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Since the early 2000s, Digital Media Ethics (DME) has emerged as a relatively stable subdomain of applied ethics. DME seeks nothing less than to address the ethical issues evoked by computing technologies and digital media more broadly, such as cameras, mobile and smartphones, GPS navigation systems, biometric health monitoring devices, and, eventually, “the Internet of things,” as these have developed and diffused into more or less every corner of our lives in the (so-called) developed countries. DME can be characterized as demotic—of the people—in three important ways. One, in contrast with specialist domains such as Information and Computing Ethics (ICE), it is intended as an ethics for the rest of us—namely, all of us who use digital media technologies in our everyday lives. Two, these manifold contexts of use dramatically expand the range of ethical issues computing technologies evoke, well beyond the comparatively narrow circle of issues confronting professionals working in ICE. Three, while drawing on the expertise of philosophers and applied ethics, DME likewise relies on the ethical insights and sensibilities of additional communities, including (a), the multiple communities of those whose technical expertise comes into play in the design, development, and deployment of information and communication technology (ICT); and (b), the people and communities who use digital media in their everyday lives.
DME further employs both ancient ethical philosophies, such as virtue ethics, and modern frameworks of utilitarianism and deontology, as well as feminist ethics and ethics of care: DME may also take, for example, Confucian and Buddhist approaches, as well as norms and customs from relevant indigenous traditions where appropriate. The global distribution and interconnection of these devices means, finally, that DME must also take on board often profound differences between basic ethical norms, practices, and related assumptions as these shift from culture to culture. What counts as “privacy” or “pornography,” to begin with, varies widely—as do the more fundamental assumptions regarding the nature of the person that we take up as a moral agent and patient, rights-holder, and so on. Of first importance here is how far we emphasize the more individual vis-à-vis the more relational dimensions of selfhood—with the further complication that these emphases appear to be changing locally and globally.
Nonetheless, DME can now map out clear approaches to early concerns with privacy, copyright, and pornography that help establish a relatively stable and accepted set of ethical responses and practices. By comparison, violent content (e.g., in games) and violent behavior (cyber-bullying, hate speech) are less well resolved. Nonetheless, as with the somewhat more recent issues of online friendship and citizen journalism, an emerging body of literature and analysis points to initial guidelines and resolutions that may become relatively stable. Such resolutions must be pluralistic, allowing for diverse application and interpretations in different cultural settings, so as to preserve and foster cultural identity and difference.
Of course, still more recent issues and challenges are in the earliest stages of analysis and efforts at forging resolutions. Primary issues include “death online” (including suicide web-sites and online memorial sites, evoking questions of censorship, the right to be forgotten, and so on); “Big Data” issues such as pre-emptive policing and “ethical hacking” as counter-responses; and autonomous vehicles and robots, ranging from Lethal Autonomous Weapons to carebots and sexbots. Clearly, not every ethical issue will be quickly or easily resolved. But the emergence of relatively stable and widespread resolutions to the early challenges of privacy, copyright, and pornography, coupled with developing analyses and emerging resolutions vis-à-vis more recent topics, can ground cautious optimism that, in the long run, DME will be able to take up the ethical challenges of digital media in ways reasonably accessible and applicable for the rest of us.
Kimberly A. Kaphingst
Direct-to-consumer advertising of prescription drugs (DTCA) is a multibillion-dollar industry in the United States, affecting the health-care landscape. DTCA has been controversial, since a major increase in this type of advertising resulted from re-interpretation of existing regulations in the late 20th century. Health and risk communication research can inform many of the controversial issues, assisting physicians, policymakers, and the public in understanding how consumers respond to DTCA. Prior research addresses four major topics: (1) the content of DTCA in different channels, (2) consumers’ perceptions of and responses to DTCA, (3) individual-level factors that affect how consumers respond to DTCA, and (4) message factors that impact consumers’ responses. Such research shows that the presentation of risk and benefits information is generally not balanced in DTCA, likely affecting consumers’ attitudes toward and comprehension of the risk information. In addition, despite consumers’ generally somewhat negative or neutral perceptions of DTCA, this advertising seems to affect their health information seeking and communication behaviors. Finally, a wide range of individual-level and message factors have been shown to have an impact on how consumers process and respond to DTCA. Consumers’ responses, including how they process the information, request prescription drugs from providers, and share information about prescription drugs, have an important impact on the effects of DTCA. The fields of health and risk communication therefore bring theories and methodologies that are essential to better understanding the impact of this advertising.
