This study explores how esports audiences discursively construct Finnish nationality when spectating games of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive during a major international tournament. The largest esports tournament broadcasts can attract tens or hundreds of thousands of viewers, who participate in the public debate surrounding the matches. In the empirical study, over 100.000 chat messages were filtered by a language model trained by the authors. The ensuing data were analysed qualitatively, focusing on how nationality is made relevant in multimodal chat interaction. The following five key types of talk were identified: (1) defining and debating the 'Finnishness' of key stakeholders, (2) cheering for 'Finnish' players and teams, (3) referencing current affairs related to Finland, (4) aggressive and hateful content constructing 'Finnishness,' and (5) humour and stereotypes related to 'Finnishness.' The findings contribute to the discussion on the sportification of esports and the way online publics participate in discursive construction of nationality.

EDITORIAL article Front. Psychol., 09 January 2024Sec. Media Psychology Volume 14 - 2023 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1349479

This study examines the acculturation of Russian speakers in Latvia and Finland by comparing their cultural (dis)involvement and preference (Carlson & G & uuml;ler 2018) with their self-reported language proficiency and use. Using survey data collected from both countries (N = 224), the study finds a correlation between Russian speakers' everyday language use and their level of acculturation. The comparative results showed that respondents using more local languages show higher Cultural Involvement (CI) compared to those who use English or Russian. Beyond language proficiency, what mattered was the actual use of the language as the local language used outside the home was significantly related to low CP scores.

The algorithmic turn has fundamentally transformed journalistic work. Academic interest in the implication of automated algorithms for journalism has grown hand-in-hand with their everyday use. This paper presents a literature review of peer-reviewed research reports (N = 62) on automated algorithms in the context of journalistic work. Our review focuses on the first decade (2010-2019) during which automated journalism gained traction. The study identifies the most prominent perspectives or themes that studies in automated journalism have explored and the future directions for research that researchers have proposed. Based on the analysis, the dominant themes that studies in automated journalism have covered include (1) testing and developing algorithmic tools, (2) developing practices and policies for journalistic work, (3) attitudes and technology acceptance, and (4) societal and macro-level discourses concerning AI and journalism. The new directions for research that studies on automated algorithms have recognized relate to (1) target groups and stakeholders-that is, who to study in the future; (2) emergent themes and phenomena-that is, what to study in the future; and (3) approaches and methodologies-that is, how to study these topics in the future. These findings help create a holistic picture of possible future directions for the field.

This paper examines language ideologies - sets of normative beliefs about language and its speakers - in a Finnish university student union's Facebook communication practices. Prior research has discussed how today's Nordic universities appear to be caught in an ideological tension between the preservation of ethnolinguistic nationalism and the pursuit of internationalization through the use of English. We are interested in the case of university student unions in the changing landscape of communication practices today. We analyzed the student union's Facebook posts using critical discursive psychology. Our analysis identifies the university's Finnish-English bilingualism as discursively affording an ambiguous kind of inclusion to students as Finnish-speaking/local and English-speaking/international students, and also social media communication as possibly contributing to the inclusion of all students as social media users. We argue that multimodal affordances of social media may act as an alternative discursive resource for inclusive intergroup relations among students in a student organization on an international campus.

This comparative study looks into Russian speakers’ acculturation in Finland and Latvia by contrasting their cultural involvement and cultural preference Carlson and Güler (J Int Migr Integr 19:625–647, 2018. 10.1007/s12134-018-0554-4) with their self-reported news media use. Drawing on survey data collected from both countries (N = 224), the findings show that participants in both countries scored closer to biculturalism than monoculturalism. Majority of the respondents report predominantly engaging with non-Russian news media sources. However, regardless of the societal context, respondents who were more engaged with Russian news media sources also scored higher on cultural preference (towards Russian culture of origin). Further significant differences and implications are discussed.

In this chapter, the authors discuss how utilising mediated communication may open new possibilities into exploring and understanding intercultural communication in education. Set in the context of Finnish higher education, the chapter follows a social constructionist viewpoint into mediated communication. The chapter argues for the prevalence of media and technology-mediated communication as a tool with which citizens of a globalised world make sense of themselves as well as the other. The authors present and discuss practical examples of how learners’ own media use practices may be drawn upon in teaching, and how focusing on the everyday affordances of media allows for strengthening learners’ agency. Such a pedagogical approach can also be seen as contributing to the development of critical media literacy.

This study analyzes social media (YouTube) discourse related to Aurat March 2019, a women's rights movement in Pakistan. Using a discourse analytical approach that draws on the premises of Positioning theory, the analysis reveals the following two major storylines from the data: "The women who stray from the path, and the men who will return them to it," and "Islam under threat from the outside." Social media platforms allow their users to express opinions in online spaces, often resulting in polarization and clustering of like-minded people in so-called echo-chambers. This study demonstrates how social media users actively participate in the discursive construction of the "other," and how the women's rights movement in Pakistan continues to struggle against hegemonic scripts of gender and sexuality.

