Pauline Hope Cheong

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at Arizona State University

Information and communication technologies are often cited as one major source, if not the causal vector, for the rising intensity of transnational practices. Yet extant literature has not examined critically how digital media appropriation plays into the constitution of transnational organizations, particularly Chinese spiritual ones. To address t...

Recent debates on the use of technology in classrooms have highlighted the significance of regulating students’ off-task and multitasking behaviors facilitated by digital media. This paper investigates the communication practices that constitute professorial authority to manage college students’ digital distractions in classrooms. Findings from int...

Emerging media afford netizens the opportunity to participate in critical civic discourse by collaboratively constructing and sharing previously inaccessible information across multiple platforms. This paper examined the communicative behaviors constituting the recent phenomenon of cyber vigilantism (human flesh search) in China, particularly how e...

The mediation of communication has raised questions of authority shifts in key social institutions. This article examines how traditional sources of epistemic power that govern social relations in religious authority are being amplified or delegitimized by Internet use, drawing from in-depth interviews with protestant pastors in Singapore. Competit...

In light of expanding epistemic resources online, the mediatization of religion poses questions about the possible changes, decline and reconstruction of clergy authority. Distinct from virtual Buddhism or cybersangha research which relies primarily on online observational data, this paper examines Buddhist clergy communication within the context o...

The burgeoning capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) have prompted numerous local governments worldwide to consider its integration into their operations. Nevertheless, instances of notable AI failures have heightened ethical concerns, emphasising the imperative for local governments to approach the adoption of AI technologies in a responsib...

Public organisations, such as local governments, underpin the very social fabric of cities. The Metaverse presents itself as a tool with potential to revolutionise local governments’ interaction with citizens, promising multiple benefits but also posing risks. Despite the significance of this area for cities, it remains underexplored in state-of-th...

Public institutions' chatbots enhance communication when they provide services. Despite their growing popularity and importance, chatbot adoption by government entities is a relatively understudied area of research. This deficiency is even more acute when examining the role of chatbots within local governments, which provide many of the services ci...

Digital technologies are used in various local government activities. Adopting suitable digital technology strategies could enhance service efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability. The challenges of technology adoption among local governments, however, are also evident. One of the major challenges is capacity, including the lack of knowledge...

The Internet of Things (IoT) has potential to deliver important benefits for IoT users, society and public good. How do citizens feel about sharing data from personal devices compared with “smart city” data collection in public spaces, with government and nongovernmental organizations, and across different situations? What predicts willingness to s...

Existential threats to human work and leadership have been expressed over intensifying human-machine communication, and the development of robots and artificial intelligence (AI). Yet popular texts and techno-centric approaches to AI assume a flat ontology in human-machine communication which obscures power relations governing new technologies, nec...

In this chapter, we discuss how individuals articulate their understanding about the Internet of Things (IoT) to explore how the public perceives and adapts to emerging datafication in IoT and artificial intelligence (AI) systems.

In light of growing concerns on AI growth and gloomy projections of attendant risks to human well-being and expertise, recent development of robotics designed to fulfill spiritual goals can help provide an alternative, possibly uplifting vision of global futures. To further understanding of the potential of robots as embodied communicators for virt...

Religious non-governmental organizations (RNGOs) are becoming powerful organizational actors, but how are these organizations enacted through the communicative practices of their members? To address this question, this article offers a conceptual framework for investigating how the terse retelling of an inspirational organizational story, encapsula...

In light of the recent rise of Chinese nongovernmental organizations (NGO) and the significant roles that they are playing to advance nonprofit and voluntary activities, this article explores the network dynamics of emerging NGOs in China, known as NGO incubators. NGO incubators were birthed to provide services to civil society actors, including ca...

In an environment of increasing digitalization and hyperconnectivity among Indian youths, this article examines the communication practices of professorial authority and the cultural tensions negotiated by college instructors as they intervene to manage digital connectivity and distractions in the Indian academe. Findings from interviews with 66 In...

