Following from Dr. Sony Jalarajan Raj and Managing Editor: Deepak Ranjan Jena
http:www.mediawatchglobal.com
Abstracts of research papers published in Media Watch, September 2015:
Journal of Media Watch: September 2015
DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77886
It’s not only ‘social’, but
sourceful!
Rohini Sreekumar
Issue Editor
School of Arts & Social Sciences, Monash
University, Malaysia
Let’s go a few years back. In 2003, ‘Salam
Pax’ hosted a blog from Baghdad named ‘Where is Raed?’ to give accounts on the
Iraq War to his friend, Raed who was in Jordan that time, about the situation
in Baghdad during that period. Though the blog became popular, the authenticity
of the regular posts on bombings and war proceedings in this blog was viewed
with suspicion by the news world and the larger social sphere until a
deliberate endeavour by The Guardian newspaper came out with a flashing
report that Salam Pax is not an imaginary character, but a real person named
Salam Abdulmunem, an architect by profession. This resulted to an end of all
speculations regarding the blog and soon Salam Pax became the most sought out
person in the media world both as a source of information and as an interpreter
of Iraq war. This was one of the frost instances that world come to know the
real power of a common man wielded with the power of new media. While a large
majority view it as the ‘next big thing’, for a few it is already part of our
routine system of work and life. The
Guardian’s ‘Mood of the Nation’ research (2014) conducted on UK citizen
found that using social media makes the people happier when compared to money
and family. The privilege or choice of being connected to a world outside one’s
reach is the core principle that makes these social sites an immediate
advantageous tool for marketing or any other online undertakings. With the
rapid growth of internet and associated network technologies with a huge rise
in the use of tablet and mobile phones, social media is becoming even more
ubiquitous and exhilarating. The consequences of these change and evolution are
influencing every aspects of human life.
As far as traditional media
are concerned, online social platforms like Facebook and Twitter with its
ubiquitous influence proved to be a threat to their existence. The increasing
preference and participation of youth on the online social platforms was seen
as a warning alarm, which is met by them by making their presence increasingly
felt in the social media platforms as shares and postings. A recent New York
Times’s article titled ‘Brian Williams Scandal Shows Power of Social Media’
rightly points to the fact that it is through social media that news get
contested, questioned, and investigated to reveal the real news. While taking
about the influences that social media make, it is the very redefinition of the
concept of ‘informer’ that comes into play if we consider the 140 character
word war or hash tag revolution. What we are witnessing now is a conversational
news culture--a move back to the old Coffee house culture. To put it in another
way, it is the laymen or public who is largely involved in the creation and the
dissemination of news. This met with changes even in the craft of Journalism;
online editions have snippet news, more illustrations, and options to link to
social networking platforms like Facebook and Twitter. On the other hand,
social networking sites are increasingly trying to gather as much as users into
their bouquet. Facebook’s acquisition of Watsapp, a text messaging service is
viewed by the world as a clever move to tap even the non-facebookies who
regularly use internet for messaging.
Facebook has also come out
with many ambitious measures and innovations to make the users hooked to its
web as long as they are online. Its ‘Instant Article’ facility, author tag and
control over individual news feeds are making use of possibilities that could
not only provide quality news experience, but also bring back the disillusioned
facebookies who abandoned it for its over-loaded news feeds and unauthenticated
news feeds. Major media corporates like BBC, New York Times and The
Guardian have already signed up with the ‘Instant Article’ provision that
would deliver quick loading of their news articles from the Facebook page
rather than linking it to their respective news website.
While shared news and tagged
photographs rule the public sphere, they are always questioned for their
accuracy, authenticity and attribution. This crucial factor along with the untrained
‘prosumers’ (a discursive word coined to denote the online users who are the
producers and consumers of news) pose a setback for the social media (on the
other hand a merit for the traditional media).
Keeping apart all these obvious
terrains of social media explosion, what makes social networking significantly
popular in the academic world is its potential in redefining space, society and
identity. Being ‘social’ is a comprehensive expression holding many meanings at
different point of references. As social media form a major part of a
Company/Institute’s reputation, marketing and social identity, their presence
online is given much prominence and precision, whereby the employers’ social
presence is also being scrutinized.
DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77888
Cultivating Connections in 140
Characters: A Case Study of Twitter Relationship Building
JESSICA D. BERTAPELLE & DEBORAH BALLARD-REISCH
Wichita State University, USA
Social media use is ubiquitous in the
United States. Not surprisingly, an academic debate has emerged about whether
or not computer-mediated communication facilitates or hurts interpersonal
relationships. This exploratory case study adds to the conversation by
assessing how Twitter users in the Wichita, Kansas community view the impact of
Twitter on their social lives, specifically, communication and relationships.
Using a grounded theory approach and inductive thematic analysis, this paper
analyzed data from a two-phase study involving key informant interviews (N=15)
and six focus groups (N = 32). Three themes emerged: Twitter and professional
relationships; Twitter and personal relationships, and Twitter and community.
Analysis indicated that Twitter is a robust tool used to build and maintain
interpersonal and community relationships that range from shallow and
impersonal to deep and meaningful, depending on the desires of users, all in
140 characters or less.
DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77890
Capturing Trends and Identifying the Emerging
Cool: A Study of Indian Bollywood Celebs on Twitter
Falguni Vasavada,
Santosh K. Patra, Palak Gadhiya & Krishna Mishra
MICA, Ahmedabad
People actively participating on social
networks like Facebook, Twitter and blogs are questioning the age old logic of
boundaries and space. Virtual networks like twitter have given space which not
only explores individual self but also connects to a mass phenomenon emerging
through thought leaders, celebrities or ‘trend setters’. This study is an
attempt to take the argument further and identify the emerging ‘trend’ in India
through the celeb-tweets. To verify the argument empirically tweets of ten
celebrities on twitter from Bollywood which include actors, choreographers,
musicians, and producers were collected over a period of one month and tweet
analysis was done by adopting hermeneutics as the method of data analysis.
Appropriate codes were considered to address the major question of the paper on
‘social trends’ and the notion of ‘being cool’ to validate the question raised
in the paper.
DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77892
Liberalisation of the Malaysian Media
and Politics: New media, Strategies and Contestations
LEE YUEN BENG
& MAHYUDDIN AHMAD
Universiti Sains Malaysia, Malaysia
On 28 April 2012, ‘Bersih 3.0’, a rally
calling for freer and fairer elections estimated that 250, 000 people gathered
to support its cause. Government controlled newspapers the New Straits Times
and Utusan Malaysia accused this rally attended by 20, 000 demonstrators
as a plot to destabilise and overthrow the ruling coalition through chaos and
disorder. Online news portals Malaysiakini and Malaysian Insider
however reported that the rally attended by 150,000 demonstrators began
peacefully but ended chaotically as demonstrators, journalists and police
personnel were attacked and manhandled. While the conflicting reports of Bersih
3.0 and other news reports unpublished by the state controlled media through
the new media suggests political dissent and possible media liberalisation, it
does not necessarily mean that press freedom is well and alive. It however
marks the beginning of a larger movement in cyberspace that threatens the
hegemony of the ruling coalition. This paper examines the proliferation of the
new media within the political economic structure of the Malaysian society and
media; selected representations and messages in the old and new media; and
whether the strategies and if representations in the new media are counter
hegemonic tools capable of creating space for diverse voices, dissent and
transformation.
DOI:
10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77893
Impact of Social Media on the Vanity Level of
Youngsters in India
Ruchi Tewari1 & Santana Pathak2
1Amrut Mody School of Management, Ahmedabad
2Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad
This paper is an attempt to
measure the impact of social media on the vanity level of youngsters
in India. An experimental research was conducted on a controlled group of 40
participants with an average age of 23 years.
Netemeyer’s vanity scale was administered on the participants and their vanity was
measured. A month later, the participants in the research were put under
controlled conditions for two hours and exposed to social media. They were
instructed to log into their social media accounts and instructed to engage
into activities like updating their status, uploading new photographs, reading
comments and going through the number of likes which had been made on their
earlier loaded statuses and photographs. Post two hours, their vanity
level was measured. Data was analysed using paired sample t tests as well as
confirmatory factor analysis and comparison was made along the factors of
Netemeyer’s Vanity Scale pre and post the exposure to social media
activity.
