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Publication Geek Cultures: Media and Identity in the Digital Age(2009-01-01) Tocci, JasonThis study explores the cultural and technological developments behind the transition of labels like 'geek' and 'nerd' from schoolyard insults to sincere terms identity. Though such terms maintain negative connotations to some extent, recent years have seen a growing understanding that "geek is chic" as computers become essential to daily life and business, retailers hawk nerd apparel, and Hollywood makes billions on sci-fi, hobbits, and superheroes. Geek Cultures identifies the experiences, concepts, and symbols around which people construct this personal and collective identity. This ethnographic study considers geek culture through multiple sites and through multiple methods, including participant observation at conventions and local events promoted as "geeky" or "nerdy"; interviews with fans, gamers, techies, and self-proclaimed outcasts; textual analysis of products produced by and for geeks; and analysis and interaction online through blogs, forums, and email. The findings are organized around four common, sometimes overlapping images and stereotypes: the geek as misfit, genius, fan, and chic. Overall, this project finds that these terms represent a category of identity that predates the recent emergence of "geek chic," and may be more productively understood as interacting with, rather than stemming from, dimensions of identity such as gender and race. The economic import of the internet and the financial successes of high-profile geeks have popularized the idea that nerdy skills can be parlayed into riches and romance, but the real power of communication technologies has been in augmenting the reach and persistent availability of those things that encourage a sense of belonging: socially insulated "safe spaces" to engage in (potentially embarrassing) activities; opportunities to remotely coordinate creative projects and social gatherings; and faster and more widespread circulation of symbols - from nerdcore hip-hop to geek-sponsored charities - confirming the existence of a whole network of individuals with shared values. The emergence of geek culture represents not a sudden fad, but a newly visible dimension of identity that demonstrates how dispersed cultures can be constructed through the integration of media use and social enculturation in everyday life.Publication Buying in: Socially Conscious Consumption and the Architecture of Choice(2013-01-01) Roodhouse, ElizabethAcademics, marketers, and the general public share a growing interest in socially conscious products that claim to support (or oppose) a variety of causes and issues, from protecting the environment to objecting to free trade agreements between countries. Although the presence of such products has grown both in the US and abroad, both academics and marketers assume that niche audiences have--and will continue to--consume the vast majority of socially conscious products. This logic implies that socially conscious products have limited political impact due to their constrained market share, and that socially conscious consumption is a generic behavior similar to "volunteering" in which consumers do not discriminate between the issues that products support. This dissertation proposes a new way to think about this emergent form of non-traditional political participation. Specifically, it argues that socially conscious consumption has a broader appeal when people are properly targeted with products that support the issues they care about (the "Issue Importance - Product Match," or IIPM). Further, it conceptualizes socially conscious consumption as both an active and reactive form of political behavior. Although consumers' choices are influenced by context ("top down" choices made by private or public institutions), behaviors such as socially conscious consumption have the potential to shape future choices made by institutions from the "bottom-up." Several pre-tests were conducted to (1) identify distinct clusters of socially conscious consumers; (2) develop good-fitting measures of IIPM; and (3) hypothetical product pairs that would force participants to choose between a socially conscious product and a similar generic alternative. Study 1 tests the hypothesis that IIPM drives socially conscious consumption, and that this relationship persists even when there is a cost differential. Having generated supportive results for both propositions in Study 1, Study 2 tests the effect of normative appeals ("nudges") on socially conscious consumption. Results from Study 2 show that normative appeals tapping the social identity of "issue supporters" may enhance the likelihood of socially conscious consumption among supporters of that issue, nearly closing the gap created by a 20% difference in cost. Implications of these findings for researchers, practitioners, and the public are discussed.Publication Political Appetites: Food as Rhetoric in American Politics(2013-01-01) Perelman, AlisonFood is mobilized as a site of political communication. The framing of food as politically relevant is possible because food is deeply rooted in a particular cultural context; because food is symbolic of its culinary community, therefore, it can be deployed as a form of strategic messaging. For that reason food has played a role in political campaigning since the earliest American elections. However major changes to the conditions under which politics is undertaken have altered the messages sent through food. Specifically, the emergence of image-based campaigning and a taste-based notion of elitism has created an environment in which food politics is designed to demonstrate a political figure's connection to, or disconnection from, middle class American culture. This qualitative study investigates three sites--diner politics, food faux pas, and the regulation of