Mediated Conversation
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ItemWill You Talk about God with a Spirituality Chatbot? An Interview Study( 2022-01-04)Chatbots are increasingly adopted in our daily activities such as offering customer services and supporting our social activities. Yet, their potential for spiritual purpose is insufficiently explored. Interested in closing this gap, we conducted an interview study with 23 participants comprising 12 Christians, 5 Hindus, 4 Buddhists, 1 Muslim, and 1 Pagan, to probe how people who profess a religion perceive the idea of interacting with a chatbot in a spiritual context. During the interview, we also used a chatbot prototype to engage people in the speculation of a chatbot’s roles in religious spaces and the desired functions. Our participants envisioned that spiritual chatbots retrieve religious information for the user. Some welcomed the idea of engaging in a religious conversation with a chatbot while others also expressed concerns of letting chatbots play an active role in religious space.
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ItemPokerFace Mask: Exploring Augmenting Masks with Captions through an Interactive, Mixed-Reality Prototype( 2022-01-04)The COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 made masks a daily wearable for personal protective equipment as a public health precaution. Traditional mask designs obscure communication by obstructing the face and muffling the voice which can make communication especially difficult for users who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH). PokerFace uses a commodity smartphone and recycled materials to display a live-stream of a user’s mouth and nose on the mask surface. This maintains the safety precautions afforded by the mask, while mitigating the obfuscation of traditional mask designs. To compare PokerFace’s ability to facilitate communication with traditional masks, we conducted a user study with 18 participants, who played a collaborative communication game similar to charades. Participants performed better at this collaborative communication task with our prototype than with traditional masks, and even non-DHH users became aware of the importance of lip-reading and facial cues in communication due to study participation.
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ItemOnline Political Comments: Americans Talk About the Election Through a “Horse-Race” Lens( 2022-01-04)This study examined whether user-generated comments posted on news stories about the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign focused on candidates’ policies or on horse-race elements of the election, such as who is winning or losing. Using a quantitative content analysis (n = 1,881), we found that most comments had neither horse-race nor policy elements, but that horse-race elements were more frequent in comments than policy, mirroring what is found in news coverage. The public were more likely to “like” or “upvote” comments that contained either policy or horse-race elements, relative to other comments, although the relationship was slightly stronger for horse race.
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ItemMobilizing Consensus on Facebook: Networked Framing of the U.S. Gun-Control Movement on Facebook( 2022-01-04)This study draws on networked framing and intermedia network agenda-setting theories to examine how different informational actors have framed the March for Our Lives gun control movement in 2018. This study uses the Social Science One Facebook URLs share dataset to compare network-agenda setting of different media types including offline news media, partisan sites, nonpartisan sites, advocacy/activism organizations, and social media/aggregate services. Results suggest that news media’s framing was the richest and most dynamic, suggesting their important roles in setting the gun issue as a salient public agenda. Meanwhile, emerging media expanded the scope of framing by covering race, gender, and equity issues into gun politics. The movement/activist organizational actors showed the least similarity to other media types, inviting further questions on the role of movement/activist actors in shaping public attention and agendas in the process.
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ItemCrafting Audience Engagement in Social Media Conversations: Evidence from the U.S. 2020 Presidential Elections( 2022-01-04)Observing inconsistent results in prior studies, this paper applies the elaboration likelihood model to investigate the impact of affective and cognitive cues embedded in social media messages on audience engagement during a political event. Leveraging a rich dataset in the context of the 2020 U.S. presidential elections containing more than 3 million tweets, we found the prominence of both cue types. For the overall sample, positivity and sentiment are negatively related to engagement. In contrast, the post-hoc sub-sample analysis of tweets from famous users shows that emotionally charged content is more engaging. The role of sentiment decreases when the number of followers grows and ultimately becomes insignificant for Twitter participants with a vast number of followers. Prosocial orientation (“we-talk”) is consistently associated with more likes, comments, and retweets in the overall sample and sub-samples.
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ItemBreakdowns in Mediated Conversations: How and Why Youth Exit Cross-cutting Political Talk on Social Media( 2022-01-04)Social media platforms are arguably reshaping how youth participate in politics today, but little is known about how youth navigate cross-cutting talk with different-minded others online. Based on in-depth interviews, this study examines the discursive strategies civic-minded youth employ to talk politics across lines of political difference on social media. Applying Hirschman (1970) to informal political talk, this study surfaces young people’s “voice” and “exit” strategies in cross-cutting political talk. Findings suggest that civic youth are well-versed in elements of rational deliberative discourse. However, youth appear to struggle when it comes to relational discourse that emphasizes reciprocity and relational listening. Youth tended to exit from political talk with different-minded others on social media. The low barriers for exit from cross-cutting talk on social media, combined with various psychosocial, dispositional factors, raise concerns about young people’s premature exits from democratic engagement on social media.
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ItemBelieving Journalists, AI, or Fake News: The Role of Trust in Media( 2022-01-04)An increasing amount of news is generated automatically by artificial intelligence (AI). While the technology has advantages for content production, e.g., regarding efficiency in aggregating information, it is also viewed critically due to little transparency in obtaining results and possible biases. As news media are dependent on trust and credibility, introducing AI to facilitate mass communication with consumers seems to be a risky endeavor. We expand research on consumer perception of AI-based news by comparing machine-written and human-written texts to fake news and by examining the role of trust that consumers exhibit when evaluating news. Through an experiment with 263 participants, we find that consumers judge AI-based texts similar to true journalistic content when it comes to credibility, but similar to fake news regarding readability. Furthermore, our results indicate that consumers with low trust in media are less averse to AI-based texts than consumers with high trust in media.
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ItemIntroduction to the Minitrack on Mediated Conversation( 2022-01-04)