The emergence of online information-seekers harnessing the aggregated experiences of others to evaluate online information has coincided with deceptive entities exploiting this tool to bias judgments. One method through which deceit about user-generated content can occur is through single entities impersonating multiple, independent content providers to saturate content samples. Two studies are introduced to explore how idiosyncratic indicators, features co-occurring between content messages that implicate a higher probability of deceit, can be used as a criterion to identify content that is not independently authored. In Study 1, analyses of a pairwise comparison of hypothetical reviews revealed that ratings of content independence were significantly lower when review pairs co-occurred in the attributes, text, and usernames compared to being heterogenous. In a high-fidelity experiment, Study 2 assessed if the effect of idiosyncratic indicators on independence is increased in the presence of multiple indicators, if it is attenuated with a high number of reviews, and if it impacts factors relevant to the choice selection process. As expected, the findings of Study 1 were replicated in addition to further revealing that the presence of multiple idiosyncratic cues yielded lower independence ratings. An interaction effect with idiosyncratic indicators and high review number was observed such that the effect of the former on independence was attenuated when there were a high number of reviews to obscure the presence of these indicators.

<div> <p>Work stoppages have had a recent upsurge in the American educational sector. Since 2018, teachers across the country have participated in record-breaking labor strikes using innovative communication technologies to skirt more traditional, offline organizing spaces in order to keep their organizing communication private and/or secret. This dissertation presents two studies that address the organizing communication done behind virtual closed doors as well as the public-facing strike communication intentionally meant for relevant stakeholders. In addition to this distinction between intended audiences, I also consider how differing legal contexts may influence the communication possibilities for teachers participating in a strike. Specifically, right-to-work (RTW) laws serve as a legal backdrop in both studies to examine how state-level policy helps or hinders workers organizing in the public sector by comparing one strike in a RTW state to another strike in a state without RTW laws.</p> <p> </p> <p>The internal organizing communication was done in private Facebook groups for both teachers groups. I used the two spectra from the Collective Action Space theoretical framework (Flanagin et al., 2006) to plot the internal organizing communication according to the posts and comments in each Facebook group. The RTW teachers’ internal organizing communication is near the personal and institutional ends of the mode of interaction and mode of engagement spectra, respectively. This placement indicates that the RTW teachers valued and utilized deliberative engagement in their channels of communication while also exhibiting communication patterns more indicative of top-down, hierarchical power structures. The unionized teachers’ internal organizing communication is closer to the impersonal and entrepreneurial ends of the mode of interaction and mode of engagement spectra, respectively. This combination of placements on the two spectra indicate that the unionized teachers valued equitable channels of communication while devaluing conversation and back-and-forth deliberation.</p> <p> </p> <p>The external organizing communication was observed and analyzed on Twitter. Building largely on network agenda-building theory (Guo & McCombs, 2011a, 2011b; Guo, 2012), I employed semantic saturation as a class of semantic network analyses to compare and contrast the public communication about each strike from each legal context. These techniques involve capturing the language structure used by various group to discuss the strike and analyzing and comparing how much of one group’s messaging ends up in another group’s messaging (Wiemer & Scacco, 2018; Wiemer et al., 2021). In general, the teachers in the RTW legal context were more effective at getting their messaging into the local press’s reporting about the strike. The teachers in both contexts also appeared to be communicating toward different audiences when specifically talking about one of their strike demands and that difference was also reflected in the local press’s reporting on each strike.</p> <p> </p> <p>Overall, this dissertation extends collective action and media effects theories by analyzing two strike events in two very different legal contexts that both used the same communication technology to organize their respective strikes. The findings presented here have important implications for organizing communication, interest group politics, and the role of local news media in labor actions.</p></div>

The topic of video games is expansive, encompassing numerous domains that have yet to be thoroughly examined within a scholarly context. Modern games, especially those in the adventure and role-playing genres, are oftentimes heavily laden with text, and therefore serve as excellent subjects when formulating hermeneutical models for simulated virtual contexts. Furthermore, many games belong under the umbrella of literary studies due to their reliance upon text to forge interactive, fictional narratives. While this means many games possess qualities that render them germane to academics within the sphere of English studies, they remain neglected outliers due to manifold factors, ranging from outmoded biases against the medium, to a lack of established evaluative methodologies. As a result, the field is largely bereft of consensus strategies for engaging digital works featuring literary exposition and dialogue in the form of on-screen text; however, existing theories, including more abstruse ones relating to ergodic literature, hypertext and cybertext, provide a foundation on which to construct new modalities for assessing texts that exist within virtual environs. Research indicates that audience experiences in text-driven games are markedly different than those offered by analog texts due to their interactivity and non-linearity, thus reinforcing the need for the expansion of existing models. Of additional concern, analyses of modern text-oriented games prefigure some important implications for the areas of pedagogy and textual information conveyance in general. These considerations all coalesce to illustrate the exigency for a new or updated theory for understanding and interpreting text in digital substrates, ultimately allowing for inchoate and emergent art facilitated by technology to be recognized as academically relevant.

