New Publication: Introduction to Special Issue in The Communication Review with Virpi Salojärvi

Virpi Salojärvi and I have a new article out in The Communication Review this week.

(De)constructing societal threats during times of deep mediatization provides an introduction to a Special Issue based on research presented in the Crisis, Security and Conflict Communication working group at the conference of International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) in 2021.

We provide an overview of the literature on mediatization of conflict and crises, with a specific focus on how online platforms present both challenges and opportunities to the agenda-setting powers of mainstream media and political institutions.

The introduction can be read here

The list of papers published in our Special Issue are as follows:

Minos-Athanasios Karyotakis (2022) Framing the Macedonian name dispute in Greece: nationalistic journalism and the existential threat, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2022.2129125

Zhe Xu & Mengrong Zhang (2022) The “ultimate empathy machine” as technocratic solutionism? Audience reception of the distant refugee crisis through virtual reality, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2022.2129118

Olivia Inwood & Michele Zappavigna (2022) A Systemic Functional Linguistics Approach to Analyzing White Supremacist and Conspiratorial Discourse on YouTube, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2022.2129122

Gregory Asmolov (2022) Internet regulation and crisis-related resilience: from Covid-19 to existential risks, The Communication Review, DOI: 10.1080/10714421.2022.2129124

We would like to thank all the authors, reviewers and the editorial team at TCR for their help bringing this Special Issue together.

Participant in BBC Radio Ulster Talkback debate on the future of Twitter

Photo by Brett Jordan on Pexels.com

Yesterday I participated in a segment on BBC Radio Ulster Talkback about the future of Twitter under Elon Musk. Presented by William Crawley, I joined Brenda Gough and Andrew Pierce to discuss the future of microblogging site in the wake of users leaving for sites like Mastodon. We also how the moderation rules on non-profit sites compare to Twitter.

You can listen to the segment here (it begins at 38:29 and finishes at 56:51).

Many thanks to William, Claire and the Talkback team for the invitation to participate.