Grounded in face negotiation theory and integrated with uses and gratifications theory and the technology acceptance model, this study explores how social face influences utilitarian and hedonic smartphone use in China. The findings of a survey of 725 smartphone users reveal that face gain positively predicts hedonic smartphone use and exerts a stronger influence on hedonic use than on utilitarian use. While face-loss avoidance did not directly predict utilitarian use, it positively moderates the effect of perceived usefulness on utilitarian smartphone use. These results confirm the dual-mechanism nature of the paradox of belonging and distinction: whereas face gain acts as an explicit engine for social distinction through hedonic play, face-loss avoidance functions as a defensive anchor that reinforces utility to ensure social inclusion in a collectivistic cultural context.
This interview outlines the multi-decade career of Professor Daniel Raichvarg, a leading figure in France’s Information and Communication Sciences whose unique academic trajectory mirrors the historical evolution of the discipline within France. Conducted during his visit to Hangzhou and Shanghai, the interview explores Raichvarg’s border-crossing identity as both an astute researcher and a dedicated theatrical performer. Seamlessly bridging the humanities and natural sciences, his journey began as a biology teacher in the 1970s before transitioning into a representative scholar of science communication. In this dialogue, Raichvarg exhibits a distinctive cross-disciplinary and cross-boundary nature: his dramatic practice and his research on “theater of science” and science communication are mutually reinforcing and complement each other. The discussion illuminates how this hybrid identity not only offers deep intellectual inspiration for his scholarly inquiries but also actively facilitates the practical, real-world translation of his research. Furthermore, Raichvarg emphasizes that contemporary science communication must balance theoretical rigor with practical application through a consistent multidisciplinary mindset. Introducing several of his ongoing public intervention projects, such as the award-winning “Experimentarium,” and the global “Ferments Road Initiatives,” he illustrates his vision for “communication and the public.”
This interview focuses on the academic journey, research achievements, and insights of Manuel Castells across various fields. His academic trajectory spans multiple locations and disciplines. He initially studied economics and law before shifting to sociology. His research on the development of the internet has evolved through three stages: initially, he explored societal transformation driven by technological revolution; subsequently, he analyzed the internet and related enterprises; more recently, he has focused on the political changes brought about by the internet, including social movements, political processes, and the impact of social networks on society. Through his trilogy The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture , he proposed the theory of the network society, arguing that globalization is a network of networks, that power relations within the network society are complex and hierarchical, that power and networks are intertwined, and that identity remains of crucial significance in the network society. In addition, he elaborated on his views regarding issues such as the governance of super network platforms, the application of artificial intelligence in warfare, and the China–U.S. tech rivalry, providing diverse perspectives and theoretical references for research in related fields.
In this dialogue, Terhi Rantanen traces her intellectual trajectory from early disillusionment with quantitative content analysis through institutional histories of news agencies to the sociology of knowledge in Dead Men’s Propaganda . Drawing on four decades of comparative communications studies, she elaborates a critique of “methodological inter-nationalism” and advances methodological cosmopolitanism by taking cities and transnational flows as primary units of analysis. Rantanen examines how archives operate as power-shaped spaces, deploys Mannheim’s ideology-utopia dialectic to illuminate knowledge production dilemmas among the “forefront generation,” and develops mediagraphy as a biographical method for studying globalisation from below. She further reflects on how gendered and migratory locations reshape visibility in comparative communications, and considers the contemporary relevance of propaganda research amid resurgent geopolitical tensions.
This study examines the processes through which different modes of political communication (mass media use, social media use, and interpersonal discussion) jointly influence affective polarization. Drawing on the communication mediation framework, we hypothesize that partisan news use influences affective polarization through attitude extremity, as well as through political expression on social media and interpersonal conversation. Using a two-wave representative panel survey conducted during the 2020 U.S. presidential election, we found that like-minded news use intensifies affective polarization through attitude extremity and social media political expression and also through attitude extremity and interpersonal political discussion. Conversely, exposure to cross-cutting news mitigates affective polarization through these same pathways. The implications of these findings for political communication research are discussed.
