cultural production process. At the heart of my project is a simple yet profound question borrowed from scholar Sasha Costanza-Chock. They ask: who is really benefiting from this?
Youth as Content (Co)creators: Digital Representations of the National High School Exam in Brazil View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session André Cardozo Sarli
This paper is an interplay of media and sociology through the topic of digital representations. It aims to understand the role of the YouTube and Tiktok as social medias mediating the children and youth voices and representations of/towards personal attainment of education - in this specific case the National High School Exam in Brazil (ENEM), which happens every year and congregates millions of children and young adults. The hypothesis to be tested is the centralisation of the use of memes and virals to "pack" social representations of, for instance, personal success and failure. The theoretical framework is based on the works of James and Prout (1997) and Irwin (2013), in childhood and rites of passage; Livingstone (2000) and Third et. al (2013) on children and media, including some analysis of the Sociology of Memes (Chen, 2012, Varis and Blommaert, 2015).
Arab Students’ Use of Social Media: A Critical Perspective View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mustafa Taha
The purpose of this study is to examine social media use among the American University of Sharjah students and how they appropriate social media in their daily lives. Conceptually, the study relies on Castells’ (1996) “theory of network society”, Kirby’s (2009) “digimodernism”, Bourdieu’s (1986) “cultural capital”, as well as Chomsky’s and Schiller’s Marxist perspectives. Arab college students who participated in a nonrandom sample (N=391), completed a questionnaire that assessed various aspects of their social media use including communication with family and friends, issues of distraction and invasion of privacy, and effects on their daily activities. Results indicated that 91% of the respondents used social media to communicate with family and friends; 75% used social media to share videos and photos, and 74% used social media for entertainment. Moreover, 70% stated that social media distracted them from their studies, and 78% of the respondents stated that social media use led them to the exposure of privacy. Some of these findings corroborate previous research findings (Jasmine Knight-McCord et al., 2013; Mastrodicasa & Metellus, 2013; Rowe, 2014; Greenwood, Pew Research, 2015; Perrin & Duggan, 2016; Lau, 2017; and Yang & Lee, 2018). These findings provide implications for future research on the importance of social media use among young people; in UAE, GCC, and the Middle East.
Conspiracy Theories, Geopolitical Games, and Infodemic Times: Tracking the Dissemination of Conspiratorial Online Content during Covid19 in Romania View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Dana C. Sultanescu
As Covid-19 became the first pandemic of the globally connected era, old wars took new shapes and old messages found new voices and new pathways to disseminate. Conspiracy theories are known to emerge in times of societal distress, but this pandemic, which brought about a communication inflation and favoured people's exacerbated reliance on social media and the online environment in general, helped them flourish on novel territories. In countries like Romania, where Western and Eastern narratives fight on an ideological battleground, conspiracy-driven explanations can have geopolitical meanings and consequences. Using data mining and text analysis tools like network analysis and topic modeling, I investigate patterns in social media narratives, looking to identify the roles of communicators and information flows, to uncover dissemination maps, and to gain insight into the structure of the online conversation about the Western model in a period of intense pressure.
The Revolution Will Be Tweeted: Anti-Caste Socio-political Mobilization and the Dalit Cybersphere in India View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Shantanu Kulshreshtha
Since 2017, India has experienced perhaps the fastest and most significant expansion of social media in the world. This expansion is quickly changing Indian society and polity in a variety of ways, not only through an “information revolution” as was theorized at the beginning of 2010, but also through avenues of organization, radicalization, and mobilization for a variety of movements. Dalits or ex-untouchables in India, who have traditionally been marginalized from the country’s mainstream informational and organizational setups, and whose position in society, while improving gradually still remains liminal, have made extensive use of social media to create mediated and radical networks on Twitter and Facebook. Using digital methods to analyse a collection of one million tweets, 250,000 Facebook posts from the “Dalit Cybersphere”, as well as extensive field interviews and digital ethnography, this paper shows how the Dalit Cybersphere organizes, mobilizes, and agitates through social media platforms, and place these changes within the broader framework of contemporary global social media activism through discussions on Internet counterpublics.
