Risk and the New Media
Crawford (2015)
- Argues that just as food engineers have worked out how to make food hyper-palatable with a particular salt-sugar-fat balance, so the various media have become expert at making irresistible mental stimuli - With such irresistibility comes an ability to distract us constantly - Refers to attention as a resource, one of the most intimate (and perhaps precious) things we have, because it determines what sits in our consciousness
Attention
- Attention is the faculty by which we encounter the world - Yet appropriations of our attention have become all-pervasive: not only in terms of the range of devices that hook us in, but in terms of the adverts that pop up on our screens - The appropriation of our attention is invisible and ubiquitous - It makes it impossible to think, to focus on one thing, a chosen thing
SARF
- For SARF a variety of aspects of the media act to either amplify or attenuate risks for the public - Eg. quantity of coverage, controversies, dramatisation, scenario sketching - The growth of the new media puts into question the specific way that the media may impact their audiences
SRT
- For SRT, the media mediate risk information from the 'reified' universe of experts to the 'consensual' universe of lay people - Eg. in epidemics, as in many other risks, print media, TV and radio have traditionally been the major transmitters of information from public health authorities to the public - The growth of the new media puts into question the specific way that the media may impact their audiences
What has changed?
- In a nutshell: there has been a change in the flow of information, with a more diverse set of voices heard - In the new media environment, information no longer flows from the reified universe, via the media, to lay people - Lay people create and post their own information onto platforms that reach massive numbers of people - They can now set agendas in an unprecedented way
Filter Bubbles
- Social media has made it easy to live in 'filter bubbles' (or 'echo chambers'), shielded from opposing viewpoints - Highly personalised news feeds dish up a steady stream of content that reinforces users' pre-existing beliefs - People have long tuned into media that reflects their viewpoint - So is the 'filter bubble' a change or was it always so? - Do not want to deny the newness of today's media environment, but perhaps the more things change the more they remain the same because humans do not change radically?
2009 Swine Flue Epidemic
- The first global epidemic where people cited the internet as their main source of information and the first since the advent of twitter in 2006 - On the surface, it appeared that information was flowing in a wholly new way: > Far more widespread relaying of PERSONAL EXPERIENCES and OPINIONS than seen in previous responses to EID > A variety of UNOFFICIAL websites appeared: sold drugs or masks to treat or prevent swine flue, or advocated swine flue parties to deliberately infect one another (Briggs and Nichter, 2009) > Swine flue blogs also appeared, with swine flu videos on YouTube and swine flu groups on Facebook - 'Twittersphere' also buzzed with swine flu inspired conspiracy theories, particularly in the USA
New Media
- The new social media environment includes Twitter, Facebook and the internet more broadly, with its blogs and comment functions - As of January 2016, global social media use was approximately 31%, with 59% of the US and 48% of Western Europe using social media - While Facebook has more users (highest of all social media), Twitter is also highly relevant for those of us studying risk
Traditional Media
- The traditional media includes print media, radio and television - Morgan and Shanahan (1996): These dominated the symbolic environment during the 20th century and thereby shaped people's beliefs about events, particularly those removed from direct experience
New media reshapes environment
- Thus far have talked primarily about the content of people's thinking - Focused less on emotion and attention - yet media are particularly powerful in these domains - The media environment in which we live increasingly endeavours to bring us into strong states of emotion and to grab our attention - Viewers are compelled by material that brings them into a strong emotional state - We seem to want our media to be anything but mundane - Extreme fear, revulsion and exhilaration keeps us watching
The future?
