Dinge, die meine Eltern nicht sehen sollten

Every successful communication process requires a certain degree of self-disclosure. However, both in real life and on social network sites like Facebook, self-disclosure does not imply a total sacrifice of privacy. People rather tend to disclose one part of the self while keeping another one protected. In doing so, it is less important where the protective line is drawn, but that a line is drawn at all. This basic principle of conditional self-disclosure can be applied in diverse strategies. An online survey among German Facebook users (n = 684) examined this assumption. Items for a scale of subjective privacy regulation were derived from Burgoon’s four dimensions of privacy. Based on user’s varying emphasis on these privacy dimensions, seven different types of privacy management could be distinguished. Among these, six different strategies of conditional self-disclosure were observed (?chatty“, ?blogging“, ?networking“, ?sorting“, ?passive“, and ?inexperienced“). Only ?careless“ users did not follow our expectations, attaching none of the measured protective conditions to their self-disclosure.     

Exploring Big Data and Privacy in Strategic Communication Campaigns: A Cross-Cultural Study of Mobile Social Media Users’ Daily Experiences

Mobile communications have played an indispensable part in contemporary human experiences. The combination of social networking and mobile technologies presents an interesting phenomenon because the pervasive nature of mobile technologies significantly impacts on users’ privacy concerns about highly personal social media like Facebook. The massive amount of data collected from users’ mobile social media usage behaviors is beneficial to strategic communication professionals and practices. However, there are significant privacy concerns as a result of these big data applications. Because cultural context provides what is considered to be private and how individuals should respond to any infringement with their own privacy, Geert Hofstede’s 5-D cultural dimension framework was used as an interpretive framework to understand cross-cultural data collected from the Experience Sampling Method (ESM). The data were analyzed by examining country-specific differences in mobile social media users’ experiences, particularly, concerns over privacy among these cross-cultural mobile social media users. Individualism/Collectivism index was found to explain cross-cultural variations in our study. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.     

Transparenz im Journalismus

The transparency that journalists and newsrooms can produce for their audience has long been regarded as a rather marginal criterion for journalistic quality. But new transparency models??due to the interactivity, immediacy, archiving capacity and the absent limitation of space in the internet??offer greater potentials than classical instruments in print and broadcasting. In comments, web videos, blogs, twitter feeds and social networks, journalists discuss with users and publicly account for editorial decisions. Transparency is fashionable in the digital public sphere; its evaluation, however, is not clear, but ambiguous and complex. This paper conceptualizes (self-)transparency and qualitatively classifies the available instruments in a three-dimensional matrix model. This is to facilitate the analysis of problematic areas and potential conflicts: Newsrooms demonstrating open self-reflection dismiss the ideal of ??objective journalism??. Yet, transparency is not only an ethical demand, but is also supposed to strengthen trust in journalistic products because it permits quality evaluations by the audience. An experiment shows, for the first time, that self-transparency has an effect on trust in some aspects but not as a basic principle. Analysing this interdependency, we have to distinguish between transparency of process and of product as well as between different media.     

Digitale Spaltung im Zeitalter der S?ttigung

Using Bourdieu??s Habitus-Capital theory and a representative dataset this study shows that social position influences internet use. The study is thus connected to the research about thedigital divide. A secondary analysis of the ACTA 2008 (n?=?7.623, representative of Germans between 14 and 64 years who use the internet) shows on the one hand that there are still gaps in internet usage (gender, generation, and education gap). On the other hand the results indicate acapital gap. Since the accumulation of capital in the internet is connected with education as well as economic status, there is a threat of a downward spiral: Those who have less capital (education, money) gather less internet knowledge. Since cultural capital influences a person??s social position, internet use enhances social inequality.     

Politiker-Homepages zwischen Politik-PR und Bürgerpartizipation

More than half of politicians on the federal level and almost a third on the state level in Germany offered their own website in 2002. Websites typically present politicians’ political work and their personality and provide citizens with interactive channels, such as electronic guestbook, online forum and email address. Politicians’ homepages as a new format of online communication are subject to critical coverage in the mass media. One fourth of internet users visit such pages more or less regularly. This article summarizes research on politicians’ homepages and focusses on two perspectives so far neglected: use and effects. Statements on current political issues and personal information are among the most widely used content elements in politicians’ homepages. Interactive components have so far only seldom been used. They contain a participatory potential, which, however, will only come to be realized if politicians keep up a transparent communication management that makes the uses of taking part evident to more citizens. Discrepancies between the citizens’ expectations for politicians’ homepages on the one hand, and people’s online behavior on the other, are discussed.     

