Communication Science
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- Doctoral Thesis (5)
My computer-aided analysis of the ‘War on Drugs’ in the Brazilian TV Annual News Reviews by the Rede Globo network (Retrospectivas), from 2000 to 2015, uncovers major patterns in these particular media narratives. My mixed-methods research design combines a quantitative content analysis of the most pertinent 16 episodes of Rede Globo’s Annual Reviews with the qualitative content analysis that scrutinizes the 24 segments and the 306 stories on drug-related violence. Combining historical studies, cultural theories, media studies, concepts from international criminology, official laws, and semi-official documents highlights long-term extreme socioeconomic inequalities, race hate, social stigmatization, structural violence, lethal victimization of nonwhite males, drug illegalization, and anti-drug legislation that effectively condition contemporary drug-related violence. Various reports of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and several other international and national organizations were analyzed to discuss the more recent illegalization of natural and synthetic substances and the illicit use of prescription medicaments. Brazil became an important player in the “Andean narcotic route” and turned out to be the world’s largest consumer of crack and the second largest user of cocaine after the USA. The illegalization of substances, anti-drug policies, the banalization of arbitrary violence and the lack of respect for human rights have fomented the emergence of powerful and well-structured comandos armados and violent paramilitary groups, like death squads and militias, since the beginning of the 1970s. Moreover, the ‘War on Drugs’ strategy implanted in Brazil in the 1960s, with a major focus on militarized repression rather than prevention has contributed to the increasing incidence of vulnerable drug addicts, brutal violence, homicides, disproportionate drug enforcement sentencing practices and the skyrocketing rates of incarceration of black and mestizo.
Sustainable development has been enriched by notions and views presented by related scientific and political discourses as well as by other actors' implicit views on sustainable development. This plethora of opinions is due to highly diverse parts of society participating in the discourse. The assumption is made that due to its abstractness, the sustainable development concept can overcome strong barriers between social systems like science, economy, politics or education. This leads to a secondary communication problem: once absorbed by the social subsystems, the abstract meaning of sustainable development is adapted to and diluted by the system's specific language. With adaptation, the communication barrier between the systems arises again, due to the different meanings that they attribute to the adjusted versions of sustainable development. This thesis therefore sets out to present a first empirical study on the meaning of sustainable development. In a theoretical discussion, a distinction is made between a denotative and connotative meaning. Scientist, politicians and economists usually discuss the denotation, in other words, the literal meaning of sustainable development. Sustainable development's connotation is, however, important for sustainable development education in general and, even more importantly, in the mass media with its focus on entertainment and on inducing moods and emotions. In this thesis, a content analysis method is used to assess the denotation of sustainable development for the economic and political system. The data obtained support the assumption that sustainable development has different meanings for different actors and systems. Furthermore, a large online survey was conducted by means of the semantic differential technique to determine the connotation of sustainable development. It revealed several interesting results, one of which was that the connotation differs with the degree of familiarity with the concept.
The availability of Web 2.0 for public use has brought new forms of interpersonal and public interaction opportunities, which affect people’s daily lives by stimulating the complex process of socialization. Online acquaintances are becoming common leading to offline communication or strengthening the existing online connections. Social networking users use massive visual and textual data for self-presentation. Profile images play a significant role in this regard. It investigates profile image typologies: production technique, visual motif, and photographic perspective. To answer the research questions, 1,028 randomly selected profile images, 90 online survey questionnaires and 7 in-depth interviews were randomly and purposefully collected from students at Duke University (USA) and Jacobs University Bremen (Germany). Content analysis and visual context analysis were used to analyze the collected data. The results show that profile images carry intended connotations meaningfully selected by profile owners. Images connote users’ feelings, emotions, and desires; they are used to tell personal stories, remember significant others, endorse people, promote products and institutions, and announce events. The vast majority of Facebook users prefer to use candid, person profile images, for modifying entails misleading relatives and friends. Moreover, the majority of the profile images are close-up, frontal, eye-level photographs which convey posed but authentic self-presentation. The process of visual self-presentation is analyzed from the perspective of hyperpersonal communication; it is asynchronous in that profile owners spend time with a purpose to choose relatively stable profile images suitable for most audiences. Online self-presentation in images is not about the individual profile owner; it is essentially about the complex interplay among the event, the subject, the photographer, and the technology. This research, therefore, provides both empirical and theoretical foundations of not only the power and significance of images in computer‐mediated communication but also the complex relationship among visual production, self-presentation, and computer-mediated communication.
Visualization of Gender in the Turkish Press : A Comparative Analysis of Six Turkish Newspapers
(2010)
This study analyses the female and the male visuals in six Turkish newspapers representing different socio-political positions. Visual representations shape the ways people perceive the world and they signify the social fabric. Changes in the visualization of the females in particular indicate societal changes taking place. Various previous studies on Turkish press focused either on the question of underrepresentation of women or on a comparative analysis of the religious and secular press with respect to the representation of women based on textual material. Turkish newspapers are very rich in terms of visual material and in terms of the visual depiction of women. The study argues that the exclusion of visuals from such analyses creates a serious shortcoming. Thus, this study aims to expand the previous research with the incorporation of visual analysis. Secondly, as is the case in previous research, approaching secular and religious press as two separate and distinct camps tends to obscure both the similarities between religious and secular newspapers and the differences within secular and within religious newspapers with respect to the depiction of women. Therefore this study aims not only to look at the differences between secular and religious newspapers in Turkey but also at the differences within them in terms of the visual representation of women. In methodological terms quantitative visual content analysis and qualitative iconological and semiological analyses are employed to analyze the characteristics and meanings of the visuals. In theoretical terms selected approaches towards modernity, media, gender and visual communication inform the study.
Germany has faced low birth rates since the 1970s. No policies have changed this trend as yet. This study focuses on the role of TV as a socialising agent contributing to viewers' attitudes and beliefs that ultimately result in having no or few children. This study, which is situated within the agenda-setting theory, social cognitive theory as well as cultivation theory is descriptive in kind. The material under analysis consists, first, of 50 highest-rating programmes as watched by 14 to 49 year-olds during an average week, considered to reflect preferences of viewers of potentially child-bearing age, and, second, the ten most watched programmes shown during a week focusing on the representation of families ("Children are the Future"). The results are related to one another with the aim of obtaining a coincidental picture from the first subset, and an intentionally constructed one from the second. The most striking finding is how little family life is shown. Where it is shown, the representations often lack detail preventing an in-depth analysis. Where recognisable, well-off two-parent families with one or two children older than six years predominate. Traditional models for the division of labour and unchanged gender roles feature. Inner-familial discourse about combining work and family issues is scarce and completely absent in the families' surroundings. Financial aids for families or external child care are virtually not shown nor discussed. Results indicate few significant differences between the two programme subsets. The description of family representations in high-rating programmes is considered an important step towards an understanding of the kind of mediated picture television viewers experience. The results of the present study seek to stimulate interest in the field of cultivaton analysis, e.g. to explore effects of televised patterns on viewers' attitudes towards family life in general or, more specifically, on their wish to have children.