Karyn Ogata Jones and Lee Crandall
Intergroup communication adds to the general knowledge about disability by summarizing key areas in research and commentary. Intergroup communication is discussed in terms of how stigma affects identification, perception, and communication. Scholarship examining efforts to measure attitudes these groups have about each other, and the effects of inter-group communication on attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors, is reviewed. Scholarly commentary plays a role in the complicated relationship between identity and disability, and how this relationship impacts intergroup interactions, as well as present a summary of studies examining intergroup communication and disability in interpersonal, group, mediated, and professional settings. Illustrations from social media are provided to show how mediated inter-group communication can impact perceptions and knowledge. Studies are presented from an international perspective, allowing for culturally based comparisons.
Rebecca Cline and Andrea Meluch
Health consequences and key communication processes that emerge during disasters vary by type of disaster. The types of disasters that researchers have most investigated are rapid-onset natural disasters and slowly-evolving human-caused disasters. Three types of communication processes occur in disasters that have implications for health.
The first set of communication processes involves the social dynamics of affected communities. Communities that experience natural disasters tend to exhibit an emergent altruistic community; community members join together to support each other in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. In contrast, community conflict is the hallmark of slowly-evolving environmental disasters. That conflict triggers a cascade of social dynamics that infests close personal relationships with interpersonal conflict, stigmatization of victims and advocates, and pressures to avoid open communication (i.e., social constraints) regarding the disaster and its traumatic effects. These dynamics contribute to elevated mental health problems.
The second set of communication processes focuses specifically on social support. Supportive communication processes and networks are important resources for coping with ongoing disasters and for mitigating their longer-term mental health effects. Due to differences in community-level social dynamics, patterns of social support evolve differently in natural versus human-caused disasters. Natural disasters are typified by immediate intra-community social support. Community members support each other in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Ultimately this social support is overwhelmed by the disaster’s needs and deteriorates. As a result, communities are largely dependent on internal and external institutional sources to meet community members’ needs. In contrast, slowly-evolving human-caused disasters tend to exhibit the emergence of corrosive communities. In these communities, those most affected by the disasters (those whose health is harmed or who claim other harmful or potentially harmful effects, and those who function as advocates) tend to experience failed or diminished social support. Whereas the community may previously have been altruistic, mutual help either fails to emerge or is withdrawn in the disaster context. Failed social support contributes to the relatively worse mental health consequences of slowly-evolving human-caused disasters when compared to natural disasters.
The third set of communication processes relate to institutional responses in disasters. In natural disasters, institutional communication is driven largely by widely disseminated and applied models that are intended to prevent harm and to provide resources to address harm and to reduce further negative consequences to health and well-being. Institutions and their agencies provide resources immediately following the disaster to meet basic human needs and, thereafter, to restore normalcy to the community and thereby protect community members’ physical and mental health. These efforts assume that natural disasters unfold in predictable stages (i.e., preparedness, warning, post-disaster, recovery) and that institutions’ responses should vary according to the stage of the disaster. In contrast, no such response models exist for slowly-evolving human-caused disasters. Moreover, community members experiencing such disasters often encounter what they perceive as institutional failures by both community-based and external responding institutions. Often community institutions (e.g., business, government) are perceived as causing the disaster and/or minimizing it, if not denying its existence or covering it up. As a result, communities experiencing this class of disasters tend to develop substantial distrust for local and responding institutions.
Kevin A. Whitehead
In the wake of what has been called the “discursive turn” or “linguistic turn” in the social sciences, research at the intersection of language and communication and race and racism shifted from being largely dominated by quantitative and experimental methods to include qualitative and particularly discursive approaches. While the term “discursive” potentially encompasses a wide range of modes of discourse analysis, discursive approaches share a focus on language use as social action, and as a constitutive feature of actions, events, and situations, rather than as merely a passive means of describing or transmitting information about them. When applied to the study of race and racism, such approaches have examined ways in which language functions to construct, maintain, and legitimate as well as subvert or resist racial and/or racist ideologies and social structures.