This article analyzes the COVID-19 addresses delivered by Ghana's former president, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and argues that aspects of his crisis communication function as an uplifting discourse intended to boost the morale of Ghanaians, transform their mood, and invoke optimism across the country. The analysis identifies three motifs that contribute to this inspirational discourse: (1) stoicism and resilience, (2) hope and inspiration, and (3) patriotism and national unity. The findings reveal that Akufo-Addo capitalized on aspects of Ghana's historical-cum-sociocultural context as well as linguistic resources like metaphor, lexicalization, and allusions to expound the identified motifs. The study illustrates why government communications during a national crisis must be situated within an appropriate sociocultural context to be impactful, and extends existing understandings of the way politicians can utilize discursive resources to perform key dimensions of leadership. It also illustrates the value of interdisciplinary discourse analysis in examining the social functions of language.
This article connects the sociology of public problems with the categorisation of participatory publics proposed by Hasebrink et al. Building on our work on depopulation in Spain, we propose to analyse the conversation on Twitter/X between 2019 and 2023 to create a proof of concept of its typology: polity publics, topic publics, and group publics, which tend to intersect and form hybrid publics. This article aims to operationalise the concept of publics proposed by Dewey by combining a theoretical model with data obtained from the analysis of a sample informed by existing ethnographic work using automated computational analysis techniques and data visualisation. Our source is the digital postings with which participants in the public related to depopulation set out their positions and relations with other actors in the public problem. On this basis, we conclude that it is necessary to understand the participatory public as a process rather than as a set of ideal types, assuming the existence of time cycles that depend on the actors' ability to introduce their problem into the public sphere.
This article offers the first systematic, comparative analysis of China's AI diplomacy across all six Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states - Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates - foregrounding Gulf governments' agency in negotiating the intersection of Chinese digital infrastructure and global AI governance. Challenging portrayals of the region as a monolithic or passive recipient of external influence, the study advances a polycentric negotiation framework that integrates theories of norm diffusion, strategic hedging, and co-production to reveal how Gulf states selectively absorb, filter, or recalibrate Chinese technological offerings and regulatory models. Drawing on systematic documentary analysis and comparative case studies, the research uncovers significant intra-GCC divergence: while some states exhibit high infrastructure dependence with limited normative alignment, others compartmentalize Chinese participation and prioritize regulatory convergence with Western frameworks. The findings highlight Gulf states' strategic use of digital sovereignty and alignment flexibility to maximize autonomy amid intensifying US-China competition. Ultimately, the analysis demonstrates how Gulf agency and institutional innovation shape the global diffusion and localization of AI norms, providing a replicable model for understanding digital diplomacy in other geopolitical contexts.
Artificial intelligence has reshaped journalism by enabling automated content creation, data analysis, news verification, content personalization, and multilingual translation, enhancing efficiency and accessibility. Tools like the Associated Press's Wordsmith and Bloomberg's Cyborg exemplify these advancements. However, artificial intelligence lacks human creativity, ethical judgment, and interpersonal skills critical to journalism. This study addresses the research question: How can media organizations ethically and effectively integrate artificial intelligence into journalistic practices to enhance efficiency while preserving creativity, originality, and ethical integrity? By examining artificial intelligence's opportunities and challenges, particularly in intellectual property, transparency, and content diversity, this article proposes a framework for responsible artificial intelligence integration. Human oversight remains essential to ensure ethical journalism, balancing technological innovation with journalistic values.
The rapid and consecutive launch of artificial intelligence applications over the past 3 years has led digital diplomacy scholars to envision the future of artificial intelligence-driven diplomacy. This article argues that while such visions are enthralling, they are also highly speculative. To better examine how artificial intelligence may impact diplomacy, this article employs an extensive analysis of digital diplomacy scholarship. By analyzing digital diplomacy studies published over the past 12 years, this article identifies the societal, institutional, and economic factors that ultimately shape how diplomats employ digital technologies. This article suggests that these factors may lead to three scenarios of artificial intelligence-driven diplomacies: a "De-evolution scenario," in which diplomats are reduced to data gatherers, an "Augmentation scenario," where artificial intelligence insight enables diplomats to better manage crises, and a "Virtuality scenario," where artificial intelligence and virtual reality facilitate interpersonal communication and negotiations between diplomats. This article also outlines two inherent paradoxes that may limit the use of artificial intelligence in diplomacy: a temporal paradox and an uncertainty paradox. Through these three scenarios and two paradoxes, this article illustrates the contours of artificial intelligence-driven diplomacy.
