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The ability of social media users to express themselves online should be influential for opinion formation, including potential polarization. Still, little is known about how expression interacts with users’ psychological predispositions, especially for controversial topics. The potential for expression to relate to support for social media-based r...
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... The Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (Valkenburg & Peter, 2013) posits that potential impact of and responses to media are contingent on individual differences. The themes of cultural socialization and processing discrimination may dovetail with other recent work in providing insight into the potential mechanisms relating digital media to individual differences (i.e., racial identity) in media impacts and responses (e.g., Coles & Saleem, 2021). Finally, these findings also contribute to literature exploring the potential affordances offered by digital media. ...
This qualitative study examined how Black college students use digital media for peer racial socialization (PRS) within digital environments (e.g., social media, text messaging, and online). Participants were 20 Black undergraduate students between the ages 18 and 25, attending a predominantly White institution. Using the thematic analysis approach, in-depth individual interviews were coded using inductive methods. PRS was revealed to occur in multiple ways, including (a) cultural socialization, (b) cultivating community, (c) processing discrimination, and (d) encouraging resilience. Findings highlight the significance of digital media in supporting social development among Black college students. These results highlight need for continued scholarship examining the processes underlying PRS across multiple domains, and understanding how Black college students are agents supporting their own racial socialization and healthy development with digital media.
... It was shown that people became further entrenched in their preconceived beliefs in the case of a contradicting opinion from a subject matter expert celebrity. In [131], the authors showed that feelings of resentment were the most significant predictor of the Black Lives Matter movement's support. Low-resentment individuals who expressed themselves on social media more frequently were less supportive. ...
Fake news has been linked to the rise of psychological disorders, the increased disbelief in science, and the erosion of democracy and freedom of speech. Online social networks are arguably the main vehicle of fake news spread. Educating online users with explanations is one way of preventing this spread. Understanding how online belief is formed and changed may offer a roadmap for such education. The literature includes surveys addressing online opinion formation and polarization; however, they usually address a single domain, such as politics, online marketing, health, and education, and do not make online belief change their primary focus. Unlike other studies, this work is the first to present a cross-domain systematic literature review of user studies, methodologies, and opinion model dimensions. It also includes the orthogonal polarization dimension, focusing on online belief change. We include peer-reviewed works published in 2020 and later found in four relevant scientific databases, excluding theoretical publications that did not offer validation through dataset experimentation or simulation. Bibliometric networks were constructed for better visualization, leading to the organization of the papers that passed the review criteria into a comprehensive taxonomy. Our findings show that a person’s individuality is the most significant influential force in online belief change. We show that online arguments that balance facts with emotionally evoking content are more efficient in changing their beliefs. Polarization was shown to be cross-correlated among multiple subjects, with politics being the central polarization pole. Polarized online networks start as networks with high opinion segregation, evolve into subnetworks of consensus, and achieve polarization around social network influencers. Trust in the information source was demonstrated to be the chief psychological construct that drives online users to polarization. This shows that changing the beliefs of influencers may create a positive snowball effect in changing the beliefs of polarized online social network users. These findings lay the groundwork for further research on using personalized explanations to reduce the harmful effects of online fake news on social networks.
... In short, the model comprises four related propositions, that are represented in Figure 1: (1) "Media effects are conditional" and depend on three categories of differential susceptibility variables: dispositional (e.g., personality, gender), developmental (e.g., cognitive development), and social (e.g., family norms); (2) "Media effects are indirect"they are mediated by cognitive, emotional, and physiological response states that occur during media use; (3) The three types of differential susceptibility factors have two roles: they predict media choice and level of exposure and moderate their impact on the associated response states; (4) Media effects are part of a feedback loopthey reciprocally affect the differential susceptibility variables, media use and response states (Valkenburg and Peter, 2013, p. 226-227). Thus far, this model has been mostly used to study the conditional effects of general media use or the role of differential susceptibility variables as moderators of these effects (e.g., Coles & Saleem, 2021;Piotrowski & Valkenburg, 2015). To our knowledge, much less is known about the predictive role of such factors for media behaviors, especially in adolescence. ...
