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February
Natalia Hatarova, Strategic Communications senior at WVPU, has been awarded Webster University St. Louis’ President’s Student/Faculty Collaborative Grant together with her faculty sponsor, Dr. Anthony Löwstedt of WVPU’s Media Communications department. The awarded project is titled “Transcultural and Transnational Communication Values: Suggestions for Minimum Principles as a Common Ground.”
An early paper outlining the project was accepted and presented at an IAMCR (International Association of Media Communications Researchers) conference in Beijing (and online) in July. This spring, the authors will finalize a scholarly research article based on that paper and submit it to one of the leading research journals in the field.
The article suggests that not norms should be chosen for global communication value consensus, but ranges of norms, allowing for flexibility and cultural diversity. For example, hate speech can be discouraged, stopped and punished by means of communication ethics codes and other self-regulatory media rules and by civil, as well as criminal law, depending on cultural differences, as well as the severity of the threat caused by the hate speech in question. In the process of mapping those ranges, communication values are extracted with media anthropological methodology from ancient Egyptian culture, as well as several non-Western (Confucian, Buddhist, Aborigine, Cree, San, Māori, Ubuntu and Islamic) and Western cultures (Stoic, Christian, Kantian, liberal, socialist and regulatory journalistic values).
January
On Friday, Dec. 2, 2022, Bradley Wiggins, PhD, Associate professor and department head, will give a keynote address at the Digital Research Data and Human Sciences Conference held at the University of Jyväskylä, Finland.
Researching Memes: Challenges, Pitfalls, and Opportunities
In this talk, I will outline and give descriptive details of my own experiences in conducting research on memes and related digital content. My examples include my own experiences as a researcher, writer, and author of published works, including peer-reviewed articles in such journals as Discourse & Society, International Journal of Communication, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, New Media & Society, Social Semiotics and a book published in 2019 by Routledge. In addition, I will also include some insights from my experience as an author during the peer-review process as well as a peer-reviewer. In my talk, I will discuss challenges associated with researching memes, such as how this area could be perceived as non-serious. The pitfalls of researching memes include such potential dangers as attracting offline far-right attention from conducting research into far-right online activity. Finally, the opportunities to research memes explores the need for new research methods and/or re-orientations to established research methods, such as critical discourse analysis or quantitative content analysis. In addition, opportunities include possible extension of the original meme concept to include more performative aspects such as those on TikTok, BeReal, or Twitch.
In December, an article jointly written by assistant professor Dr. Anthony Löwstedt and media communications alumna Altijana Kapidzic (2020) was conditionally accepted by the Journal of Intercultural Communication Research. The article is titled The Communicative Aspects of Dignity: From Ptahhotep to Current Ethics and International Law. It tracks the roots of current conceptions of dignity by means of media anthropology methodology in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, and elsewhere, many centuries before the ancient Greek, Roman, Jewish, and Christian sources usually treated as the earliest notions of dignity. They exemplify dignity in relationist and interactionist terms by affirmation of freedom of speech, in gender as well as socio-economic class relations, and, especially, with negative conceptions of violations of dignity. They treat as duties, virtues, and ideals the opposites of humiliation, defamation, censorship, deception, incitement, hate speech, injustice, greed, lack of connectivity, and invasion of privacy. Transcultural continuity is demonstrated in the article, mainly, but not only, before or outside of Western culture, which has so far been investigated the most for providing origins of moral and legal dignity.
October
Bradley E. Wiggins, PhD, Associate Professor and Head of Department will be representing WVPU at the ninth annual ECREA (European Communication, Research and Education Association) conference in Aarhus, Denmark. He's presenting two papers. The first is co-authored with a colleague from the WU. It is entitled "Where to, Q-Anon? An Organizational Analysis of Digital and Pre-Digital Movements," presented with University Professor Jens Seiffert.
Wiggins will also present results from a research study of 4chan called “'Nothing Can Stop What's Coming': An Analysis of the Conspiracy Theory Discourse on 4chan's /Pol Board." Discover more information about the conference.
Abstracts from “Where to, Q-Anon? An Organizational Analysis of Digital and Pre-Digital Movements,” B. Wiggins, Webster Vienna Private University, Media Communications and J. Seiffert-Brockmann, Wirtschafts Universität Wien, Strategic Communication
This presentation will examine the conference theme of "impact" with regard to the conspiracy theory-social movement known as Q-Anon. Central to the tenets of Q-Anon is the overwhelming conviction of a secretive network of elite individuals involved in the trafficking, ritual sacrifice and even cannibalization of children. Further, Q claims that the primary architects of this insidious, pedophilic regime stem from politically left-leaning areas such as Hollywood, higher education, and most certainly politicians from the Democratic party of the United States. The impact Q-Anon has made, both in terms of politics but also by its insistence on alternative facts, suggests a deeply integrated knowledge of digital technologies for spreading their conspiratorial evangel. Yet apart from assigning Q-Anon a certain judgment or evaluation, this contribution examines how ideas emerge and flow across various platforms (both online and off) thus sustaining coherence to online communities, such as Q-Anon, over time.
Drawing on extant research in organizational communication and media anthropology, this contribution analyzes the conceptual links between Q-Anon and the so-called Satanic Panic that spread in the United States in the early 1980s. The emergence and development of Q-Anon is compared with a pre-digital social movement known as the Montagsdemos or Monday demonstrations that took place in and around Leipzig, Germany in 1989 up to and after the fall of the Berlin Wall. While no thematic link is argued between Q-Anon and the Montagsdemos, this analysis will delineate how the emergence of these movements and their respective impact on organizational formation correlate to memetic thinking. Memory traces, a concept associated with British sociologist Anthony Giddens, describe how human beings interact with social structures and how this interaction guides and structures human relations yet as mediated through technological choices for communication.
The ultimate aim of this presentation is to reveal whether shared networked logics exist between a well-known internet-fueled conspiracy theory movement such as Q-Anon and the arguably less digital example of the Montagsdemos leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The analysis relies on a methodology of grounded theory, meaning that categories of association will emerge alongside the analytical process.
Abstracts from “'Nothing Can Stop What's Coming': An Analysis of the Conspiracy Theory Discourse on 4chan's /Pol Board,” B. Wiggins, Webster Vienna Private University, Media Communications
This presentation reveals results from a critical discourse analysis of search-phrase determined posts from discussions on 4chan, specifically/pol, which features a space for individuals to post matters relating to politics.
4chan definitely has seen an increase in hate speech since at least 2015 (Arthur, 2019). If we view 4chan as an environment instead of a social media platform, although it is arguably both simultaneously, one may begin to understand that a given white supremacist post from someone with non-serious and ironic intentions may, however, encourage or motivate another to feel the sentiment expressed by the post, perhaps not available by other forms of media. With the involvement of conspiratorial thinking in posts and reactions to posts on 4chan, this influencer-like pattern may become more complicated. Due in part to the COVID-19 pandemic, conspiracy theories appear to be on the rise in such forums but also within the mainstream given evident migration from established platforms such as Facebook and Twitter to “alt-tech spaces like Gab, Discord, Slug, or BitChute” but also TikTok and Telegram (Baele, Brace and Coan (2021, p. 78). Echoed by Dafaure (2020, p. 15), “the advent of the Internet seems to have given a dramatic new momentum to paranoid mindsets.”
Given the influence of conspiratorial ways of perceiving social problems, it is also important to identify the conspiracy theories that may inspire users to take violent action against others, as in the above examples. Hellinger (2019) noted that with regard to conspiracy theories that may encourage offline violence, it is necessary to “identify the ones that should be taken seriously and how we assess whether they are malevolent (p. 56)." This contribution aims to explore signs and indicators of conspiratorial thinking in posts to/pol.
Specifically, the posts collected for analysis emerge from a web scrape of 4chan’s /pol board during the dates Jan. 3-9, 2021, days before and after the attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building. Two terms steal and Trump served as the initial search terms resulting in 663 threads and 160,667 posts from /pol. A critical discourse analysis investigates the presence and articulation of conspiracism in selected posts. Findings reveal confirmation with previous research about the apparent lack of ideological coherence on /pol yet also affirms the discourse of white supremacism. Additionally, a diversity of conspiracism functions as a primary form of communication on 4chan regardless of one’s loyalty to a particular political policy or entity.
July
Research by associate professor and Media Communication department head Dr. Bradley Wiggins was published as a chapter of an edited book called "The Pragmatics of Internet Memes". His contribution (pp. 64-84) examines the role of the "media narrative" that is often incorporated into memes, sometimes meaning that people might become aware of issues and current events first through memes, rather than traditional forms of news media.
Book abstract:
What is a meme? What is in a meme? What does "living in/with memes" actually mean? What do memes mean to human beings dwelling in a life-world at once connected and fragmented by the internet and social media? Answers to and ways of answering these and other meme questions that arise in social events represent human assistance in - or resistance to - meaning making. A pragmatic perspective on internet memes as a way of seeing social life experience offers a unique window on how meme matters in mediated (inter)actions turn out to be inextricably intertwined with human beings’ presencing and essencing in the life-world. Ultimately, this volume seeks to reveal what and how serious if not unsayable concerns can be concealed behind the seemingly humorous, carefree and colorful carnival of internet memes across cultures, contexts, genres and modalities. This book will be of some value to anyone keen on the dynamics of memes and internet pragmatics and on critical insights that can be garnered in kaleidoscopic multimodal communication. Originally published as special issue of Internet Pragmatics 3:2 (2020).
June
The paper titled "Transcultural and Transnational Communication Values" by Assistant Professor Anthony Löwstedt, PhD, has been accepted for presentation in the first panel of the conference Digital Governance and Transcultural Communications: values and strategies in an era of neo-globalisation, digitalisation and platformisation, to be held in Beijing, Sydney and online on July 8, 2022.
The paper explores continuity and near-consensus on basic communication principles throughout much of the world’s religious and philosophical traditions includes the ancient Egyptian, Abrahamic, and Indian traditions and Ubuntu, Confucian, Taoist, Stoic, Kantian and Habermasian philosophies as well as reformist socialism and political liberalism. They all either agree or do not express any opinion on any of the nine principles embodied in the International Federation of Journalists’ 1954 Bordeaux Declaration on the Conduct of Journalists.
But they do not disagree with any of them. Since international law was developed largely under the influence of the experience of the Second World War, it prioritized dealing with oppressive and excessive state powers, persecution, war, and genocide. Currently, we seem to be dealing increasingly with capitalism, environmental challenges, and the Internet instead. These precepts therefore carry much potential, for media regulation as well as for international law.
May
Recently, Prof. Dr. Bradley Wiggins, associate professor and department head, was contacted by Bored Panda, an online magazine which attracts around 100 million views a month, to get his response to a series of memes known as the asbolute unit meme based on his research.
Wiggins' typically examines more serious topics such as the presence of conspiratorial thinking in online forums and far-right extremism expressed through shared visual expressions. Occasionally, Wiggins is asked to give his take on lighter topics, such as the absolute unit meme. In a twist, though, his perspective is that the popularity of this meme is due in large part to Elon Musk, who personifies meme-ness as much as Trump did in 2016 and in the years since. Here's a quote from the article:
"It bears noting that when Trump was elected president in 2016, online supporters posted on 4chan that 'we've elected a meme as president', or something like that. That idea of a person inhabiting meme-ness (whatever that means) isn't that new. And one of the reasons why the absolute unit spread is due to the participation of Elon Musk in the meme's spread and remix, in my professional opinion."
