FCRP - Emergent Media

Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://localhost:4000/handle/123456789/96

Browse

Now showing 1 - 13 of 13

The Game of Reflection and the Power Over People. A Semiotic Approach to Communication
(Springer, 2019) Borțun, Dumitru
Ogden and Richards emphasized that in an act of communication the message does not exist before being coded; in addition, coding is a process of creation: the message self-generates in the communication process itself. As such, the term “receptor” should be replaced by the term “reader”—in other words, the “universal receptor” breaks into a multitude of readers, whose readings are culturally pre-determined. The significance of a sign is not given beforehand, it is born following the encounter between the message and the cultural loading with which the reader welcomes the message. As homo significans, we relate not to objects, but to “interpretants” (Peirce). For man, the world is a universe of interpretants. But this renders manipulation possible through partial truths or even fake news, i.e. through the plausible denaturation of reality. The acceptance of a phrase as true is not related to its relation with reality, but rather to its relation with the reader’s cultural loading. This paper describes the mechanism of semiosis that makes possible the exercise of power to have people over other people, through the management of their cultural loading.
Hate speech in the Romanian online media and its impact on peoplețs civic engagement with the Roma minority
(Publishing House of the Romanian Academy, 2023) Negrea-Busuioc, Elena; Buturoiu, Raluca; Oprea, Denisa Adriana; Boțan, Mădălina
In addition to their potential to stimulate conversation and participation in the (online) public sphere, social media have also become a springboard for hate speech (KhosraviNik & Esposito, 2018). Ethnic minorities are among the preferred targets of online hateful content. In this paper, we report findings from an experiment that measured the extent to which exposure to various degrees of hate speech on Facebook, accompanied by positive or negative comments, might influence Romanians’ willingness to engage civically with the Roma minority. The results show that the level of civic engagement is negatively impacted by exposure to hateful content, ranging from derogatory to extreme hate speech. People’s willingness to support the Roma minority is reduced by exposure to hateful Facebook posts accompanied by negative comments. Furthermore, negative comments are associated with lower levels of civic engagement, which may suggest that reactions to hate speech could play a more significant role than the post itself.
The Romanian Media System: Dynamics, Challenges, and Implications for Democracy
(Cogitatio Press, 2024) Boțan, Mădălina
This article endeavors to delve into the recent transformation of the Romanian media landscape, aiming to offer a nuanced comprehension of the cultural and political dynamics that have influenced journalistic practices. The Romanian media environment has undergone swift changes, transitioning from a monolithic structure to one increasingly driven by commercial interests, all while navigating economic and political pressures. The shift toward a free-market framework has not only reshaped the social and political fabric but has also significantly impacted the media sector. This article posits that the Romanian media landscape is shaped by the interplay of cultural, economic, and political forces, evident in journalistic outputs across both traditional and digital platforms. This assertion aligns with Hallin and Mancini’s (2004) notion of parallelism between journalism and politics. Moreover, it extends this perspective to encompass cultural influences and the evolving media landscape resulting from shifts in the media market, changing consumption patterns, and the proliferation of digital media. Key indicators such as professional standards, editorial autonomy, transparency, financial sustainability, political influence, and media regulations are critically examined within the unique context of Romania, in which political interference and growing reliance on advertising revenue often curtail editorial independence. In conclusion, the article reflects on the current state of the Romanian media system and the manifold challenges it confronts amidst the changing dynamics of the media landscape.