This study aimed to investigate the differential relationship between Temperament, Executive Functioning (EF) and Media Use Motivations and the frequency of two kinds of Media Multitasking (MM) in early adolescence. Results showed differential roles of temperamental Effortful Control, Negative Affectivity and Affiliativeness in predicting academic MM and MM with other media activities. Greater EF deficits in inhibition predicted more frequent MM with other media activities and fewer EF deficits in monitoring predicted more frequent academic MM. Significant relationships have also been found between some Media Use Motivations and MM. These results are discussed in the context of the changes in adolescents’ relationship to technology that have been brought by the COVID-19 pandemic and persist after its end. Implications also center on the need to consider the context and factors that generated MM in the first place to better understand MM effects.
... This special issue was inspired by a sense that race and ethnicity are increasingly central to our lived experiences of politics yet are often absent from studies of urgent questions in contemporary political communication. As junior researchers interested in race and digital politics, we have often searched for theory and scholarship that place race at the center of the phenomena we study (e.g., Lane et al., 2021;Coles & Saleem, 2021). Yet, as we have attended conference panels on "big questions" in political communication and read handbooks on political communication research, we have found these concepts infrequently mentioned and rarely foregrounded. ...
Despite the centrality of race and ethnicity in social and political life, they are often absent from studies of the urgent questions in contemporary political communication research. In this essay introducing a special issue focused on Race and Ethnicity as Foundational Forces in Political Communication, we examine factors that may contribute to the relative absence of race/ethnicity in the political communication scholarship, including: 1) structural inequalities in the field, 2) contested conceptualizations of race, and 3) the domination of certain epistemological and methodological traditions. We introduce the articles in this issue as a means of moving toward a richer integration of race/ethnicity into the field’s big questions and expanding the boundaries of the field itself. In making a case for a more robust conversation about race and ethnicity in political communication, we note crucial areas for self-reflection, debate, and inspiration.
... Why it is so important for the social media natives of this study to not leave traces in "open" spaces online may be manifold, however (see, for example, Coles & Saleem, 2021;Laurison, 2015). One may start out by seeing their responses through the lens of their "distinct positionalities of privilege" (Fang et al., 2019, p. e11). ...
This study emphasizes social media natives’ utilization of social media for
maintaining social relationships through an active negotiation and construction of space. A continuous attentiveness to social space is connected to features of Gesellschaft in social media: the utilization of people’s data traces for economic purposes. The social media natives’ online activities are still tied to the market rationales of social media corporations, however, as platforms both facilitate and profit from their practices. This study proposes the concept of “digital Gemeinschaft 2.0,” through examining Rich Ling’s employment of Ferdinand Tönnies’ Gesellschaft (market society) and Gemeinschaft (fellowship), when conceptualizing the “digital Gemeinschaft.” Drawing on 11 in-depth interviews with social media natives in Norway, it identifies three recurring themes, reflecting (1)
a Gesellschaft attentiveness, (2) continued Gemeinschaft, with occasional public orientations, and (3) information gathering and learning without direct public partaking. The digital Gemeinschaft 2.0 concept hence highlights a continued
tension between Gesellschaft and digital Gemeinschaft in social media as both medium and (social and public) space.
... The most prominent communication means that help in conveying the message is social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. These platforms enable users to express themselves by commenting on the posts they encounter and saying their views on an issue (Coles& Saleem, 2020). Among the most prominent of these issues is the issue of social movements such as #MeToo, #BlackLivesMatter (Jackson et al., 2020;Mundt et al., 2018). ...
This paper aims to define the role of the communication posters designed by feminist protesters in expressing the rejection of domestic violence against women in Jordan, since few studies address such topics. In response to a notorious incident in 2019 where a suburban woman in Jordan was physically abused by her husband in front of her children, Jordanian feminists staged a protest march in the heart of the capital city, Amman. The victim became permanently disabled due to this violence. Several female protesters joined the demonstration, carrying reflective visual and verbal posters to show their empathy towards the victim and repudiation of the victimization. Moreover, these posters have been circulated via Twitter, with users writing empathic comments on the images and using several hashtags such as #Jerash Crime and #Enough, which prove that these posters are effective in vindicating women's rights, besides claiming security and protection against violence. The research methodology involved conducting a semiotic analysis on the most explicit posters raised during the march and distributed via Twitter to show condemnation of the brutal physical violence against the Jordanian victim.