When it comes to the "absolute unit" meme, the professor noted it’s a relatively neutral category whose main component would be light humor. "It's therefore pretty attractive, you can remix it pretty easily by applying the absolute unit phrase to any image, for example, that shows an exaggerated proportion and this then serves as the joke." However, there is a catch.
"Being comically oversized also implies the potential for body-shaming, or sometimes called fat-shaming. It might also point to other physical attributes that the person affected has little or no agency over. However, it's very important to remember that in the history of humor in general, sometimes a bit of pain is necessary for the joke to succeed."
March
Recently, Prof. Dr. Bradley Wiggins, associate professor and department head of media/strategic communication, was asked to give a research talk at the WU in Vienna on Thursday, March 24, 2022. The talk will focus on some of Wiggins' previous research in using games and simulations within learning environments. The reason for interest in his perspective is in part based on a well cited publication of Dr. Wiggins' from 2012 and others from 2016 and 2017. These publications appeared in the journal Simulation & Gaming, the International Journal of Game-Based Learning, and the International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication. The invitation for the talk is also due to the desire among WU faculty to incorporate simulations in their teaching.
Below is the abstract for his talk.
In the course of this talk, a clear and precise introduction to the fundamental aspects of games and simulations will primarily address their function within learning environments. An important first step is to distinguish games and simulations, and also to discuss inherent advantages and disadvantages of both as used in learning environments. One essential aspect to games and simulations not commonly associated with traditional learning process is an opportunity for the learner to fail. Sometimes referred to as the sandbox, the chance to fail without punitive measures can increase creativity in problem solving. Examples of both digital and non-digital games and simulations will be included. Several specific learning elements common to games and simulations will enhance understanding of using them in learning contexts. Such elements include: Kolb’s (1984) experiential learning cycle; a social constructivist framework; and, an often explicit emphasis on role-play and problem-solving.
February
Prof. Dr. Bradley Wiggins has been invited to serve as a keynote speaker at the upcoming Digital Research Data and Human Sciences (DRDHum 2022) conference to be held at the University of Jyväskylä 1-3 Dec. 2022.
The conference aims to bring together researchers who have different areas of interest and expertise to discuss the themes of data compilation and management, and to share their knowledge and experience of using digital materials, methods and data analysis tools.
Based on recognition of his research output, especially in the area of digital culture and political communication, Dr. Wiggins' tentative title for his talk is Researching Memes: Challenges, Pitfalls and Opportunities. The conference is planned to be held in person, but due to the pandemic may be switched to a hybrid model. The conference is organized by the Departments of Social Sciences and Philosophy; Language and Communication Studies; Music, Art and Culture Studies; and the Centre for Applied Linguistics.
January
On Friday Dec. 3, 2021, associate professor and department head Dr. Bradley Wiggins taught an invited graduate seminar at the University of Helsinki. The invitation was based on Dr. Wiggins' research, specifically the work conducted in a 2016 research article published in the International Journal of Communication.
That article, Crimea River: Directionality in Memes from the Russia–Ukraine Conflict, examined Twitter posts that addressed the conflict shared on the @RuNetMemes account throughout the year 2014. That study revealed a tendency of memes to inhere an explicit directional bias, with memes that support the Russian (pro-Putin) perspective as particularly vitriolic and memes that support Ukraine's independence (and therefore also a critical view of Putin) as lacking the same degree of vitriol but still inhering a critical stance.
The invitation was also based on Dr. Wiggins' book published in 2019 and research article published in 2020 in New Media & Society. That article, Boogaloo and Civil War 2: Memetic antagonism in expressions of covert activism, analyzed tweets before and after a controversial gun rally in the United States, seen as a harbinger of the Jan. 6, 2021 attempted insurrection at the U.S. Capitol building.
The title of the lecture was Political Memes and Visual Platforms and also included more recent research Dr. Wiggins has collected on the role of conspiracy theories in far-right activism online, in the US and also in Europe. The lecture was held via zoom.
December
Media Development in a Wide Sense
An article by Dr. Löwstedt has been published in print by a leading journal. It presents a theory about how ICTs develop in each person as well as throughout history. With a media anthropological-philosophical approach to ICT, four convergent developmental stages are distinguished and defined: pictography, ethography, phonography and prography.
They are invented/acquired in this sequence by human individuals as well as the human genus in general. ICT is understood here as the intentional use of artifacts (including codes) to access, transmit or store data outside of the user’s body, whether in electronic or non-electronic, analogue, digital or other forms. After a brief look at the natural preconditions of ICT, a (so far) uniquely human form of communication by means of lasting or permanent signs is identified as pictography. Pictograms were first invented in forager cultures, ethograms in permanently settled village communities, phonograms in the early cities and civilizations of southwest Asia and northeast Africa, and electronic programs in a globalized society under North Atlantic domination.
Print is considered as a corollary to phonography. Three arguments are forwarded as to why the invention of print should be considered as an event of secondary importance in media development. In very general terms, a possible future developmental direction is also charted. Anthropological contextualization, including developments of other technologies, socio-economic institutions and structures, such as nuclear power, metallurgy, land ownership, ceramics or class societies, is employed throughout as key to explain and understand ICT development, though never in a reductionist manner. The relationships between ICT and other technologies and with institutions are viewed as generally interactive rather than causal.
The recapitulation of historical/evolutionary stages by each individual media user is apparently upset at the prographic stage, as children now learn to use photography, video and sound recording before they learn to read and write, or even instead. ‘Leapfrogging’, particularly over the phonographic stage, is therefore considered a possibility. Artificial intelligence is treated as a great promise and a great threat, the latter as long as this ICT remains an exclusive medium. The socio-politico-economic inclusivity and exclusivity of media are highlighted. At first, in the form of pictography, ICT is an attempt to maximize intelligibility. Since the ‘agricultural revolution’, however, exclusive as well as inclusive media have accompanied humanity.
Lately, inclusive potential has grown again greatly through the accessibility, ubiquity, and convergent depth of prography. However, challenges to inclusivity, including new forms of surveillance, weaponization of the media, and widening wealth disparities, have materialized in the same context.
Löwstedt, A. (2021). Developmental Stages of Information and Communication Technology, Communication Theory, 31(4), pp. 758–778.
October
Sustainability and Communication
Together with Diana Igropoulou, one of his former students at Webster Vienna, Dr. Anthony Löwstedt has published a chapter in a definitive volume on the relationship between international communication and sustainable development. Selected chapters from the volume will serve as texts for an upcoming course in international communications (MDST 3260) to be taught by Löwstedt at Webster Vienna.
The authors of the chapter argue that media regulation systems must refocus their justifications and legitimacy on more than human rights, which – along with nation-state, governmental, and corporate rights – have so far dominated media regulation on national, as well as transnational levels. Löwstedt and Igropoulou recommend more globalization of media regulation and more regulative focus on sustainability by means of normative biodiversity and cultural diversity.
Cultural diversity includes diversity of media ownership and control, of sponsorship, employment, content, perspective, and opinion. But the regulative framework, international law in its present form, is also not enough. The sovereignty and the egoism of nation-states and business corporations and related, jealously protected secrecies, are among the main problems. Freedoms of information and expression, regulation of hate speech and incitement to violence, protection of privacy and other human rights are all necessary aspects of transnational media regulation, say the authors, but so is a new governance structure able to respond effectively to climate change and unsustainable developments on a global level.
Löwstedt, A. & Igropoulou, D. (2021). Between Rights and Diversities: Can the Regulation of Communication Help Prevent Climate Change and Promote Sustainable Development? Chapter 6 in J. Servaes & M. J. Yusha’u (eds.) Palgrave Handbook of International Communication and Sustainable Development. London: Palgrave-MacMillan, pp. 127-147.
September
WVPU at the 8th European Communication Conference
Webster Vienna provides insight into some of its ongoing research projects at the grand conference of ECREA, the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), held online Sept. 6-9, 2021, with research projects that matter and make a difference.
Department Head Bradley Wiggins plans on presenting an analysis of a sample of TikTok videos with the hashtag #comingout. TikTok has quickly become a platform embraced by LGBT individuals, but there has not yet been much research on TikTok despite it becoming the most downloaded app in recent years.
Titled "I'm coming out": Patterns and themes of using TikTok as a social platform for coming out, Dr. Wiggins' presentation examines the seemingly emerging and viral new genre of coming out videos, as well as general supportive commentary directed at the larger LGBTQ+ community. Originally launched in Sept. 2016, TikTok has emerged as one of the fastest growing social apps in recent years with approximately 500+ million active monthly users and 1.5 billion downloads in 2019. Its users gravitate toward the younger end of the spectrum with approximately 41% in the range between 16 and 24, with a daily average use of about 52 minutes, and the app’s availability in at least 155 countries. Zuo and Wang (2019) note that most users tend to fall into one of three groups of popular culture: producers, disseminators or consumers.
One of TikTok’s main advantages over other visually heavy mediums may be due to its emphasis on “people, highlighting the desire of contemporary young people to express themselves, helping them realize their personal values and enhance their creativity” (Yang, Zhao, & Ma, 2019, p. 341). This study will examine patterns of coming out on the platform as it appears to be a nascent space for LGBTQ individuals to express their sexuality, but also to receive both support and enmity from other TikTok users.
Further, this contribution uses qualitative discourse analysis to identify themes of solidarity, support, expressions of anxiety, worry, etc., in coming out and related videos collected for the study.
Webster Vienna's Dr. Anthony Löwstedt and media communications alumna Diana Igropoulou together present "How can the regulation of communication serve to help achieve more sustainable development?" a critical look at ways in which the media can play either facilitating or opposing roles in the quest for sustainable development.
To promote and safeguard sustainable development, the mass media need to improve in several regards. If not, they may soon find themselves facing charges of complicity in serious crimes (as argued by Hertsgaard and Pope in the Columbia Journalism Review in 2019). Not that the media will or should be policed about prioritizing sustainable development, but if media gatekeepers or politicians knowingly cover up (or lie about profiting from) unsustainable developments they may even be charged with crimes against humanity, for endangering the biosphere. The authors look at how media logic, media effects, mediatization, common journalistic practices, framing, cultural cognition, ideology, and prevailing political and cultural economies have acted and interacted to create a global media environment which is still unhelpful or hostile to sustainable development. Sustainable development is defined as development which does not result in or lead to a net loss of biodiversity and cultural diversity, the latter not only because of its importance for the media.
However, the media also produce crucial information, critical analysis, whistleblowing, positive examples of eco-narratives, and other hopeful signs that need to be encouraged and supported rather than held back by media regulation systems that encumber and present obstacles to communication, and thus also to sustainable development. These systems need to refocus their justifications and legitimacy on more than human rights, which have so far dominated media regulation on national as well as transnational levels. Of course, basic human rights such as freedoms of expression and information or the right to privacy need to be at the center of law and morality, but so do sustainability of development, biodiversity, and cultural diversity, including media diversities: of ownership, content, perspective, employment, linguistic pluralism and more. Anthropocentrism (like ethno- and androcentrism previously) is no longer sustainable, not even in the fields of media regulation.
