Revisiting the Dark Side of Political Deliberation

The Effects of Media and Political Discussion on Political Interest

Abstract:

Citizens’ deliberation and interest in politics are crucial to democracy and have always been understood as positively related. We argue here that political discussion, one of the most common mechanisms of deliberation, might lead to citizens’ political disengagement or lack of interest. Using the Comparative National Elections Project (CNEP), an innovative data set of postelection national surveys, we attempt to ascertain and shed light on these apparently contradictory effects on citizen engagement. The results indicate that political discussions, specifically those involving disagreements, can produce a lower level of interest when citizens are less informed, are strongly partisan, or hold strong social ties with those they disagree with.

Source: Public Opinion Quarterly

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Backgrounder: Media Censorship in China

Introduction:

The Chinese government has long kept tight reins on both traditional and new media to avoid potential subversion of its authority. Its tactics often entail strict media controls using monitoring systems and firewalls, shuttering publications or websites, and jailing dissident journalists, bloggers, and activists. The severity of media censorship grabbed headlines in early January 2013 when Southern Weekly, a liberal-leaning paper based in Guangzhou, staged a week-long confrontation with the government after local propaganda authorities rewrote a front-page pro-reform editorial. Google's battle with the Chinese government over Internet censorship in China, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee's awarding of the 2010 Peace Prize to jailed Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo, have also increased international attention to media censorship in the country. At the same time, the country's burgeoning economy has allowed for greater diversity in China's media coverage, and experts say the growing Chinese demand for information is testing the regime's control.

Source: Council on Foreign Relations

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Reactions to Media Violence: It’s in the Brain of the Beholder

Abstract:

Media portraying violence is part of daily exposures. The extent to which violent media exposure impacts brain and behavior has been debated. Yet there is not enough experimental data to inform this debate. We hypothesize that reaction to violent media is critically dependent on personality/trait differences between viewers, where those with the propensity for physical assault will respond to the media differently than controls. The source of the variability, we further hypothesize, is reflected in autonomic response and brain functioning that differentiate those with aggression tendencies from others. To test this hypothesis we pre-selected a group of aggressive individuals and non-aggressive controls from the normal healthy population; we documented brain, blood-pressure, and behavioral responses during resting baseline and while the groups were watching media violence and emotional media that did not portray violence. Positron Emission Tomography was used with [18F]fluoro-deoxyglucose (FDG) to image brain metabolic activity, a marker of brain function, during rest and during film viewing while blood-pressure and mood ratings were intermittently collected. Results pointed to robust resting baseline differences between groups. Aggressive individuals had lower relative glucose metabolism in the medial orbitofrontal cortex correlating with poor self-control and greater glucose metabolism in other regions of the default-mode network (DMN) where precuneus correlated with negative emotionality. These brain results were similar while watching the violent media, during which aggressive viewers reported being more Inspired and Determined and less Upset and Nervous, and also showed a progressive decline in systolic blood-pressure compared to controls. Furthermore, the blood-pressure and brain activation in orbitofrontal cortex and precuneus were differentially coupled between the groups. These results demonstrate that individual differences in trait aggression strongly couple with brain, behavioral, and autonomic reactivity to media violence which should factor into debates about the impact of media violence on the public.

Source: PLOS One

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Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America

Overview:

The Joan Ganz Cooney Center has conducted a national survey of more than 1500 parents of children ages 2-10 to find out how much of children’s media time is devoted to educational content, platform by platform, age by age. Learning at Home: Families’ Educational Media Use in America is the first comprehensive analysis of parents’ experiences with the educational media their children use: Which subjects do parents feel their children are learning the most about from media? Which platforms do they perceive as being most effective? And what are some of the obstacles to greater use of educational media? All of these issues are explored by age, gender, race/ethnicity, and socioeconomic status. The report measures the degree to which children and parents use media together, overall and by platform, and looks at how this joint media engagement changes as children get older. The study also examines children’s reading behaviors, especially online or on electronic reading devices.

Source: Joan Ganz Cooney Center


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Media Influences on Social Outcomes: The Impact of MTV's 16 and Pregnant on Teen Childbearing

Abstract:
This paper explores how specific media images affect adolescent attitudes and outcomes. The specific context examined is the widely viewed MTV franchise, 16 and Pregnant, a series of reality TV shows including the Teen Mom sequels, which follow the lives of pregnant teenagers during the end of their pregnancy and early days of motherhood. We investigate whether the show influenced teens’ interest in contraceptive use or abortion, and whether it ultimately altered teen childbearing outcomes. We use data from Google Trends and Twitter to document changes in searches and tweets resulting from the show, Nielsen ratings data to capture geographic variation in viewership, and Vital Statistics birth data to measure changes in teen birth rates. We find that 16 and Pregnant led to more searches and tweets regarding birth control and abortion, and ultimately led to a 5.7 percent reduction in teen births in the 18 months following its introduction. This accounts for around one-third of the overall decline in teen births in the United States during that period.

Source: National Bureau of Economic Research

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Mining Large-scale TV Group Viewing Patterns for Group Recommendation

Description:

We present a large-scale study of television viewing habits, focusing on how individuals adapt their preferences when consuming content in group settings. While there has been a great deal of recent work on modeling individual preferences, there has been considerably less work studying the behavior and preferences of groups, due mostly to the difficulty of data collection in these settings. In contrast to past work that has relied either on small-scale surveys or prototypes, we explore more than 4 million logged views paired with individual-level demographic and co-viewing information to uncover variation in the viewing patterns of individuals and groups. Our analysis reveals which genres are popular among specific demographic groups when viewed individually, how often individuals from different demographic categories participate in group viewing, and how viewing patterns change in various group contexts. Furthermore, we leverage this large-scale dataset to directly estimate how individual preferences are combined in group settings, finding subtle deviations from traditional preference aggregation functions. We present a simple model which captures these effects and discuss the impact of these findings on the design of group recommendation systems.

Source: Microsoft Research

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Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States

New Report Shows Growing Role of Philanthropy in Shaping the Media Landscape 

Data Map and Knowledge Center to Serve as Resources for Funders and Grantseekers 

Foundation support for media is growing at nearly four times the rate of domestic giving in other areas, with $1.86 billion invested between 2009-2011, according to a report released today. The report, Growth in Foundation Support for Media in the United States, is a collaboration among the Foundation Center, Media Impact Funders, and the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, and provides the most comprehensive view to date of philanthropy’s role in the media funding landscape.

Answering a demand for data in this area, the report provides a chronological view of media-related funding across organization types and areas of focus, providing a benchmark for further progress. The report is part of a larger project that includes an interactive data visualization tool and knowledge center that open up the findings for further analysis.

Source: Foundation Center
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Link to interactive data map

Nielsen Social Media Report 2012: Social Media Comes of Age

Introduction:

Social media and social networking are no longer in their infancy. Social media continues to grow rapidly, offering global consumers new and meaningful ways to engage with the people, events and brands that matter to them. According to Nielsen and NM Incite’s latest Social Media Report, consumers continue to spend more time on social networks than on any other category of sites—roughly 20 percent of their total time online via personal computer (PC), and 30 percent of total time online via mobile. Additionally, total time spent on social media in the U.S. across PCs and mobile devices increased 37 percent to 121 billion minutes in July 2012, compared to 88 billion in July 2011. The recent proliferation of mobile devices and connectivity helped fuel the continued growth of social media. While the computer remains as the predominant device for social media access, consumers’ time spent with social media on mobile apps and the mobile web has increased 63 percent in 2012, compared to the same period last year.

 Source: NielsenWire

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