DOI:
10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77894
Social Media Usage and Physical Inactivity among
School Children
BANINDER
RAHI, Vivekananda Institute of Professional Studies, New Delhi
The power of social media is
virtually untameable. The advent of social media has shrunk the world to what
Marshal McLuhan once termed ‘global village’. This paper has examined into the
amount of time government and private school students spent on social media
vis-à-vis on physical activities. It has attempted to answer the questions: (i)
How much time government and private school students spend using different
social media applications?, (ii) Is there any association between government
and private school students regarding time spent on social media applications?,
(iii) Whether they use social media applications primarily to communicate with
others, and (iv) how much time, on an average, school students spend on outdoor
games after school hours. For the purpose of the study, a self administered
survey was conducted among five government and private schools each.
DOI:
10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77895
Influence of Facebook in
Pakistani Pedagogy
Tazeen Hussain, Indus Valley School of Art &
Architecture, Karachi, Pakistan
This study grounds itself in
the communication, information sharing, discussion and co-creation potential of
ICTs with reference to social media-Facebook. Taking a qualitative approach, it
explores the above as building blocks of new educational paradigms of learner
autonomy; learner-centered education and co-creation of knowledge through
discussion and collaboration, by exploring the various ways and reasons
teachers use Facebook as part of pedagogy in Pakistan. It suggests that, in
order to understand fully the potential of Facebook as a pedagogical tool,
being egalitarian, autonomous and emancipatory, there is a need to review the
ways in which learning is viewed and evaluated.
DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77896
Social Media and Image Management: An
Analysis of Facebook Usage in Celebrity Public Relations
BHAVNEET BHATTI, Panjab University,
Chandigarah
Creation and maintenance of a
favourable image is an essential function of public relations and social media
is emerging as an important weapon in this image management armoury. The social
media environment provides an opportunity to reach out to a variety of public
in a more intimate and interactive way especially in the case of celebrity
image management. Social media accounts of celebrities serve as a medium to
blur the boundaries between the public and private spheres of their lives and
content posted on these accounts also serves as a credible source of
information for mass media. Since the social media presence of celebrities
plays a crucial role in their image creation. This paper is an attempt to
explore the emerging trends in social media usage by celebrities. The
objectives of the paper were to look at the Facebook usage of celebrities from
different walks of life (including politics, sports, music, cinema and
television) and analyse this usage in terms of dominant subject matter,
presentation, language used, frequency and continuity. The method used was a
content analysis of the Facebook accounts of celebrities for a period of one
year for the theory purpose a total of 1469 Facebook posts for one year to
provide an insight into social media usage in the practice of celebrity public
relation and potential that lies untapped were analyzed.
DOI:
10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77898
Non-Embodied Embodiment:
Transgenderism, Identity and the Internet
Joe Weinberg
Online, no one can tell that
you’re a dog. When in the third space of the internet, the body is left behind,
allowing people to explore their own identities and to engage in identity
tourism with different possible bodies. It is the representations we choose for
ourselves online that allow this exploration, the icons and avatars we create
that produce embodiment in online environments. Those groups that exist on the
fringe of identity, or in a state where identities are in flux, such as: the
transgendered community. By examining what embodiment these icons and avatars
allow, we can better understand how identity works online.
DOI: 10.15655/mw/2015/v6i3/77900
Romanian Public Service
Television: Struggle for Existence in the Digital Era
Bianca Mitu, University of Wolverhampton, UK
The
increasing use of the internet has brought new challenges for the public
service television system all around the world. Despite the free access to
information and the use of digital technology, the Eastern European public
service television is still in a shading cone mostly because of the small scale
of their broadcasting markets. This article tells the story of the Romanian
public service television’s (TVR) path towards an uncertain future in the
digital age. The article offers an overview of the major changes and challenges
of TVR (in terms of remit, purpose, values, and objectives) since the fall of
the Communist regime in 1989 and aims to address the following questions: Is
public service television still relevant in the digital era? What are the
present challenges and what is the future of the Romanian public service
television in the digital era?
* * * * * *
Editor-in-Chief:
Dr. Sony Jalarajan Raj
Managing
Editor: Deepak Ranjan Jena
http:www.mediawatchglobal.com