In the long run, the authors maintain, rights will mainly benefit from being associated more closely with diversities and with sustainable development. According to Igropoulou and Löwstedt, like the First Amendment to the US Constitution (1791) or the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) until now, media law and ethics should make more use of and more references to the Convention on Biological Diversity (1992), UNESCO’s Universal Declaration on Cultural Diversity (2001), and the UN Sustainable Development Goals (2015), among other recent developments of regulation pertaining to both communication and sustainable development.
August
Dr. Bradley Wiggins, associate professor and head of the Media Communications Department, was recently invited to give a talk for the Centre for Data Culture & Society at the University of Edinburgh. Hosted by the Meme Studies Research Network, the talk is scheduled to take place via Zoom at 4:00pm (CET) on Thursday, July 29.
The topic of the talk relates to Dr. Wiggins' book, The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture, but will also include current reflections on this increasingly important and relevant part of digital culture.
"Internet memes often address a real-world event, and this means that memes often also convey a certain media narrative. Also, I claim that memes are perhaps best understood as a new form of art, and one that is conceptually linked to Dadaism, Surrealism, and related forms of art. I will discuss these and related subjects in the talk, but I will also include as current examples as possible".
In addition, Dr. Wiggins was interviewed recently by Doha News, for an article called "Are we meme-ing too much? How images became a key communication tool."
Here is a brief excerpt from the article: "In his research, Dr. Wiggins came across a Facebook group called 'Zoom memes for self Quaranteens', in which people shared content to cope with the sudden need for all college students to begin remote learning. During the time of panic and spread of news denying the presence of the pandemic, the students were able to continue to share memes about the outbreak. “I’ve never seen so far in the sample [any actual] questioning of science. So maybe we can view memes as educational. It seems that it is developing in that direction,” Wiggins said. In some cases, memes can even deliver major global news events to the masses, helping disseminate important information to educate and raise awareness. Dr. Wiggins believes that the use of memes to address global issues also can turn them into a measure of “micro-activism”.
Here is the link to that interview.
June
Insider online magazine (formerly Business Insider) recently interviewed Professor Bradley E. Wiggins about his research into internet memes and digital cultures, and how he interprets the memes from the Suez Canal blocked cargo ship, the Ever Given.
Dr. Wiggins is an associate professor and department head of media communications at Webster University in Vienna, and author of the 2019 book The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality. He remembers a similar instance of an innocuous news event becoming meme-shorthand for a social mood back in 2018, when a photo was released showing newly discovered skeletal remains of a man who survived the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 A.D., only to be killed by a boulder.
Much like the Suez Canal interpretation, everyone seemed to identify with the skeleton, while the boulder represented "the relentless news cycle" or "fake news and social media," Wiggins explained. He believes these moments occur when there's a collective need for a "release of tension."'
Read the full article from the Tuesday, May 20 interview.
In addition, Wiggins' interview with a reporter at CNBC has been published online: Listen here. (Wiggins speaks starting from approx. 1:47). Due to poor zoom recording quality, only the audio file was used.
At the same time, Associate Professor and Head of the Strategic Communication Department, Dr. Bradley E. Wiggins, published his paper named “#CivilWar2 – Instagram Posts during COVID-19,” examining the serious and strategic messaging on Instagram posts tagged with #CivilWar2.
May
"Fighting Censorship: A Shift from Freedom to Diversity"
In April, Anthony Löwstedt’s "Fighting Censorship: A Shift from Freedom to Diversity" was published as the opening chapter of Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship, edited by Mathieu Deflem and Derek Silva. It is a conceptual investigation into some of the most pressing regulatory communication problems of our time.
Drawing on his professional experience of working to counteract, contain, and minimize censorship, having worked for over ten years for the International Press Institute and the United Nations Development Programme, Dr. Löwstedt explores what must, should, and should not be said in the public sphere of information, ideas, opinions, and tastes. The chapter develops a theoretical framework for combating censorship not only with the legal concept of liberty, but, increasingly, with the principles of cultural and media diversity. A wide range of censorship is considered, from hard to soft, to self-censorship. In a chaotic, post-Cold War world of digital media ubiquity, alternative facts, inflammatory hate speech, fake news, media ownership concentration, corporate censorship, copyright censorship, and rampant plagiarism, the frontlines have relocated and transformed, and neither libertarian nor liberal principles are going to be sufficient to regulate the media in ways that will keep censorship in check. The chapter also builds a bridge to a closely related kind of activism, namely for biodiversity. Following an historical analysis of the development of the concept of freedom, he argues that the wider ideal of promoting biocultural diversity will be needed as a prioritized principle beside, and not behind, liberty, equality, and human rights.
Dr. Löwstedt has been invited to present this new approach to censorship and communication values in mid-July at the annual conference of the International Association for Media and Communication Research. The conference, originally scheduled to be held in Nairobi, has since switched to an online format, due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Löwstedt, A. (2021). Fighting Censorship: A Shift from Freedom to Diversity. In Deflem, M. and Silva, D.M.D. (Ed.) Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship (Sociology of Crime, Law and Deviance, Vol. 26), Emerald Publishing, Bingley, UK, pp. 9-23.
April
"A Meta-analysis of the Impact of Point of View on Narrative Processing and Persuasion in Health Messaging"
Assistant Professor Meng Chen of the Department of Media Communications has had a research article published in a peer-reviewed journal, Psychology & Health. The article, "A meta-analysis of the impact of point of view on narrative processing and persuasion in health messaging," reported a meta-analysis synthesizing experimental research on the impact of narrative point of view (POV) on message processing and persuasion outcomes in health promotion. Based on the random-effects model of 16 experiments, the results indicated narratives told in the first-person POV led to higher perceived susceptibility and identification feelings than third-person narratives.
The effects of first-person POV narratives would be more potent for stories written in the past-tense and depicted the protagonist as being similar to message recipients. The practical implication is that narrative persuasion's effectiveness is enhanced by using the first-person point of view, emphasizing target audience-protagonist similarities, and telling stories in the past tense.
March
On Friday, Feb. 26, Dr. Wiggins was interviewed by a producer at CNBC in New York for his perspective on the role memes played in the recent WallStreetBets/GameStop trading frenzy in the U.S. and what it could mean for the future of Wall Street as more everyday people enter the markets.
Producer Natalie Zhang asked Dr. Wiggins about the history of memes, what they tell us about today’s internet culture and how they work in forums/web-based communities like Reddit. The interview was scheduled for 30 minutes but ended up well over an hour. It will be edited and published as an explainer video, with a target length of approximately 10 minutes.
Similar videos produced by CNBC in this explainer genre receive views in the range of 140,000 to over 350,000. This was a great opportunity for Dr. Wiggins to relate some of his academic expertise to a more general audience, and it also provides some excellent exposure for Webster Vienna's position as a research and teaching institution.
Additionally, Dr. Wiggins only learned this week that an interview he gave a reporter at TIME magazine (online) in early, pre-lockdown 2020 has actually been published. Both an excerpt from the interview and references to his monograph, The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture are included. The link to the TIME article is here.
Here is a brief excerpt:
“Once selected by digital culture to address an issue or concern, the meaning is altered,” Wiggins tells TIME, noting that this is why certain memes have more staying power than others.
February
Dr. Wiggins' monograph, The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture, published by Routledge in March 2019, has been re-issued in paperback and e-book form as of September 2020. In a humorous series of events, Dr. Wiggins only became aware of this good news as of mid-January 2021.
Additionally, his article entitled #CivilWar2: Instagram Posts During COVID-19 has been accepted for publication by the competitive journal Social Semiotics(impact factor approx. 1.2). Once the final editorial processes are over, a link to the full article will be provided.
The abstract: The COVID-19 pandemic uniquely represents an unprecedented health crisis that has permeated all aspects of human society. Given the technological affordances of social media to disseminate fact-based as well as purposefully misinformed and/or conspiratorial information, this paper examines the serious and strategic messaging on Instagram posts tagged with #civilwar2. Results from a critical discourse analysis show that within modern American conspiratorial thinking and given the problematic politicization of COVID-19, healthy scepticism is replaced with conspiracy absent of theory. When extreme political and socio-cultural polarization occurs, this tendency is exacerbated by the bifurcation of meaning as expressed by those who seek to promote a particular angle of a given story or event. While this may be somewhat common in so-called old media, online in discursive spaces such as Instagram, the challenge to understand the mediated message is compounded by visual referents which are often remixed to include adjunct information, such as mashups, hashtags, inserted text or images, etc. Results include the identification of two main categories of Instagram memes tagged with #civilwar2. These categories are analysed following three primary characteristics of discourse: genre, discourse/representation, and style.
January
Recently, associate professor Dr. Bradley Wiggins was featured as the main guest on an episode of the new podcast series out of the United Kingdom entitled Highbrow Drivel hosted by comedian Anthony Jeannot. The episode focuses on Dr. Wiggins' perspectives on internet culture, including deep discussion dives into memes, fake news, conspiracy theories and how far-right movements find fecund ground in various online spaces.
The episode will be released on Jan 24, 2021, and this post will be updated accordingly.
Bradley E Wiggins, PhD has been associate professor and department head of Media Communications at Webster Vienna Private University since July 2015. His research interests include digital culture, new media, games and simulations, and intercultural communication. His scholarship has been published in competitive journals, such as Simulation & Gaming, New Media & Society, International Journal of Communication, and International Journal of Game-Based Learning. He has presented his scholarship at the National Communication Association, International Communication Association, Popular Culture Association, and at conferences in Switzerland, Germany and Turkey.
December
Anthony Löwstedt's chapter 'Fighting Censorship: A Shift from Freedom to Diversity' has been accepted for publication in M. Deflem & D. M. D. Silva (eds.). Media and Law: Between Free Speech and Censorship (Sociology of Crime, Law, and Deviance: Vol. 26). Bingley, UK: Emerald Press.
In this text, Dr. Löwstedt takes a fresh look at the opposition to censorship and reformulates it in 21st century terms. Freedom is not the only opposite of, strategic resource against, or antidote to, censorship.
This chapter argues against censorship with a Kantian-normative approach (the deontological position of the categorical imperative), using conceptual analysis, constructivism, and international legal scholarship, from the standpoint of a humanity-wide duty to safeguard and promote cultural diversity and biodiversity. Increasingly visible weaknesses of the argument against censorship from the utilitarian standpoint of freedom, a negative argument, can be avoided in this way.
Especially the neoliberal approach to freedom has no provisions against concentrations of media ownership, against corporate censorship, and only little against copyright censorship, which are all becoming increasingly acute. Diversity, on the other hand, both biological and cultural, is argued to be instrumentally good, and intrinsically good, but the latter only if balanced by equality of basic rights. The resulting moral and legal imperatives, then, are to support, safeguard and promote diversity and thus to minimize both censorship in culture and selection/elimination in nature, but only to minimize them, simply because they cannot themselves be eliminated. It is impossible to eliminate elimination.
This becomes especially clear when one considers self- and soft censorship. At least in the wide sense, censorship is inevitable — but sustainable development is impossible without strict minimization of censorship.
As long as slavery, forced labor, human trafficking, exploitation (also of nature) and oppression in general continue to exist, the ideal of freedom will be necessary. But current challenges to humanity demand additional ideals, and diversity may not only complement freedom. It may also take over some of the arguments for which freedom is now used, including arguments against censorship, not displacing freedom — but relieving it, supporting it, and giving it a partly new trajectory.