Research in these areas has made use of a range of empirical materials, including “elite” texts and talk (media texts, parliamentary debates, academic texts, etc.), individual interviews, focus groups and group discussions, “naturally occurring” talk-in-interaction from conversational and institutional settings, and text-based online interactions. Although these different data types should not be seen as strictly mutually exclusive, each of them serves to foreground particular features of racial or racist discourse(s), thus facilitating or constraining particular sorts of discourse analytic findings. Thus, different data sources respectively tend to foreground ideological features of racial discourse(s) and their intersection with power and domination, including examination of “new” racisms and the production and management of accusations and denials of racism; discursive processes involved in the construction and uses of racial subjectivities and identities; interactional processes through which prejudice and racism are constructed and contested; and the everyday interactional reproduction of systems of racial categories, independently of whether the talk in which they occur can or should be considered “racist.”
Martha Augoustinos and Simon Goodman
The recent emergence of discursive psychological approaches has challenged the dominance of cognitive and structural models of language that theorize it as an abstract and coherent system of meanings. Epistemologically informed by social constructionism, discursive psychological approaches examine how language is actually used in everyday formal and informal talk or discourse. Discourse (both written text and talk) is treated as a social practice that is both central to understanding and constructing social reality and oriented to the practical concerns of everyday life. Discursive psychological approaches to intergroup communication have produced a large body of research examining everyday informal talk and institutional discourse on intergroup relations in liberal democratic societies. This work has focused primarily on the text and talk of majority group members and powerful elites about matters pertaining to race, immigration, ethnicity, and gender. How speakers attend to and account for group differences in discourse is perceived to be intimately related to the reproduction and legitimation of social inequalities in liberal democratic societies. This body of research has identified common and pervasive patterns of talk by majority group members that are seen as contributing to the continued marginalization and social exclusion of minorities. These discursive patterns include: positive self and negative other presentation, denials of prejudice, discursive deracialization, and using liberal arguments to justify and legitimate inequality.
The disruption information seeking and processing (DISP) model is a variation on the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model. While both the DISP and the original RISP models seek to predict how individuals will search for and attend to information in response to a perceived hazard, DISP aims to broaden analysts’ view of the sorts of information individuals may seek in such situations. It does so by expanding the repertoire of social psychology theory on which the model is constructed to include ideas from the literatures on sensemaking and identity maintenance.
A major argument of DISP is that on many occasions the information that people seek in response to a risk will not be directly related to the risk itself. For example, if you hear a news bulletin on an outbreak of food poisoning associated with ground beef, the next thing you look for may not be information on the risks of E. Coli, but a recipe for chicken. While the observation that people seek non-risk-related information in response to risks is a broad one, the DISP concerns itself with one particularly important aspect of this idea.
Specifically, based on research in the sensemaking and identity maintenance traditions, the DISP model proposes that, for information seekers, the self and the various identities in which individuals are personally invested are often as much the objects in need of interpretation as the hazardous environment. The implication of this is that when faced with a risk, individuals are likely to pay attention not just to information on the risk itself (the sort of information prioritized by RISP), but on the identities impacted by the hazard—for example, how a person’s acceptance of or strategy for coping with the risk might affect her self-image as being a good parent, a conscientious employer, etc.
The DISP also proposes that some hazard situations are likely to be more disruptive to individuals’ sense of self than others—namely instances where the individual has a high vested interest in a particular identity that is challenged by the hazard combined with a low sense of self-efficacy with respect to remediating the hazard. A typical example would be a parent who prides herself on keeping her kids safe, who finds out about an environmental risk to children in her neighborhood, but who cannot afford to move.
According to the DISP model, in such a circumstance the individual would likely become more attuned to information about the countervailing positive aspects of the neighborhood, such as good schools or a low crime rate. These sorts of information, which do not pertain to the risk directly, but are nonetheless sought as a consequence of the risk, exemplify the manner in which DISP seeks to expand the focus of the original RISP model. In the parlance of DISP, the model adds a “self-relevant” information dimension to RISP’s original focus on “risk-relevant” information.
Finally, the DISP model proposes the notion of “norm trumping,” suggesting that individuals experiencing disruption in the face of a hazard—who run afoul of the set of social norms associated with an identity in which they are highly invested—are likely to pay particular attention to self-relevant information that emphasizes alternative sets of norms that help to preserve or reconstitute a desired sense of self.