food--where food and politics intersect. Data for this analysis consists of textual analysis of over 400 articles published in newspapers and magazines; semi-structured interviews with public health advocates, political officials, and strategists; and candidate speeches and peripheral campaign materials. Analysis of these data demonstrates that political strategists deploy food tastes commonly associated with down-home culinary culture--namely tastes for diners, bars, and local restaurants--as a way to present their candidate as in touch with average Americans. Conversely, food faux pas committed by presidential candidates are treated by their opponents and the press as evidence of the erring candidate's elite food tastes. But food tastes do not carry the same symbolic weight in legislative contexts as they do in campaign contexts. This is because food tastes invoke little symbolism for legislators. Even so, proposed food policy legislation can nonetheless be framed by the press as a site of symbolic conflict if and when oppositional voices adopt the "food police" narrative. In sum, the mobilization of food's symbolic value is motivated by the desire to frame political figures according to their food tastes. This is the case because such a narrative maps onto the increasing role of personal tastes in the cultural organizing of the American public.Publication Communities of Journalists and Journalism Practice at Radio Free Europe during the Cold War (1950-1995)(2013-12-01) Haas, Susan DSusan D. Haas Dissertation Chair: Dr. Carolyn Marvin This study describes the construction, maintenance and defense of news practices by journalists at Radio Free Europe (RFE), an experimental U.S. government-sponsored organization whose mission was to act as a "surrogate free press", in effect, to disrupt state media-controlled public spheres of totalitarian states during the West's Cold War with communism. At RFE from 1950-1995, two groups of journalists cooperated to produce content: politically activist, exiled citizens - self-trained journalists -- from East-Central Europe working in semi-autonomous language services (radios) broadcasting through the Iron Curtain to the people of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania and Bulgaria, and, experienced journalists from Western democracies working in the Central Newsroom, an internal news agency serving the broadcast desks. This study outlines aspects of RFE and its Cold War context -- including journalists' knowledge of the human rights and informational deficits of audiences -- critical to understanding these groups of journalists. It differentiates group conceptions of roles at RFE and means of constructing practice despite the paradox of doing news work from a position aberrant to Western journalism. Research includes 100 interviews and correspondence with 70 former RFE employees gathered from 2004-2012; and, for the first time in scholarship, the voices of RFE's Western journalists. It incorporates documents collected from and created by participants. It places these data in conversation with memoirs and histories by RFE insiders, and with corporate documents from archives opened to researchers during the past decade. It describes both groups of journalists as "exiles" practicing in the absence of legitimacy in the contexts of both Western journalism and communist states. It describes organizational challenges and group negotiations of news work. It posits émigrés as constructing national imaginaries available only in RFE broadcasts, and Western journalists as constructing a hyper-vigilant practice that modeled journalism for broadcasters and served as a credibility anchor for broadcasts. Translating different conceptions of the mission - modeling a free press -- into practice, absent legitimacy and in view of listener needs and risks, produced two different journalisms, each unique and hyper-vigilant. The study suggests that the RFE historical case presaged challenges facing contemporary journalism and journalists.Publication The Mobocratic City: Race, Space and Citizenship in Nineteenth Century Philadelphia(2013-01-01) Crocco, AndrewThis dissertation focuses on publics and the public sphere to argue that communication theory should investigate connections across discourse, space, and practice in the creation and maintenance of publics. I chose antebellum Philadelphia as my test case for two reasons. First, theorists such as Jurgen Habermas have identified the antebellum period as the time when the public sphere ceased to be maintained through face-to-face relations and became connected by means of the news media. Second, tremendous social and political conflict also characterized this period when categories considered by communications theory to be discursively constructed, such as "race" and "nation," were contested and revised. The majority of archival evidence tells a different story, one in which spatial relations and material conditions defined the public, and the act of being in public was a contested mode of political communication. Antebellum Philadelphians attempted to define, shape, and communicate public opinion through the development of the material city and the spatial practices of its inhabitants.Publication Raising the Volume: Media and the Rise of the 21st Century Tea Party(2013-01-01) White, Khadijah LorraineRaising the Volume: The News Media and the Rise of the Twenty-First-Century Tea Party is a multi-platform analysis that critically examines the ways in which online, broadcast, and print news outlets have used the Tea Party to address modern conflicts over race, class, gender, journalism, and politics. While the current Tea Party and its previous incarnations have had a perpetual presence in American politics, national news outlets recognized the phenomenon as the rise of a New Right only recently, at the very beginning of the Obama presidency. This work locates the way that