Focusing on Indian and American university students, this investigation explores the impact of authority values on students’ classroom digital behavior in individualistic and collectivistic societies. The results indicate that university students in India and the U.S. differ significantly in (1) frequency of digital usage, (2) preferred classroom p...

The prolific rise of Chinese non-governmental organizations (NGOs) for advancing social and political change has attracted considerable attention in recent years. Nonetheless, limited communication studies research has been conducted to further contemporary understanding of these emerging collectives, particularly beyond the popular hype of digital...

We are witnessing the growth of a distinct sub-field focusing on new media and religion as the relationship between the two is not just important, it is vital. I discuss in this article how this vitality is both figurative and literal in multiple dimensions. Mediated communication brings forth and constitutes the (re)production of spiritual realiti...

Information and communication technologies are often cited as one major source, if not the causal vector, for the rising intensity of transnational practices. Yet, extant literature has not examined critically how digital media appropriation affects the constitution of transnational organizations, particularly Chinese spiritual ones. To address the...

This study explores the intersection of culture, new media, and social context—an essential component of intercultural new media studies—by investigating the social uses of smartphones, tablets, and laptops in university classrooms in Denmark and the US. American and Danish university students differed significantly in (1) frequency of new media us...

This volume considers the implementation difficulties of researching religion online and reflects on the ethical dilemmas faced by sociologists of religion when using digital research methods. Bringing together established and emerging scholars, global case studies draw on the use of social media as a method for researching religious oppression, re...

Religious believers have historically adapted Scripture into brief texts for wider dissemination through relatively inexpensive publications. The emergence of Twitter and other microblogging tools today afford clerics a platform for real time information sharing with its interface for short written texts, which includes providing links to graphics...

Beyond the widespread coverage of terrorism-related stories on international news outlets, we are witnessing the swift spread of alternative interpretations of these stories online. These alternative narratives typically involve digital transmediation or the remix, remediation, and viral dissemination of textual, audio, and video material on multip...

In contemporary wired developments, it is a popular proposition that many of us are living in a “Web 2.0” age. In common conception, social media represents a paradigm shift from “Web 1.0,” which is described as an email era with read-only content, static HTML websites, and directories, to Web 2.0, with read-write, user-generated content and social...

This chapter provides readers with foundational knowledge of how cultural factors mediate online learning and instruction in global education-based on a review of contemporary scholarship. The authors first describe three approaches--social scientific, interpretive, and critical-- to theorizing the role of culture in online pedagogy. Then, for each...

This article examines how those who hold leadership positions in an internationally renowned Taiwanese Buddhist humanitarian organization establish themselves as legitimate authors of their organization by invoking a spiritual leader in their daily interactions and use this invocation to author their organization with a shared sense of compassion a...

Authority Pauline Hope Cheong, Arizona State University Before the contemporary advent of digital media, authority has historically been marked as having a contentious relationship with the development of newer communication technologies. Marvin (1988) illustrated for instance, how the then new medium of the electric bulb was accompanied by debates...

This chapter presents a case study of developing and teaching an intercultural communication (IC) course online, within the context of a department in a large research University in the U.S. In so doing, we discuss a broadened and recursive model of cultural access and divides in E-learning. Expanding on Van Dijk’s (2005) framework, the authors pre...

At the start of the second decade of the new millennium, there is increasing awareness of the development of newer “smart” and more interactive media that is happening in precipitate speed in many parts of the world. The upris-ings in the Arab region in 2011, for instance, have focused attention on using digital social media and acknowledged their...

There is increasing awareness of the development of newer smart and more interactive media, at precipitate speed, in many parts of the world. The concept of change-as opposed to continuity-is central to the increasing interest in digital media. However, this focus has not yet been matched by substantive theoretical discussions, or by extensive empi...

In this paper we suggest that the exchange of communication in a mediatized environment is transforming the nature of transactions in the religious marketplace. In this economy of religious informational exchanges, digitalization facilitates a process of mediatization that converts religious performance into forms suitable for commodification and c...

