Cogitatio Press (E-Journals)
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Data Subjects vs. People’s Data: Competing Discourses of Privacy and Power in Modern Russia
Get PDFThe notion of individual privacy has always been a political one throughout Russia’s Soviet and post-Soviet periods, but in the age of all-encompassing datafication and digitisation of identities, privacy has become an even more contested concept. This article considers how Russian state officials and Russian digital rights advocates construct the notion of privacy in their public online discourses. I argue that how these actors talk about privacy helps shape the norms and the politics around it in Russia. An in-depth analysis of activity reports published online by the state internet regulator and a grassroots digital rights group reveals competing privacy discourses underpinned by differential understandings of how anonymity, secrecy, confidentiality, and control of personal data determine the distribution of power and agency in Russian public and political life. These differential interpretations of privacy inform the contentious politics that emerge around how privacy is regulated and negotiated within the greater regulatory and normative framework of digital citizenship in Russia. Thus, the article offers critical insights into the contestation of citizenship and, consequently, the distribution of power in more and less democratic systems
Automated Journalism: A Meta-Analysis of Readers’ Perceptions of Human-Written in Comparison to Automated News
Get PDFThis meta-analysis summarizes evidence on how readers perceive the credibility, quality, and readability of automated news in comparison to human-written news. Overall, the results, which are based on experimental and descriptive evidence from 12 studies with a total of 4,473 participants, showed no difference in readers’ perceptions of credibility, a small advantage for human-written news in terms of quality, and a huge advantage for human-written news with respect to readability. Experimental comparisons further suggest that participants provided higher ratings for credibility, quality, and readability simply when they were told that they were reading a human-written article. These findings may lead news organizations to refrain from disclosing that a story was automatically generated, and thus underscore ethical challenges that arise from automated journalism
Dual Control: Investigating the Role of Drone (UAV) Operators in TV and Online Journalism
Get PDFAt a time when TV and online journalism embraces more moving images filmed from drones than ever before, this article seeks to explore the thoughts and actions of those who produce them. It builds on earlier research into how aerial images impact on the viewer through the lens of ‘quality journalism’ (Adams, 2018). It investigates how drone operators are involved in the journalistic process, what meanings and effects they seek and who controls their work in a market-driven environment. Qualitative analysis was carried out of seventeen in-depth interviews with drone operators, journalists and editors working in UK and around the world. Data revealed a high degree of creative freedom among the operators, a passion for using drones and some desire to immerse and impress the viewer. It showed that aerial images have become paramount in video journalism amid market pressures to find ever more sophisticated and ‘cinematic’ shots. Interviewees felt drones had been “good for journalism,” by providing raw data, exciting new perspectives, context and story-telling techniques and “space to think.” The article explores the significant yet often unplanned contribution to the journalistic process of the drone operator and recommends more is done to increase understanding between journalist and pilot, such as providing training courses designed to teach quality drone journalism, as the media approaches ‘peak drone.
Science Journalism and Pandemic Uncertainty
Get PDFNovel risks generate copious amounts of uncertainty, which in turn can confuse and mislead publics. This commentary explores those issues through the lens of information seeking and processing, with a focus on social media and the potential effectiveness of science journalism
Digital Participation and Risk Contexts in Journalism Education
Get PDFHigh school journalism programs nurture student voice, information literacy, and collaboration. Journalism programs do not merely produce commodities; they help students constitute a public within a school community. When publishing online, student journalists navigate relationships behind the scenes with stakeholders, including peers, adults, and the institution. Publishing can be fraught with hesitation and fear of consequences for speaking out. Because of this implication, journalism programs can serve as “potentially valuable yet imperfect” settings for the amplification of student voice and civic development, but can also unduly limit students’ self-expression, especially for girls (Bobkowski & Belmas, 2017). What might be the affordances and constraints of digital participation in a high school journalism program? How might youth journalists and other participants navigate exigencies of publishing online in this context? We, the head editors and adviser, use grounded theory to examine processes and develop pragmatic knowledge (Glaser & Strauss, 2017). Through a mix of prompts, group interviews, and participant observation, we develop a case study that demonstrates implications for ‘risk context,’ or the total situation of an actor’s vulnerability brought on by digital participation in publishing online. We describe what digital participation is good for, and for whom, thus further theorizing relationships between agency and co-production
Audience Attention and Emotion in News Filmed with Drones: A Neuromarketing Research
Get PDFEmotional journalism is being driven by audiovisual technology such as drones, also known as unmanned aerial vehicles, which have demonstrated their usefulness in transforming objective news into news stories from a new visual perspective, facilitating access to dangerous or difficult places. They also allow for greater immersion by an audience that has become an active participant in the news, and they contribute to the storytelling of communication despite the risk to privacy and security that their misuse might entail. The aim of this research is to determine the differences in attention and intensity of the emotions experienced when viewing two pieces of audiovisual news: One was filmed with the technological support of a drone, and the other was produced in the conventional way. The techniques of eye tracking and galvanic skin response were used in 30 Spanish university students. The results suggest that attention was focused on the most spectacular visual elements, although the images filmed with a drone received a higher concentration of attention from the subjects, and this attention was spread throughout the entire image, which demonstrates that drones enhance the effectiveness of panoramic images with natural landscapes. The greatest emotion generated by viewing the images recorded with drones was statistically significant, but it was limited exclusively to these particular scenes, and not to the entire recording of the news