AbstractThis chapter analyzes the discursive construction of nationality and ethnicity in the context of the Overwatch World Cup 2019 and especially among the discussions of the world cup’s spectators on the live-streaming platform Twitch. Drawing on the positioning theory and the concept of banal nationalism, our study demonstrates how esports fans are active negotiators and co-creators of the esports discourse. The analysis illustrates what kind of role nationality and ethnicity take in this environment, in other words what they come to mean for those participating in the discourses defining them.

This study analyzes how participants playing VR games construct co-presence and shared gameplay. The analysis focuses on in­stances of play where one person is wearing the VR equipment, and other participants are located nearby without the ability to directly interact with the game. We first show how the active player using the VR equipment draws on talk and embodied activity to signal their presence in the shared physical environment, while simul­taneously conducting actions in the virtual space, and thus creates spaces for the other participants to take part in gameplay. Second, we describe how other participants draw on the contextual config­urations of the moment in displaying co-presence and position themselves as active and consequential co-players. The analysis demonstrates how gameplay can be communicatively con­structed even in situations where the participants have differential rights and possibilities to act and influence the game.

This thematic issue presents a number of emerging scholarships into the study of digital gaming. The articles are based on a 2019 symposium on game studies hosted by the Digital Games Research section of ECREA. As the phenomena related to digital gaming keep on evolving and emerging, so must research keep up with the times and constantly challenge itself. Whether speaking about validating previously developed research methods, imagining totally new ones, or even challenging the whole philosophy of science on which research is being done, there is a constant need for reappraisal and introspection within games research. As a cultural medium that has become deeply embedded into the social fabric of the 2020s, digital gaming continues to excite and challenge academia. This thematic issue provides a collection of approaches to look into the future that addresses some of the challenges associated with game research.

From crossword puzzles and quizzes to more complex gamification strategies and serious newsgames, legacy media has long explored ways to deploy playful approaches to deliver their content and engage with the audience. We examine how news and games fit together when news organizations, game creators and news audiences welcome gameful forms of communication and participation. Moreover, we reflect on the theoretical and empirical significance of merging news with games as a way to reformulate normative assumptions, production practices and consumption patterns. As a result, the boundaries between journalism and game's logics start to erode, and they begin to find new ways of converging.

This study analyzes how team members perceive changes in relational leadership processes over time. Interview data from three virtual teams (N = 18) were analyzed using qualitative thematic analysis. The findings illustrate how ideals of well-functioning leadership and teamwork communication can differ both between and within teams at different times. Team members may perceive benefits of the passage of time in teamwork, including experienced closeness, adjustment, and clarification of practices, as well as challenges such as rigidity and historical baggage. Organizations and teams may experience a shift in the ideals of leadership, but adapting to and adopting new forms of leadership over time may not be unproblematic. The findings also highlight how relational leadership is neither stable nor linear in its development. Overall, the study contributes to leadership and team research by increasing understanding of the relational construction of leadership among naturally occurring teams and by challenging assumptions about how leadership and time are perceived by team members. The implications of studying subjective time in connection with relational leadership are discussed.

This chapter discusses immersion and how it may be applied to journalism. It begins by unraveling the concept of immersion itself as a reminder that it is not only connected to virtual reality or augmented reality technologies, but rather that it is a multifaceted concept that may be understood in many ways. The chapter turns specifically to the theorizing done in the context of digital games research, where immersion and some related concepts have been explored in detail over the last decades. This theorizing helps us see how immersion can be understood and in what way the concept may be problematic. The chapter maps out some of the historical precedents for immersion, discusses alternative and related concepts, and how this understanding may be used to inform discussions of immersive journalism. Virtual reality can transport users to new worlds and adventures regardless of where they are physically in the real world.

This paper examines player-to-player interaction in Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft (Blizzard Entertainment, 2004). The game designers have attempted to limit what they see as negative interaction by forcibly limiting player-to-player social interaction. Based on an analysis of forum discussions, this empirical study illustrates how players utilize Hearthstone’s restricted communication affordances for negative and insulting purposes, and how players negotiate their shared symbolic reality concerning this type of interaction, labeled “Bad Manner(s)” or “BM”. The continuous debate over an issue which ultimately cannot be solved shows that players care deeply about the game and the surrounding culture. This study contributes to our understanding of player-to-player communication, and offers insight into game design from a social interaction point-of-view. By doing so, it connects with the larger questions of emergent negotiations of meaning related to human communication behavior in technology-mediated settings with designed limitations on communicative affordances.