This model has yet to be tested empirically.
Kevin Douglas Kuswa and Edward Lubich Kuperman
Donna Haraway is a prophet. Not only is her work indispensable to an understanding of science, technology, feminism, environmental studies, and protest, but she is also outlining a vivid description of where society is headed in a simultaneous array of dystopian and utopian futures. To think about human and nonhuman bodies (as well as their machinic and organic trajectories) requires engaging this provocative scholar and her work spanning over three decades. Like other prophets, Haraway has her critics, including many with understandable objections to her politics or her omissions. From any perspective, however, the way she merges genres and negotiates perspectives is unparalleled, even in critical and cultural studies. The insight she offers into the juxtaposition between humans and the environment shows how the interactions between the natural and social worlds are far more intricate and intertwined than previously conceived. The very survival of the planet depends on a new orientation to humanity’s impact on surrounding ecosystems, generating a personal, political, theoretical, and moral imperative to live in tandem with our surroundings, not in opposition. Reading Haraway thus becomes more than an academic exercise or form of intellectual tourism. In short, she is arguing for a sea-change in perspective that centers on animals and ecosystems as an indispensable part of human life on Earth.
Whether thinking through the relationships between humans and primates, ants and acacias, art and politics, compost and toxicity, or gods and pigeons, Haraway always finds ways to blur science and fiction, speculation and empiricism, or sustainability and rupture. As she demonstrates that the Anthropocene is better thought of as the Chthulucene, Haraway provokes her readers to think deeply and in unique and reflective ways. The three main clusters that constitute her work are each monumental: first, the merging of human and machine in the form of the cyborg; second, the concept of “natureculture” and the double-edged sword represented by technology that can either help natureculture contribute to a radical emancipation or experience a catastrophic exploitation; and, third, the available means of politics within both ideological structures and new identities. Between the clusters the various criticisms of Haraway’s work will also emerge, both highlighting and interrogating the clusters themselves. Overall, quilting a shelter to brave the ongoing storm is Haraway’s objective, but she knows that such a goal necessitates staying with the trouble.
Lauren Keblusek and Howard Giles
Forms of dress, ranging from runway fashions and sports jerseys to traditional cultural apparel and religious garb, are central to contemporary social life and are intimately connected to issues of personal and social identity, communicating to others who we are or who we would like to be. Given this, dress style is a subject worthy of serious scholarly inquiry, particularly within the field of intergroup communication. Dress style—as well as other bodily accoutrements—has received some attention in disciplines across the social sciences, but has received less attention among those studying intergroup relations and communication. Prominent intergroup communication theories, such as social identity, uncertainty identity, and communication accommodation theories, teach us that clothing choices can reflect actual or desired group affiliations, demarcating group boundaries, shaping and reinforcing social identities, and influencing our perceptions of others. Dress style can also stem from a desire to reduce identity uncertainty, serving as a conduit for personal expression and self-discovery. Overall, intergroup dynamics play a prominent role in shaping dress style and body adornment practices across the globe.
Courtney Barclay and Kearston Wesner
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Please check back later for the full article.
Drones armed with cameras have allowed journalists to capture images from new perspectives and in places previously unreachable. Footage of volcanic eruptions, war-torn villages, and nuclear disaster areas have all been made possible with drone technology. However, this same technology presents risks to personal privacy.
Since before Warren and Brandeis penned the oft cited Right to Privacy, newsgatherers have tested the boundaries of society’s notion of privacy. The development of new technologies at the time, such as the snap camera, made photography a faster, more efficient endeavor. Warren and Brandeis recognized that the increased photographic recording of society threatened individual privacy on a scale never before imagined. More than a century later, the use of new technology—drones outfitted with cameras and other imaging devices—has once again ignited debate over how to protect an individual’s privacy while ensuring journalists’ ability to gather news.
The traditional remedy for intrusive journalism has been through tort law, which requires an individual to show that she or he had a reasonable expectation of privacy. By and large, these laws have favored journalists; however, that result is usually based on the fact that the newsgathering activity occurred in a public place rather than any recognition of the importance of newsgathering. State lawmakers have begun to address drone photography with a wide variety of approaches that would move away from this public place exception—from prohibiting photography over private property to prohibiting any photography without someone’s consent, even in a public place.