Terrorism is a mounting global threat for national security, yet the rise of social media facilitates prosumption and the spread of alternative grassroots stories in response to civic militarization and state propaganda. This article discusses the structural and cultural conditions underlying the production and spread of online user-generated conte...

In this article we provide a brief account of the uses of humor, in particular satire and ridicule, to counter extremist narratives and heroes. We frame the appeals of humor as “rhetorical charms,” or stylistic seductions based on surprising uses of language and/or images designed to provoke laughter, disrupt ordinary arguments, and counter taken-f...

Islamic extremism is the dominant security concern of many contemporary governments, spanning the industrialized West to the developing world. Narrative Landmines explores how rumors fit into and extend narrative systems and ideologies, particularly in the context of terrorism, counter-terrorism, and extremist insurgencies. Its concern is to foster...

Confession represents and exemplifies larger trends that emerge across the course of this volume on digital religion, new media, and culture. Here, we and our contributors examine how far “religion”—meaning, minimally, the individual and institutionalized practices, values, and beliefs that make up specific religious traditions—interacts with the m...

As identity has a profound influence on intercultural communication, we explicate a dialectical perspective to identify multiple relationships between new media and identity perception and performance complexities within the context of multidimensional virtual worlds. These mediated intercultural dialectics include the personal-contextual, static-d...

This essay discusses the relationships between mediated religious authority and social change, in terms of clergy's social media negotiation and multimodal communication competence, with implications for attracting attention and galvanizing active networks and resources for social initiatives.

This chapter provides readers with foundational knowledge of how cultural factors mediate online learning and instruction in global education-based on a review of contemporary scholarship. The authors first describe three approaches--social scientific, interpretive, and critical-- to theorizing the role of culture in online pedagogy. Then, for each...

This article examines the discursive strategies employed by violent extremists to build a persuasive collective youth identity, drawing from strategic communication, social movement, and membership categorization theories to analyze youth references from texts disseminated by Al Qaeda from 1996–2009. “Youth” is constructed via (a) ascriptions of al...

Asian youths are embracing communication technologies at a burgeoning rate, yet interesting differences in Internet access and use exist among this younger generation. Our empirical investigation provides a rich and comparative look into what Asian youths do online, with an emphasis on an understudied area: their civic uses of new media. Data colle...

Death and bereavement are human experiences that new media helps facilitate alongside creating new social grief practices that occur online. This study investigated how people’s postings and tweets facilitated the communication of grief after pop music icon Michael Jackson died. Drawing on past grief research, religion, and new media studies, a the...

There’s no reason to think that Jesus wouldn’t have Facebooked or twittered if he came into the world now. Can you imagine his killer status updates? Reverend Schenck, New York, All Saints Episcopal Church (Mapes) The fundamental problem of religious communication is how best to represent and mediate the sacred. (O’Leary 787) What would Jesus tweet...

Executive SummaryThis chapter presents a case study of developing and teaching an intercultural communication (IC) course online, within the context of a department in a large research University in the U.S. In so doing, the authors discuss a broadened and recursive model of cultural access and divides in E-learning. Expanding on van Dijk’s (2005)...

This study investigates the relationship between Taiwanese adolescents’ depressive mood and their self-reported online and offline activities. The results indicate that adolescents who reported higher depressive mood were more likely to use the internet to make friends and express feelings compared to those who were lower in depressive mood. Teens...

We examine “religion-online,” an underrepresented area of research in new media, communication, and geography, with a multilevel study of the online representation and (re)presentation of Protestant Christian organizations in Singapore, which has one of the highest Internet penetration rates in the world and also believers affiliated with all the m...

This paper examines the relationship between new media use and international communication that addresses religiosity and affirms users’ standpoints occupied by transmigrants that are marginalized in dominant societal structures. Drawing from focus group interviews among recent Chinese Protestant immigrants in Toronto, we argue that new media ‘use’...

