Search results

This study examines how media use for news can relate to expressive and collective participation through the mediating role of political talk and internal and external political efficacy. Based on two cross-sectional analyses and one autoregressive analyses of the data obtained from a two-wave panel survey during the 2012 presidential campaign in South Korea, this study finds that political talk and internal political efficacy mediate the association between news attention and expressive participation, while external political efficacy does not. Political talk and internal political efficacy jointly mediate the impact of news attention on expressive participation. The analysis also reveals that social media news attention and internal political efficacy play a bigger role in connecting news attention and political participation than traditional news attention, external political efficacy, and political talk.

This study examines what roles citizen news podcasts of South Korea play, based on two unique concepts—carnivalism and engaging journalism. To this end, the current study content analysed the content of 11 citizen news podcasts that are most popular in this country and conducted interviews with 10 professional journalists. The findings reveal that through the use of comedic techniques such as humour, parody, and satire, the discourse of citizen podcasts transgresses existing social and cultural hierarchies and subverts a range of authoritative discourses by mainstream media. The analysis also finds that the discourse in citizen news podcasts takes on the nature of engaging journalism, which motivates ordinary individuals who are left largely disillusioned from mainstream journalism to engage in elite-challenging political action. Professional journalists admitted that citizen news podcasts provide an opportunity to re-evaluate the journalism norms and practices of South Korea.

This study examines how using different types of social media for news predicts political knowledge. Drawing on a national survey, the present study finds that blogs and Twitter are positive predictors of political issue knowledge, while Facebook and YouTube are not. Using blogs for news predicts political personalities and process knowledge, but using Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube for news does not. Additionally, the present study reveals that political talk offline and online reinforces the impact of social media use for news on political issue knowledge.

This study utilizes the beheading of two American journalists, James Foley and Steven Sotloff by Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) in 2014. The content analyses of 980 comments from three political blogs (Townhall - conservative, Daily Kos - liberal, and The Moderate Voice - moderate) reveal that the majority of blog users exhibited their subjective thoughts and opinions rather than engaging in deliberative communication based on deep reasoning. Blog users also did not show a reciprocal attitude, mostly ignoring different voices. Most comments were made based on one-sided perspectives.

This paper focuses on the blurring boundary between the "human self" and the smartphone, using interviews with 60 heavy smartphone users. The interview responses reveal three types of self-extension via the smartphone— functional extension, anthropomorphic extension, and ontological extension. Smartphone users assert that their phone has become an indispensable part of their self and thus influences their identity and sense of being in both positive and negative ways.