International Journal of Communication Publishes a Special Section on Internet Shutdowns in Africa There is an evolution underway in how information controls are perceived and understood. The view that Internet access should be a fundamental right has gained traction, but concerns are increasing about the very real threat posed by the dissemination of misinformation and hate speech online. This Special Section on Internet Shutdowns in Africa looks at these tensions within the context of one particularly extreme solution to perceived online threats: Shutting off Internet access. It wades into the fierce debate between advocacy groups that condemn shutdowns as evidence of governments seeking to stifle political dissent, and governments that argue they are increasingly powerless to contain hate speech on social media platforms that are slow to respond to grievances from the global south. This Special Section emerged from a conference on Internet shutdowns in Africa by the Programme in Comparative Media Law & Policy at the University of Oxford’s Centre for Socio-Legal Studies, and the School of Communications at the University of Johannesburg.  Some of the pieces are the culmination of ideas presented there, while others come from scholars unable to attend, but whose research pushes forward our understanding of Internet shutdowns in important ways. Although Internet shutdowns have now occurred across nearly all continents, they are on the rise in Africa where some of the longest shutdowns have taken place. Drawing from research across the continent, this Special Section probes the boundaries around what is an Internet shutdown. More than simply intentional government orders to shut off Internet access, the articles included here capture the variations in how Internet shutdowns actually come about and are experienced. For example: How do we understand social media taxes and their impact on the ability to access the Internet, or Internet blackouts instigated by hacker or private sector companies rather than governments? Together, the authors, coming from law, communications, political science, and human rights, make a compelling case for the reconceptualization of Internet shutdowns and their relationship to other forms of information control. (This Special Section emerges from ongoing research from the European Research Council project, ConflictNet ‘The Politics and Practice of Social Media in Conflict’ at the University of Oxford.) We invite you to read these seven articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on August 13, 2020. Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct linking to the papers of interest. __________________________________________________________________________________________ The Changing Landscape of Internet Shutdowns in Africa—Introduction Eleanor Marchant, Nicole Stremlau Internet Shutdowns and the Limits of the Law Giovanni De Gregorio, Nicole Stremlau State-Ordered Internet Shutdowns and Digital Authoritarianism in Zimbabwe Admire Mare Dissent Does Not Die in Darkness: Network Shutdowns and Collective Action in African Countries Jan Rydzak, Moses Karanja, Nicholas Opiyo The Slow Shutdown: Information and Internet Regulation in Tanzania From 2010 to 2018 and Impacts on Online Content Creators  Lisa Parks, Rachel Thompson “Don’t Tax My Megabytes”: Digital Infrastructure and the Regulation of Citizenship in Africa  Clovis Bergère A Spectrum of Shutdowns: Reframing Internet Shutdowns From Africa Eleanor Marchant, Nicole Stremlau __________________________________________________________________________________________ Larry Gross Editor Arlene Luck Managing Editor Guest Editors Eleanor Marchant, Nicole Stremlau According to the latest statistics from Google Scholar, IJoC ranks 2nd among all Humanities, Literature & Arts journals, and 4th among all Communication journals.

International Journal of Communication invites you to read these 27 papers that published in JULY 

The International Journal Communication is pleased to announce the publication of 27 papers in JULY 2020. To access these papers, please Ctrl+Click on the titles below for direct hyperlinking. We look forward to your feedback!

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Articles

Testing Three Measures of Verbal–Visual Frame Interplay in German News Coverage of Refugees and Asylum Seekers
Viorela Dan, Maria E. Grabe, Brent J. Hale

Searching for the Global Audience: A Comparative, Multiple-Method Analysis of a Global Trending Topic on Twitter
Katerina Girginova 

There’s More to the Story: Both Individual and Collective Policy Narratives Can Increase Support for Community-Level Action
Chris Skurka, Jeff Niederdeppe, Liana Winett 

Student Participation and Public Facebook Communication: Exploring the Demand and Supply of Political Information in the Romanian #rezist Demonstrations
Dan Mercea, Toma Burean, Viorel Proteasa

Digital Feminism and Affective Splintering: South Korean Twitter Discourse on 500 Yemeni Refugees
Do Own (Donna) Kim, Nathaniel Ming Curran, Hyun Tae (Calvin) Kim 

The Multiplex Networks of Strategic Alliances and Follower– Followee Relations Among U.S. Technology Companies
Jingyi Sun 

Organizational Threat Appraisal by Publics: The Effects of Perceived Temporal Distance on Health Crisis Outcomes
Sungsu Kim, Yan Jin  

Enabling Cultural Policies? Culture, Capabilities, and Citizenship
Torgeir Uberg Nærland, Jan Fredrik Hovden, Hallvard Moe 

