Communication

This case study examined the effects of equivocation in sport communication. U.S. National Football League quarterback Tom Brady held a press conference in January 2015 during a scandal. The author experimentally manipulated versions of the press conference, one with equivocal parts included (e.g., "I don't know, I have no idea"), and one with those parts removed. Outcome measures included source credibility and perceptions of dodging questions. When Brady equivocated, participants perceived him to have more goodwill. Furthermore, his equivocal answers were not perceived as dodging the questions. This case study helps extend predictions of strategic ambiguity and equivocation theory into the field of sport communication.

 

 

We live in a world increasingly ruled by technology; we seem as governed by technology as we do by laws and regulations. Frighteningly often, the influence of technology in and on our lives goes completely unchallenged by citizens and governments. We comfort ourselves with the soothing refrain that technology has no morals and can display no prejudice, and it's only the users of technology who distort certain aspects of it. But is this statement actually true? Dr Robert Smith thinks it is dangerously untrue in the modern era. Having worked in the field of artificial intelligence for over 30 years, Smith reveals the mounting evidence that the mechanical actors in our lives do indeed have, or at least express, morals: they're just not the morals of the progressive modern society that we imagined we were moving towards. Instead, as we are just beginning to see - in the US elections and Brexit to name but a few - there are increasing incidences of machine bigotry, greed and the crass manipulation of our basest instincts. It is easy to assume that these are the result of programmer prejudices or the product of dark forces manipulating the masses through the network of the Internet. But what if there is something more fundamental and explicitly mechanical at play, something inherent within technology itself? This book demonstrates how non-scientific ideas have been encoded deep into our technological infrastructure. Offering a rigorous, fresh perspective on how technology has brought us to this place,Rage Inside the Machine challenges the long-held assumption that technology is an apolitical and amoral force. Shedding light on little-known historical stories and investigating the complex connections between scientific philosophy, institutional prejudice and new technology, this book offers a new, honest and more truly scientific vision of ourselves.

How black Americans use digital networks to organize and cultivate solidarity Unrest gripped Ferguson, Missouri, after Mike Brown, an unarmed black teenager, was shot and killed by Officer Darren Wilson in August 2014. Many black Americans turned to their digital and social media networks to circulate information, cultivate solidarity, and organize during that tumultuous moment. While Ferguson and the subsequent protests made black digital networks visible to mainstream media, these networks did not coalesce overnight. They were built and maintained over years through common, everyday use. Beyond Hashtags explores these everyday practices and their relationship to larger social issues through an in-depth analysis of a trans-platform network of black American digital and social media users and content creators. In the crucial years leading up to the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives, black Americans used digital networks not only to cope with day-to-day experiences of racism, but also as an incubator for the debates that have since exploded onto the national stage. Beyond Hashtags tells the story of an influential subsection of these networks, an assemblage of podcasting, independent media, Instagram, Vine, Facebook, and the network of Twitter users that has come to be known as "Black Twitter." Florini looks at how black Americans use these technologies often simultaneously to create a space to reassert their racial identities, forge community, organize politically, and create alternative media representations and news sources. Beyond Hashtags demonstrates how much insight marginalized users have into technology.

The lure of big data and analytics has produced new partnerships between news media and social media and consequently a fragmentation of digital journalism. The era is coupled with the rise in fake news and controversial data sharing. However, creative mobile reporting and civilian drones setnew standards for journalist during the European asylum seeker crisis. Yet the focus on data and remote cloud servers continues to dominate online news and journalism, alongside new semantic models for data personalization. News tags that define concepts within a news story to assist search, are nowmonetized abstractions in accelerated data processing that enables automation and feeds advertising. Can journalism compete with this by defining its own concepts with ethical values named and embedded in algorithms? Can machines make sense of the world in the same way as a traditional journalist?In this book, Cate Dowd analyzes the tasks and ethics of journalists and questions how intelligent machines could simulate ethical human behaviors to better understand the dizzy post-human world of online data. Looking to digital journalism and multi-platform news media, from studios and integratedmedia systems to mobile reporting in the field, Dowd assesses how data and digital technology has impacted on journalism over the past decade.Dowd's research is informed by in-depth participation with investigative journalists, including images drawn and annotated by industry experts to present key journalism concepts, priorities, and values. Chapters explore approaches for the elicitation of vocabulary for journalism and design methodsto embed values and ethics into algorithms for the era of automation and big data. Digital Journalism, Drones, and Automation provides insights into the lasting values of journalism processes and equips readers interested in entering or understanding online data and news media with much neededcontext and wisdom.