Tijana Milosevic

Polarizing news? Representations of threat and efficacy in leading US newspapers’ coverage of climate change:

This study examines non-editorial news coverage in leading US newspapers as a source of ideological differences on climate change. A quantitative content analysis compared how the threat of climate change and efficacy for actions to address it were represented in climate change coverage across The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post, and USA Today between 2006 and 2011. Results show that The Wall Street Journal was least likely to discuss the impacts of and threat posed by climate change and most likely to include negative efficacy information and use conflict and negative economic framing when discussing actions to address climate change. The inclusion of positive efficacy information was similar across newspapers. Also, across all newspapers, climate impacts and actions to address climate change were more likely to be discussed separately than together in the same article. Implications for public engagement and ideological polarization are discussed.

The impact of copyright permissions culture on the US visual arts community: The consequences of fear of fair use

As digital opportunities emerge in the visual arts—to produce multimedia art and digital scholarship, publish online, and hold online museum exhibitions—old copyright frustrations have worsened in a field where getting permissions is routine. A national survey of 2828 visual arts professionals, combined with 100 in-depth interviews of visual arts practitioners throughout the United States, explored how visual arts professionals use the US copyright doctrine of fair use. Results showed widespread lack of confidence and misconceptions about fair use; resulting exaggerated risk assessment; personal and social relations within the community that deter reliance on fair use; and consequent delays, deformations, and failure to execute mission.

Cyberbullying in US Mainstream Media

This study relies on content analysis of US print and TV coverage to analyze how cyberbullying has been framed in US mainstream media from 2006 to 2013 (total of 775 newspaper articles and TV transcripts), primarily in terms of who and what causes cyberbullying (causal responsibility) and which individuals, institutions, and policies are responsible for taking care of the issue (treatment responsibility). An analysis of issue frames is presented too. Findings show that the TV coverage is more episodic in nature—triggered by individual cyberbullying incidents—than the print coverage. Episodic frames attribute causal responsibility to individuals rather than institutions or broader social forces. Results show the overall debate on cyberbullying is narrow, focused on incidents that resulted in suicides, and subsequent blaming of individuals involved. Such framing can have implications for audience’s support of punitive policies, inability to comprehend complexity of the issue and moral panic around children’s use of technology.

Critical robotics: exploring a new paradigm.

In recent years, we have witnessed a rise in voices advocating more human-centered and holistic approaches to research on robot technology. Towards this end, the adoption of broader perspectives and the exploration of critical questions related to the design and study of these technologies in everyday life have become increasingly pressing. In this workshop, we aim for researchers and industry experts to experience hands-on approaches to explore how we can address critical human-centered perspectives in robot research and whether critical questions within the area of Human-Robot Interaction (HRI) can be considered a new emerging paradigm: critical robotics. We invite people from a variety of disciplines both inside and outside of HRI and HCI (e.g., education, media and communication, philosophy of technology, applied ethics) to submit a short position paper and join us in an open exploration of this burning topic already identified by leading researchers in HRI and HCI.

Children’s Privacy in the Big Data Era: Research Opportunities

This article focuses on the privacy implications of advertising on social media, mobile apps, and games directed at children. Academic research on children’s privacy has primarily focused on the safety risks involved in sharing personal information on the Internet, leaving market forces (such as commercial data collection) as a less discussed aspect of children’s privacy. Yet, children’s privacy in the digital era cannot be fully understood without examining marketing practices, especially in the context of “big data.” As children increasingly consume content on an ever-expanding variety of digital devices, media and advertising industries are creating new ways to track their behaviors and target them with personalized content and marketing messages based on individual profiles. The advent of the so-called Internet of Things, with its ubiquitous sensors, is expanding these data collection and profiling practices. These trends raise serious concerns about digital dossiers that could follow young people into adulthood, affecting their access to education, employment, health care, and financial services. Although US privacy law provides some safeguards for children younger than 13 years old online, adolescents are afforded no such protections. Moreover, scholarship on children and privacy continues to lag behind the changes taking place in global media, advertising, and technology. This article proposes collaboration among researchers from a range of fields that will enable cross-disciplinary studies addressing not only the developmental issues related to different age groups but also the design of digital media platforms and the strategies used to influence young people.

Cyberbullying victimization in context: The role of social inequalities in countries and regions

The phenomenon of cyberbullying is gaining ever more attention by media and policy makers in many countries. Theoretical frameworks using a socio-ecological approach emphasize the importance of contextual explanatory factors located at the societal level. It has been suggested that in addition to cross-national differences, the analysis of smaller units of more adjacent cultural contexts (i.e., regions) might yield more explanatory power. Leaning on previous findings and theory, the current article aims to identify and compare contextual explanatory factors associated with social inequality (i.e., crime rates, gross domestic product [GDP], life expectancy, and population density) for variation in cyber- and face-to-face bullying victimization rates within one sample. Moreover, corresponding explanatory factors are investigated across national and regional levels. Cyber- and face-to-face bullying victimization of 15,813 nine- to sixteen-year-olds (50% female) from the cross-national survey data of EU Kids Online were linked with contextual variables of 18 countries and 179 regions obtained from data of the European Social Survey (ESS). Hierarchical multilevel-modeling analyses, adding first regional and then country-level contextual predictors for bullying victimization, were performed. Against expectations, differences for cyber- and face-to-face victimization between regions within countries were smaller than differences between countries. Regional-level life expectancy showed a negative and crime rates showed a marginal positive relation with both cyber- and face-to-face victimization. Population density showed a negative and GDP a positive relationship with cyber- but not face-to-face victimization. Adding the same predictors on the country level did not improve model fit. Possible research and policy implications are discussed.

Adolescents and children in global media landscape: from risks to rights

ABSTRACT We examine what we see as some of the key developments in the field of adolescents and children and media research. With the caveat as regards to our specific research perspective and possible bias stemming from there, we identify two important developments that have begun to take place in the past five years – 1. The enrichment of the field by data and perspectives coming from so-called developing countries. 2. A greater tendency toward citing research evidence in response to public anxieties over youth engagement with (especially) digital media. A shift toward rights-based framework and focus on media opportunities is discussed as well.