The press has recognized the cost to individual privacy incurred by use of technologies such as drone photography. Professional codes of ethics instruct journalists to minimize harm to the public, requiring an “overriding” public interest to invade someone’s privacy. The Professional Society of Drone Journalists’ Code of Ethics addresses the additional responsibilities inherent to drone technology. Under this code, journalists should record only public spaces and delete any images of individuals in a private space.
Drone technology represents only one of the latest developments in surveillance used for law enforcement, commercial enterprise, and journalism. However, its growth and the gaps in privacy tort law underscore the importance of strong codes of ethics that serve the interests of both newsgathering and individual privacy.
Gary L. Kreps
Ehealth, also known as E-health, is a relatively new area of health communication inquiry that examines the development, implementation, and application of a broad range of evolving health information technologies (HITs) in modern society to disseminate health information, deliver health care, and promote public health. Ehealth applications include (a) the widespread development of specialized health information websites (often hosted by government agencies, health care systems, corporations, professional societies, health advocacy organizations, and other for-profit and nonprofit organizations); (b) the widespread use of electronic health record (EHR) systems designed to preserve and disseminate health information for health care providers, administrators, and consumers; (c) an array of mobile health education and support applications that have often been developed for use with smartphones; (d) mobile health behavior monitoring, tracking, and alerting equipment (such as wearable devices and systems imbedded in vehicles, clothing, and sporting equipment); (e) interactive telemedicine systems for collecting health data and delivering health care services remotely; (f) interactive adaptive tailored health information systems to support health education, motivate health behaviors, and to inform health decision making; (g) online social support groups for health care consumers, caregivers, and providers; (h) health promotion focused digital games to engage consumers in health education and train both providers and consumers about health promoting procedures; (i) dedicated computer portals that can deliver a variety of digital health information tools and functions to consumers, caregivers, and providers; and (j) interactive and adaptive virtual human agent systems that can gather and provide relevant health information, virtual reality programs that can simulate health environments for training and therapeutic purposes, and an ever-increasing number of digital applications (apps) for addressing a range of health conditions and activities. As information technology evolves, new ehealth applications and programs are being developed and introduced to provide a wide range of powerful ehealth systems to assist with health care and health promotion.
Ehealth technologies have been found by many researchers, practitioners, and consumers to hold tremendous promise for enhancing the delivery of health care and promotion of health, ultimately improving health outcomes. Many popularly adopted ehealth applications (such as health websites, health care portals, decision support systems, and wearable health information devices) are transforming the modern health care system by supplementing and extending traditional channels for health communication. The use of new ehealth applications enables the broad dissemination of relevant health information that can be personalized to the unique communication orientations, backgrounds, and information needs of individuals. New ehealth communication channels can provide health care consumers and providers with the relevant health information that they need to make informed health care decisions. These ehealth communication channels can provide this information to people exactly when and where they need it, which is especially important for addressing fast-moving and dangerous health threats. Yet, with all the promise of ehealth communication, there is still a tremendous amount of work to be done to make the wide array of new ehealth applications as useful as possible for promoting health with different audiences. This article describes the current state of knowledge about the development and use of HITs, as well as about strategies for improving ehealth communication applications to enhance the delivery of health care and the promotion of public health.
Spring Chenoa Cooper and P. Christopher Palmedo
Embarrassment, according to Fischer and Tangney, is an “aversive state of mortification, abashment, and chagrin that follows public social predicaments.” It is usually related to our perceptions of how others perceive us as well as their judgments of us, and it is associated with a loss of self-esteem when we perceive that others have judged us as inadequate or incompetent. However, even mere exposure or attention publicly placed on someone can elicit embarrassment (think of someone pointing at you and laughing).
Embarrassment is considered a self-conscious emotion. Self-conscious emotions include those that are evoked by self-reflection and self-evaluation: embarrassment, shame, guilt, and pride. Shame, an intense form of embarrassment, also has structural and larger social contexts, while embarrassment is more individually experienced. Self-conscious emotions play an important role in regulating behavior; they assist us in behaving according to social standards and guide us in responding when those rules are broken. While these emotions provide feedback in social situations, they also provide feedback for anticipated outcomes.
