Voice-Based Agents as Personified Things: Assimilation and Accommodation as Equilibration of Doubt

We aim to investigate the nature of doubt regarding voice-based agents by referring to Piaget’s ontological object–subject classification “thing” and “person,” its associated equilibration processes, and influential factors of the situation, the user, and the agent. In two online surveys, we asked 853 and 435 participants, ranging from 17 to 65 years of age, to assess Alexa and the Google Assistant. We discovered that only some people viewed voice-based agents as mere things, whereas the majority classified them into personified things. However, their classification is fragile and depends basically on the imputation of subject-like attributes of agency and mind to the voice-based agents, increased by a dyadic using situation, previous regular interactions, a younger age, and an introverted personality of the user. We discuss these results in a broader context

Bereichernd oder belanglos?: Der Nachrichtenwert partizipativer Pressefotografie im Boulevardjournalismus

Zusammenfassung: Partizipative Pressefotografie existiert zwar bereits seit Jahrzehnten, doch ihre Institutionalisierung durch den Boulevardjournalismus ist relativ neu. Bekanntestes Beispiel in Deutschland sind die Leserreporter der Bild-Zeitung. Anhänger versprechen sich von ihnen eine Bereicherung der Berichterstattung, Kritiker werfen ihnen Belanglosigkeit vor. Diese Streitfrage versucht der vorliegende Beitrag auf Basis der Nachrichtenwerttheorie zu klären. Dazu ermittelt er anhand einer Vollerhebung der Leserreporter-Fotos und der dazugehörigen Beiträge, ob sich deren Selektion und Beachtung durch die Journalisten eher an gesellschaftlichen oder an individuellen Relevanzkriterien orientiert. Es stellt sich heraus, dass bei der Selektion "weiche" Nachrichtenfaktoren dominieren und im Zeitverlauf zunehmen. Die journalistische Beachtung jedoch wird in erster Linie von "harten" Nachrichtenfaktoren bestimmt. Diese werden den Fotos auch über den Beitragstext zugeschrieben. Die gewonnenen Erkenntnisse lassen sich mit Vorsicht auf andere Formen des partizipativen Journalismus übertragen. Sie stützen die Annahme, dass dieser sich eher komplementär zum professionellen Journalismus verhält und entwickel

Die Arbeitszufriedenheit des kommunikations- und medienwissenschaftlichen Nachwuchses: Einfluss der Betreuung und Auswirkungen auf die Publikationsleistung

Zusammenfassung: Die Wissenschaftslandschaft ist einem starken Wandel unterworfen, doch das Nachwuchsproblem der Kommunikations- und Medienwissenschaft bleibt bestehen. Um ihm auf den Grund zu gehen, beleuchtet die vorliegende Untersuchung die Arbeitsbedingungen der Promovierenden und Postdocs im Fach. Sie knüpft damit an die Vorgängerstudien von Wirth et al. (2005, 2008) an. Besonderes Augenmerk liegt auf der Arbeitszufriedenheit, da diese wohl erheblich zu der Entscheidung beiträgt, in der Wissenschaft zu verbleiben oder nicht. Eine Online-Befragung unter 504 Promovierenden und Postdocs ergibt, dass der Nachwuchs insgesamt mit seiner Arbeit zufrieden ist. Ein großes Problem ist jedoch die berufliche Unsicherheit. Regressionsanalysen zeigen, dass Betreuungssituation und Vertragsbedingungen die Arbeitszufriedenheit am stärksten beeinflussen. Den größten Anteil an der Betreuungszufriedenheit haben die vorgesetzten Professoren. Der Zusammenhang zwischen Arbeitszufriedenheit und Publikationsleistung erweist sich als komplizierter als erwartet. Auf der Grundlage der Ergebnisse werden Handlungsempfehlungen formuliert

Media Systems in the Digital Age: An Empirical Comparison of 30 Countries

Media systems have changed significantly as a result of the development of information technologies. However, typologies of media systems that incorporate aspects of digitalization are rare. This study fills this gap by identifying, operationalizing, and measuring indicators of media systems in the digital age. We build on previous work, extend it with new indicators that reflect changing conditions (such as online news use), and include media freedom indicators. We include 30 countries in our study and use cluster analysis to identify three clusters of media systems. Two of these clusters correspond to the media system models described by Hallin and Mancini, namely the democratic-corporatist and the polarized-pluralist model. However, the liberal model as described by Hallin and Mancini has vanished; instead, we find empirical evidence of a new cluster that we call “hybrid”: it is positioned in between the poles of the media-supportive democratic-corporatist and the polarized-pluralist clusters