Involving Older People in Participatory Action Research: An Example of Participatory Action Design
(College of Communication and Public Relations, NUPSPA, 2018) Schiau, Ioana; Ivan, Loredana; Bîră, Monica
Participatory Action Research (PAR) has as a main goal the collaborative construction and production of meanings between the researchers and the participants. PAR has been largely used in the area of technology creation and appropriation involving end-users in different stages of technology designing process. However, research studies concerning older people and their use of technology employ PAR to a lesser extent. In the current paper we provide arguments for the value of different participative action approaches when studying technology appropriation by older people, and present an example of a participatory action design that we have implemented in three Romanian cities, with people 60+, to reveal the way older adults depict their experience in using Facebook. We used a five-step collaborative research design – (1) initial evaluation; (2) training session; (3) immediate evaluation; (4) group co-creation; (5) final evaluation – to reflect on the participants’ experience through groups techniques and participant observation notes. Results reveal the fact that one trainer per each participant, adapting the interaction to the participant’s individual needs, intergenerational trainer-trainee communication and patience, as well as proper timing of the organized sessions are key factors to foster participant engagement with social media. In addition, the proposed participatory action design proved to have some potential to empower older people in long time engagement with social media.
Media Construction of Sport Celebrities as National Heroes
(College of Communication and Public Relations, NUPSPA, 2018) Dumitriu, Diana Luiza
Within the broader media-sport nexus framework, sport is known for providing not only engaging performances for the entertainment market, but also important symbolic capital in terms of national identity and public diplomacy. The present paper looks at how these dimensions overlap, focusing on the centrality of the media logic within the dynamics of the social field of sport and its corollary celebrization imagery. The aim of the paper is, thus, to identify the contextual aspects and the legitimation strategies mobilized through media discourses in the overlap of the star status and the national hero image of a sport actor. When and how does media crown an athlete with the national hero aura? What does this national hero status involve in terms of identity and identification mechanisms? Focusing on a corpus of 310 online articles and 12 Facebook highlights published by two main Romanian sport newspapers during the 2014 Roland Garros Tournament, the study discusses the media construction of the raising sport star, Simona Halep (i.e. first Romanian tennis player to enter Top 3 WTA), as national hero. The analysis examines not only the symbolic power of the sport performances as national identity resources and celebrity input, but also the engaging deliberative spaces that emerge along with the national hero frame and the hybrid form of civic celebrity practices involved in legitimizing it.
The Articulation of Public Problems within a Communicative Figuration Approach
(College of Communication and Public Relations, NUPSPA, 2019) Ciocea, Mălina; Cârlan, Alexandru; Cheregi, Bianca Florentina
This article proposes an analytical shift in the theorization of public problems, from the standard (institutional) constructionist view which has informed the tradition of conceptualising social problems since Spector and Kitsuse’s classic work, to a communicative constructionist view, stemming from the mediatization paradigm. The rationale behind this shift is based on the conceptualization of the relation between various types of actors as claim makers and the logic of visibility governing processes of publicization in a media ecology marked by accelerated development. If, in the new communicational landscape, claim-making activities can turn any new-media user into a potential constructor of public problems, then we need to explain how developments in media technology reconfigure the practices of claim-making. In our understanding, such reconfigurations are just a particular case of the socio-cultural processes of transformation which are the focus of the mediatization paradigm. On the other hand, in a Foucaultian tradition, a shift from problems to problematizations is required in order to account for the processual dynamic through which certain phenomena are analysed under specific circumstances and at certain times, while others are ignored. This shift leads to an understanding of communicative figurations as a meta-theoretical framework for the construction of public problems, accounting for the interdependencies between articulations of public problems and the dynamics of the public sphere. With this aim in view, we first identity and evaluate the theoretical directions that are symptomatic for the transition from social problems to public ones and from problems to problematizations. In the second part, we present the heuristic potential of the concept of communicative figurations for our topic and articulate some methodological implications for a research agenda.
Hate Speech in Social Media and Its Effects on the LGBT Community: A Review of the Current Research
(College of Communication and Public Relations, NUPSPA, 2021) Ștefăniță, Oana; Buf, Diana Maria
Hate speech on social media is a real problem with real consequences. Despite the constant efforts of social media platforms to moderate, flag, and ban hate posts, there is still a vast amount of hateful content flooding them. Hate speech, in general, and offensive material online, in particular, are not easy to define and may include a wide spectre of expression. To thoroughly account for the nature and intensity of the effects of hate speech in social media requires to distinguish between various shades of hate speech targeting different groups and their subsequent effects. This paper seeks to review the literature on the psychological effects of online hate speech on the LGBT community and to highlight the strong negative impact of this phenomenon. The paper aims to contribute to the field by examining the propagation and the effects of derogatory language and hate speech based on sexual orientation.