This study aims to investigate how media from China and the United States construct the ongoing technological conflicts between the two countries. While concerns and disagreements over technological development are primarily political, their interpretations are cultural and ideological. Conceptually, we merge literature from international relations, social psychology, and media studies into a full model centered on the concept of "de-otherness." Empirically, we carried out a depth qualitative text analysis of two mainstream newspapers: The New York Times in the United States and China Daily in China. Results show that the narrative construction in the media of both countries is strikingly political, a position tactfully concealed by opinion writers who try to divert attention toward moral and social progress aspects of technology. With a host of frames ranging from threat to theft, the mutual de-otherness reflects a shift of discursive emphasis on global technological development to exclusive de-globalization.
In this dialogue, Professor Terry Flew first explains the real-world changes and theoretical underpinnings that have prompted his Australian Research Council (ARC) Laureate Fellowship to study media and public trust. Based on the concept of mediated trust, he reveals the relationship between trust, power and communication technologies. Professor Flew then elaborates on how artificial intelligence (AI) affects trust in human-machine and interpersonal relationships, and how governments and technology companies shape public trust in AI in a complex geopolitical environment. Finally, Flew explores ways to foster public trust and encourages communication research to actively embrace changes in technology and society.
This research endeavours to examine the discursive construction of blackness and whiteness by protestors spanning from Minneapolis to the entirety of America following the murder of Floyd. The data, which were analysed using the framework of van Dijk's critical discourse analysis approach, consisted of 140 slogans collected from photos found on CNN, BBC, AP News, CBS News and Shutterstock websites. The analysis uncovered several recurring discursive strategies utilised to construct the notions of vulnerable blackness and privileged whiteness, including polarisation, concretisation, norm and value violation, victimisation, negative lexicalisation, generalisation, compassion move, self-identity descriptions, negative comparison, resource description and hyperbole. The findings revolve around 'Othering', which emphasises positive self-perceptions and negative perceptions of others while shedding insight into the power dynamics between White and Black people. This study offers unique perspectives on whiteness and blackness within the wider social context of the United States by addressing systemic racial inequality and societal change.
This is an extended dialogue with Nick Couldry, a leading media scholar at the London School of Economics and one of the most influential critical voices in contemporary communication studies. Over the past two decades, Couldry has developed an increasingly urgent theoretical framework for understanding how digital technologies reshape human social life-and how resistance remains possible. The conversation unfolds around three foundational works that chart the evolution of his thought: The Space of the World: Can Human Solidarity Survive Social Media and What If It Can't? (2024), which diagnoses how social media platforms have fundamentally restructured social interaction through systematically flawed spatial design; Data Grab: The New Colonialism of Big Tech and How to Fight Back (2024) (co-authored with Ulises Mejias), which situates digital data extraction within the long history of Western colonialism; and the forthcoming Predatory AI: How We Can Resist the Corporate Capture of the Human Mind (planned for 2026), which confronts the systematic capture of human cognitive autonomy.
Studies of reaction media within global networked culture have emphasized the political economy and hegemonic meanings of reaction videos and particularly considered the role of the close-up as creating the meaning of the "reaction." This article alternatively examines Uncle Roger's reaction media through a medium-specific and cross-platform perspective, considering both textual and audiovisual image-based reactions, to explore the nuances of reaction media as a meta mode of engagement. Drawing on a case study approach, online observation, and qualitative textual analysis, this research investigates Uncle Roger's reaction videos and reactions to his content across YouTube, TikTok, Douyin, and Bilibili. By conceptualizing reaction media as a cross-platform practice, we suggest the need for an expanded and more dynamic definition of what constitutes reaction media. We seek to explore reaction media as globalizing social media entertainment that is not only defined by authenticity and community but also by reactivity. This article attempts to interrogate current literature on reaction media built on YouTube reaction videos and contributes to the studies in platformized cultural production and social media entertainment.