Prevailing attempts to reconcile paradigmatic differences in human and economic geography have tended to occur at the methodological level. Methodological concerns, however, do not adequately address the chasm that divides constructivist and positivist geographers in their understanding of the first-person subject and third-person object. Separabil...

Expectations surrounding the role of e-learning need to be tempered by an awareness of the variety of technical, institutional, social and economic constraints on the innovation process. This paper reports on a case study of the introduction into a university of one of the most central e-learning initiatives in higher education, an enterprise-wide...

This paper discusses how students understand and interpret credibility in their search for online information, especially in relation to websites such as Wikipedia, which present new approaches to authority and information management. Based on focus group and survey data, we found that source authority is not a major determinant in students' inform...

This article critically examines the technologically-savvy image of young adults by investigating the digital divide issues underlying youth internet use, including their daily computer and internet problem-solving behaviors. The study draws on data from a web-based questionnaire and face-to-face interviews with young adults in Singapore, a country...

Blogs represent an especially interesting site of online religious communication. Analysis of the content of 200 blogs with mentions of topics related to Christianity, as well as interviews of a subset of these bloggers, suggests that blogs provide an integrative experience for the faithful, not a “third place,” but a melding of the personal and th...

This paper examines the relationships between Internet and social capital building within religious organizations, which are relatively understudied foci. Building upon theoretical insights provided by new institutionalism and recent research on the Internet, social capital and religion, this article explores the ways in which religious organizatio...

This study examines the factors that influence instructors’ adoption and use of an Internet-based course management system and tests the applicability of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), introduced by Davis (1986) , in the context of e-learning practices in higher education. Using data from an online survey of a university’s instructors (N =...

This article provides a critical discussion and empirical investigation of secondary digital divide factors, including gendered variations in Internet use. Analyses were conducted on data obtained from 716 respondents, who were self-reported Internet users based on a nation-wide telephone survey in Singapore. Results showed that females and males d...

Numbers of the uninsured in America have risen in the past few years to more than 40 million people, yet relatively little is known about their health communication behaviors. Data from the 2003 Health Information National Trends Survey (HINTS) were used to analyze the relationship among demographics, health status, health insurance status, online...

This study critically examines the ways in which technological modernization and religion co-exist and mutually reinforce one another within the Singaporean context. Interviews with religious leaders of a diverse set of faiths in Singapore about how they understand the role of information technology in religious practice reveal a broad-based accept...

In recent years, there has been an intense public and policy debate about ethnic diversity, community cohesion, and immigration in Britain and other societies worldwide. In addition, there has been a growing preoccupation with the possible dangers to social cohesion represented by growing immigration flows and ethnic diversity. This paper proposes...

There are increasing numbers of medically uninsured populations in the United States today. Despite rising concerns with the health status of the uninsured, a dearth of information exists about their health seeking and health communication behaviors. Because Hispanics experience elevated risks of being medically uninsured, and have less access to h...

This article examines the influence of the social environment on adolescents’ connectedness to the internet in East Asia, one of the most wired regions in the world. Connectedness is a qualitative conceptualization of an individual’s relationship with the internet, taking into consideration the breadth, depth, and the importance of individuals’ int...

The implications of e-learning in higher education have been limited by an array of technical, institutional, social and economic constraints on innovation. This paper describes a case study of the introduction into a university of a widely diffused e-learning platform: an enterprise-wide virtual learning environment. The study suggests a variety o...

Electronic course management software has emerged as a significant aspect of instructional technology infrastructure among institutions of higher education. This study sought to investigate the ways in which electronic courseware is being adopted by higher educational institutions, and how this technological change might impact the role of the inst...

Expectations surrounding,the role of e-learning need tobe tempered byan awareness of the varietyof technical, institutional, social and economic constraints on the innovation process. This paper reports on a case study of the introduction into a university of one of the most central e-learning initiatives in higher education, an enterprise-wide vir...