Abstracts of May 2015 issue of Media Watch

Following is from Deepak Ranjan Jena

Managing Editor, Media Watch: 

Abstracts of May 2015 issue of Media Watch 

http://www.mediawatchglobal.com/

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DoI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65673

Interfaces in shaping newsroom and readership: Switching between news making and consumption in web synced platforms

NITHIN KALORTH

Issue Editor

Amity University, Rajasthan

“Every new medium begins as a container for the old” - Marshall McLuhan

The relation between mass media and digital environment is practiced and studied over the two decades. The web-synced journalism, not only changed the storytelling, but also the reception of

the news. The user could do act upon the news making process and information sharing, which itself questions the role of the journalist in the digital age. There are various media interfaces reinvented and restructured which plays a vital role in journalist work space. The myths behind such computer communication systems and their output need to be studied which will pave the way for understanding journalism and mass media from a digital age perspective.

          Making it simple, understanding the interface in the mass media context is a collaborative body of hardware and software which connect to share information. It will be the combination of various levels of operating systems, computer languages, applications, software, hardware and other features. The popularity of social media in the making and reception of the news enables interface controlled newsrooms. From the traditional use of microphone to the latest touch and talk applications, interfaces do make a greater shift in the mass communication. It not only lay platform for the communication, but also enabling them to perform in its method. The job of a news reporter or editor becomes very perfunctory that their role is to fit the space which combined with such interfaces.

On the other hand, interfaces liberate the journalist from work of words. They could report the stories by incorporating various digital data tools. The news stories could be presented along with the dynamic numerical and statistical data. When it comes to collection of the news, reporters of the digital age could contact the source of the news by a few touches on the screen. The shared journalism between the journalist and citizen reporter became much easier to collaborate. The contents generated by the citizen and netizens become the thread for traditional print and television journalists. The social media application like Geo- tag, hashtag and trends amass the analogous stories together and reaches the news desk. The space based satellite platform GPS (Global Positioning System) which is enabled with digital cameras help the news desk to track the geographic locations of the photographs. During the Arab Spring, the photographs posted on Twitter with Geo-tag was useful for the newsroom to organize report according to the geographic locations.

The news platforms in electronic media also incorporates the digital interface for better appearance and simple presentation of news. However, the interface was introduced in the television news reporting as early as 1973, when BBC patented teletext which could subtitled along with the video. But digital interface came to prominence in news appearance after the invention of HTML. The Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) language got its prominence during the emergence of blog and later it became a popular language for news portals. The websites could not only present the news with attractive designs, but also drive the readers to give feedback. The social media pages also helped to connect with the readers in real time. The growth of multi-platform news credited to

users who are accessing the news from greater diverse platforms. Moreover, the communication services like Email and other social connections can be combined with the news interfaces.

The latest human computer interfaces like Google Glass, Optinvent Ora, iOptik, and other smart wearable technologies enables instant reporting and uploading of news. But this impulsive act of reporting will lead to the ethical issues which will question the accuracy and verification of the information. The social media interfaces of the news medium are designed in such a way that users could select the news or stories which they like to follow. This often leads to user demanded news stories. The reader of traditional newspapers becomes the users and subscribers which are enabled by just “like”, “re-post”, “share”, “retweet” or “comment”. These social media features become the bookmarks of news media. In turn, the web desk of news organization also goes for the stories which may become more popular or the interest of the reader. The market force, however, plays an imperative position in determining news and readership targeting. From the audience point of view, a good interface provides flexible, ready-made and controlled platform. They could read news and stories as they like. And what to do they do with the news? They could even give an opinion, manipulate, update and engage with the story as they wish. The newsroom often goes blind over the user behavior since these engagements result in gaining endorsement and popularity for the organization. In this context of emerging technology, the response from academia is to look closely the shift happening between the news producer and consumer. The role of journalist and editor here needs to be redefined by accumulating various global and regional digital news occurrences. Our future media classroom need to address more than “writing for the web”, or in other words focus should move on to “administrating the web”. Amidst these developments, this issue of Media Watch provides a space for scholars to discourse on social media interfaces and technological explosion.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65659