Embarrassment can play an important role in health, both in communication and behavior, and occurs through different forms. Primary embarrassment is the first rush of blood to the face and increased heart rate that usually lasts a few moments. Secondary embarrassment is the after-effect that shapes future behavior. Anticipatory embarrassment is the emotion surrounding the potential for embarrassment in an upcoming situation. Solitary embarrassment is the one that no one actually observes.
Three stigmatized areas of health—mental health, healthcare, and sexual health—may be assessed as case studies through which to understand the literature around embarrassment, as both an affect and an emotion.
Maureen P. Keeley
End of life communication includes both verbal and nonverbal messages that transpire following a diagnosis of a terminal illness and death. The circumstances that occur at the end of life create opportunities for unique and important communication. Specifically, communication at the end of life is impacted by numerous and complicated factors: First, cultural views on death and dying often determine what is talked about, when it can be talked about, and who is included in the conversations. Second, the fears, desires, and needs of the terminally ill must be taken into account at the end of life as it is their personal end of life journey. Third, the nature of the relationships between the terminally ill and their family and friends have tremendous influence on the nature and topics of conversations that will be shared. Fourth, interactions with healthcare professionals (preferably with palliative care specialists) tend to be more task focused, emphasizing end of life decision making and comfort care for the terminally ill. Fifth, as people are tending to live longer with terminal illness and often doing so far from their family, professional caregivers and hospice volunteers are also engaging in meaningful and significant communication with the terminally ill.
Communication at the end of life often determines whether or not the dying are allowed to die with dignity, with some control over their final wishes, and whether they are ultimately able to obtain some peaceful closure. Within close relationships communication at the end of life has the potential for authentic conversations that bring people closer, heal old wounds, and allow the terminally ill and close others to create some final memories and to say goodbye to one another. Communication at the end of life with health professionals has the potential for both the terminally ill and their family members to have greater satisfaction with end of life decisions and control of pain for the terminally ill, as well as better outcomes regarding grief and bereavement following the death for family members. For hospice volunteers and professional caregivers, communication at the end of life teaches the necessity and complexities of interactions at the end of life for the larger society.
Suruchi Sood, Amy Henderson Riley, and Kristine Cecile Alarcon
Entertainment-education (EE) began as a communication approach that uses both entertainment and education to engender individual and social change, but is emerging as a distinct theoretical, practice, and evidence-based communication subdiscipline. EE has roots in oral and performing arts traditions spanning thousands of years, such as morality tales, religious storytelling, and the spoken word. Modern-day EE, meanwhile, is produced in both fiction and nonfiction designs that include many formats: local street theater, music, puppetry, games, radio, television, and social media. A classic successful example of EE is the children’s television program Sesame Street, which is broadcast in over 120 countries. EE, however, is a strategy that has been successfully planned, implemented, and evaluated in countries around the world for children and adults alike. EE scholarship has traditionally focused on asking, “Does it work?” but more recent theorizing and research is moving toward understanding how EE works, drawing from multidisciplinary theories. From a research standpoint, such scholarship has increasingly showcased a wide range of methodologies. The result of these transformations is that EE is becoming an area of study, or subdiscipline, backed by an entire body of theory, practice, and evidence. The theoretical underpinnings, practice components, and evidence base from EE may be surveyed via the peer-reviewed literature published over the past 10 years. However, extensive work in social change from EE projects around the world has not all made it into the published literature. EE historically began as a communication approach, one tool in the communication toolbox. Over time, the nascent approach became its own full-fledged strategy focused on individual change. Backed by emerging technologies, innovative examples from around the globe, and new variations in implementation, it becomes clear that the field of EE is emerging into a discrete theoretical, practice, and evidence-based subdiscipline within communication that increasingly recognizes the inherent role of individuals, families, communities, organizations, and policies on improving the conditions needed for lasting social change.
Phaedra C. Pezzullo
Central to the study of communication and cultural studies is the relationship between nature and culture, not as a rigid dichotomy, but as elements that are coconstituted by each other materially and symbolically. With the rise of ecological awareness, the past three decades has fostered an increase in scholarship addressing environmental matters explicitly, as well as professional organizations mobilizing around the ways this perspective has shaped research, teaching, and praxis. Communication scholars from a range of perspectives have contributed to ongoing conversations about “environment” as a keyword, including at least these seven general approaches: (1) environmental personal identity and interpersonal relationships; (2) environmental organizational communication studies; (3) science, technology, and health communication; (4) public participation in environmental decision-making; (5) green applied media and arts; (6) environmental mass media studies; and (7) environmental rhetoric and cultural studies. Given this rich and expanding disciplinary terrain, identifying the heart of this research is a complicated task.