November
Assistant Professor Meng Chen in the Media Communications Department was invited to give a research talk in the Department of Communication and Journalism at Peking University inChina in November. The main theme of the talk was language use and its effects on digital health communication.
She first discussed one of her ongoing research projects which examined the global news coverage of COVID-19 using massive-scale data analysis. She also shared several publications that investigated how cancer patients used language to cope with the disease and solicit social support in new media.
After the talk, she had an inspiring intellectual conversation with the faculty members and graduate students in the department.
September
Dr. Bradley Wiggins, associate professor and department head of media communications, was informed that an article he wrote was recently accepted for publication by the prestigious and highly-ranked academic journal, New Media & Society and according to Journal Citation Reports, its 2019 impact factor of 4.577 gives it a ranking of one out of 79 journals in the category 'Communication'.
The title of Dr. Wiggins' article is "Boogaloo and Civil War 2: Memetic Antagonism in Expressions of Covert Activism" and was submitted March 1, 2020, underwent two revisions and received immediate acceptance on July 6, 2020.
The term boogaloo refers to a disparate group of individuals linked together mostly due to concerns about gun control and a desire for armed, insurrectionist violence in the United States. The group has been covered by the New York Times, as well as the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, among others.
Here is the abstract of Dr. Wiggins' article:
Internet memes are remixed images, videos, GIFs, hashtags, and similar content that usually incorporates humor but also some form of political or cultural critique (Milner, 2012; Shifman, 2014; Wiggins and Bowers, 2014). Several studies have previously examined the ways in which minority groups curate internet memes for the purpose of protest or other forms of activism (Frazer and Carlson, 2017; Lenhardt, 2016). This paper examines usergenerated tweets including any of the following hashtags: boogaloo, boogaloo2020, and/or civilwar2. The time period of interest on Twitter concerns any and all images posted between 15 and 25 January 2020, exactly five days before and after a controversial gun rally held in Richmond, Virginia. Drawing on Eco’s theory of semiotics, the results from a critical discourse analysis reveal a tendency toward a preference for antagonism as a means to consolidate identity for individuals engaged in online discursive practice within hybrid structures. Findings include the presence of deeply contextualized and situated logics within an emergent boogaloo discourse. In addition, the study found that hypernarrative storytelling serves the movement in terms of identity negotiation and consolidation.
August
Ground-breaking Media Theory
On behalf of the International Communication Association, Oxford University Press has published an article by WVPU’s Dr. Anthony Löwstedt on its website. The abstract and the article, titled ‘Developmental Stages of Information and Communication Technology’ can be accessed here. It will also appear in an upcoming print edition of Communication Theory, a leading journal in the field.
Among other things, the article offers a new, critical, and synthetic approach to media development based on a solid methodology borrowed from media anthropology, including cultural relativism and a concept of cultural diversification through reversible and multi-directional progress. It seeks to replace a so far dominant, largely Eurocentric and “agrocentric” paradigm on ICT development, which according to Löwstedt, assistant professor at Webster Vienna’s media communications department, over-emphasizes both the Greek alphabet and Gutenberg's ‘invention’ of print media to the detriment of ICT innovations outside the North Atlantic area.
Dr. Löwstedt suggests the developments of media literacy and artificial intelligence will also profit from the new conceptual, more balanced and more global approach to ICT development and its anthropologically contextualized positioning exemplified in the article. He adds that his 23 years of work at Webster University with its cultural diversity and deeply rooted ideals of academic excellence and global citizenship have contributed positively to the articulation of this theory and its broader acceptance and recognition.
July
Associate Professor and Department Head of Media Communications, Dr. Wiggins was recently invited to submit a revision to an article for New Media & Society, currently ranked as the top journal in the field of media and communication, with an impact factor at 4.8. The reviews were very positive, and Dr. Wiggins plans on submitting the revision by the end of April, though he was given until May 25 to submit the revised article. The title of the article is "Boogaloo and Civil War 2: Memetic Antagonism in Expressions of Covert Activism". While this by no means suggests a definite acceptance, given how competitive the journal is, it is an honor to come this far.
The abstract:
Internet memes are remixed images, videos, GIFs, hashtags, and similar content that usually incorporates humor but also some form of political or cultural critique (Milner, 2012; Shifman, 2014; Wiggins and Bowers, 2014). Several studies have previously examined the ways in which minority groups curate internet memes for the purpose of protest or other forms of activism (Frazer and Carlson, 2017; Lenhardt, 2016). This paper examines user-generated tweets including any of the following hashtags: boogaloo, boogaloo2020, and/or civilwar2. The time period of interest on Twitter concerns any and all images posted between 15 and 25 January 2020, exactly five days before and after a controversial gun rally held in Richmond, Virginia. Drawing on Eco’s theory of semiotics, the results from a critical discourse analysis reveal tendencies toward a preference for antagonism as a means to consolidate identity for individuals engaged in online discursive practice within hybrid structures.
Associate Professor and Department Head of Media Communications, Dr. Wiggins' full paper submission to the competitive European Communication Conference, administered by ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) has been accepted for presentation at the conference to be held in Braga, Portugal from October 2-5, 2020. The title of the paper is "I'm Coming Out": Patterns and Themes of Using TikTok as a Social Platform for Coming Out.
The abstract:
Coming out represents both an effort to communicate and to identify one’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity but also serves as a metaphor for the LGBTQ+ community and its struggles over time. It was perhaps first with Facebook’s Celebrate Pride page that started on June 26, 2015, and the addition of an option to react to a post with a pride flag button, which saw a high volume of individuals using the platform to come out (Wiggins, 2019). Incidentally, the date of the Facebook launch coincided with the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court ruling of the same date (effectively legalizing same-sex marriage). As a consequence of the ruling, the incidence of Facebook users coming out on the social media platform increased alongside demonstrations of support for the ruling and its implications for social and cultural relations (State & Wernerfelt, 2015). This contribution examines the seemingly emerging and the viral new genre of coming out videos as well as general supportive commentary directed at the larger LGBTQ+ community. Originally launched in September 2016, TikTok has emerged as one of the fastest-growing social apps in recent years with approximately 500+ million active monthly users and 1.5 billion downloads into 2019. Its users gravitate toward the younger end of the spectrum with approximately 41% in the range between 16 and 24, with daily average use of about 52 minutes, and the app’s availability in at least 155 countries (Mohsin, 2019). Zuo and Wang (2019) note that most users tend to fall into one of three groups of popular culture: producers, disseminators, or consumers. One of TikTok’s main advantages over other visually-heavy mediums may be due to its emphasis on “people, highlighting the desire of contemporary young people to express themselves, helping them realize their personal values and enhance their creativity” (Yang, Zhao, & Ma, 2019, p. 341). Through a quantitative content analysis of a select sample of TikTok videos and/or user profiles, this study will demonstrate patterns of coming out on the platform as well as the uses and gratifications implied in that action. Further, this contribution aims to use qualitative discourse analysis to identify themes of solidarity, support, expressions of anxiety, worry, etc. in the coming out and related videos collected for the study.
June
Dr. Anthony Löwstedt is working for the third straight summer as an evaluator for the Portuguese public science and technology fund, FCT. He is evaluating the 96 top applications in the fields of media and communications, political science, and law, as the first reader for ten, second reader for another ten, and on various panels for the rest of the applications.
The quality of applications has risen lately as the procedures and conditions have been fine-tuned to promote and support the best basic research in Portugal. A crucial role is thereby played by outsiders, able to evaluate the applications in terms of the international state of research in each field.
May
Assistant Professor in the Media Communications Department, Dr. Chen published a paper in the Journal of Health Psychology, an international peer-reviewed journal covering all aspects of health psychology. This paper employs computational language analysis to examine breast cancer patients' psychological and social adjustment along the disease trajectory. The findings have both theoretical and practical implications. Please see below for the abstract of the paper.
This article reports a language analysis of breast cancer patients’ posts in an online support group. Adopting web-scraping techniques, the study analyzed 27,078 online posts contributed by 1443 users along multiple linguistic dimensions to investigate the trajectory of the patients’ psychosocial adaptation of the disease. The findings suggested that breast cancer patients’ emotional experiences and adjustment in the course of illness vary from one stage to another. They reached the peak of emotional expression, struggle and despair, and self-focus at Stage III, whereas wiped out negative emotions and signaled a desire for connections with others at Stage IV.
April
Associate professor and department head of Media Communications, Dr. Wiggins was recently invited to submit a revision to an article for New Media & Society, currently ranked as the top journal in the field of media and communication, with an impact factor at 4.8. The reviews were very positive, and Dr. Wiggins plans on submitting the revision by the end of April, though he was given until May 25 to submit the revised article. The title of the article is "Boogaloo and Civil War 2: Memetic Antagonism in Expressions of Covert Activism". While this by no means suggests a definite acceptance, given how competitive the journal is, it is an honor to come this far.
The abstract: Internet memes are remixed images, videos, GIFs, hashtags, and similar content that usually incorporates humor but also some form of political or cultural critique (Milner, 2012; Shifman, 2014; Wiggins and Bowers, 2014). Several studies have previously examined the ways in which minority groups curate internet memes for the purpose of protest or other forms of activism (Frazer and Carlson, 2017; Lenhardt, 2016). This paper examines user-generated tweets including any of the following hashtags: boogaloo, boogaloo2020, and/or civilwar2. The time period of interest on Twitter concerns any and all images posted between 15 and 25 January 2020, exactly five days before and after a controversial gun rally held in Richmond, Virginia. Drawing on Eco’s theory of semiotics, the results from a critical discourse analysis reveal tendencies toward a preference for antagonism as a means to consolidate identity for individuals engaged in online discursive practice within hybrid structures.
Associate Professor and Department Head of Media Communications, Dr. Wiggins' full paper submission to the competitive European Communication Conference, administered by ECREA (European Communication Research and Education Association) has been accepted for presentation at the conference to be held in Braga, Portugal from Oct. 2-5, 2020. The title of the paper is "I'm Coming Out": Patterns and Themes of Using TikTok as a Social Platform for Coming Out.
The abstract: Coming out represents both an effort to communicate and to identify one’s sexual orientation and/or gender identity but also serves as a metaphor for the LGBTQ+ community and its struggles over time. It was perhaps first with Facebook’s Celebrate Pride page that started on June 26, 2015, and the addition of an option to react to a post with a pride flag button, which saw a high volume of individuals using the platform to come out (Wiggins, 2019). Incidentally, the date of the Facebook launch coincided with the Obergefell v. Hodges U.S. Supreme Court ruling of the same date (effectively legalizing same-sex marriage). As a consequence of the ruling, the incidence of Facebook users coming out on the social media platform increased alongside demonstrations of support for the ruling and its implications for social and cultural relations (State & Wernerfelt, 2015). This contribution examines the seemingly emerging and the viral new genre of coming out videos as well as general supportive commentary directed at the larger LGBTQ+ community. Originally launched in September 2016, TikTok has emerged as one of the fastest-growing social apps in recent years with approximately 500+ million active monthly users and 1.5 billion downloads into 2019. Its users gravitate toward the younger end of the spectrum with approximately 41% in the range between 16 and 24, with daily average use of about 52 minutes, and the app’s availability in at least 155 countries (Mohsin, 2019). Zuo and Wang (2019) note that most users tend to fall into one of three groups of popular culture: producers, disseminators, or consumers. One of TikTok’s main advantages over other visually-heavy mediums may be due to its emphasis on “people, highlighting the desire of contemporary young people to express themselves, helping them realize their personal values and enhance their creativity” (Yang, Zhao, & Ma, 2019, p. 341). Through a quantitative content analysis of a select sample of TikTok videos and/or user profiles, this study will demonstrate patterns of coming out on the platform as well as the uses and gratifications implied in that action. Further, this contribution aims to use qualitative discourse analysis to identify themes of solidarity, support, expressions of anxiety, worry, etc. in the coming out and related videos collected for the study.
