CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media

The essays that comprise CARGC Briefs Volume I: ISIS Media began their lives as presentations at a small, by-invitation workshop, “Emerging Work on Communicative Dimensions of Islamic State,” held on May 3-4, 2017 at the Center for Advanced Research in Global Communication at the Annenberg School for Communication. Consistent with CARGC’s mission to mentor early-career scholars, the workshop was a non-public event featuring graduate students, some affiliated with the Jihadi Networks of Communication and CultureS (JINCS) research group at CARGC, and others from around the United States and the world, in addition to postdocs and faculty members. Parameters were purposefully broad to encourage independent thought and intellectual exploration: contributors were asked to write short essays focusing on any single aspect of Islamic State that was part of their research. The result is a group of fascinating essays: using mostly primary sources (textual, visual, or audio-visual), examining several media platforms and modalities, considering multiple levels of theoretical deployment and construction, and shedding light on various aspects of Islamic State communication against the broad back drop of history, ideology and geopolitics, the following include some of the most innovative approaches to Islamic State to date, and promise a wave of fresh voices on one of the most important challenges to global order.https://repository.upenn.edu/cargc_briefs/1000/thumbnail.jp

Social Media Events

Audiences are at the heart of every media event. They provide legitimation, revenue and content and yet, very few studies systematically engage with their roles from a communication perspective. This dissertation strives to fill precisely this gap in knowledge by asking how do social media audiences participate in global events? What factors motivate and shape their participation? What cultural differences emerge in content creation and how can we use the perspectives of global audiences to better understand media events and vice versa? To answer these questions, this dissertation takes a social-constructivist perspective and a multiple-method case study approach rooted in discourse analysis. It explores the ways in which global audiences are imagined and invited to participate in media events. Furthermore, it investigates how and why audiences actually make use of that invitation via an analytical framework I elaborate called architectures of participation (O’Reilly, 2004). This dissertation inverts the predominant top-down scholarly gaze upon media events – a genre of perpetual social importance – to present a much needed bottom-up intervention in media events literature. It also provides a more nuanced understanding of what it means to be a member of ‘the audience’ in a social media age, and further advances Dayan and Katz’ (1992) foundational media events theory. The findings offer new theoretical, methodological, and practical insights, which carry implications for communication and media scholars, as well as practitioners alike

The Disappearing Audience and Reflexive Visibility

Contrary to popular opinion and some academic writing that celebrates the renewed visibility of new media audiences, this essay argues that they are increasingly going into retreat. To understand how new media audiences “disappear” from view of one another, I borrow from Brighenti’s typology of visibility and develop the idea of “reflexive visibility.” The latter describes the ability to socially orient ourselves in a digital environment through the textual and contextual cues of others—an activity that is of utmost importance not only to researchers wishing to “see” various audiences but also for audiences writ large, wishing to know themselves