Affording Immediacy in Television News Production: Comparing Adoption Trajectories of Social Media and Satellite Technologies

Scholars have added nuance to debates about technology’s effects on journalism by exploring how news organizations adopt technologies. Extending this work, this article argues that technological adoption occurs at the intersection of technological affordances, journalism practice, and internal power relations. It uses interviews and observations with over 100 journalists at eight mainstream television news organizations in the United Kingdom and Canada to compare the adoption of social media and satellite technologies and their affordance of immediacy, a central television news value. Adoption trajectories and use of each set of technologies are found to vary in three respects: the extent to which they afford and shape immediacy; top-down versus bottom-up investment strategies; and effects on news-gathering and transmission practices

Programming sex, gender, and sexuality: Infrastructural failures in the "feminist" dating app Bumble

Background Bumble is a self-declared "feminist" dating app that gives women control over initiating conversations with potential matches. Analysis Through a material-semiotic analysis of Bumble's software and online media about the app, this article critically investigates how gender, sex, and sexuality are produced and given meaning by Bumble's programmed infrastructure. Conclusions and implications Since the epistemological underpinnings of Bumble's design centre gender as the solitary axis of oppression, the authors argue that the app's infrastructure generates an ontological relationship between gender, sex, and sexuality that narrows the capacity to achieve its creators' stated social justice objectives. Several infrastructural failures are detailed to demonstrate how control and safety are 1) optimized for straight cisgender women, and 2) contingent on the inscription of an aggressive form of masculinity onto straight male bodies

Facebooking in "face": Complex identities meet simple databases

Online systems often struggle to account for the complicated self-presentation and disclosure needs of those with complex identities or specialized anonymity. Using the lenses of gender, recovery, and performance, our proposed panel explores the tensions that emerge when the richness and complexity of individual personalities and subjectivities run up against design norms that imagine identity as simplistic or one-dimensional. These models of identity not only limit the ways individuals can express their own identities, but also establish norms for other users about what to expect, causing further issues when the inevitable dislocations do occur. We discuss the challenges in translating identity into these systems, and how this is further marred by technical requirements and normative logics that structure cultures and practices of databases, algorithms and computer programming

The Internet, mobile phones and blogging

This research examines adaptations within traditional journalistic practice that are a result of the varied use of new media among both journalists and the public. Observations in newsrooms and 40 interviews with journalists from eight major news organisations in the United Kingdom and Canada highlight three significant changes: (1) shifts in traditional news flow cycles; (2) heightened accountability; and (3) evolving news values. Rising public documentation via mobile phones inserts a new element into traditional news flow cycles while material from bloggers acting as “citizen journalists” occasionally aids reporting of contested topics or regions fraught with accessibility issues. Elevated public scrutiny also obliges news organisations to contend with increasingly effective flak-producers. Some journalists have modified their daily routines to reflect the opportunities enabled by new media but altered organisational notions of immediacy significantly constrain time spent gathering the news, particularly within 24-hour programmes. Largely as a means of securing audiences, organisations are turning to their websites to offer interactivity and transparency

Digital currents: How technology and the public are shaping TV news

Social media has irrevocably changed how people consume the news. With the distinction between professional and citizen journalists blurring like never before, Digital Currents illuminates the behind-the-scenes efforts of television newscasters to embrace the public's participation in news and information gathering and protect the integrity of professional journalism. Using interviews with more than one hundred journalists from eight networks in Canada and the United Kingdom, Rena Bivens takes the reader inside TV newsrooms to explore how news organisations are responding to the paradigmatic shifts in media and communication practices. The first book to examine the many ways that the public has entered the production of mainstream news, Digital Currents underscores the central importance of media literacy in the age of widespread news sources

Rape: is there an app for that? An empirical analysis of the features of anti-rape apps

This study of mobile phone apps designed to prevent sexual violence (n = 215) is a quantitative analysis of all their features (n = 807). We analyze the intended users (victims, bystanders, and perpetrators) and rape prevention strategies of each feature, finding that anti-rape app design generally reinforces and reflects pervasive rape myths, by both targeting potential victims and reinforcing stranger-danger. To demonstrate that these limitations are primarily cultural rather than technological, we conclude by imagining apps with similar technical features that resist rather than reinforce rape myths. This study offers an empirical investigation of the relationship between technical design and social norms, and a unique methodology for uncovering the ideologies that underlie design