Developing a Digital and Traditional Political Participation (DTPP) Scale for Youth: A Validity and Reliability Study
(College of Communication and Public Relations, NUPSPA, 2023) Kuș, Zafer; Bertani, Michele; Ivan, Loredana; Mert, Hilal
The purpose of this study is to develop and validate a political participation scale for youth, considering both traditional and digital political participation (DTPP). The research was conducted using 458 participants from Turkey, Italy, and Romania, aged between 15 and 29 years. Explanatory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were performed to test the structural validity of the scale. EFA results illustrated that scale consisted of three factors and the total variance was 61.23%. These factors were labeled as “digital political support”, “traditional political support” and “digital political following”. During confirmatory factor analysis, the three-factor structure was tested, and the resulting model produced an acceptable goodness of fit The scale consists of 39 items and the reliability coefficients for each subscale vary from .92 and .95. The results show that the scale is valid and reliable to measure traditional and digital political participation of young people.
Beyond Self-Presentation. An Analysis of the Romanian Governmental Communications on Facebook
(Babes-Bolyai University, Faculty of Political, Administrative and Communication Sciences, Public Administration Department, 2023) Zeru, Florin; Balaban, Delia Cristina; Bârgăoanu, Alina
The present study is one of the few studies that examine the social media communication of the Romanian governmental institutions from a systematic perspective accounting for three categories of messages that enhance the goals of pen governance, transparency, participation, and collaboration. Our research contributes to developing the research methodology in the field, given the methodological tool we used based on previous literature on social media communication of public institutions with relevant elements added from political communication. The research focuses on the official Facebook pages of the following Romanian governmental institutions: the Romanian Government, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, the Ministry of National Defense, the Ministry of Transportation and Infrastructure, the Ministry of Education, and the Ministry of Health. Moreover, based on content analysis of N = 2,484 Facebook posts, we examined how different social media content generates differences in citizen engagement. Findings showed that the Romanian governmental institutions we analyzed frequently used Facebook posts. However, we observed significant differences between the institutions regarding message types. Our results align with previous research conducted in other Western countries showing that public institutions mostly used social media for impression management and transparent communication and less for participation and collaboration.
The impact of ‘technology generations’ on older adults’ media use: Review of previous empirical research and a seven-country comparison
(International Society for Gerontechnology, 2020) Ivan, Loredana; Loos, Eugene; Bird, Ioana
Background: In our information society, media use plays an important role. However, knowledge is lacking about whether specific birth cohorts show preferences for specific traditional or new media and whether technology generations can be identified across different countries. Objective: A cross-cultural research project was carried out with the aim of providing empirical evidence for the concept of ‘technology generations’ formulated by Sackmann & Weymann (1994; 2013) in relation to media use by older adults. The research questions focus on empirical evidence for the existence of technology generations related to media use and preferences. Methods: We tested differences in media use and media preferences (traditional versus new media) in Austria, Canada, Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, Romania and Spain, using commensurate samples consisting of Internet users aged 60 years and older at the time we started collecting data in 2016 (N=10527). We selected three technology generations: the ‘mechanical generation’ (age group of 78 and above), the ‘household revolution generation’ (age group of 68-77), and the ‘technology spread generation’ (age group of 60-67), and analyzed the differences in media use and preferences between these technology generations and across the seven countries. Results: Our cross-cultural data reveal differences between the technology generations, especially in terms of media use, but not in technology media preference (time spent using different media). We also found the effect of country of origin to be stronger than the effect of generation in explaining older adults’ preferences for traditional vs new media. Conclusions: The results point to the need for a more nuanced view of the concept of ‘technology generation’, i.e., one taking into account contextual aspects, such as country of origin, gender, level of education, working status and the interaction effect between country of origin and ‘technology generation’.