Culture and Health Communication: A Comparative Content Analysis of Tweets from the United States and Korea
Minhee Choi, Brooke Weberling McKeever

Only So Many Hours in a Day: Early Childhood Screen Time in Boston and Mexico City
Lisa B. Hurwitz, David S. Bickham, Summer H. Moukalled, Michael Rich

Authoritarian Populism and the Discourse of “the People” in the Turkish Islamist Media: The Case of Yeni Şafak
Yesim Kaptan

How Satirists Alternate Between Discursive Modes: An Introduction of the Humoristic Metaphors in Satirical News (HMSN) Typology
Ellen Droog, Christian Burgers, Gerard J. Steen

#MeToo; #HimToo: Popular Feminism and Hashtag Activism in the Kavanaugh Hearings
Tisha Dejmanee, Zulfia Zaher, Samantha Rouech, Michael J. Papa

The Effects of Personality Traits and Situational Factors on the Deliberativeness and Civility of User Comments on News Websites
Johannes Beckert, Marc Ziegele 

Is Bad News Biased? How Poll Reporting Affects Perceptions of Media Bias and Presumed Voter Behavior
Mallory R. Perryman, Jordan Foley, Michael W. Wagner

Facebook Not Statebook: Defining SNS Diplomacy with Four Modes of Online Diplomatic Participation
Q. Elyse Huang

Doubt Versus Trust: Framing Effects of the News About the 2018 Trump‒Kim Jong Un Summit in Singapore on American College Students
Chang Sup Park, Barbara K. Kaye

Developing a Mediation Model for Narrative Evidence Processing Based on Social-Cognitive Variables and Agency-Based Cultural Exemplars
Soo Jung Hong

Cross-Media Usage Repertoires and Their Political Impacts: The Case of China
Qiong Gong, Marc Verboord, Susanne Janssen

Book Reviews

Carey Jewitt, Sara Price, Kerstin Mackley, Nikoleta Giannoutsou, and Douglas Atkinson, Interdisciplinary Insights For Digital Touch Communication
Wei Zhang 

Nancy Baym, Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection
Alexandria Arrieta 

Advances in Digital Intimacy Research (Book essay on 2 books)
Lik Sam Chan

Pablo J. Boczkowski and C. W. Anderson (Eds.), Remaking the News: Essays on the Future of Journalism Scholarship in the Digital Age
Shuning Lu

Philip N. Howard, Lie Machines, How to Save Democracy from Troll Armies, Deceitful Robots, Junk News Operations, and Political Operatives
Albana Dwonch

Taberez Ahmed Neyazi, Political Communication and Mobilisation: The Hindi Media in India
Tabassum Ruhi Khan

Rajiv George Aricat and Rich Ling, Mobile Communication and Low-Skilled Migrants’ Acculturation to Cosmopolitan Singapore
Mai Nou Xiong-Gum

Christina Dunbar-Hester, Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open
Technology Cultures
Samantha Shorey

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Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor    

According to the latest statistics from Google Scholar, IJoC ranks 2nd among all Humanities, Literature & Arts journals, and 4th among all Communication journals.                                                              

International Journal of Communication invites you to read these 31 papers that published in JUNE 

The International Journal Communication is pleased to announce the publication of 31 papers in June 2020 including a Special Section on Participation and Media. To access these papers, please Ctrl+Click on the titles below for direct hyperlinking, or to ijoc.org for the Special Section.
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ARTICLES

From Disenchantment to Reenchantment: Rural Microcelebrities, Short Video, and the Spectacle-ization of the Rural Lifescape on Chinese Social Media
Han Li

Governing Hate Content Online: How the Rechtsstaat Shaped the Policy Discourse on the NetzDG in Germany
Danya He 

Historiography of Korean Esports: Perspectives on Spectatorship
Dal Yong Jin

A Model of Social Eavesdropping in Communication Networks
Leila Bighash, Kristen S. Alexander, Christina S. Hagen, Andrea B. Hollingshead

Examining Factors Associated With Facebook Use Among Sheltered Homeless in Hawai’i
Wayne Buente, Rachel Neo, Luz M. Quiroga, Joseph Greene

Capturing Citizens’ Opinions Through a Combination of Survey and Online Social Data
Manuela Farinosi, Leopoldina Fortunati, John O’Sullivan, Laura Pagani

Source Interests, News Frames, and Risk Delineation: A Content Analysis of U.S. Newspapers’ Coverage of Genetically Modified Food (1994–2015)
Xigen Li, Zerui Liang, Xiaohua Wu

Participation and Transmediality: Audience Influence on Web Series
Tomás Atarama-Rojas, Enrique Guerrero-Pérez, Valeria Gerbolini