- Very shifting field - is the traditional media going to continue to be drawn on by the new media? - Traditional media now just one of a number of players influencing public engagement with risk
Functions of Social Media
1) Providing news to its followers 2) Organising and disseminating information - Twitter used to help organise and disseminate information during major events - 2008 Californian wildfires - 2008 terrorist attack in Mumbai - 2011 Arab Spring
Pew Research Center (2016)
1) Providing news to its followers - About 6-in-10 Americans get news from social media - 5 of US adults who get news on a social networking site: > Often: 18% > Sometimes: 26% > Hardly ever: 18% > Never: 38% - % of each social networking sites' users who gets news on the site > Reddit: 70% > Facebook: 66% > Twitter: 59% > Tumblr: 31% > Instagram: 23% > Youtube: 21% > LinkedIn: 19% > Snapchat: 17% > Vine: 14%
Huang (2011)
2) Organising and disseminating information - Twitter used to help organise and disseminate information during major events > The 'Arab Spring' of 2011
Lenhart and Fox (2009)
2) Organising and disseminating information - Twitter used to help organise and disseminate information during major events > The 2008 Californian Wildfires > The 2008 Mumbai terrorist attack
Briggs and Nichter (2009)
2009 Swine flu epidemic - A variety of UNOFFICIAL websites appeared: sold drugs or masks to treat or prevent swine flue, or advocated swine flue parties to deliberately infect one another
Carter (2014)
@EbolaAlert - In 2014 the twitter tag @EbolaAlert was created by a Nigerian dentist in order to disseminate accurate information to its followers - Within a few weeks, the account had 76k followers - The account gave practical advice about how to stay safe and how to best handle situations in the crisis (eg. how to respectfully and safely bury someone who has died from Ebola) - Also drawing attention to things like new personal protective equipment guidelines from the WHO, to inform healthcare professionals - The campaign spread to other platforms such as FaceBook
social representations literature and traditional mass media
A key focus in the social representations literature has been on the role played by the traditional mass media in constructing common sense. The classic social representations model holds the traditional mass media largely responsible for shaping initial public awareness of a given disease, as well as for aspects of its ongoing representation. Since it is the mass media that typically convey information drawn from the 'reified universe' of medical science to the 'consensual universe' of the public, mass media are seen to set off the evolution of a widely shared 'common sense' (Moscovici, 1984).
The construction of risk
Changes in the way that the new media construct risks - Old model of mass media impact, reflected in classical SRT and SARF, is no longer tenable - The growth of the digital media requires the updating of older models of mass media impact, embodied in SRT and SARF
Cultivation theory
Complementary to social representations theory, cultivation theory posits that traditional mass media dominated the symbolic environment during the twentieth century and that they thereby shaped people's beliefs about events, particularly those removed from direct experience (Morgan and Shanahan, 1996). This media theory is concerned with the 'long-term trickle' of the mass media and its role in shaping audiences' beliefs, concepts and worldviews. Cultivation theory researchers look at audience representations to see whether they mirror the pervasive patterns of images and ideologies conveyed by mass media (Morgan and Shanahan, 1996).
Oyeyemi et al (2014)
Dissemination of information about Ebola through twitter - Checked the quality of ebola related information on twitter in Guinea, Liberia and Nigeria - Collected all tweets with the words 'Ebola', 'prevention' or cure from 1st to 7th September 2014 - Found that most tweets and retweets contained some misinformation - The most common misinformation: Ebola might be cured by the ewedu plant or by blood transfusion - Drinking and washing in salty water were also mentioned - Most erroneous tweets were left undisputed, but some were corrected by a Nigerian government agency - This correction spread on Twitter in 3 days - Authors suggest that public health and government agencies should use twitter to correct and reduce the spread of misinformation
CDC Division of E-health Marketing
In 2006, the CDC created the Division of E-health Marketing to preside over social media campaigns, and with the emergence of the H1N1 pandemic in 2009, CDC officials shot videos, wrote Twitter messages and transmitted text messages to 15,000 subscribers. The CDC became the predominant online choice for information, with 28% of all search engine users seeking H1N1 information going to the CDC website (Smith 2009).
newspaper texts and artefact of the public sphere for analysis simplistic 'hypodermic model'
In the social representations literature, newspaper texts have often been the artefact of the public sphere chosen for analysis; newspaper text is taken to indicate what messages lay people are gleaning from the public sphere in relation to a particular phenomenon (e.g. Moscovici, Duveen and Macey, 2008, Washer, 2004, 2006, Washer and Joffe, 2006, O'Connor, Rees and Joffe, 2012). In addition to textual analyses, newspaper images (e.g. Joffe and Haarhoff, 2002, Smith and Joffe, 2012) and television images (Rose, 1998) are also occasionally analysed. While such studies reject a simplistic 'hypodermic model' of lay people internalising media images directly and uncritically, many of the studies assume that traditional mass media cultivate the terrain in relation to which publics conceptualise the issues presented.