Environmental communication is the study and practice of pragmatic and constitutive modes of expression that define and trouble our ecological relationships within the world. It has been founded as a crisis discipline, one dedicated to addressing some of the greatest challenges of our times and to foregrounding the ethical implications of this orientation. In this article, environmental communication also is characterized fundamentally as a care discipline, one devoted to unearthing human and nonhuman interconnections, interdependence, biodiversity, and system limits. In the United States, environmental discourse has articulated dominant, residual, and emergent attitudes, values, and practices related to—though not limited to—wilderness, preservation, conservation, public health, environmental justice, sustainability, climate science, and resilience. Despite historical reluctance, future possibilities for scholarship on the environment are exigent and expanding, including communication-based research on climate justice, as well as digital environmental communication and archives.
Mats Ekström and Oscar Westlund
Epistemology is a central issue in journalism research. Journalism is among the most influential knowledge-producing institutions in modern society, associated with high claims of providing relevant, accurate, and verified public knowledge on a daily basis. More specifically, epistemology is the study of how, in this case, journalists and news organizations know what they know and how the knowledge claims are articulated and justified. Practices related to justification have been studied in (a) text and discourse; (b) journalist practices, norms, and routines within and outside the newsroom; and (c) audience assessment of news items and acceptance or rejection of the knowledge claims of journalism. Epistemology also includes the study of news and journalism as particular forms of knowledge. In journalism research, sociological approaches on epistemology have been developed to understand the institutionalized norms and practices in the processing of information and in socially shared and variable standards of justification, as well as in the authority of journalism in providing exclusive forms of knowledge in society. In recent years, epistemology has received increased scholarly interest in response to transformations within journalism: digitalization, emerging forms of data journalism, the acceleration of the news cycle, diminished human resources and financial pressure, and forms of audience participation.
Dani Filc and Nadav Davidovitch
The medical encounter is one of the most important channels of communication between the patient and his or her caretaker. Apart from its therapeutic effect, the medical encounter serves to convey information about a symptom or disease; construct a diagnosis and give information about the expected course of a disease (“prognosis”); and discuss treatment plans, including risks and benefits. The centrality of the medical encounter makes ethical considerations fundamental, not only within the clinical context but also within the broader context of health promotion. Furthermore, since the medical encounter is characterized by asymmetry and dependence, it can create problems of abuse of power or subordination. The current dominant liberal bioethical approach tends not to take into account the power relations within the medical encounter, or the social context in which the medical encounter takes place. It is in this sense that a republican egalitarian approach to bioethics can be of use. Instead of traditional bioethics emphasis on the individual and on personal autonomy, a radical egalitarian health rights approach will stress the importance of social structures, and the need for a different institutional framework that works toward making a universal right to health possible. Such an approach also emphasizes the centrality of politics in building adequate institutions and in modifying those social structures that cause inequities in health. These considerations have important consequences on how the medical encounter should be constructed, such as in the case of conveying risk and disclosing medical errors.
Yannis Stavrakakis and Antonis Galanopoulos
Arguably one of the most important political theorists of our time, Ernesto Laclau has produced an extremely influential theoretical corpus involving a multitude of methodological and political implications. His contribution is mainly focused on three fields; discourse, hegemony, and populism, all of them highly connected with communication and mediation processes.
In particular, Ernesto Laclau has introduced, throughout his career, a complex conceptual apparatus (comprising concepts like articulation, the nodal point, dislocation, the empty signifier, etc.) as a result of the radicalization and re-elaboration of the Gramscian conceptualization of hegemony. According to this framework, elaborated for the first time in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy, co-authored with Chantal Mouffe (first published in 1985), discourse is a social practice that performatively shapes the social world. Human reality is thus articulated through discourse and obtains its meaning precisely through this discursive mediation. All social practices are therefore understood as discursive ones. To the extent, however, that processes of articulation are never taking place in a vacuum and are bound to involve different or antagonistic political orientations, the field of discursivity comes to be seen as a field marked throughout by the primacy of the political. As a result, any hegemony will be contingent, partial, and temporary.