Kognitive Dissonanz »Revisited«

Using the theory of cognitive dissonance, this study investigates whether users of an online magazine prefer contents that agrees to their attitudes to political issues. In contrast to earlier studies, dissonance is defined issue-specifically rather than by party identification. Moreover, personal relevance is also included. In a two-step data collection, attitudes and relevance assessments were measured first. Participants were asked in a second session to look at an online magazine. Background software recorded the selection of and the time spent with specific contents as participants looked at the magazine. Results show that users spent more time with attitude-consistent information. This was, however, mostly due to persons who had rated issue relevance high. Users with low or moderate rating for issue relevance spent significantly less time with attitude-consistent content and significantly more time with attitude-inconsistent information, as compared with users with high relevance ratings. The influence of issue relevance is discussed as an explanation of contradictory results on cognitive dissonance and media use.     

Wirtschaft Online: Zweitverwertung oder publizistischer Mehrwert?

The present study analyzes the relevance and structure of business journalism in the internet aiming at a systematic analysis and evaluation of journalistic diversity in online business news coverage. Based on a multi-step procedure, 16 websites with high relevance for internet users were identified. In a subsequent communicator survey, the providers of these internet platforms were interviewed to derive insights into the structure and quality evaluation of online business journalism. Results indicate that internet-only business news coverage has not been able to establish itself yet. Further, the importance of traditional media brands for online communication could be confirmed. In spite of a judicial and organizational autonomy of the majority of the internet platforms, no provider generates his content independently of the umbrella brand. These facts may be attributed to limited personal manpower as well as differentiated and topic-oriented content recycling strategies aimed at the exclusivity of topics in general rather than content specific to certain channels.     

Qualitätserwartungen und ethischer Anspruch bei der Lektüre von Blogs und von Tageszeitungen

Besides classical journalistic products, media users increasingly tend to read texts on the internet published by other users, as in weblogs. How do users navigate among these offers, how do they evaluate the quality, and which standards in terms of media ethics do they apply when reading weblogs compared to newspaper articles? Two empirical studies address these questions. In a survey, 702 internet users rated their theoretical expectations in terms of journalistic quality and compliance with ethical standards, comparing weblogs and daily newspapers. In a consecutive 2 × 2 experimental design, 120 participants read a journalistic text with varying source information (weblog/daily newspaper) and varying degree of adherence to ethical standards (ethically questionable/neutral). Participants then rated the quality of the text and its ethical standards. Results indicate that daily newspapers more than blogs are expected to deliver journalistic quality. But when read, texts are evaluated according to their content rather than their source. Ethically questionable texts in newspapers are disapproved as much as ethically questionable blog postings.     