As global geopolitics and communication landscapes undergo rapid change, the Global South has become a crucial space for rethinking international communication and knowledge production. Through a series of in-depth interviews conducted by Xinyu Wang, Chinese-Canadian communication scholar Yuezhi Zhao reflects on how communication research should be "reoriented" through a sustained engagement with Global South realities. The first part traces the intellectual and practical origins of the Harare Forum for Africa, outlining its vision as a practice-based platform that links interdisciplinary inquiry with fieldwork and dialogue across sectors and societies. The second part turns to theoretical reflection, reconstructing the internal logic of Zhao's scholarly reorientation and her critique of the structural dilemmas facing contemporary communication research in both China and the English-language academy. The article highlights her transcultural political economy of communication as a framework for understanding the frictions between capitalist modernity and diverse local social realities in the Global South. It also introduces "global rurality" as an analytical extension of Global South research that foregrounds the urban-rural divide within and across nations. Finally, the article calls for a new knowledge paradigm for the Global South-one that treats practice as method, values mutual and equal knowledge production, and calls for a revolutionary praxis-centered Marxism in reimagining the purpose and direction of communication research.
This article examines the role of media partnerships in China's public diplomacy efforts to reshape its perception in Latin America. It analyses four cases of collaboration between Chinese media organisations and their partners in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Venezuela. The study investigates the nature of these partnerships, the dynamics between the collaborators, and the discourses emerging from the co-produced programmes to advance China's soft power in the region. The findings reveal a subtle asymmetry, where Latin American voices are included primarily when they contribute to constructing a positive narrative about China's rise on the continent. Comparable to 'borrowing microphones', these media partnerships function as an extended platform for Beijing to disseminate key ideological concepts, such as the 'community of shared destiny for humankind', while reshaping China's image as a champion of free trade and globalisation, in opposition to protectionism and unilateralism.
The emergence of Generative Artificial Intelligence has to be seen as a paradigmatic shift that moves digital information systems from Search to Prediction. This article establishes how the Googlization of the world led to the naturalization of search-based information systems as our default modes of digital narration, offering 'Revelation' as the primary author function of digital systems that opens up the practice of 'interpretation' as central to digital epistemology. In looking at the models of Generative Artificial Intelligence, with a specific focus on ChatGPT, I argue that the new author function that is being normalized by Generative Artificial Intelligence systems is one of 'concealment'. I illustrate the new forms of Generative Artificial Intelligence concealments by looking at the most prevalent anxieties that have accompanied these applications and unpack what authorship of concealment looks like in these emerging technology networks. It thus positions the narratives of rogue, hallucinating or fabricating Generative Artificial Intelligence as actively shaping new forms of digital authorship, which cannot be addressed merely by the current trend of asking for a slowing down of AI development and setting safeguards. Instead, this article proposes the interventions that are needed to address the Generative Artificial Intelligence emergent moment, beyond the easily thrown-around demands of transparency and explainability.
This study sought to analyze Ukraine's innovative use of Twitter (X) during the Russia-Ukraine War while identifying which Ukrainian innovations may diffuse among diplomatic institutions, thereby impacting the practice of diplomacy. Through an extensive literature review of 90 digital diplomacy studies, the study mapped 14 factors that may facilitate or inhibit the adoption of digital innovations in diplomacy. Using these factors, the study identified four Ukrainian innovations which may be widely adopted by diplomats including lobbying big tech CEOs, using memes and humor to narrate events, and utilizing celebrity Ambassadors. The study also identified one innovation that may not be adopted by diplomats-crowdfunding weapons procurement online. The study discusses the impact of each Ukrainian innovation on diplomatic practices and digital publics. By identifying factors that impact the adoption and diffusion of innovative technologies among diplomats, and demonstrating how such innovations impact diplomacy, the study addresses an important lacuna in digital diplomacy research.