March
Prof. Wiggins' book will be reviewed in the top-ranked journal Discourse & Society published by Sage. That review is expected by May of this year. Here is a short excerpt from the review, already accepted for publication and written by Dr. Andrew Ross, Lecturer in TESOL in the Sydney School of Education and Social Work at the University of Sydney. Dr. Wiggins was given a preview of the book review, here is an excerpt:
"Overall, at a time when we can expect to experience a new tsunami of Internet memes in the lead-up to the 2020 U.S. election, Wiggins’ book is a timely and extremely comprehensive analysis of this contemporary new media phenomenon. Underlying the detailed analysis is that when dealing with Internet memes we need to, in the author’s own words, be willing and able to step back and “consider what the big picture is, to see beyond the humor of the initial moment, to view a particular meme, its iteration, or even a series of memes as a discourse and not simple bon mot” (p. 143). In doing this, the discursive power so confidently and precisely detailed in this book can be felt by the broader digital community."
February
Developmental Communication Theory
A research article by Dr. Anthony Löwstedt has been accepted for publication with minor revisions by Communication Theory, a major communication journal with an impact factor of 3.395. The article, “Developmental Stages of Information and Communication Technology”, is based on a chapter from Dr. Löwstedt’s doctoral dissertation and presents a new, integrated and systematic treatment of all ICTs, from the Stone Age until now. With a media anthropological-philosophical approach to ICT, four fully convergent, developmental stages so far are distinguished and defined: pictography, ethography, phonography, and prography.
They are invented/acquired in this sequence by human individuals as well as the human genus in general. Pictograms were first invented in forager cultures, ethograms in permanently settled village communities, phonograms in the early cities and civilizations of southwest Asia and northeast Africa, and electronic programs in a globalized society under North Atlantic domination. In contrast to currently prevalent views, print is argued to only provide a corollary, or sideshow, to phonography. Anthropological contextualization of technologies and institutions and the socio-politico-economic inclusivity and exclusivity of media are highlighted in the article. Ever since ethography and the ‘agricultural revolution’, exclusive as well as inclusive media have accompanied humanity. Lately, inclusive potential has grown again through the accessibility, ubiquity, and convergent depth of prography. However, new challenges to inclusivity, including new forms of surveillance, the weaponization of the media and widening wealth disparities, have materialized in the same context.
January
Two Articles Accepted in Peer-Reviewed Journals
Recently, Assistant Professor Meng Chen in the Department of Media Communications has two articles accepted in peer-reviewed journals.
The first article, “From network positions to language use: Understanding the effects of brokerage and closure structures from a linguistic perspective”, is currently in press in Health Communication. The article reports a study investigating breast cancer survivors’ interactions on an online social support forum. Based on a large-scale data of 27,248 online posts and 336,151 received replies, the study examines on how the network structures relate to the types of social support received and to the language used in posts. It was found that survivors’ brokerage and closure levels were positively correlated with the use of positive affective words in their posts, a linguistic marker of well-being. Different network positions fostered different types of support in the community. The findings have practical implications for cancer support forum designers and health practitioners.
The second article, “Mapping breast cancer survivors’ psychosocial coping along disease trajectory: A language approach”, was recently accepted in Journal of Health Psychology. This study reported a language analysis of breast cancer patients’ posts in an online support group in an attempt to map survivors’ psychological change along the disease trajectory. The findings suggested that breast cancer patients’ emotional experiences and adjustment in the course of illness vary from one stage to another. They reached the peak of emotional expression, struggle and despair, and self-focus at Stage III, whereas wiped out negative emotions and signaled a desire for connections with others at Stage IV.
December
Zurich health conference
Dr. Meng Chen attended and presented her paper “The Impact of Language Use on Social Support Exchange in an Online Breast Cancer Discussion Group” at the European Conference on Health Communication held in the University of Zurich in mid-November. The paper sought to understand the linguistic features of social support solicitation posts in an online breast cancer discussion group, and their impacts on types and amount of social support obtained from peers.
The analysis is based on 21,952 threads made by 1,443 breast cancer survivors which elicited 257,130 replies from an online discussion group. It specifically found that using positive affective and future tense words significantly increases the amount of social support received from their peers. The results contribute to the current literature of social support solicitation by examining the language used on the quality and quantity of received social support. This study represents one of the early attempts to bring computational language analysis to the field of social support and health communication.
Accreditation Site Visit to Cyprus
Dr. Wiggins was invited to serve as an expert external reviewer on an accreditation site visit to the Open University of Cyprus in Nicosia/Lefkosia from December 11-14, 2019. The visit included a daylong meeting with various stakeholders at the hosting university in order to review two separate Master of Arts programs, one emphasizing Media in Contemporary School and the other Communication and New Journalism. Research infrastructure and capacities, experience of the teaching faculty, and emphasis on a practice-oriented thesis were major topics of discussion.
November
Media Diversity Distinctions
MEDC assistant professor Anthony Löwstedt and his former student, WVPU (international relations) and University of Vienna (anthropology) alumna Josipa Palac, saw their research paper “Media and Other Biocultural Diversities” published as the first chapter in an Innsbruck University Press volume, titled Das Ende der Vielfalt? Zur Diversität der Medien (‘The End of Pluralism? On Media Diversity’) and edited by Katharina Holzmann, Theo Hug, and Günther Pallaver. The chapter is based on a keynote speech Dr. Löwstedt held at a conference on the theme at Innsbruck University in 2018. Co-author Josipa Palac is the founder and president of the International Cultural Diversity Organization, whose main objective is to promote diversity, interculturality, and raise awareness of different cultural expressions and values in order to encourage the development of cultural interaction with the goal of bringing people closer together and closing cultural gaps. She is also the recipient of the 2019 Webster Vienna Alumni Award.
The chapter outlines media diversities differently from other leading concepts and theories, including the European Union’s Media Pluralism Monitor, the United States Federal Communication Commission’s Diversity Index, and Herman & Chomsky’s propaganda model, all of which undergo critical scrutiny. The authors instead distinguish seven different media diversities: ownership and control, sponsorship, censorship (in a wide sense), type, employment, content and perspective/opinion. As the definition of media is currently undergoing an extensive reconstruction phase, largely due to technological developments, they also provide additional orientation by means of a context employing the wider concepts of cultural, linguistic and biocultural diversity as well as some of the many ethical and regulatory dimensions involved. Finally, Löwstedt and Palac speculate briefly on a not-so-distant future world, in which the Internet penetrates the entire biosphere and the convergence of these two concepts.
Download the Innsbruck University Press publication, Das Ende der Vielfalt? Zur Diversität der Medien (‘The End of Pluralism? On Media Diversity’)".
October
Principles of Communication Ethics
The article “Do we still adhere to the norms of ancient Egypt? A comparison of Ptahhotep’s communication ethics with current regulatory principles” by MEDC research faculty member Anthony Löwstedt was published in Volume 81, Issue 6-8 of the International Communication Gazette, a peer-reviewed journal.
The article explores discourse ethics in ancient Egypt nearly 3,900 years ago and finds close parallels with current ethical values. One popular Egyptian text, in particular, is shown to contain all the values and norms of the ethics code of the International Federation of Journalists, the largest journalist organization worldwide today. It is also compatible with the present-day ideologies of political liberalism and reformist socialism. Communications ethics principles may, therefore, be more trans-cultural than commonly assumed.
In looking for origins, the historians of communication ethics so far hardly ever went beyond ancient Greek ethics and the Ten Commandments. But there are even older roots of (not only) Western civilization, and they are easily translatable to current regulatory principles that inform not only communications ethics codes and discourses, but also media law and policy. The Teachings of Ptahhotep can and should, therefore, be taken into account in numerous discourses that currently overlook and ignore them.
Unfortunately, ancient Egyptian secular culture has had very little backing in history. Neither Judaism, nor Christianity, nor Islam have had particularly nice things to say about ancient Egyptian wisdom or values. Many ancient Greek and Roman writers already also distorted or downplayed these elements in particular. This led to a kind of lasting blindness regarding norms that current societies share with ancient Egypt. The insights gathered may prove useful for current efforts to translate, balance and formulate global communication ethics, for example in the UN-affiliated Internet Governance Forum.
Kiev Site Visit
Also in October, Associate Prof. Dr. Bradley Wiggins traveled with Vildana Kurtovic to Kiev in order to promote the undergraduate programs in the Media Communications Department emphasizing the anticipated new program in Strategic Communication. During his visit, he met with over 70 potential students in three separate mini-lectures and received highly positive feedback about the programs and our line of research in the department.
September
Memes and the media narrative - The Nike-Kaepernick controversy
Recently, Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bradley E Wiggins, Department Head of Media Communications, Webster Vienna Private University, published his article on "Memes and the media narrative - The Nike-Kaepernick controversy"
This article presents the results of a critical discourse analysis of internet memes. This analysis considers the highly visual nature of internet memes situated in a context of meme-as-utterance prompting other remixed versions as memes-as-responses. Prior to the analysis an orientation to pragmatics as related to internet memes is presented. Following this is an overview of memes research and a necessary discussion of the role of media narratives in the construction and dissemination of internet memes. Finally, a series of memes tweeted in response to Nike’s inclusion of former National Football League player, Colin Kaepernick, in its Just Do It anniversary campaign, serves as the corpus of analysis.
August
Peer Reviews
Assistant MEDC professor Dr. Löwstedt conducted a peer review for the journal Media and Communication. In recent months and years, he has also peer-reviewed articles and papers for the following journals and research organizations: the International Journal of Digital Television, Political Research Exchange, the Journal of Digital Media and Policy, the Journal of Greek Media and Culture, the International Communication Association (ICA), the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, the Journal of Media Ethics, the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR), and the International Review for Information Ethics.
July
Meeting in Madrid
Drs. Bradley Wiggins, Meng Chen and Anthony Löwstedt, all MEDC researchers at WVPU, presented separate papers and participated at the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) 2019 Congress in Madrid, Spain, July 7-11. The theme of this year’s conference was ‘Communication, Technology, and Human Dignity: Disputed Rights, Contested Truths’. It was hosted by the School of Communication of the Complutense University of Madrid and was the biggest IAMCR conference to date with 1,785 registered participants from 83 countries and five continents.
In addition to chairing a session, Dr. Wiggins also presented in the Visual Culture working group on the conceptual linkages between modern memes and related expressions within digital culture and Dadaism. The impetus of this contribution was to elevate the importance of semiotics and intertextuality in order to discern the intended critique of society, politics, gender, sexuality, etc. embedded in a given meme. The tendency in such memetic messages is to rely on issues that polarize people or demarcate directionalities. The relationship to Dadaism is especially demonstrated with specific examples, such as Marcel DuChamp’s readymade and the work of artists such as Hannah Höch, Johannes Baader, Max Ernst, Hugo Ball, Tristan Tzara, Hans Richter, and others.