Older Adults and the Digital Divide in Romania: Implications for the Covid-19 Pandemic
(2021-10-31) Ivan, Loredana; Cutler, Stephen
At the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Romania invoked the 15th Amendment of the European Convention of Human Rights for emergency situations and issued an Emergency State Presidential Decree (first put into effect on March 16 and extended until May 15, 2020). This amendment allowed for exemptions from broad categories of human rights (e.g., the right to privacy and intimacy). Older people became the main target of the Romanian government’s plans for isolation. Using data from the Romanian National Institute of Statistics and data gathered prior to the COVID-19 pandemic from a longitudinal study on communication technologies used by older people in Romania (Loos, Nimrod, & Fernández-Ardèvol, 2018; 2020), we examine the digital inequalities faced by Romanian elders. The current study addresses the following specific research questions: (1) what digital opportunities and limitations were faced by the older population of Romania: e.g., online shopping, asking for help from various organizations using online platforms, using online medical assistance, etc., and (2) how did digital inequalities shape the lives of older people in Romania? Although the data do not reflect the situation of older Internet users during pandemics, we used the most recent and detailed data regarding Internet behavior of older adults in Romania. The current article discusses the opportunities faced by those who already had access and Internet skills when the pandemic started, and the limitations faced by older people who were less digitally skilled. With many of the daily activities moving online during this period, older adults with poor digital skills or no Internet access risked social isolation. Also, we consider policy recommendations to reduce digital inequalities that affect elders. Although we focus on Romania, the current study typifies vulnerabilities older people face in emergent economies during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Social Support Mediated by Technology. A Netnographic Study of an Online Community for Mothers
(2020) Bîră, Monica; Daba-Buzoianu, Corina; Tudorie, George
New mothers experience social isolation, and they sometimes lack experience in interacting withtheir babies. Social support accessed via information and communication technologies (ICTs) can helpmitigate such difficulties. Social media groups, in particular, offer opportunities for interacting with oth-er mothers, thus locating an alternative and potentially powerful source of support. In this study, wedescribe such an online community of mothers in Romania, aiming at capturing the mechanisms of so-cial support in the group, and also, schematically, the changing norms of motherhood they are relatedto. The paper expands on a four-dimensional analysis of social support – informational, emotional, af-firmational, and instrumental components (Langfort et al., 1997; Leger & LeTourneau, 2015). It thenintroduces the results of the netnography we conducted in the context of a three-week data gatheringperiod in the observed community. We suggest that the physiognomy of support we observed is relat-ed to changing normative models of motherhood in this Eastern-European nation. In helping each oth-er, the mothers we observed also expressed their difference from older generations, and their personaland professional aspirations.
Patterns of Digital Behavior on Instant Messiging Platforms. WhatsApp Uses among Young People from Romania
(2020-12) Corbu, Nicoleta; Boțan, Mădălina; Buturoiu, Raluca; Dumitrache, Alexandru Cristian
This paper examines the digital behaviour on one widely used instant messaging (IM) platform, namely WhatsApp, of young people in Romania, with a focus on the reasons for sharing information on the platform and dependency of using it. Within the broad framework of the digital single market, little is known about the motivations and behavioural patterns of young Europeans while using the increasingly popular IM platforms, nor is it clear whether country characteristics are relevant or not when evaluating the impact of such technological platforms on the life of young audiences. Rooted in the uses and gratifications perspective, this study uses media diaries (N = 229), filled in by young people in an ordinary day of the week and self-administered questionnaires in order to assess what might be the main gratifications that lead young and educated people to share information on WhatsApp and what makes them spend more time and be dependent on the platform on a daily basis. Main results show that the most frequent reasons why young Romanians use WhatsApp are social, professional, and instrumental. Moreover, the tendency to share content on the platform is higher for people who use it for instrumental and informative purposes. Dependency on the platform is significantly higher for young people who use it to fulfil affective needs (i.e., to express or receive affection or emotional support and avoid loneliness).

Browse

Recent Submissions