Volume 43, Issue 2

The study explores communication strategies of ethno-nationalist terrorists with respect to their framing and identity building. Strategies of eight ethno-nationalist terrorist groups were analyzed using 70 articles published on the groups’ websites. Three cluster-analytic procedures and a correlational analysis were applied to (1) strategies of problem definition, (2) cause and responsibility attribution, (3) treatment recommendations, and (4) identity building. The analysis revealed various dimensions on which terrorists frame their content. No group-specific strategies of framing and identity building have been found yet, suggesting that the strategies were universal across terrorist groups, and they were applied on a case-by-case basis. Knowledge about these strategies should advance counter-terrorism efforts, and assist in development of alternative identities among ethnic groups at risk of conflict.

A closer look at the three areas of action in communication permits us to conclude that the discipline faces a serious crisis. First, an epistemological review shows a fragmented body of theories. Secondly, there is a plurality of separate traditions within academia. Third, the professional field is technology-centered and lacks expertise since there is little connection between theory and practice. Our goal is to analyze the three-fold state of the discipline and to propose a conciliatory model. The Interactive Communication Process (ICP) is based on an interactive process in which a human subsystem (a processor), conditioned by his or her psychological and social and cultural state, interacts with another communicative subsystem (another human or a technological processor) to elaborate or process a message conveyed through some space (channel) in a certain time (synchronous or asynchronous).

The main aim of this article is to analyze the social circulation of discourses on non-hegemonic cultural practices, in particular, on what is called “trash TV”, and how they are connected to struggles over cultural and social hierarchies. To do so, it takes a specific event as starting point: the injunction that the CNMC (the Spanish broadcasting regulatory body) filed against Mediaset (a commercial TV operator) to adjust the contents of Sálvame Diario (a celebrity gossip program frequently associated with “trash TV”) to the requirements of what is known as the “child protection time slot”. This paper uses constructionist framing to analyze how this event was discussed by different social actors. Our analysis shows that while the CNMC and the press painted the conflict as a legal issue, Sálvame and social media users focused their discussion on the social acceptability of celebrity gossip media and their viewers (specifically working-class women).

In their depictions of scandalized politicians, journalists frequently use news images that highlight the (alleged) isolation of politicians. To test how this way of portraying political actors affects a recipient’s attitudes and his/her guilt perception toward such a scandalized politician an experiment was conducted. All participants were exposed to the identical textual information. However, the visual information (degree of isolation) was systematically altered. A multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) showed that participants – exposed to a visual highlighting the isolation of the politician – evaluated the politician in a significantly more negative way and rated other recipients’ perceptions of the politician’s level of guilt to be higher.

The framework of the ‘social ontology of the internet’ is applied to music recommendation platforms. Those websites provide individual suggestions of music to users, creating new dynamics of taste that are no longer based on human-to-human interaction and verbalized judgments. An exemplary analysis of three platforms shows that different conceptions of musical tastes are represented by technical systems: situational emotional preferences, a formalist aesthetics, and social proximity based on tastes. The platforms share certain assumptions about the ontology of musical entities and of course the constitutive act of recommending. We discuss how this act can be ascribed to technical systems. Theses on the platforms’ effects on the social structure of musical tastes are developed.