Discourse of Practice: The Negotiation of Sexual Norms Via Online Religious Discourse
Ruth Tsuria

How Combining Terrorism, Muslim, and Refugee Topics Drives Emotional Tone in Online News: A Six-Country Cross-Cultural Sentiment Analysis
Chung-Hong Chan, Hartmut Wessler, Eike Mark Rinke, Kasper Welbers, Wouter van Atteveldt, Scott Althaus

Intermedia Reliance and Sustainability of Emergent Media: A Large-Scale Analysis of American News Outlets’ External Linking Behaviors
Chankyung Pak, Kelley Cotter, Julia DeCook

“He and the Paper Had Merged Into One”: An Analysis of the Coverage of the Death of Israeli Journalists
Moran Avital-BenAtar

Social Media News Consumption and Opinion Polarization on China’s Trade Practices: Evidence from a U.S. National Survey
Yanqin Lu, Rik Ray, Louisa Ha, Peiqin Chen

Refugees and National Identity in Letters to the Editor
Kate Dunsmore, Andrea Hickerson

Are Netflix and Spotify Subscribers More Likely to Pay for Online News? Comparative Analysis of Data From Six Countries
Richard Fletcher, Rasmus Kleis Nielsen 

Mind Your Social Media Manners: Pseudonymity, Imaginary Audience, and Incivility on Facebook vs. YouTube
Gi Woong Yun, Sasha Allgayer, Sung-Yeon Park

Anonymous’s Glory
Ashley E. Gorham

FEATURES

Ideological Health Spirals: An Integrated Political and Health Communication Approach to COVID Interventions
Dannagal G. Young, Amy Bleakley

BOOK REVIEWS

Russell Chun and Susan J. Drucker (Eds.), Fake News: Real Issues in Modern Communication
Dennis S. Gouran

Maria Repnikova, Media Politics in China: Improvising Power Under Authoritarianism
Ruth Moon

Melissa Zimdars and Kembrew McLeod, Fake News: Understanding Media and Misinformation in the Digital Age
Rachel E. Moran 

Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Cyberwar: How Russian Hackers and Trolls Helped Elect a President: What We Don’t, Can’t and Do Know
Danielle R. Mehlman-Brightwell

Angles of the Youth Digital Divide
AnneMarie McClain

Elena Giannoulis and Lukas R. A. Wilde (Eds.), Emoticons, Kaomoji, and Emoji: The Transformation of Communication in the Digital Age
ZiBi Huang

____________________________________________________________________________________________

Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor    

According to the latest statistics from Google Scholar, IJoC ranks 2nd among all Humanities, Literature & Arts journals, and 4th among all Communication journals.                                                              

International Journal of Communication
Publishes a Special Section on “Participation and Media:
Comparative Analysis of Anti-Austerity in the Eurozone Crisis”

This Special Section on “Participation and Media: Comparative Analysis of Anti-Austerity in the Eurozone Crisis” reflects on the way citizens channelled demands to political authorities during a critical period for the European Union. Political decisions and economic strategies set in place by European and national authorities were challenged in the streets and on the Internet by expressions of social dissent, turning social media into an arena for online collective action.

This Special Section includes six original papers (plus an editorial introduction) drawing on current research about the social and political implications of citizen participation in social protests.  Based on empirical research emerging from Cyprus, Greece, Ireland, Portugal and Spain, the findings offer a broad overview of impacts and reactions in the weaker Eurozone economies. A mixture of criticism aimed at the European Union’s neoliberal turn and demands for deeper political openness to citizens’ participation appeared in varying proportions across time and territories during these turbulent times.

This Special Section analyzes citizen participation in social change and contemporary media politics of dissent in the context of anti-austerity protests in the Eurozone crisis since 2008.  It focuses on the primary question:

Which are the main values, strategies and mechanisms adopted by mainstream news and activist social media in constructing anti-austerity protests and European conflicts in the Eurozone crisis?

All these studies have important implications for understanding how people use and produce mediated practices when confronting political power and authorities. These papers investigate a wide range of topics related to media participation and usage in times of political unrest. In these uncertain times, dominated by the COVID-19 menace, learning from good and bad decisions taken during the global financial crisis of 2008 can guide wiser choices in the near future.