Dr. Löwstedt’s presentation was titled ‘Communication and Dignity in Early Antiquity’. It was delivered to the ‘Working Group: Ethics of Society and Ethics of Communication’ and dealt in detail with how early civilizations, such as those of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, Israel, and Greece all had something to say about dignity in communication, especially with regard to deception, humiliation, demonization, de-humanization, defamation, invasion of privacy, and censorship, i.e. violations of human dignity. Still today, this ‘negative’ approach to dignity – it is hard to know what it is, but we know when it is violated – is prevalent in philosophical and theoretical approaches. But many communicative aspects of dignity have recently been overlooked as dignity became mainly associated with bioethics. This paper was thus the beginning of an attempt to make dignity communicative again.
Dr. Meng Chen presented her paper “The effects of language use on cancer information diffusion on Twitter” in the Health Communication division. This paper reports a content analysis of cancer prevention messages posted on Twitter. Based on a dataset of 1,245 cancer prevention tweets posted by the official account of Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the study investigates how language use of cancer prevention messages affects its diffusion and audience engagement. The results have practical implications for health practitioners to design spreadable cancer-related messages by considering the linguistic factors in a prevention message.
June
Vetting Research Project Proposals
Anthony Löwstedt of WVPU’s media communications department worked for the second year as an external evaluator of research project proposals for Portugal’s public science and technology agency, FCT, Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, (the equivalent of Austria’s FWF – Fonds zur Förderung der wissenschaftlichen Forschung) from June 2019 to February 2020.
Dr. Löwstedt was again called upon as an expert on the media and communications, as well as the anthropology, law, political science and interdisciplinary panels. He was the lead reviewer for 12 applications out of a total of 76. External expert evaluators from other major European research centers, such as the London School of Economics, Université Catholique de Louvain, Cork University, Södertörn University, and the University of Edinburgh, were also on the panels. The procedure involved in-depth scrutiny, critique, discussions, and assessments of project proposals from post-doctoral and higher-level researchers. The proposals were assigned to three different levels: principal, assistant and junior research projects, and there were six experts who had a say on each proposal. Previously this year, Dr. Löwstedt also worked in a similar role for South Africa’s public science and technology agency, the National Research Foundation (NRF), Social Science and Humanities Panel, the Thuthuka Programme.
May
Webster Professor Takes Her Research Global
Recently, Dr. Meng Chen, Assistant Professor in the Department of Media Communications at Webster Vienna, had the notable opportunity to present at two high-level academic conferences on her research of breast cancer patients’ language use and its effect.
From April 19-20, Meng attended the International Linguistic and Language Studies Conference, which was being held in Istanbul, Turkey. Here she shared her research on how multiple linguistic dimensions in breast cancer’s online posts are related to their disease stage and clinical status, a presentation which was entitled “Mapping breast cancer survivors’ psychological change across four stages: A linguistic approach”.
Following this, Meng travelled to Montreal, Canada, for the International Network for Social Network Analysis Conference from 18-23 June. Meng then presented another research project, entitled “A linguistic analysis of the relationships between brokerage and closure structures with online social support exchanges”. This project, built upon the research presented in Istanbul, went further by examining the impact of network positions and language use on breast cancer patients’ online support solicitation. The goal of this research line is to gain a better understanding of breast cancer patients’ mental well-being and their online support seeking behaviors.
Dr. Chen viewed these conferences as a great opportunity to showcase her work at WVPU and research findings with the wider academic community, while staying connected and sharing ideas with other scholars in the field around the world.
Cyberspace Exploration
The Third European Multidisciplinary Conference on Global Internet Governance Actors, Regulations, Transactions and Strategies (GIG-ARTS), titled "Europe as a Global Player in Internet Governance", was held in Salerno, Italy. In its opening session, it featured a presentation by WVPU media communications professor Anthony Löwstedt on “The Role of ‘Europe’ in the Invention of Global Media Governance”. The paper asks whether global media governance is mainly ‘industry-driven’ or ‘state-driven’, and what roles ‘Europe’, itself an invention, plays in current cyberspace governance. Furthermore, the ‘-space’ in ‘cyberspace’ is investigated as a metaphor serving various interests, implying that parts of the internet can be claimed, appropriated, fenced in with firewalls, with owners sometimes charging entrance fees or renting out ‘space’ at a profit. It also implies that states or state agencies can treat is as the territory and claim legitimate authority, impose and enforce laws, and exercise surveillance, even covert surveillance, over parts or even all of it. The spatial metaphor may serve to empower individuals (safe space; shared space; space to grow), but it may also serve the existing economic and political order. The more we treat the internet as space, Löwstedt argues, the more it will become a space, with a center, or the number of centers, and with margins and fringes.
Eurocentric tropes and ideologies of discovery, conquest, appropriation, forced conversion and labor, and taming of wilderness exist since over half a millennium and now also make use of this metaphor. They typically and increasingly involve entrepreneurs as the rugged individualists and pioneers, the first to penetrate the wilderness, now at the forefront of the fast-expanding internet. As the ‘de-nationalization of media history’ proceeds, historians need to pay more attention to abstract agents, ideologies, metaphors, and images such as these. Europe often plays exemplary roles in furthering human rights, democracy, rule of law, efficient trade and financing, etc. with regard to the internet. But there is inevitably also plenty of ideological baggage involved. Especially the way the English, French and Spanish languages have been and are spreading may still often be considered as instances of imperialism. We should not forget that Chinese, Arabic, and others are also still spreading similarly, but the global image of Europe is a split one. Much of the rest of the world regards Europe in its role as a global player in internet governance with mixed feelings, and partly for good reasons. Dr. Löwstedt was on a panel with Stanford University professor Max Senges, also head of Google Germany, Claudia Padovani (University of Padova), Meryem Marzouki of Sorbonne University in Paris, and Jan Aart Scholte of Gothenburg University.
April
Soft Regulation in Antiquity
MEDC professor Dr. Anthony Löwstedt held an invited lecture at Egypt's Office for Cultural and Educational Relations, at the Embassy of the Arab Republic of Egypt in Vienna on the topic of his decades-long research into ancient Egyptian ethics and philosophy regarding speech, writing, and communication, dating back to the research he did for his doctoral dissertation. Titled “The Continued Relevance of Ancient Egyptian Communication Ethics”, the presentation covered issues such as the equal dignity of all humans, respect, commitment to truth, the free flow of information and opinions, hate speech, incitement to violence, defamation, invasion of privacy, deception, greed, and concentration of ownership.
The main ethical concerns facing media communications today are not as new as they sometimes appear, and a great deal, he argued, can be revealed and learned from this insight alone. The lecture was attended by, among others, Webster faculty and students as well as faculty from the departments of Communication Science, Sociology, and Egyptology at the University of Vienna.
February
Recently Dr. Bradley E. Wiggins, associate professor and head of the Department of Media Communications, was contacted by a researcher at the University of Sydney in Australia. The purpose of the contact was an invitation to have Dr. Wiggins serve as an external examiner of a PhD dissertation. The title of the dissertation is Intertextual Fragments and the Post-Meme Subject. Dr. Wiggins will examine the dissertation and provide a written review to colleagues at the University of Sydney.
Dr. Wiggins has published extensively on the subject of internet memes, beginning with the 2014 article in New Media & Society that advanced a central argument to view memes as a new genre of online communication. Using structuration theory as developed by Anthony Giddens, the article proposed that memes as a genre are similar to a continued conversation between and among members of participatory digital culture. System and structure coalesce as structuration: a process by which a system is maintained through the use or application of structures. Dr. Wiggins has published further research on the subject such as the 2016 International Journal of Communication article that examined the memes produced during the 2014 Crimean crisis, and a 2017 article in the International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics which centered on the memes that emerged from the 2016 U.S. presidential election. Most recently, Dr. Wiggins has written a monograph on contract with Routledge expected to be published in March 2019.
January
This January the Media Communications Department welcomes new Assistant Professor Dr. Meng Chen. The Chinese native graduated in Chinese Language and Literature from the Beijing International Studies University and holds an MA in Mass Communication from the University of Houston. After finishing her MA, she went on to teach Interpersonal Communication at the University of California, Davis. Additionally, she was a recipient of Provost’s First-Year Fellowships in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences as well as Provost’s Dissertation Fellowships in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences.
Last year Dr. Chen defended her PhD thesis titled “Persuasive Effects of Health Narratives: Examining Story Features and Persuasion Mechanisms” in which she investigates the strategic use of narrative power to persuade people to adopt healthy behaviors.
Her research lies at the intersection of persuasion, health communication, and language use. She is active in two lines of research: one examines the strategic use of narrative persuasion in health contexts. In particular, she tests how narrative features (e.g., linguistic agency assignment, the similarity with story protagonist, point of view, and protagonist competence) influence readers’ engagement with the story character and, ultimately, their health-related perceptions and decision-making. The other research line centers on breast cancer patients’ language use and effects on new media. Taking an interdisciplinary and multi-methodological approach, this research program explores the interactions among linguistic features of patients’ online posts, their personal network structures, and social capital flow on social support platforms.
Starting in Spring 2019 she will be teaching Interpersonal Communication and Health Communication here at WVPU, and will also continue to conduct her research.
December
Dr. Bradley Wiggins, head of the Department of Media Communications, has been invited to give a keynote talk at a Spotlight Seminar hosted by Webster Geneva Campus. The title of the seminar is Can Social Media Change the World? Dr. Wiggins discusses some of the factors that question the ability of social media to enact real-world change through activism and protest. Drawing on his research on internet memes and a discussion of the ways in which social media can be used for activist purposes including among far-right groups, he argues that memes and related viral content are extensions of ideological practice; this means that they may help to reconfirm bias and may serve to intensify personalized politics displacing, in certain cases, real-world action for online engagement.
The Media Communications Department in Geneva holds the Spotlight Seminars in order to address contemporary issues in the media, communications and photography. This special event scheduled for Thursday, Dec 13, 2018, will also celebrate Webster Geneva Campus’s 40th Anniversary and commemorate International Human Rights Day.
November
Social media seem to be excellent at initiating reactions to real-world events, especially ones that polarize, but exceedingly poor at following through on pursuing actionable social change, due to the lack of meaningful strong ties. Indeed, even as a phrase, social media is less accurate when used to describe what it is supposed to signify; arguably it is less social and more connective with respect to the role of algorithms. Internet memes visually reconfirm biases, allow for people to vent their anger, rage, frustration, etc. without the commitment of engaging in a social movement.
According to Dr. Wiggins, head of the Media Communications department, meaningful action and opportunities for social change, regardless of the desired political leaning, is being replaced by a hypermemetic spectacle. The confluence of reacting to real-world events, social and cultural points of interest, political movements, etc. and engaging in online networking means that online discourse is at once liberating and paralyzing. The former emanates from the vast array of communicative tools available to anyone with access, and the latter occurs given that the operation of online spaces is nuanced by malleable truths, tribalism, and emotional rather than logical reasoning. Internet memes are surely only one part of the discursive maelstrom but their tightly encapsulated visual nature is conducive to such a situation.