journalists have used the Tea Party movement to represent the contemporary slippages between news platforms, journalistic norms, and political institutions. Due to its meteoric rise in the national news spotlight, this dissertation examines the news coverage of the Tea Party as a case study that explores the key themes, ideologies, and features of national news and political storytelling in a digital age. Specifically, this dissertation answers this research question: How does the news coverage of the Tea Party serve as a cipher into the values, function, and norms of a transforming media and political environment? Implicitly, I am also asking: What are the key themes and news and political storytelling in the Obama-era and technology-laden period? And what recurring ideologies appear in news narratives at this moment? Through a close examination of the Tea Party's early emergence in the national news media, this project describes how it was widely portrayed by reporters in two distinct ways: 1) as indicative of an increasingly complex, expansive, and digitally-enhanced news environment 2) as a political brand and 3) as a response to a socio-political landscape transformed by the race and gender make-up of the candidates in the 2008 presidential campaign. In a media environment in which everyone has the opportunity to tune out, tune in, and speak back, Tea Party news coverage ultimately shows the dissolution of the categories that distinguish citizens, journalists, activists, and consumers in a branded and fragmented media.Publication Belief Echoes: The Persistent Effects of Corrected Misinformation(2013-01-01) Thorson, EmilyThe omnipresence of political misinformation in the today's media environment raises serious concerns about citizens' ability make fully informed decisions. In response to these concerns, the last few years have seen a renewed commitment to journalistic and institutional fact-checking. The assumption of these efforts is that successfully correcting misinformation will prevent it from affecting citizens' attitudes. However, through a series of experiments, I find that exposure to a piece of negative political information persists in shaping attitudes even after the information has been successfully discredited. A correction--even when it is fully believed--does not eliminate the effects of misinformation on attitudes. These lingering attitudinal effects, which I call "belief echoes," are created even when the misinformation is corrected immediately, arguably the gold standard of journalistic fact-checking. Belief echoes can be affective or cognitive. Affective belief echoes are created through a largely unconscious process in which a piece of negative information has a stronger impact on evaluations than does its correction. Cognitive belief echoes, on the other hand, are created through a conscious cognitive process during which a person recognizes that a particular negative claim about a candidate is false, but reasons that its presence increases the likelihood of other negative information being true. Experimental results suggest that while affective belief echoes are created across party lines, cognitive belief echoes are more likely when a piece of misinformation reinforces a person's pre-existing political views. The existence of belief echoes provide an enormous incentive for politicians to strategically spread false information with the goal of shaping public opinion on key issues. However, results from two more experiments show that politicians also suffer consequences for making false claims, an encouraging finding that has the potential to constrain the behavior of politicians presented with the opportunity to strategically create belief echoes. While the existence of belief echoes may also provide a disincentive for the media to engage in serious fact-checking, evidence also suggests that such efforts can also have positive consequences by increasing citizens' trust in media.Publication Customizing Message Content to Facilitate Decisions about Participating in Genomics Research: A Reasoned Action Approach(2013-01-01) Paquin, Ryan S.According to the doctrine of informed consent, research participants have a right to voluntarily decide whether to enroll in a study and to do so with an adequate understanding of what participation entails (Beauchamp & Childress, 2009). Mirroring these rights, investigators have a moral obligation to give people the facts that are most critical to their choices (Fischhoff, 2011). Yet, theory-based analytical tools for determining which information is likely to have the largest impact on participation decisions are underdeveloped. Lacking a basis to prioritize elements of disclosure for distinct audiences, the length and complexity of consent documents has increased over time. Ironically, these improvements may have hindered comprehension and people's access to the information they need to make informed choices. According to the reasoned action model (Fishbein & Ajzen, 2010), decisions to participate in genomics research--like any other behavior--are driven by a limited number of factors. In this dissertation, consequences of participating that readily came to mind for respondents were expected to have a larger impact on attitudes and intentions to participate in genomics research than were nonsalient consequences. Moreover, customized messages designed to target salient versus nonsalient beliefs were expected to have larger effects on attitude and intention. Based on media priming theory (e.g., Price & Tewksbury, 1997), plausible downstream effects on belief salience resulting from message exposure were also explored, as was the conditional effect of salience on belief change (Jaccard, 1981). An open-ended belief elicitation in Study 1 revealed audience segments with different motivations for participating in a genetic biobank. Contributing to the greater good was especially salient for