Effect of Audience Personality Traits on Reality Show Watching Motives

VARSHA JAIN¹ & SUBHADIP ROY^2
1Mudra Institute of Communication, Ahmedabad, India
²Indian Institute of Management, Udaipur, India

The relationship between viewer personality and reality show watching has been a point of discussion among media researchers but has been rarely tested. The authors in the present study explore: (i) Reality Show Watching Motives (RSWM) of viewers, (ii) further investigates the impact of viewer personality on RSWM in a developing nation context. The authors followed mixed method approach to this end. A qualitative approach was applied to investigate consumer perceptions about reality shows and generate RSWM items. This was followed by a large scale survey to relate viewer personality to RSWM. Structural equation modelling was applied to generate findings in the quantitative phase. Five RSWM dimensions emerged from the qualitative and quantitative analysis. Consumer personality was found to have a significant impact on RSWM dimensions. However, there was variation on the effect of individual personality dimensions on individual RSWM dimensions. The study has theoretical and managerial implications.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65660

Mapping the Portrayal of Females in Contemporary Indian Advertisements

SHYAMA KUMARI & SHRADHA SHIVANI

Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, India

The role of advertising as an effective vehicle of communication has long been acknowledged. It has become the important ‘part of the cultural and economic fabric of a society and continues to be a primary tool for marketing communication’ (Lane et. al., 2005). The current study examines the portrayal of women in contemporary Indian magazine and television advertisements in various product and service categories. The present study is an effort to fill the gap of limited research on gender representation in Indian context. Using content analysis, a total of 275 advertisements comprising print and television ads were examined. The result reveals the dominance of female stereotyping in Indian advertising where females were mostly depicted as a housewife, predominantly endorsing household products and mostly young female models were preferred for brand promotion by advertisers.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65662

Rural Women Psychology and Emotional Contents in Indian Television Advertisements

SANJAY JERATH & MRINALINI PANDEY

Indian School of Mines, Dhanbad, India

The current study examines the effect of emotional contents in television advertising on the rural women and how they understand and react towards these advertisements. The study further leads us to the issues of cognitive behaviour of rural women after the advertisement has influenced their emotional corridor. For this study 167 women are selected from rural districts of Maharashtra and cluster sampling approach is used. 5 point Likert scale with the range from strongly disagree to strongly agree is used along with structured questionnaire. Contents of the advertisement are broken down it to defined parts like model, slogan, jingle etc for the easy understanding and correct answering from the respondents and it helps us in understanding the role played by each variable in the emotional outcome of the respondent after viewing the advertisement. This study provides the insights to the marketers and advertisers about the factors which actually influences the rural women and persuades them and further provides a direction in developing an effective communication approach towards this particular market segment.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65664

Recognizing the Politics of Visual Imagery through Transplanted Traditions in Indian Television Soap Operas

KAIFIA ANCER LASKAR

Tripura University, India

Television is known to be a powerful provoker and circulator of meanings. The attempt in this article is to read the discursive elements of female soap opera protagonists and find out if they are idealised partly as religious devotees in their whole existence. Wars of production and re-enforcement of meanings are often waged in media space. Therefore an analysis of ‘character reading’ of the soap operas broadcast in the Hindi networks will help focus analytical attention on different forms of hegemonic power that constitute the text. The objective of this article is to delve into the textual and semiotic codifications used in the characterisation of the protagonists of the select soap operas under study. These codes will help in describing the phenomenon of creating religious devotees in soap operas.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65665

What Gamification Tells Us about Web Communication

MARK GOODMAN, DANAE CARLSON, LACI KYLES & NICK GOODMAN

Mississippi State University, USA

The games that have become a staple on Facebook provide lessons on how to make websites and Internet marketing more successful. We highlight these points that gamers have accomplished: Provide ideological agreement, Create a community, Provide a sense of control or autonomy, Create a way for people to communicate with each other, Recognize gender differences, Provide rewards, and Convince people to commit.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65666