Protecting Youths’ Wellbeing Online: Studying the Associations between Opportunities, Risks, and Resilience
Get PDFAs youths engage in different activities on the Internet, it is inevitable that they are exposed to risky online contents that might bother or upset them. Previous research has shown that online resilience, or the ability to effectively cope with online risks and to deal with their negative consequences, protects youths against these feelings of harm that sometimes emerge after a risk experience. However, knowledge about the role of resilience in protecting youths’ overall wellbeing seems rather limited. The current study analyzes new EU Kids Online data using structural equation modeling to fill this gap. The findings corroborate earlier findings that the more opportunities youths take up online, the more they are exposed to risky content. These risk encounters are negatively associated with wellbeing. Online resilience moderates this association and protects youths’ overall wellbeing from being harmed by online risk exposure. Implications for further research and practice are discussed
Staying at the Edge of Privacy: Edge Computing and Impersonal Extraction
Get PDFFrom self-driving cars to smart city sensors, billions of devices will be connected to networks in the next few years. These devices will collect vast amounts of data which needs to be processed in real-time, overwhelming centralized cloud architectures. To address this need, the industry seeks to process data closer to the source, driving a major shift from the cloud to the ‘edge.’ This article critically investigates the privacy implications of edge computing. It outlines the abilities introduced by the edge by drawing on two recently published scenarios, an automated license plate reader and an ethnic facial detection model. Based on these affordances, three key questions arise: what kind of data will be collected, how will this data be processed at the edge, and how will this data be ‘completed’ in the cloud? As a site of intermediation between user and cloud, the edge allows data to be extracted from individuals, acted on in real-time, and then abstracted or sterilized, removing identifying information before being stored in conventional data centers. The article thus argues that edge affordances establish a fundamental new ‘privacy condition’ while sidestepping the safeguards associated with the ‘privacy proper’ of personal data use. Responding effectively to these challenges will mean rethinking person-based approaches to privacy at both regulatory and citizen-led levels
Discourse Networks and Dual Screening: Analyzing Roles, Content and Motivations in Political Twitter Conversations
Get PDFThe increasing relevance of social networking platforms is accompanied by a growing number of studies using digital trace data. However, most studies still lack further understanding of the data-generating process. This analytical gap can be directly attributed to the prevalence of quantitative approaches, as only qualitative work is able to generate these insights. The broad methodological toolset of Discourse Network Analysis addresses this shortcoming as it combines both qualitative and quantitative approaches. The present study therefore employs Discourse Network Analysis in order to (1) determine different user groups’ varying role as senders and recipients of targeted online conversations, (2) identify and compare Twitter users’ (simultaneous) reference to different forms of conversational Twitter content, and to (3) asses the motivation of @message authors to direct particular tweets at particular user groups. To this end, this study analyzes @messages during the BBC program ‘Question Time’ on 2nd of June 2017—the final media encounter of Prime Minister Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn in the context of the 2017 UK election campaign. We draw on the theoretical background of Maarten Hajer’s discourse coalitions approach in order to investigate the preconditions for the formation of discourse coalitions in new and emerging virtual discourse arenas. Thus, our work not only mirrors the focus in existing literature on Twitter usage during high-profile political media events, but also emphasizes Twitter’s unique features for interactive exchange. This article identifies different forms of meta-talk and policy issues, which vary in both their general popularity with Twitter users as well as their interconnectedness. Furthermore, our analysis uncovers the motivation behind the decisions of @message authors to send particular @messages to certain groups of Twitter users. Finally, we could establish that media events only temporarily affect the topical foci of @message authors
Islands of Good Government: Explaining Successful Corruption Control in Two Spanish Cities
Get PDFBetween 2012 and 2018, Spanish public opinion has been shaken by a seemingly endless series of corruption scandals, to the point that corruption has become one of the main long-term concerns of the Spanish population, according to nation-wide surveys. Despite the sharp rise in corruption scandals within local authorities, there are Spanish cities that have managed to limit corruption and build a transparent and efficient government, which stand out as islands of integrity and good governance. This article qualitatively investigates two cities in Spain—Alcobendas and Sant Cugat del Vallès—which, despite being in a region with comparatively lower quality of government, have managed to successfully control corruption. We argue that the key to success is the administrative reorganization prompted by the appointment of city managers that institutionalized professional management. Findings also have implications for practitioners, meaning that complex anti-corruption legislative frameworks will not work within an overburdened administration unless the administrative structure is reformed