Populists prefer social media over talk shows: an analysis of populist messages and stylistic elements across six countries

For studying populism in a hybrid and high-choice media environment, the comparison of various media channels is especially instructive. We argue that populism-related communication is a combination of key messages (content) and certain stylistic devices (form), and we compare their utilization by a broad range of political actors on Facebook, Twitter, and televised talk shows across six countries (CH, DE, FR, IT, UK, and US). We conducted a content analysis of social media and talk show statements (N = 2067) from 31 parties during a nonelection period of 3 months in 2015. We place special emphasis on stylistic devices and find that they can be grouped into three dimensions—equivalent to three dimensions used for populist key messages. We further find that political parties are generally more inclined to use populism-related communication on Facebook and Twitter than in political talk shows and that both new challenger parties and extreme parties use higher amounts of populist key messages and style elements

Event- , politics-, and audience-driven news: a comparison of populism in European media coverage in 2016 and 2017

This chapter focuses on trends in reporting over time. It examines the presence of populist key messages in “news coverage of immigration” and “commentaries on current political events” in European newspapers at two points in time, namely spring 2016 and spring 2017. The chapter has a twofold aim. First, it will explore similarities and differences in the populist content of European newspapers between the two periods. Second, it identifies a set of extra-media and intra-media explanatory factors contributing to the understanding of the emerging differences in a year-to-year comparison. The chapter by Blassnig et al. in this volume provides more detailed information about the newspaper stories we content-analyzed. Two types of stories are analyzed: ‘news articles on immigration’, and ‘editorials commenting on current political events’ irrespective of the topic. While the chapter by Blassnig et al. pooled and jointly investigated the data from 2016 and 2017, and the chapter by Maurer et al. in this volume, used only content data from 2017, this chapter will evaluate and compare the data from 2016 and 2017. These two periods are seen as two phases of a news and policy cycle that responds to real world cues. The two phases are understood as stages of a crisis, which offer more or less favorable opportunity structures for populist discourse (Moffitt, 2015). As stated in the introduction to this volume, a whole range of contextual factors influence the populist worldview of crises and, subsequently, the use of populist communication in news reports and commentaries about theses crises

Journalistic culture, editorial mission, and news logic: explaining the factors beind the use of populism in European media

Against the background of the variation in populism between countries exposed in the previous chapter by Blassnig et al., this chapter will focus on article, newspaper, and country-level explanatory factors for this variation. Evidence for between-newspaper variation with respect to populist communication has already been presented elsewhere (Manucci & Weber, 2017; Rooduijn, 2014; Wettstein et al., 2018). The role of the press in a political climate of intensifying conflict among European democracies, especially in relation to financial bailouts for EU member states and the EU’s response to migration pressure, to name a few, has been criticized (Sarikakis, 2012). For instance, Tomov and Raycheva (2018) assert that for Bulgaria, populist messages are widely disseminated in the media, especially during the migrant Crisis and periods of instability. They conclude that the media disseminate populist messages without the necessary criticism, not seeking different points of view on the subject. Due to the emergence and establishment of populist parties in the political field of virtually all European democracies, political communicators might cultivate a populist discourse in the public sphere which would then also be reflected in the degree of populism in newspapers. Furthermore, existing theoretical accounts of populism and the media have suggested that we must distinguish between two forms of populist discourse in media coverage: First, populist messages stemming from political actors who communicate through the media thereby using the media as a communication channel for their ideas, and, second, populism voiced by 3 media actors themselves. For the former, Esser, Stepinska and Hopmann (2017) have coined the term “populism through the media”, and for the latter, “populism by the media”. Mazzoleni (2008) has argued that we can speak of “media populism” when journalists create Populist messages themselves – and thus become much more proactive than merely transmitting the populist statements of political actors. The aim of the chapter is to explore the weight of factors that may help us to explain varying levels of populist communication within and between countries and newspapers, such as journalistic culture of a country, editorial mission of a medium, or style of an article. We work with the same content analysis data as already presented in the previous chapter by Blassnig et al. However, we will limit ourselves to the spring 2017 data (and leave aside the spring 2016 data) because we had a slightly larger number of countries in the sample in spring 2017. The following analyses are based on 762 news stories and 632 opinion pieces published in 34 newspapers from ten western and eastern European countries between February and April 2017. For more information on the type of stories and newspapers analyzed, and for more information on our operationalization of populism and exact methodical approach, we refer to the detailed information given in the preceding chapter of this book, by Blassnig et al