Featured Health Communication and Data Journalism : Evaluating the Import of Data Journalism with Health Communication for Effective Media Campaigns against Viral Hepatitis in Nigeria
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Samuel Chukwuemeka Nwamini, Linus I. Ogbuoshi
The practice of health communication as a behavioural change mechanism aimed at convincing the general public and health policy maker to adopt new health behaviour and policy shift in support of better and improved health condition is still a challenge in most developing countries of the world. In Nigeria for instance, the prevalence rate of viral hepatitis is high and the rate at which it spreads is grossly under reported. Health statistics on the prevalence of Viral Hepatitis B in Nigeria shows that 75% of the population are at the risk of contracting HBV. Research report further shows that HBV prevalence among surgeons are 25.7%, voluntary blood donors, 23.4%, infants 16.3%, pregnant women 11%. Report from Kano State shows that out of 440 HIV positive patients; 12.3% of them were co-positive for HBV. It is also reported that HBV is the commonest cause of chronic liver disease in Nigeria. In the southern part of the country were this study will be conducted about 58.1% of the patients with chronic liver problems were found to be HBV positive. The study is anchored on Communication for Persuasion Theory and Communication for Behavioural Impact (COMBI) model to demonstrate how effective reportage of health related data in support of media campaign against hepatitis can help to curb the prevalence of hepatitis in the South East Nigeria. Qualitative method is adopted. Recommendations are made based on findings.
The Cyborg Phenotype: The Future of the Human as Data Prosthetic
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Lucas Bang
Human embodied cognition and algorithmic learning form a mutualistic cyborg system. Through the medium of data, each fills the niche created by the other’s inabilities. In particular, algorithms, which lack human abilities for perception and action such as reading, writing, typing, and recognizing images, act as parasites upon humans to compensate for this lack. In this paper, I draw on cognitive science, bioinformatics, and cyborg theory to critique human-computer communication. First, I argue that misdirections by early researchers in robotics and artificial intelligence created a path-dependent trajectory in which human beings increasingly become, in the words of Simon Penny, “the perceptual front-end of Internet-based machine learning” and the “perceptual prosthetic of data mining”. Next, I carry these observations further by analyzing them through extended phenotype theory. This framework understands biological organisms as primarily gene-centered information transmission and preservation systems. I generalize it to non-biological systems as a method for explaining the persistence of a world in which human beings are coerced and suffer for the benefit of data-mining and machine learning algorithms and their creators. Ultimately, I contend that recognizing and grappling with human strengths and weaknesses in perception and reasoning with respect to big-data algorithms is crucial in promoting human flourishing—the remaking of typographic man—that would otherwise be impossible if our current trajectory continues.
Disinformation and the Need for an Uncontaminated Journalism View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Carmen Peñafiel, Udane Goikoetxea
Social media, initially conceived as platforms for bringing people together, is being used – together with fake news and big data – as a veritable weapon with a clear objective: to subtly and imperceptibly change our behaviour in order to provoke political and social changes that have nothing to do with democracy. Within this context, a long format digital journalism is being consolidated, one which is not contaminated, as an alternative to other styles: slow journalism, a narrative journalism, the different key points of which have been analysed via ten case studies, with in-depth interviews, a Delphi study and 2,000 questionnaires carried out in Argentina, Colombia, Spain and Mexico. Among the most notable results, we find that the digital press is the priority news media for 41% of men, whilst it is social media for 40% of women. Trust in the news entity is the main reason for consumption (61%). News professionals arrive at the conclusion that slow journalism is more necessary than ever in order to combat misinformation and information overload. They are optimistic about the future of this journalistic current insofar as they see a growing space in which it can differentiate itself from one centered on immediacy. Slow journalism reports the news from other more literary focuses that are more reflexive and analytical. Never before have so many people had so much media at their fingertips and never before has misinformation reached such global dimensions due to a lack of a critical use of the news media.