Aufstieg der Semiöffentlichkeit: Eine relationale Perspektive

In this theoretical contribution we reflect previous attempts to re-conceptualize the public sphere in a digital era and suggest an alternative perspective: to combine public sphere theory with relational sociology. By doing so, we are better able to understand the transformation of public spheres as a transformation of communicative relations within public spheres.In the past decades, scholars have addressed these transformations by mainly two strategies: a fragmentation and/or a conceptual extension of the public sphere. The first approach, fragmenting the public sphere concept, deals with the question if and how new publics emerge as a result of digital communication tools. It sees the “remnants” of the mass-mediated public sphere as only one of many new public spheres—and not necessarily as a central one in network societies, resulting in a differentiation of new types of public spheres. The second approach, extending the public sphere, focuses mainly on how digital communication technologies change traditional, mass-mediated publics. In this view, the multiple forms of digital communication add to the mass-mediated public sphere: The public sphere now contains the diversity of mass media, the Internet and mobile media. Thus, the public sphere now encompasses all forms of mediated communication, resulting in more complex structures.This contribution argues that the current “relational turn” promises new avenues to understand what changes within public spheres in a digital era. Relational sociology shares its roots with network theories, but it focuses on the edges, the links between nodes, thereby overcoming the nodocentrism of network approaches. Relations are seen as the constitutive elements, molecules of society and public spheres. In a relational paradigm, all analysis of public spheres begins with social relations. This means that it is no longer necessary to define a new “space” for new forms of interaction, such as virtual public spheres, digital public spheres or networked public spheres. Instead, we add new forms of interactions and social relations that constitute public spheres. In this view, social relations within public spheres are diversified, not public spheres as such. The argument continues with a discussion of different types of social relations: chains, triads and categorical pairs.In connection with public sphere theories, social relations can be differentiated as public, semi-public and private. Based on the notion that public communication, whether personal or impersonal, always requires an addressee beyond the closest circle of friends, family and acquaintances, public social relations are defined as relations containing strangers. In this perspective, private social relations take place between social entities that know each other and are shielded from strangers. Public social relations, on the contrary, take place between social entities that are (still) strangers to each other and, in principle, open for participation. If private social relations must not encompass strangers, and public social relations must encompass strangers, then semi-public social relations can encompass strangers: either as addressees or only as observers and otherwise passively involved social entities. Thus, semi-public social relations are delimited, as are private social relations (not open for everyone), but the demarcation is permeable for strangers. The public sphere contains only specific social relations based on communication: those that can encompass strangers and those that must encompass strangers. Thus, we can define the public sphere as a dynamic configuration of social relations of various types that encompass strangers.It is argued that with the waning dichotomy of public and private, semi-public social relations are a major consequence of the current transformations within public spheres. In connection with the different kinds of relations introduced above, we then discuss private, semi-public and public chains, triads and categorical pairs, illustrating them with examples.A focus on communicative relations that constitute public spheres allows to understand—across micro, meso and macro perspectives—how different platforms and their affordances impact the formation of social phenomena, e.?g., how protest publics emerge from low-threshold interactions and below the radar of mass media. Semi-public relations are key: Public spheres are no longer built only on addressing as many strangers as possible (in the form of an audience), as was and is the modus operandi of mass media. Social media enable individuals to communicate beyond their private networks: friends of friends, weak ties bringing visibility, relevance, reach for information from non-redundant, socially distant sources. Semi-public communicative relations enable the formation of protest groups from Facebook groups of friendship circles (e.?g., the German right-wing nationalist movement Pegida), proliferate “fake news” and stimulate public discourse through hashtags (e.?g., #metoo). A relational perspective of semi-public communication allows for a better understanding of viral phenomena. Due to the current transformations of the public sphere, we do not only experience more semi-public communication, but a diversification of semi-public communicative relations.     

Zur Theorie des Gerüchts

Rumors are often thought of as psychopathological processes: They seem to lack truth and their ongoing change of content, volume, direction and velocity of diffusion lacks validity. Therefore, they are often seen as a type of “mental disorder” of the societal organism. But regardless of the growing size and volume of media and information channels and the ongoing speed of dissemination of information in media society, rumors do not fade out. On the contrary, the number of ongoing rumors, their velocity of diffusion and their access to mass media is increasing steadily, in particular in respect to the word wide web. Therefore, their power and their possible effects are also increasing. From a systemic point of view, rumors are to be understood as infinite communication processes, producing their “genetic code“ (i. e. their content) and reproducing themselves by use of this genetic code. Rumors are always catalyzed as a type of social self-help processes in situations where relevant norms and values or other relevant structures of a group, a population or a societal subsystem seem to be hurt or are hurt, in particular by insufficient flow or level of information. A rumor, once catalyzed, grows in its own right and according to its own principles. In particular, it fulfills the latent pattern maintenance function, which is fulfilled by all social systems. From this it follows that 1) rumors can adapt easily to changing situations and can easily change their content, 2) they may operate infinite in time and borderless in any region, 3) their denial will increase rather than stop their diffusion, 4) they often cause paradox effects, and that 5) the truth of rumors is fully indifferent to their genesis and dissemination.     

Social Media Influencers in Strategic Communication: A Conceptual Framework for Strategic Social Media Influencer Communication

ABSTRACT

Strategic social media influencer communication has become a major topic in strategic communication. However, despite the growing relevance of this new strategic communication instrument, research has paid only limited attention to elaborating its basic concepts. In this article, we adopt a strategic communication perspective to develop a conceptual framework for strategic social media influencer communication. Particularly, we draw on research findings that identify the external resources social media influencers contribute to organization-influencer cooperation. We use these findings to systematically develop functional definitions of social media influencers and of strategic social media influencer communication. We define social media influencers as third-party actors who have established a significant number of relevant relationships with a specific quality to and influence on organizational stakeholders through content production, content distribution, interaction, and personal appearance on the social web. Subsequently, we define strategic social media communication as the purposeful use of communication by organizations or social media influencers in which social media influencers are addressed or perform activities with strategic significance to organizational goals. We then situate these definitions within the broader framework of strategic communication by discussing related concepts and by describing the strategic action field that has emerged around strategic social media influencer communication.     