We invite you to read these articles that published in the International Journal of Communication on June 6, 2020. Please Ctrl+Click on the article titles below for direct linking to the papers of interest.
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Participation and Media: Comparative Analysis of Anti-austerity in the Eurozone Crisis — Introduction
Miguel Vicente-Mariño, Tao Papaioannou, Peter Dahlgren

Contentious Responses to the Crises in Spain: Emphasis Frames and Public Support for Protest on Twitter and the Press
Camilo Cristancho, Eva Anduiza, Mariluz Congosto, Silvia Majó-Vázquez

Dominant and Emerging News Frames in Protest Coverage: The 2013 Cypriot Anti-Austerity Protests in National Media
Tao Papaioannou

Citizens Beyond Troika: Media and Anti-Austerity Protests in Portugal
Ines Amaral

Hybrid Media and Movements: The Irish Water Movement, Press Coverage and Social Media
Henry Silke, Eugenia Siapera, Maria Rieder

Media and Twitter Agendas for Social Mobilizations: The Case of the Protests in Defense of the Public Healthcare System in Spain
Pere Masip, Carlos Ruiz-Caballero, Jaume Suau, David Puertas

News Media Framing of the Anti-Austerity and Pro-“Europe” Movements During the Greek Referendum Protest Cycles
Fani Kountouri, Andreas Kollias

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Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor

Guest Editors
Miguel Vicente-Mariño, Tao Papaioannou, Peter Dahlgren

International Journal of Communication
Publishes a Special Section
Practicing Media—Mediating Practice

Media technologies of all kinds are an integral part of our social worlds. People worldwide engage with a wide range of communication services to accomplish most of their daily activities. But how can we understand the performative dimension of such routines and their intimate ties with media technologies and with the media texts that we produce and circulate through them?  In their conspicuous ordinariness, the practices of handling media and, in turn, the mediation of contemporary practices require us to assess how and with what consequences these dual processes become embedded in our lives.

The Special Section “Practicing Media—Mediating Practice” strives for an explanation and critical appreciation of media-related practices because, as of now, we lack a clear conceptualization and analytical implementation of what media(-related) practices are (and what they leave out), what their relationship to other types of activity looks like, and what they add to our understanding of innovations in telecommunications and digital data.

Guest-edited by Christian Pentzold, Kenzie Burchell, Olivier Driessens and Alice Mattoni, this Special Section is one of the first efforts to substantiate media and communication studies’ interest in understanding the entanglement of media-related activities. The 11 original articles (plus an editorial introduction) come from an international set of scholars from media and communications, anthropology, and sociology. Their conceptual groundwork and empirical analyses scrutinize what media users actually do and say in relation to media technologies, texts, and genres, and the wider digitally networked ecologies within which those practices take place.

The contributions come from Christian Pentzold, University of Bremen & Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany and Manuel Menke, LMU Munich, Germany; Jesper Pagh, University of Copenhagen, Denmark; Alice Mattoni, University of Bologna, Italy; Stephen F. Ostertag, Tulane University, USA; Christoph Raetzsch, University of Aarhus, Denmark and Margreth Lünenborg, Free University Berlin; Asen O. Ivanov, University of Guelph, Canada; Kenzie Burchell, University of Toronto, Canada; Maria Bakardjieva, University of Calgary, Canada; and Peter Lunt, University of Leicester, UK.

We invite you to read this new Special Section of scholarly articles in the International Journal of Communication  that published May 20, 2020. Please Ctrl+Click  on the titles below for direct hyperlinking.

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Practicing Media—Mediating Practice: Introduction
Kenzie Burchell, Olivier Driessens, Alice Mattoni

Conceptualizing the Doings and Sayings of Media Practices: Expressive Performance, Communicative Understanding, and Epistemic Discourses
Christian Pentzold, Manuel Menke

Managing Context Collapses: The Internet as a Conditioning Technology in the
Organization of Practices
Jesper Pagh

A Media-in-Practices Approach to Investigate the Nexus Between Digital Media and
Activists’ Daily Political Engagement
Alice Mattoni

News as Relational Social Practice: A Theoretical Framework
Stephen F. Ostertag

Anchoring Practices for Public Connection: Media Practice and Its Challenges
for Journalism Studies
Christoph Raetzsch, Margreth Lünenborg

Evaluative Practices in a Broadcasting Newsroom Archive: Culture, Context, and
Understanding in Practice
Asen O. Ivanov

Reporting, Uncertainty, and the Orchestrated Fog of War: A Practice-Based Lens
for Understanding Global Media Events
Kenzie Burchell

New Paradigm or Sensitizing Concept: Finding the Proper Place of Practice Theory
in Media Studies
Maria Bakardjieva

Beyond Bourdieu: The Interactionist Foundations of Media Practice Theory
Peter Lunt

Jumping on the Practice Bandwagon: Perspectives for a Practice-Oriented Study of
Communication and Media
Christian Pentzold

__________________________________________________________________________­­__________________

Larry Gross
Editor

Arlene Luck
Managing Editor 

Christian Pentzold, Kenzie Burchell, Olivier Driessens, Alice Mattoni
Guest Editors

 

According to the latest statistics from Google Scholar, IJoC ranks 2nd among all Humanities, Literature & Arts journals, and 4th among Communication journals.