Abstract
Victoria L. LaPoe, Candi S. Carter Olson, and Benjamin R. LaPoe II are not only the editors but also the primary contributors to this expansive compilation of case studies sharing the theme of underserved communities in digital communication. The book’s subtitle suggests it will offer strategies for greater inclusion of the spotlighted groups, which encompass a range of social identities from gender to sexuality to ability but ultimately focus more on race and ethnicity, particularly of Blacks and Native Americans/Indigenous people.
A more apropos subtitle might have been The good, the bad, and the ugly, as the book proves more determined to complicate our understandings of how online discourse affects vulnerable populations, than to proffer guidance. Olson’s astute introduction challenges Walter Ong’s argument that face-to-face communication promotes unity, while technologies like writing and print isolate. Likewise, could the common belief that online communication isolates and alienates more than it includes and empowers be wrong? “Community, then, is the issue at the core of debates about new communication technologies,” Olson writes. “Do they create community? Or do they shatter it?” While digital technologies disproportionately subject minorities and women to online harassment, doxing, and self-silencing, they also provide unprecedented means to build community and discourse, or what Olson refers to as “villages,” often more virtual than proximate.
The book’s case studies employ a range of research methodologies, from surveys to content analysis to posttest only. Approaches are as varied the forms of digital communication they study, which include legacy news, ethnic media, Facebook and Twitter, online forums for television series, and more. Chapters 1 and 2 are the most contemporary, using survey data to explore attitudes about online communication—from social media to “fake news”—about politics, race, gender, sexuality, and religion before and after the 2016 election. Perhaps the most telling data are those that show after the election, a significantly larger proportion of respondents said that they were more likely to self-censor when discussing these topics online.
Chapters 3 and 4 also use survey data to apply online communication to two professional communities: women academics (specifically, the Association of Education in Journalism and Mass Communication’s Commission on the Status of Women) and journalists (responding to open-ended questions about covering traumatic events). Both data sets were relatively small. Because few of the journalist respondents in Chapter 4 opted to give demographic data, unlike in Chapter 3, there were few conclusions that linked study’s findings to underserved populations.
Chapter 5, an analysis of tweets about the 1-year anniversary of the Deepwater Horizon disaster, seeks to explore the social media platform’s unique abilities to provide a community voice that contrasts the narratives dictated by traditional news media gatekeepers (broadcast television news, in the case of this particular study). This study has an even less clear connection to the theme of the underserved than Chapter 4, other than to posit that Twitter can capture more community voices of those affected by disaster than legacy news media. However, the chapter does pave the way for the second half of the book, by establishing nontraditional media’s ability to amplify and bring together. “The final four chapters,” Olson writes, “examine the ways that subaltern publics, particularly racial and ethnic minorities, have used and continue to use a multitude of media to create villages that intervened in the mainstream media coverage and confront and challenge prevailing ideologies.”
These last four studies include a historical chapter on World War II Black Press pioneer Roi Ottley, an analysis of online forums discussing race and gender in the fictional television programs Nurse Jackie and HawthoRNe, a study of tweets by African American newspapers, and two chapters on Native American communities as both producer and subjects of news media, specifically addressing coverage of the Native Lives Matter movement and the Dakota Access Pipeline. The book’s diverse list of contributors includes Stine Eckert of Wayne State University, Jinx C. Broussard and Andrea L. Miller of Louisiana State University, Rebecca J. Tallent of University of Idaho, and Mary T. Rogus and Nerissa Young of Ohio University. As with many edited volumes that lean more toward anthology than agenda, variations on a theme are expected. A reader’s inability to find truly cohesive messages and approaches in Underserved Communities and Digital Discourse may be indicative of the brave new digital world it explores. Nevertheless, at least one of the three editors are coauthors on all of the chapters, and are primary authors on all but one of the chapters. Such productive collaboration should have merited a more consistent definition of underserved throughout, as well as more clarity and evenness on the scope of the digital discourse that the book would spotlight. Twitter seems to be of particular interest to the editors and contributors, as do racial-minority communities—both are worthy and urgent foci of communication and news research, but more context and dot connecting with the wide array of other discourses, and of definitions of underserved, in the book would be helpful to readers.
The book’s studies have much to offer communication researchers; scholars specifically focused on news media/journalism, and its social media manifestations, will find selective sampling of chapters most useful. From an instructor’s perspective, the book would be difficult to adopt wholesale for its lack of cohesion, but individual chapters would provide valuable contributions to curricula addressing news media studies, social media, online journalism, ethnic media, and social identity issues in journalism.
Given the sometimes dizzying range of case studies undertaken, it’s possible to overlook the book’s most paradigm-shifting study, Chapter 10, “Ethics and Reporting on Native Communities: Going Beyond the Parachute Story.” In this chapter, Victoria L. LaPoe et al. capture the essence of the book’s subtitle at its best: “Getting voices heard,” not only in the journalism profession but also as a meta-discourse about academic research norms. These conventions, the authors argue, stand as obstacles to conducting and publishing research about underserved populations, in particular Native American communities. “Within this study and in this method, we will air out the history of how this case study developed,” the chapter’s unconventional “Method” subsection begins. “While this may not be a traditional method in academia, we urge academics and others to consider pushing the envelope to understand and provide transparency in underserved and under-published areas—moving away from models and more toward understanding. The conversation needs to get started so we may collectively build on its future as academics.” The chapter concludes that mainstream news media must also change its methods and work in ways that are more collaborative and culturally flexible with underserved populations. As if to suggest a way forward, the conclusion features a helpful appendix of resources for scholars, instructors, and students alike to encourage better representation of underserved groups.
In that sense, Undeserved Communities and Digital Discourse may well be the book that launches a thousand studies, likely many by the coeditors and contributors themselves, to further explore, refine, and disrupt the power structures it examines.