Dialogue and Relationship Building in Online Financial Communications

The use of social media in investor communications is a fairly new phenomenon. The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) in the United States announced that corporations may use social media to disclose mandatory key information required by law. With that ruling, social media communications leaves the sometimes fancy world of creativity and image creation and enters the core of strategic communication linked to corporate viability and success. Investor relations in general are essentially about engaging in dialogues with shareholders. Whereas disseminating information online is quite established, online dialogues offer a greater challenge. Dialogue-oriented and dialogic communication processes are not the same according to speech philosophy; and dialogic communication serves only as one possibility for corporations to build relationships with stakeholders. The research presented here analyzes how listed corporations deal with the highly participatory and fragmented communication environment on the web. The prevalence and intensity of social media dialogues was analyzed in an empirical study that focused on the 150 largest global corporations listed on DJIA (United States), FTSE (United Kingdom), CAC (France), DAX (Germany), and NIKKEI (Japan). A framework has been constructed to analyze dialogue-oriented and dialogic financial communications on the Internet and social web.     

Publikumsvorstellungen im Rezeptionsprozess

This article addresses the question of how individual media users, who are part of a mass media audience, perceive their co-audience. We approached this question from an empirical social scientific communication research perspective by introducing a theoretical model of (situational) audience conceptions that might arise in the context of an anonymous, imperceptible mass audience. According to the model, both subjective media theories held by people and cues from the media content influence the users’ impression formation about their anonymous co-audience during media consumption. Audience conceptions would include assumptions on size, simultaneity, social structure and the experience of other consumers. We assume that, as soon as conceptions of the co-audience are formulated, they could influence cognitive and affective aspects of a person’s reception experience. The model states that the more the conception of the audience is salient in a viewer’s mind the stronger its influence on subsequent experiences will be. Possible effects on reception phenomena including social comparison processes and feelings of embarrassment are discussed exemplarily to illustrate fields the model could be fruitfully applied to. Finally, the concept of audience conception is illustrated in a model and brought into context with existing research.     

?Wir sind besser als die anderen??

The paper applies social psychology??s results on the theory of social comparison to media content. The finding that people tend to evaluate themselves better than they evaluate others, even if there is no foundation for that in reality, presents the starting point of these considerations. Such an optimistic bias can also be observed in social groups. It is established and distributed in small groups by interpersonal communication and contributes to the individuals?? identification with the group and, thus, to the group??s stability. The paper argues that this phenomenon should be applicable to larger social groups such as religious and ethnic groups or social strata. In these cases, the optimistic bias would have to be communicatively distributed through the media. We introduce a theoretical model that combines the role of media content, its individual reception and processing, and the reciprocal effect of processing on social structure. Subsequently, first empirical evidence of optimistic-bias presentations in media discourses is presented, and resulting problems for future research are discussed.     

Lassen sich mit dem Internet Wählerstimmen gewinnen?

The internet is widely used by political parties and candidates as an instrument in election campaigns in Germany. Voters’ use of the internet for political information is, however, still at a low level. Studies yield mixed results regarding the impact of online campaigning on candidates’ electoral performance but there is some evidence for such an impact. However, the mechanism behind it remains unclear. Can positive effects be attributed to persuasion or mobilization? An analysis addressing this question is lacking for German election campaigns. Based on three candidate surveys during local, state and national election campaigns in Germany, this article presents new results regarding the question of whether the internet helps German politicians to win votes, and how these effects can be characterized. Multivariate analysis reveals that, on all three levels, structural characteristics such as party membership and political status are the most significant predictors of a candidate’s electoral performance. The use of online media as a campaign technique has an effect during the national elections only. This effect is only significant for Web 1.0 applications and not for the more interactive Web 2.0.     

Wer regiert das Internet?