The impetus of Dr. Wiggins' presentation asserts a conceptual connection between what is commonly called or understood to be internet memes (or related forms of political humor and satire) and Dada and Surrealist art. His claim is that those internet memes which inhere a critique of society, politics, gender, sexuality, etc. (i.e. those issues which tend to polarize people or which demarcate directionalities) contain a relationship to Dada and consequently must be discussed. This work results from a multimodal semiotic analysis, and represents a section of one of the chapters in his book.
Specifically, the presentation examines the source and subsequent reaction videos produced as part of the #everysecondcounts campaign following the initial (or source) video America First, the Netherlands Second meme broadcast on the Dutch TV show called Zondag met Lubach. This paper adopts the perspective of internet memes as expressed by Milner, (2015), Shifman (2014), and Wiggins and Bowers (2015), as units of digital culture that function discursively and represent a new genre of online communication; further their function inheres something closer to an enthymeme, or visual argument, than the mere replicator espoused by others including Richard Dawkins who coined the term meme as a cultural corollary to the biological gene in The Selfish Gene (1976).
The presentation presents the findings of a multimodal semiotic analysis of the constitutive components of the reaction videos with an emphasis on the perspective that the videos largely adhere to real-world references to actual Trump statements, policies, etc. Thus, Trump, as depicted in the reaction videos and with respect to real-world issues, represents a kind of exaggeration of the exaggerated. In a very real sense, the reception of the Netherlands Second meme as a message, which is part of a larger discourse characterized by a shared sense of shock and/or disillusionment with current events, is contingent upon the inclusion of peripheral components of persuasion as described by the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion (Petty & Caccippo, 1986). As an example, the reaction videos-as-internet memes demonstrate a tendency toward dichotomous reasoning with an emphasis on extremes. This echoes Trump’s own rhetorical style, which favors short sentences, few polysyllabic words, and embellishing language, such as in the use of words and phrases like great, big, tremendous, huge, fantastic, and repetitions of such keywords as if to exaggerate the superlative. The videos’ use of language positions the subject as being of paramount importance to the United States with other countries (and planets) denoted as the worst, scumbags, losers, total failures, etc. Thus, the juxtaposition of good and bad delivers a polarized and quintessentially Trumpian view of the world which is normally expressed in extremes.
Finally, the presentation introduced a neo-Dadaist semiotic for understanding how dark humor and the distanced irony is used to communicate about and negotiate meaning when discussing such matters as the Trump presidency in terms of the initial Dutch TV show’s parody video as well as the resulting reaction videos-as-internet memes. In this vein the main point of this particular part of Dr. Wiggins' work is to highlight how in a world of perceptively growing disillusionment and retreat to our echo chambers and sources of confirmation bias, making and sharing memes may offer a way to exercise of the negativity away, but it also keeps us hopelessly distracted and disengaged from effecting real-world change and taking part in meaningful dialogic exchange.
October
In a new article by Dr. Anthony Löwstedt values and norms for communication expressed in the ancient Egyptian treatise, The Teachings of Ptahhotep, are compared to current regulatory communication standards, especially the International Federation of Journalists’ Declaration of Principles on the Conduct of Journalists, and to liberal and socialist ideologies. The article has been accepted for publication by the International Communication Gazette, one of the world's leading communication journals.
Titled “Do We Still Adhere to the Norms of Ancient Egypt? A Comparison of Ptahhotep’s Communication Ethics with Current Regulatory Principles“, the article refers to continuity and near-consensus on Ptahhotep’s basic communication principles throughout much of the world’s religious and philosophical traditions, including the Abrahamic and Indian traditions and Ubuntu, Confucian, Taoist, Stoic, Kantian and Habermasian philosophies as well as reformist socialism and political liberalism. Ptahhotep’s teachings are less in tune, however, with revolutionary socialism and economic liberalism and contradict fascism as well as other prescriptive elitisms.
Ptahhotep argued in favour of basic equalities, especially the equal dignity of all humans, and of respect, commitment to truth, and the free flow of information and opinions, particularly for political speech, much like social democracy and political liberalism do. He also set limits regarding freedom of communication similarly: for hate speech, incitement to violence, defamation, invasion of privacy, and concentration of ownership. The close parallels between principles of communication ethics in ancient Egypt and today are partly explained by Dr. Löwstedt with a look at similarly restructuring powers of innovative phonographic media (writing) then and prographic (electronic programming) media now, and partly with (indirect) influence. The article also asks whether the concept of ‘Western civilization’ should continue to exclude ancient Egypt.
In his conclusions, Dr. Löwstedt considers global media self-regulation based on these values and writes: “Ptahhotep may deserve to again become a symbol for continuity of civilization, as a phenomenon opposed to the commonly perceived (and invoked) discontinuity or clash of civilizations.”
September
Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, Assistant Professor at the Media Communications Department at WVPU, has contributed to Volume 26 of De Gruyter-Mouton’s Handbooks of Communication Science series. The volume was edited by Patrick Lee Plaisance, who recently paid an impromptu visit to Dr. Löwstedt’s Ethics in the Media class in Vienna. Plaisance is editor of the Journal of Media Ethics and Don W. Davis Professor in Ethics at Pennsylvania State University.
The volume, appearing this September, is titled Communication and Media Ethics and
carries the following publisher blurb:
‘Ethics in communication and media has arguably reached a pivotal stage of maturity
in the last decade, moving from disparate lines of inquiry to a theory-driven, interdisciplinary
field presenting normative frameworks and philosophical explications for communicative
practices. The intent of this volume is to present this maturation, to reflect the
vibrant state of ethics theorizing and to illuminate promising pathways for future
research.’
The abstract of Dr. Löwstedt’s chapter reads: ‘This chapter explores the global ramifications of media ethics and various moral conditions of globalization regarding information and communication. Globalization is considered in economic, political, social and cultural terms. All four dimensions manifest profound recent changes in forms and modes of communication, through electronic and digital media and archives, increasingly important economies of scale, concentration of ownership and control, spread of nation-state democracy amid trans- and de-nationalizations of power (with a concomitant net loss of democracy worldwide), old and new imperial expansions, as well as enhanced knowledge, research, connectivity, cooperation, cosmopolitanism and cultural diversity potential. The actual trend in cultural diversity, however, is bleak. Unless communications become more inclusive, the vast majority of languages and cultures will soon become extinct. A concrete realization of global citizenship could reverse current destructive developments, especially by means of global media ethics values, such as the maximization of communicative self-regulation upholding freedoms of expression and information (about public affairs), the equality of individual communicators, net neutrality, and a principled commitment to human rights, bio- and cultural diversity. However, these “proto-norms” only marginally overlap with – and sometimes contradict – the currently dominant, capitalistic regulatory framework for the global markets.’
August
Dr. Irmgard Wetzstein, adjunct faculty member in the Department of Media Communications at Webster Vienna Private University and senior lecturer for the Institut für Publizistik- und Kommunikationswissenschaft at the University of Vienna, has recently co-edited a book on refugees in Europe. The book "Refugee News, Refugee Politics: Journalism, Public Opinion and Policymaking in Europe" was published by Routledge, and is co-edited by Dr. Giovanna Dell’Orto, associate professor at the University of Minnesota’s Hubbard School of Journalism and Mass Communication. More information on the book can be found here.
Short description of the book: "The unprecedented arrival of more than a million refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants — plus the political, public, and policy reactions to it – is redefining Europe. The repercussions will last for generations on such central issues as security, national identity, human rights, and the very structure of liberal democracies. What is the role of the news media in telling the story of the 2010s refugee crisis at a time of deepening crisis for journalism, as “fake news” ran rampant amid an increasingly distrustful public?
This volume offers students, scholars, and the general reader original research and candid frontline insights to understand the intersecting influences of journalistic practices, news discourses, public opinion, and policymaking on one of the most polarizing issues of our time. Focusing on current events in Greece, Austria, and Germany – critical entry and destination countries – it introduces a groundbreaking dialogue between elite national and international media, academic institutions, and civil society organizations, revealing the complex impacts of the news media on the thorny sociopolitical dilemmas raised by the integration of hundreds of thousands of asylum seekers in EU countries."
July
Dr. Wiggins and a doctoral student from Florida State University, Jerrica Rowlett, presented in the LGBTQ division at the 68th annual conference of the International Communication Association during May 24-28 in Prague, Czech Republic.
The overarching title to their poster session was "Together: On the Construction of LGBTQ+ Identity Online Using Memes", and Dr. Wiggins' section focused on the so-called "Babadook" meme that surfaced in 2015 onward online as well as offline. The section he presented is from a larger chapter on audience and identity in a book Dr. Wiggins is writing contracted with Routledge. The book is called "The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality". Here is a brief segment from that chapter:
The "Babadook" meme originated from a 2014 Australian horror movie by the same name. In the film, a monster, known as the "Babadook", is summoned through incantations and the monster emerges from the closet to cause fear, anxiety, and paranoia. This sentiment is representative of coming out to one’s family and friends; metaphorically, the push to put the Babadook back in the closet addresses the anxieties associated with “being out” as an LGBTQ+ individual.
Introduce the internet.
In 2015 in the wake of the Obergefell vs. Hodges Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, Facebook added the "pride" reaction option, and around the same time, the "Babadook" meme slowly started appearing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even offline at pride parades.
Similar to Butler’s (1993) view of gender as performative and Giddens’ (1991) perspective that identity is a continuous process of reflexivity and that to speak of identity is a process of demarcation, deploying the Babadook internet meme represents a form of synecdoche.
It is a visual phrase used to represent a larger whole, namely the anxieties and pain
that may accompany coming out to one’s family and friends is similar to the desire
in the film to renounce and expel the Babadook. The adoption of the Babadook as a
kind of temporary representative of LGBTQ+ also underscores the notion that identity
is always temporary and unstable – it needs to be recursively reified in order for
members of the community to know with what they should identity, regardless of the
community.
Dr. Anthony Löwstedt's Contribution: "In the Communication, Law and Policy division of the International Communication
Association's annual conference, the largest gathering of communication researchers
worldwide, Dr. Anthony Löwstedt of Webster Vienna presented a paper titled "How could
global media regulation safeguard and promote human rights and cultural diversity?"
at the opening session. Also presenting on this panel was the world-renowned Monroe
Price of the Annenberg School for Communication."
June
Dr. Wiggins and a doctoral student from Florida State University, Jerrica Rowlett, presented in the LGBTQ division at the 68th annual conference of the International Communication Association during May 24-28 in Prague, Czech Republic.
The overarching title to their poster session was "Together: On the Construction of LGBTQ+ Identity Online Using Memes", and Dr. Wiggins' section focused on the so-called "Babadook" meme that surfaced in 2015 onward online as well as offline. The section he presented is from a larger chapter on audience and identity in a book Dr. Wiggins is writing contracted with Routledge. The book is called "The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Ideology, Semiotics, and Intertextuality". Here is a brief segment from that chapter:
The "Babadook" meme originated from a 2014 Australian horror movie by the same name. In the film, a monster, known as the "Babadook", is summoned through incantations and the monster emerges from the closet to cause fear, anxiety, and paranoia. This sentiment is representative of coming out to one’s family and friends; metaphorically, the push to put the Babadook back in the closet addresses the anxieties associated with “being out” as an LGBTQ+ individual.
Introduce the internet.
In 2015 in the wake of the Obergefell vs. Hodges Supreme Court ruling on same-sex marriage, Facebook added the "pride" reaction option, and around the same time the "Babadook" meme slowly started appearing on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even offline at pride parades.