In addition, Laclau is one of the most well known analysts of populism, to which he has (partly) devoted two of his books, Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory (1977) and On Populist Reason (2005). Populism, for Laclau, is designated, as expected, as discourse, as a specific way to articulate and communicate social demands as well as to form popular identities, to construct “the people.” His elaborations of populism are surely critical for the analysis of a pervasive political phenomenon of our era. All in all, the thought of Ernesto Laclau remains influential in the sphere of theory and political practice, and his theoretical arsenal will be an extremely helpful tool for academics and researchers of discourse theory and political communication.
The design and dissemination of health and risk messages invariably involves moral and ethical issues. The choice of the topics, the focus on particular recommended practices, the choice of particular groups to be the intended recipients of the messages and their inclusion in or exclusion from the message development process, all raise ethical issues. Further, the persuasive tactics used to influence people to change their attitudes and beliefs and to adopt recommended changes in their lives also raise ethical concerns. For example, persuasive tactics may infringe on people’s privacy when people view images they may find intrusive, offensive, or cause them distress. Tactics that “tug” at people’s emotions may infringe on their unhindered ability to make a conscientious decision. Employing digital media and sophisticated advertising and marketing tactics also elicits ethical challenges both related to their manipulative potential and their differential reach: all of which may contribute to social and health disparities. In addition, the practices recommended in health and risk messages may conflict with values people cherish. For example, people could be urged to change the way they communicate with their spouses on intimate issues, relinquish the consumption of favorite traditional foods—or messages may raise issues that recipients find taboo according to their culture or religious beliefs. Health and risk messages may have unforeseen and unintended adverse effects that could affect people’s emotional and physical aspects by inadvertently contributing to people’s sense of guilt through shaming or stigmatization. Also, on the cultural and social level, such messages may contribute to an idealization of a certain lifestyle or commercialization of products and celebrities associated with the messages.
Philosophical and ethical frameworks typically used in communication ethics, bioethics, communication campaigns, and social marketing literature emphasize the central guiding principles of personal autonomy and privacy with the aim to ensure equity and fairness. The obligation to avoid “doing harm” includes concerns regarding labeling, stigmatizing, and depriving; the obligation to help; the obligation to respect people’s autonomy to make free choices, particularly concerns regarding persuasion tactics and manipulations and the use of threat tactics, provocative appeals, distressing images, framing tactics, cultural sensitivity, and moral relativism; the obligation to obtain consent; the obligation to truthfulness; the obligation to sincerity; the obligation to correctness, certitude, and reliability; the issue of personal responsibility; equity obligations including concerns regarding segmentation and “targeting”; the obligation to comprehensibility; the obligation of inclusion; utility and efficiency considerations; the “harm reduction” approach; and concerns regarding social value priorities and “distortions,” which includes prosocial values as moral appeals.
Health promotion communication interventions invariably raise ethical issues because they aim to influence people’s views and lifestyles, and they are often initiated, funded, and influenced by government agencies or powerful public or private organizations. With the increasing use of commercial advertising tactics in health promotion communication interventions, ethical issues regarding advertising can be raised in health promotion communication when it applies techniques such as highly emotional appeals, exaggerations, omissions, provocative tactics, or the use of children. Key ethical concerns relate to infringing on people’s privacy, interfering with their right to freedom of choice and autonomy, and issues of equity (such as by widening social gaps, where mainly those who are better off benefit from the interventions). Interventions using digital media raise ethical issues regarding the digital divide and privacy. The interventions may have unintended adverse effects on the psychological well-being of individuals or groups (e.g., by inadvertently stigmatizing or labeling people portrayed as negative models). They can also have an effect on cultural aspects of society (e.g., by idealizing particular lifestyles or turning health into a value) and raise concerns regarding democratic processes and citizens’ consent to the interventions.
Interventions can have repercussions in multicultural settings since members of diverse populations may hold beliefs or engage in practices considered by health promoters as “unhealthy,” but which have important cultural significance. There are also ethical concerns regarding collaborations between health promoters and for-profit organizations. Identifying and considering ethical issues in the intervention is important for both moral and practical reasons. Several ethical conceptual frameworks are briefly presented that elucidate central ethical principles or concerns, followed by ethical issues associated with specific contexts or aspects of communication interventions.