some respondents, while receiving personal test results was salient for others. In Study 2, an experimental design was used to test the conditional effects of segment-targeted messages on belief strength, attitudes and intentions toward participating in a fictional genomic research project. Both studies suggested that salient behavior-related beliefs had a larger influence on people's participation decisions. Results from Study 2 further indicated that salient beliefs might also be more difficult to change. Theoretical and practical implications for fostering informed consent in large-scale genomic research are discussed.Publication Toxic? The Nature and Effects of Mothers' Exposure to Pediatric Environmental Health information in the Media(2013-01-01) Mello, Susan LProtecting children from environmental threats like lead poisoning and pesticides is becoming a greater public health priority. Research dedicated to prenatal and pediatric environmental health (PPEH) coupled with the green movement and increasingly intensive parenting has created a new, dynamic environment in which information can play a critical role in determining protective behaviors. New and expecting mothers particularly vulnerable to toxic chemicals in the environment are exposed to health information from a variety of sources, including the mass media. Despite several decades of environmental and health communication research, the nature and effects of environmental health information available to mothers have received limited research attention. This dissertation launches a new exploration into environmental health communication by asking three overarching research questions: (1) how prevalent is PPEH information in the media, (2) is mothers' exposure to such information linked to key outcomes - namely, protective behaviors, behavioral intentions, knowledge, descriptive norms, and perceived threat, and (3) are the effects of such exposure contingent on the relative volume of media coverage PPEH topics receive? To address these questions, four studies were conducted. Study 1, an elicitation survey, determines where mothers routinely come across, or scan, PPEH information and how they conceptualize toxic threats. Study 2, a content analysis of popular media sources (i.e., the Associated Press (AP), parenting magazines, and parenting websites), focuses on the first research question. Study 3, a cross-sectional survey, addresses the second question, while Study 4 combines data from Studies 2 and 3 to address the third. While Studies 1 and 2 examine multiple PPEH issues, the latter two studies focus in on three chemical toxins: arsenic, bisphenol A (BPA), and pesticides. Results show that PPEH information is prevalent on parenting websites and exists to a lesser extent in AP stories and parenting magazines. Perhaps more importantly, there is evidence that mothers scan this information and that scanning is associated with certain positive outcomes. The observed differences between the effects of media scanning at different levels of coverage volume were in a direction not entirely consistent with study hypotheses. Implications of these findings for communication research and practice are discussed.Publication Development and Persuasion Processing: An Investigation of Children's Advertising Susceptibility and Understanding(2013-01-01) Lapierre, Matthew AllenOver the past 40 years, research on children's understanding of commercial messages and how they respond to these messages has tried to explain why younger children are less likely to understand these messages and are more likely to respond favorably to them with varying success (Kunkel et al., 2004; Ward, Wackman, & Wartella, 1977), however this line of research has been criticized for not adequately engaging developmental research or theorizing to explain why/how children responde to persuasive messages (Moses & Baldwin, 2005; Rozendaal, Lapierre, Buijzen, van Reijmersdal, 2011). The current study attempts to change this by empirically testing whether children's developing theory of mind, executive function, and emotion regulation helps to bolster their reaction to advertisements and their understanding of commercial messages. With a sample of 79 children between the ages of 6 to 9 and their parents, this study sought to determine if these developmental mechanisms were linked to processing of advertisements and understanding of commercial intent. Moreover, the current study tested whether these aspects of cognitive and affective development explain children's understanding of and reaction to advertisements above and beyond age and cognitive ability as earlier researchers have proposed (e.g., Chernin, 2007; Kunkel et al., 2004). The results suggest that children and media researchers would be well advised to consider how these more recent advancements in developmental research influence persuasion understanding and responses to commercial messages. In particular, this study found that children with less developed theory of mind are less likely to understand why advertisements are shown on television, that children who struggled to control their reactions to emotionally exciting stimuli asked for more consumer products and fought with their parents more about these requests, and children with less developed executive function were more likely to ask their parents for more consumer goods. However, with this last set of findings, they should be interpreted with caution due to the large number of hypothesis testing. These results also offer important insights into how developmental mechanisms influence consumer behavior along with new entry points for the study of how individuals develop as consumers of persuasive messages. Moreover, while the results of this study are not uniformly conclusive, there are interesting implications for how children are sold to and what constitutes fair practice based on these developmental differences.