Similar to Butler’s (1993) view of gender as performative and Giddens’ (1991) perspective that identity is a continuous process of reflexivity and that to speak of identity is a process of demarcation, deploying the Babadook internet meme represents a form of synecdoche.
It is a visual phrase used to represent a larger whole, namely the anxieties and pain that may accompany coming out to one’s family and friends is similar to the desire in the film to renounce and expel the Babadook. The adoption of the Babadook as a kind of temporary representative of LGBTQ+ also underscores the notion that identity is always temporary and unstable – it needs to be recursively reified in order for members of the community to know with what they should identity, regardless of the community.
Dr. Anthony Löwstedt's Contribution: In the Communication, Law and Policy division of the International Communication Association's annual conference, the largest gathering of communication researchers worldwide, Dr. Anthony Löwstedt of Webster Vienna presented a paper titled "How could global media regulation safeguard and promote human rights and cultural diversity?" at the opening session. Also presenting on this panel was the world-renowned Monroe Price of the Annenberg School for Communication.
May
In late 2015, Dr. Wiggins was contacted by the editors of a planned encyclopedia volume to be published by Wiley Blackwell. The editors asked Dr. Wiggins to write an entry on Intercultural Games and Simulations because they knew of an earlier article Dr. Wiggins published in the journal Simulation & Gaming in 2012. That article argued for a design model for intercultural simulations, especially digital versions. The encyclopedia was planned to be completed in 2018. However, Dr. Wiggins' entry along with all others was published in December 2017, and he was contacted about the publication in early 2018. The expansive volume is entitled The International Encyclopedia of Intercultural Communication and features entries written by experts in the broad field of intercultural communication.
Dr. Wiggins' entry was granted a length of 5,000 words and features an authoritative view on what constitutes a game, how this differs from a simulation, and what primary benefits games and simulations bring to the area of intercultural training.
Abstract: The entry presents intercultural games and simulations in the context of their use as a training and learning tool for the purposes of improved or enhanced intercultural competency. It also introduces conceptual differences between cross‐cultural and intercultural, game and simulation, non‐digital and digital. Metaphors common to intercultural games and simulations illustrate their necessity in the entry in terms of bridging the conceptual complexity of culture with real‐world application. Prior to a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of national and synthetic cultural representation in simulations and games, it is necessary to review a series of common intercultural simulations and games. Finally, several learning elements common to intercultural simulations and games are presented.
March
Dr. Bradley Wiggins, associate professor and department head of media communications, recently presented research at the 12th meeting of INTED, the International Technology, Education, and Development Conference in Valencia, Spain on Tuesday, March 6. His talk was titled “Challenges to Media Literacy in an Era of Fake News” and cited recent events such as the Parkland school shooting in Florida and the fake news that surfaced on various political spectrums.
The main focus of the talk was to address how and why fake news is received, shared, posted, etc. and what educators can do about it. He emphasized that media narratives are constructed and that highly polarizing topics are especially prone to fake news.
Dr. Wiggins defined fake news in two distinct ways, emphasizing that both carry heavy demands on our attention online and off. The first definition states that news stories constructed to confuse or appeal to specific forms of confirmation bias and/or opinion are fake news and their reception is dependent on one or more of five factors he outlines in his talk. The second definition includes its use as an insult. When used as such, fake news signifies an entity that does not fit within your worldview. Why? If the entity expresses a view different from your own, fake news as an insult can be deployed strategically.
Abstract: Challenges to Media Literacy in an Era of Fake News
According to studies conducted by Ipsos and Stanford University, individuals demonstrate a weak ability to discern so-called fake news stories from news stories based on real and/or evidence-based events. In the Stanford study, students from middle school to college were unable to judge the credibility of news stories shown to them. The initial reaction from Facebook was the development and deployment of a four-step plan to decrease the availability of fake news stories at least on its platform. The challenge posed by discussions of fake news centers not on ‘what to do about it’ but rather how to understand it from both ‘sides’. Invariably any given news story contains a specific frame. To this, I add the term media narrative within a specific and contextualized definition to address the challenge. Furthermore, I situate the term fake news historically but also with reference to the semiotic use of the term by President Donald Trump. I then suggest reasons why fake news exists today in an increasingly mediated environment where attention-as-currency is paramount to the online experience. Finally, I propose ways in which we can help our students identify and challenge fake news.
February
The Ethics in the Media class (MEDC 2200) will cooperate this semester with EdVenture Partners peer-to-peer program and participate in the Facebook Global Digital Challenge to create strategies of counterspeech to hate speech and challenges to extremism on social media. The class will also work with ZARA (Zivilcourage und Anti-Rassismus-Arbeit), an Austrian non-governmental organization, to help develop new initiatives to promote civil discourse and cultural diversity. Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, who teaches the class, says it promises to be an exciting exercise in public relations, in understanding and communicating while making a difference in the public sphere.
The student will form an agency, organize agency departments, elect leaders, and reach out and engage on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, and YouTube. Every student will participate in: naming the agency, the research process, generating, developing and selecting the marketing campaign ideas, contributing to the Creative Brief, helping with campaign logistics, completing a post-campaign wrap-up and analysis, and the final submission. The project will then take part in a Facebook competition with cash and other prizes.
January
Assistant professor Holger Lang was invited to represent Austria at the first European
Animation Award ceremony held at the Nouveau Siècle auditorium in Lille in December
2017 as a result of the notable research he has conducted in the field of animation
and film. This brand new annual award honors the achievements in various creative
categories in animation and it functions as a platform to connect and celebrate professionals,
artists, and scholars from all across Europe. Depending on the size of a country one
or two ambassadors, individuals who show refined experience and connections in their
local environment had been exclusively selected to join the gala in France.
At the same time “A ditto, ditto device”, an exhibition at the Angewandte Innovation
Laboratory in Vienna, opened to the public, featuring professor Lang’s 2014 short
film “re-animated Sparta”. This work was projected continuously in a looping program
together with pieces from other artists like Christiana Perschon and Dara Birnbaum.
On January 10th, 2018 Lang joined an additional screening of a second special program,
also containing this work. It was followed by a well-attended panel discussion and
a lively reception.
December
Dr. Bradley E. Wiggins, associate professor and head of the department of media communications, was recently invited to join the International Scientific Advisory Board of the 12th annual International Technology, Education and Development Conference.
The invitation stems from his own research contributions from the 2017 conference and his recognized expertise in some of the conference topics. The advisory board was created as a consultant body with the specific aim of getting new ideas and proposals for this conference. It is composed of selected professors and researchers from all continents around the world.
Dr. Wiggins will review research contributions and assess them in terms of applicability to conference themes.
November
Dr. Bradley E. Wiggins, associate professor and department head of media communications, has just signed a book contract with Routledge. The book is tentatively titled The Discursive Power of Memes in Digital Culture: Semiotics, Intertextuality, and Ideology and will feature chapters on current as well as historical issues on this nascent research area. Dr. Wiggins’ own perspective is that internet memes should be viewed as a new genre of online communication, and as such are tightly encapsulated discursive units packed with meaning and socio-cultural referents. Intertextual and inter-memetic references (or memes that refer to other memes) often are used to discuss or critique a person or event from the real world, but are remixed based on a particular worldview informed by media narratives. As such, internet memes have the power to inform individuals and groups about real-world events, movements, people, etc. through the merging of intertextual references and socio-cultural and/or political realities.
Here is a sample from a chapter that discusses political memes during the Trump presidency:
“In a vertically dual-panel image meme, Trump’s long-awaited meeting with Russian President Vladimir Putin is remixed with a scene from the Netflix-produced series House of Cards. Their fictional counterparts are depicted in a similar setting and demonstrate nearly identical posture and body-language, not to mention a nearly indistinguishable tie worn by Trump and his fictional counterpart, President Frank Underwood.
The capacity for individuals within digital culture to remix a scene from real-life with a scene from a streaming television series is at once sublimely remarkable and mundane. It is remarkable precisely because of the rapidity by which digital culture made the connection between real life and characters from Netflix a series, but it is mundane when compared to the strangeness that has come to define Trump’s presidency thus far. In other words, seeing Donald Trump as the U.S. President is more unreal than a Netflix series production. Reality has outdone fiction. Truth is malleable, and consequently meaning is negotiable depending upon one’s own ideological point of view. It is true that Donald Trump is the president, but the reception of that information is accompanied by notions of the absurd. I state this not out of personal conviction, but as a cerebral response to the shock and awe of the Trump electoral victory and the ensuing peculiarities that have come to define his presidency, regardless of any personal political leanings. In other words, times have changed, and the Trump/Underwood meme captures that brilliantly – and without a single unit of verbal text.”
October
Dr. Bradley E. Wiggins, associate professor and department head of media communications, spoke with science and technology editor Karin Krichmayr from Der Standard about his research on internet memes and fake news.
Krichmayr was especially interested in discussing what effects, if any, memes have such as the ones disseminated on the ÖVP-leader Sebastian Kurz’s Facebook page. Dr. Wiggins also discussed how fake news and political campaign work by emphasizing that if an event or story highly polarizes people, the tendency is to stick to their assumptions and not to question one’s world view.
Wiggins emphasized the role of the algorithm in the news feed of social media, especially Facebook, as a determining factor for what a person may know or be able to talk about on a particular issue, contingent upon a constructed media narrative. In response to questions about the role of memes and fake news in the Trump campaign, Wiggins highlighted that while we may assume that the internet connects us through communication technologies, it is also very good at fragmenting audiences.
Trump and his campaign exploited this by emphasizing emotional appeals, forgetting about facts and evidence especially if they conflict with the Trump message. His presidency is not about “post-truth”. Rather, it shows that truth is malleable, flexible, depending on what details the audience in particular knows or is willing to accept.
June
“Power and Media: Ownership, Sponsorship, Censorship”, a special double issue of the International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, edited by WVPU media communications research faculty members Dr. Anthony Löwstedt, Dr. Monika Schwärzler-Brodesser, and department head Dr. Bradley Wiggins, was published by Intellect Books. The chapters of the volume address some of the most vexing issues facing journalism, media governance, and media regulation in our times. It deals in-depth with technological change, big data, public and private spheres, corporate control, nudging, polarization, bias, historical baggage, immigration and discrimination, media evolution, and more.
Most of them originated in the Media Trends conference held at Webster Vienna in September 2015 and organized by Löwstedt, Schwärzler-Brodesser, Wiggins and former MEDC department head, Dr. Michael Freund. Contributors to the conference and the volume include illustrious media and media research personalities such as Aidan White, director of the Ethical Journalism Network and former general secretary of the International Federation of Journalism, Dr. Alexander Wrabetz, director of the ORF, the Austrian public broadcaster, Dr. Katherine Sarikakis, head of the Media Governance and Industries Research Lab and full professor of communication at the University of Vienna, and Amelia Arsenault, leading communication researcher at Georgia State University. Articles written and co-written by Drs. Wiggins and Löwstedt are also featured in the volume:
Löwstedt, A. & Mboti, N. (2017). Media Racism: Beyond Modernity and Postmodernity, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics, Vol. 13(1-2), pp. 111-130.
Wiggins, B.E. (2017). Digital dispatches from the 2016 US election: Popular culture, intertextuality and media power. International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics, 13(1-2), pp. 197-205.