<p>This study uses Incivility Spirals and Uses and Gratifications frameworks to explore how people discuss scientific topics on the social media site Reddit. Specifically, the goals of this project were to develop a new typology of online messages, examine how different factors influence online discourse, and determine whether uses and gratifications vary between Subreddits. The dataset consisted of comments on the top ten posts of 2019 from r/EverythingScience and r/Science. These Subreddits were examined because, although they both focus on science, they differ in terms of group rules and moderator style. Human coders and the text analysis software Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count were used to evaluate the comments on a series of dichotomous and continuous variables. These variables were used in a two-step cluster analysis to identify message typologies. Results indicate that there were three types of messages in the dataset: Polite Participation, Emotional Interrogation, and On Topic Information. Further analysis demonstrated that group norms and the first comment in a conversation impact the quality of discourse that takes place. Conversations on r/Science (the more strict Subreddit) that begin with an On Topic Information comment are more likely to be extremely deliberative, while conversation on r/EverythingScience that begin with an Emotional Interrogation comment are more likely to result in incivility spirals. Results also suggest differences in gratifications between Subreddits, with Redditors using r/Science for productive discussion and r/EverythingScience for heated debate. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed, along with avenues for future research. </p>

No description available.

<p>   </p> <p>Health-related misinformation presents a significant threat to public health and wellbeing. Misinformation exposure is associated with decreased compliance with public health initiatives, decreased trust in science, and greater levels of disease transmission. Unfortunately, fact-checking is not a panacea for mitigating the negative effects associated with misinformation exposure. The present dissertation, guided by the Theory of Planned Behavior, investigated across two studies whether providing participants with different levels of media literacy education could enable them to successfully determine news articles, on a variety of different health topics, contained either legitimate or illegitimate information. Both studies utilized a three-group, pretest-posttest, between-subjects experimental design in which participants were randomly assigned to either a brief or detailed media literacy skill promotion message, or a no-message control. The messages took the form of Facebook posts from a fictitious organization dedicated to promoting media literacy. The first study recruited 305 undergraduate students. Results from the first study indicated that participants assigned to the detailed message condition were more successful compared to the other conditions in identifying health-related misinformation. A content analysis of participants’ open-ended responses revealed that participants in the detailed message group were the most likely to utilize skills related to media literacy and were the least likely to utilize heuristics or to guess when determining whether news articles contained legitimate or illegitimate information. The second study sought to replicate and extend the results of the first study in a sample of adults recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. The results of the second study found that the detailed message condition promoted a greater ability to identify misinformation compared to either the brief message or control condition. Similarly, participants in the second study were most likely to use skills related to media literacy when completing the misinformation identification task. The results suggest that brief media literacy messages may be insufficient in enabling participants to successfully identify health-related misinformation online. However, more detailed media literacy education messages show promise for potentially limiting the spread of misinformation online. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed. </p> <p>  </p>

<p>The hyperpersonal model predicts computer-mediated communication can allow for relationships formed in that medium to become more intimate than their offline counterparts. Specifically, it combines ideas first presented in social information processing (i.e., that the volume of information exchanged over time within computer-mediated relationship is more important than how long it takes to exchange that volume) with the technological affordances given to the sender, receiver, message, and channel in order to create a feedback loop of assumed good intentions within the CMC medium that allows for online relationships to surpass face-to-face relationships in terms of their emotional intimacy. Existing research has shown that a variety of factors influence how people feel about an online friend, including the richness of the medium, personality, and the amount of emotional self-disclosure that had been exchanged within the relationship. However, studies to date have inconsistently measured self-disclosure and largely rely on survey or experimental methods rather than the examination of existing text-based datasets. This study proposes and tests a model that the relationship between an initial person’s emotional self-disclosure and the reciprocal self-disclosure the friend responds with in a CMC medium is mediated by the degree to which their language converges, or the degree to which they empathize with each other, and is moderated by the volume of text exchanged by the pairs during their relationship. The study uses a corpus of the text messages exchanged between 2,174 pairs of people. The results indicate that there is an indirect relationship between initial self-disclosure and reciprocal self-disclosure which is mediated by is empathetic convergence. Furthermore, the volume of information exchanged may also play a role in some of these interactions. This study offers implications and suggestions for refining the hyperpersonal model to be applicable in the current digital zeitgeist.</p>