Fictional Depictions of Youth in School in Films Made in China and United States

WANG CHANGSONG & ROHANI HASHIM

Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia

This study discussed the differences between Chinese youth film and American teen film through the perspective on cultural foundation. The authors argue that Confucianism was an alternative that greatly affects the depiction of young characters and the causal relationship of morality and fate of the characters in films. The objective of such a comparison was not to advocate for either Chinese or American youth cinema in portraying young people, but to promote a better understanding of the strengths and impacts of youth cinema and youth genre. In addition, this study examined cinematic depictions of young characters portrayed in Chinese youth films and American teen films. It was argued that Chinese youth films and American youth films differ in depictions of school settings and even their purposes.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65668

Glocalisation, Cultural Identity, and the Political Economy of Indian Television

AMARENDRA KUMAR DASH

Rajiv Gandhi University of Knowledge Technologies, India

From its Delhi moorings in the late 1950’s till date, the Indian television has gone through steady evolution marked by phases of silent or radical revolution. Born with a political agenda of national reconstruction and turning out to be an ideological hegemony, its course has been redefined by absorbing transnational media participation and the dispersion of ideas in regional channels. It is to be noted that the Indian media market has shown resistance to both global as well as national cultural hegemony. While large scale glocalisation by the transnational media networks these days is the recognition that Indian market and culture cannot be radically colonised, the expansion of regional language channels later has weakened the hegemonic authority of national networks. The Indian market today is defined by the simultaneous presence of the global, the local, the regional, and the glocal media signifiers. Taken together, these significations point at a larger picture of glocalisation of market culture, especially, where the consumer agency consists of participants across space, class, gender, and generation.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65669

Political Mapping of Media in India

SHEKH MOINUDDIN

Kalindi College, University of Delhi, India

Every day media is interpreting the space with a new name, identity and representation. The media discourse shaped in such extent that the identity of a space is deflecting from original and existing together with new name both together as well. The constructed identity and existing identity of the region is shaped in such an extent that the space is known with a new identity apart from original social, cultural and geographical identity. How the issue of reservation, caste and corruption being fixed with a regional space and the issues found more or less everywhere same in the country. How media fixed these spaces with new identity where roles of media was inevitable. The study inhibits specific issues based news from both print and visual media and assessing viewers through it and mapping the region over it. The study based on field surveys across six capital cities (Lucknow, Patna, Ranchi, Delhi, Jaipur and Bhopal) of northern India where political fever remain found high and both media and politicians supposed to shaping and reshaping these spaces in order to reflect a mediated identity apart from traditional identity.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65670

Twittering Public Sentiments: A Predictive Analysis of Pre-Poll Twitter Popularity of Prime Ministerial Candidates for the Indian Elections 2014

KALYANI SURESH & CHITRA RAMAKRISHNAN

Amrita Vishwa VidyaPeetham, Coimbatore, India

Twitter is a useful tool for predicting election outcomes, effectively complementing traditional opinion polling. This study undertakes a volume, sentiment and engagement analysis for predicting the popularity of Prime Ministerial candidates on Twitter as a run-up to the Indian Elections 2014. The results from a survey of 2,37,639 pre-poll tweets finds tweet volume as a significant predictor of candidate vote share, and volume and sentiments as predictors for candidate engagement levels. Higher engagement rates evolve from the horizontality of conversations about the candidate, therefore indicating a high degree of interactivity, but do not translate into a higher vote share.

DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i2/65672

Indian Television in the Eras of Pre-Liberalisation and Liberalisation

SHANTHI MATHAI

Jagran Lakecity University, India

India witnessed a revolution in the television communication landscape following the shift in the economic policies in 1991. This analytical study looks into the changes and additions in the functions performed by mass communication using television medium before and after the implementation of liberalization policies in India. Tables are included to provide overviews of the historical developments at different periods and to distinguish the functions performed by television communication. In addition to information, education, entertainment, correlation and mobilization functions, empowerment and need satisfaction are also accounted as functions added in the due course of mass communication progression in the transnational and digitized era.

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