The internet rules itself. Is this more than a slogan? Can communication policies control cyberspace, or does cyberspace rule or regulate itself? In this article, we argue that the internet is a public property that needs to be particularly protected by communication policies. At the same time, the internet’s construction is a new challenge to the regulation of communication. The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) plays a crucial part in the regulation of a central realm of the internet, the domain name system. With the development of ICANN and using its present structure, it can be analyzed whether the net can be controlled in the first place, and whether ICANN may serve as a blueprint for future regulation models. In this, the inclusion of the internet users — the »net citizens« — is the focus of interest: The first worldwide online elections (for ICANN officials) took place in October 2000. Communication politics has thus gained a new and more direct quality, the numerous points of criticism of the actual election procedure nonwithstanding. Is ICANN, having found (in the uniform dispute resolution policy that is also addressed in this article) a mechanism for the implementation of policies in cyberspace, not only an example of a network-type supranational institution (offering pragmatic, efficient and effective solutions), but also a democratically legitimate solution for future problems of regulating communications by including users? This article argues, based on theories of global governance, that the locus of origin has changed for the case of communication policies for the internet, and that new forms of regulation are about to develop.     

Das Paradox der Medienwirkung auf Nichtnutzer

The article presents data from a secondary analysis of the project »Wählerwanderungen und Politikverdrossenheit« from 1994. The data allow to conduct time series analysis on a day-to-day basis. The focus is agenda setting in combination with a thesis formulated by Marcus Maurer — published in Publizistik 2004 — on the paradox of media effects on non-users. In contrast to Maurer, the paper is not concerned with the methodological but the theoretical paradox: Can there be such a thing as media effects on media non-users? The hypothetical effect is analyzed in comparison of daily and less than daily TV news users. The analyzed models confirm the agenda-setting effect: The media agenda affects the public agenda at later points in time, but the public agenda does not have effects on the later media agenda. In addition, there are indirect effects on people who seldom use TV news. As they do not watch every day, there is no direct immediate effect of the media input on them. But there is a significant effect some days later, which we interprete as a consequence of conversation. The effect of the media on the daily users is passed on to less frequent users by interpersonal communication.     

Empowering Engagement: Understanding Social Media User Sense of Influence

For all the hope and hype hailing the democratizing effect of social media, few studies have explained public influence as an element of social media engagement. Insight into how and why individuals attempt to exert influence over organizations online is particularly underdeveloped. This study takes the first step in understanding sense of influence online through in-depth interviews with social media users. Findings call into question assumptions in research about the motives and meanings underlying individual efforts to exert influence via social media. The data from 19 in-depth interviews with active social media users suggest that sense of influence is enacted for social relationships rather than to influence organizations or society, and information is the driving force of that effort. Findings also place the imperative on strategic communication to emphasize the value of the organization’s role on social interaction toward a fully functioning society.     

Warum täuscht sich die Öffentlichkeit über ihre eigene Meinung?

The widespread belief that one has to conform to the expectations of others often leads individuals to adapt their own personal judgment and behaviour to what they imagine to be the group standard. Against this background perceptions and misperceptions of political majorities are crucial for private and collective opinion formation on political issues. Two theoretical concepts address this topic. The spiral of silence focuses on the role of media in shaping the climate of opinion, pluralistic ignorance is more concerned with social and cultural conditions that foster false perceptions of the attitudes of others. The present research uses both concepts to analyse public opinion perception in a direct democratic referendum process. The results show that mass media and interpersonal communication are unable to influence public opinion perceptions in cases where the privately held views of the majority seem to break a political taboo.     

Medien und Integration

Although attention to the relationship between social integration and media has increased over the years, a gap remains in terms of quantitative content analysis on this topic. This applies particularly to the content of foreign-language media, probably due in part to the difficult operationalization of the concept of ??integration??. The paper outlines an action theory-based framework for the identification and empirical analysis of integration-related media content. The ??integrative function?? of the media can be understood as the dissemination of matching definitions of stereotyped situations to support individuals in successfully coordinating their actions. Of particular importance are four processes that grant access to societal resources: (1) Culturation, (2) Placement, (3) Interaction, and (4) Identification. These processes represent a logical point of reference for an empirical operationalization and analysis of integration-relevant media content (conceived as meta-messages). To test this framework, a focus study of Turkish-language media was conducted. The results provide evidence that the concept allows a broader perspective and detailed analysis of media content concerning integration and the processes involved. Overall however, integration-related content only plays a marginal role in Turkish-language media, at least in times of routine coverage.