<p>This research is based on Construal Level Theory (CLT) and explores the impact of inducing high-level vs low-level construals through various message content on health behavior intentions in the context of medication taking in depression and anxiety. In addition to the direct effects on intentions, the research also explored the mediating roles of perceived psychological distance and risk perception on these intentions and the moderating effects of age and mental health stigma.</p><p>Previous work in CLT suggests that concrete low-level construals, or mental representations, are likely to dominate thinking near decision times, but those who remain focused on more abstract high-level construals are more likely to follow through with good intentions and that a person can be induced to focus on these abstract benefits and goals through messaging. However, evidence that a person’s construal level mindset can be maintained over time to support ongoing intended behavior in the face of daily cognitive demands is lacking.</p><p>Messages were sent via secure text service to a mobile device twice weekly for 4-weeks. Results of within and between-subjects analysis showed that low-level construal messages have the greatest direct effect on behavioral intentions (BI) (<i>Wilks’ λ F</i>=11.591, <i>p</i><.001, <i>η</i>^<em>2</em>=.056) and actual medication taking behavior (<i>Wilks’ λ</i> <i>F</i>=2.979, <i>p</i>=.051, <i>η</i>^<em>2</em>=.271) as compared to controls. Significant changes were also seen in perceived social distance to a future risk (SD) (<i>Wilks’ λ F</i>=61.654, <i>p</i><.001, <i>η</i>^<em>2</em>=.240) and overall risk perception (RP) (<i>Wilks’ λ</i> <i>F</i>=3.393, <i>p</i>=.019, <i>η</i>^<em>2</em>=.058) over the 4-week study vs controls, but no mediation effect was detected between messaging, SD, or RP and BI. Finally, mental health stigma (MHS) was seen to moderate the direct effect of the messaging on BI (<i>F</i>=2.701, <i>p</i>=.048, <i>R</i>^<em>2</em><i>chng</i>=.043).</p><p>Results suggest text messages delivered over time can positively impact treatment adherence intention, behavior, and health attitudes in patients with depression and anxiety. In addition, the construal level focus of the messages is likely to impact those outcomes differentially in various patient groups.</p>

<p>  </p> <p>Science by its very nature is a networked discipline. Experiments and research build off of past experiments and research. Labs are collaborative spaces where many individuals work together with an array of technologies and other infrastructural elements. Much of the work of network building in science is done online as scientists communicate with each other and with the public on platforms like Twitter. But how do science communicators work in these online, digital spaces to build their networks and communicate? What kinds of rhetorical choices do science communicators make when they share research or reach out to connect with others? How do social media, networking, and other technologies influence those choices? What kinds of networks are created in these online, public discussions? In this study, I draw from actor-network theory and assemblage theory methodologies to begin answering these questions. Using snowball sampling, I recruited 12 climate science communicators from three network clusters: Purdue scientists, scientists whose work was highlighted by the nonprofit Black in Environment, and science writers for NASA. Drawing from choices I observed in the Twitter writing of participants, I then spoke with each participant in a discourse-based interview, inviting them to reflect on the choices they made as they wrote online. </p> <p><br></p> <p>The resulting conversation indicated the nonhuman (such as technologies) and human influences on their online discourse. Our discussions also revealed how participants used rhetorical strategies around identification and emotion to better appeal to their specific audiences. With identification, they not only asked themselves how an audience might react to their writing, but also engaged in internal dialogue with their imagined audiences and used conversational language. With emotion, participants emphasized the importance of humor and positivity as strategies by which to make online spaces more appealing and welcoming. This study offers four takeaways from the data: (1) science communicators should be aware of and take control of the networks that surround them; (2) public science communication should still be specific and directed at smaller audiences; (3) science communication—especially in online public spheres like Twitter—should not shy away from engaging with emotion; and (4) those of us who teach writing can (and should) teach writing as a networked process. </p>

<p dir="ltr">This study conducts a comprehensive multimodal analysis of online food reaction videos (OFRV), uploaded by Buzzfeed, featuring Americans consuming and engaging with East Asian foods. Employing social semiotic theory, Orientalism, and colonialist discourses as theoretical lenses, this research aims to discern how these videos contribute to narratives that perpetuate the orientalized view that East Asian culture is fundamentally different from American culture and examine how these narratives are constructed multimodally via the YouTube platform. The methodological approach involves moment analysis, multimodal transcription, and in-depth analysis of selected moments to unravel narrative patterns and the various multimodal methods employed. Findings reveal pervasive decontextualization, stigmatizing, and an us vs. them paradigm surrounding the food, which reinforces orientalized portrayals. The study identifies distinct narrative patterns such as savagery, strangeness, sickness, and fear surrounding representations of Asian food, highlighting the multifaceted ways these narratives are constructed. The term "gastronomic orientalism" emerges from the analysis, encapsulating the complex process by which these videos utilize food representation to create an oriental narrative. This paper not only illuminates the multimodal construction of gastronomic orientalism but also contributes to future research by introducing a qualitative analysis method. The findings from this research suggest that media producers should prioritize cultural sensitivity and inclusivity to counter othering narratives against Asians in online media. Additionally, it suggests that future studies delve into more diversified video content and incorporate quantitative methods to yield more generalizable findings on cultural representation narratives.</p>