Abstract
This issue of the Journal of Communication Inquiry includes first two original research articles cohering around the role of digital media toward social change. Part two of the issue includes three original articles and a book review that coheres around digital media and power, hegemony, and cultural imperialism.
This issue starts with the article titled “Mobile Payment in China: A Study from a Sociological Perspective,” by WeiMing Ye, Weirong Chen, and Leopoldina Fortunati. The paper looks at the adoption of mobile money in China. The authors of this study focused on the macro- and meso-level reasons why people in China are adopting mobile money. This is different from most studies which have focused on mobile payment functionality and the microlevel reasons of adoption. This paper is divided into five sections with the first section looking at mobile phone as the new locus of payment. The second section looks at the structure, evolution, and policies that influence mobile payment, while the third section explains the reconstruction of socioeconomic premises for the development of mobile payments in China with a point of reference to the USA. The authors argue that China's mobile money market is the fastest growing and the largest market, 204 times bigger than that of the USA. They argue that the USA has lagged most likely because of the high inertia produced by credit cards’ use. Lastly, the fourth section focuses on the socioeconomic reasons for the rapid development of mobile money, while the fifth section looks at how social relationships have shaped the development of mobile money. In their conclusion on why mobile payment has become a locus form of payment in China, the authors argue that with mobile phones becoming the closest to the human body, mobile phones are now an important tool as a payment method as well as forming relationships.
The second paper by Jessica Maddox and Shaheen Kanthawala is titled, “The Revolution Will Be Forwarded: Interrogating India's WhatsApp Imaginary.” The article looks at WhatsApp as one of the most popular social media apps, as well as one of the most popular chat-based, closed platforms in India. The authors conducted 19 in-depth interviews taking a cultural perspective of WhatsApp's ritual communication, with the aim of understanding how WhatsApp users make sense of its usage in their daily lives. While focusing on individual who are 40 years and older, the authors of this article tapped into the underrepresented populations which shared insights on what life was like before WhatsApp. Hence, they approached the paper as a ritual communication analyzing how past and present views of communication tools intertwine to privilege social bonds first, followed by message sharing. In their conclusion, the authors reinstated the importance of WhatsApp in India, with the participants appreciating the usefulness of WhatsApp especially during the Covid-19 pandemic. Even though the daily practices of most people in India were shaped by WhatsApp usage, the authors observed that its usage was augmented by the pandemic, culturally maintaining the society during a time that was defined by lockdowns and other restrictions.
The third paper of the issue is titled, “Getting Better? Hegemonic, Negotiated and Oppositional Uses of Instagram for Mental Health Support,” by Simon Lindgren and Anna Johansson. The article investigates the uses of Instagram and its hegemonic affordances. They focus on mental health communication and its support practices enacted on Instagram. While most research has focused on addressing mental distress on one single condition, this study takes a spectrum of widespread forms. The authors provide an in-depth understanding of how the social–technical interplay between platform characteristics, social norms, and technological affordances privileges certain support practices and notions of coping. They also looked at how these privileges are negotiated and resisted according to the needs and preferences of the users. The authors collected data from two different occasions that were a year apart. This time difference allowed them to confirm consistence of communicative patterns over time, despite individual social media users’ lack of consistency as posters. They concluded that Instagram posts relating to mental health support show that the Instagram platform, due to its perceptible features, privileges casual snapshots of individuals recovery. They tie in with dominant cultural notions of recovery through positive thinking and individual responsibility; hence easy to respond to, and show support, through the like button, the limited space, and emoji-rich vernacular of comments.
“Calling Time Out in Doha: The Seiko Block Camera and Image Ethics,” by David Staton, looks at how World Athletics unveiled a new camera with the aim of adding an immersive experience. To gain viewership, and to reinvigorate a sport long beleaguered by doping scandals, a vanishing audience, and questions of gender equity, World Athletics (formerly the International Association of Athletic Federations, or the IAAF) unveiled a new camera designed in cooperation with Seiko during the September 2019 World Athletics Championships held in Doha, Qatar. The idea was to add to an immersive experience, offering unparalleled views of selected sprint competitions at the moment runners exploded from the starting blocks.
To increase the viewership of the sport, the World Athletics placed cameras in-between the legs of the athletes without their consultation. Drawing from a quote by one the World Athletics’ director, “The new cameras within the blocks will capture that intense moment just before a race. Seiko has done a brilliant job of bringing this to life.” World Athletics in collaboration with Seiko did not consider it as an invasion of athletes “sacred space” in addition to lack of consent. As the author posited, when “power imbalance goes unrecognized, unmentioned, or uncontested, inequalities arise.” The author recommends technology designers and adopters especially in the field of sports to listen to, acknowledge cultural differences and different viewpoints, and enact rules that protect vulnerable players. These should be enacted in consideration of competitors’ consent, privacy, and autonomy to ensure athletes’ equal care and attention to their mental states.
The fifth article of this issue is titled “A Presidential Bromance: How Meme Culture Upsets Race, Gender, and Political Power Dynamics,” by Sara Erlichman and Roseann Pluretti. They look at the rhetoric behind the fictional interactions created between Obama and Biden in the BROTUS internet memes that highlighted the imagined bromance between President Obama and his Vice President Biden. In the USA, the relationship between presidents and their Vice Presidents are historically tense. However, Obama and Biden's relationship, coined by the media as presidential bromance led to creation and collection of internet memes that were referred to by NPR as BROTUS memes. Memes provide internet users the ability to generate short narratives that explore ideal relationships between political figures, often aimed at expressing political discourse.
The objective of this study was to analyze the political discourse of visual enthymeme in the BROTUS memes. Adopting thematic analysis as a method of study, the authors analyzed the meme content focusing on overarching themes and multiple common narratives, as either political and nonpolitical, with humorous dissonance, inversion of power structures, and empowerment of internet users as the major themes that emanated from the analysis.
The last item of this issue is a book review by Christof Demont-Heinrich titled “Globalization and Media in the Digital Platform Age.” The book is authored by Dal Young Jin. It looks at the complex relations between globalization, media, and communication technologies, focusing on the informed overview of various media and cultural theories that explains these relations. The book accomplishes its objective by focusing on the case of “digital platforms” that rule the digital media-sphere as well as to a large extent, everyday life in the postmodern world such as Facebook, YouTube, Netflix, and Spotify. Christof posits that the book is accessible to undergraduate and graduate students’ overview of the contemporary state of the global media and communication. Christof identifies the strength of the book as its ability to effectively situate the emergence of digital platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Spotify, and Netflix in relation to power as well as focusing on cultural globalization perspectives and cultural imperialism.