SRT constructed prior to the advent of the new media posited...
It is worth noting, at this point, that much social representations theory constructed prior to the advent of the new media posited that people within different groups assimilated information in a way that was group-specific; information was not merely taken in, in a top-down manner. In particular, in the health sphere, ideas circulating in the public sphere have often been taken up in ways that are identity protective for the person representing the disease, as the 'othering' of infectious disease has indicated (e.g. see Joffe, 1999). Studies of EID in the new media age, however, provide evidence of a more radical redirection of the flow of information.
Chowell et al 2016 Mathematical models forecasting disease transmission
Mathematical models forecasting disease transmission are often used to guide public health control strategies, but they can be difficult to formulate during the early stages of an outbreak when accurate data are scarce, the researchers said. "In the absence of detailed epidemiological information rapidly available from traditional surveillance systems, alternative data streams are worth exploring to gain a reliable understanding of disease dynamics in the early stages of an outbreak," they said.
Misinformation and user-generated content
Misinformation and user-generated content that suggested conspiratorial origins to swine flu was generally disparaged by other users, perhaps suggesting that trust of or the credibility of user-generated content was quite low.
Hilton and Smith, 2010 'scaremongering'
On the other hand, some people felt the media had 'over-hyped' the swine flu pandemic (Hilton and Smith, 2010), reflecting the broader unease regarding the credibility of journalists. Furthermore, blog postings posited that 'scaremongering' had been afoot and presented it as something predictable, articulating a shared assumption that the media could not always be trusted.
blurring of the boundaries between public and traditional media
One further example of the impact that public use of new media can have upon more traditional media coverage is with regards to the blurring of the boundaries between the spheres of public 'responses' to coverage and what is actually covered by more traditional media outlets. Before social media, what was headline news was decided by journalists and editors in newsrooms, according to what the audience would feel to be most important. The possibility of retweeting a news story from a traditional media outlet to one's contacts means that a message can 'go viral', spreading from one location to another like a virus. This produces a new, more ground-up possibility of agenda setting than is enabled by the traditional top-down model where traditional media heads decided upon newsworthiness. Hence, with new social media, a news story can gain momentum and newsworthiness through public engagement with it in a way that the traditional news media could not have afforded it.
One important implication this has for SRT...
One important implication this has for social representations theory is that, in incorporating new media platforms, one cannot simply split media outlets into traditional like newspapers, television and radio, and new media generated by the lay public. As they gain in popularity, new media outlets will be increasingly used by mainstream sources to deliver information to the public. In parallel, particularly popular new media outlets may come to have the reach of traditional media outlets, and new media conglomerates that manage multiple channels may arise, in a manner similar to traditional media broadcasters.
Pew Research Center (2014)
People have long tuned into media that reflects their viewpoint Consistent liberals - Name an array of main news sources: > CNN: 15% > NPR: 13% > MSNBC: 12% > NYT: 10% - Are more likely to defriend someone on a social networking site because of politics - Trust more than distrust 28 of the 36 news sources surveyed Consistent conservatives - Are tightly clustered around one main news source: Fox news 47% - Are more likely to hear political opinions similar to their own on Facebook - Distrust more than trust 24 of the 36 news sources But they also share common ground - Both consistent liberals and consistent conservatives are more likely to drive political discussion - That is, others turn to them, they lead rather than listen, and they talk about politics more overall
Nerlich and Koteyko (2012)
Secondly, blogs may shape what the traditional media write about. Nerlich and Koteyko (2012) retrospectively examined the ways in which swine flu was communicated during the pandemic, comparing UK newspaper articles and blogs written between the period from the start of the outbreak until the WHO announcement of the pandemic. Media self-coverage (that is, how the media reported their own responsibility for creating or allaying panic) was explored with regards to the swine flu outbreak. Nerlich and Koteykos' (2012) analysis showed how this meta-coverage developed in parallel with discussions of swine flu information handling in blogs, leading to the suggestion that user-generated blogs may have influenced self-coverage by traditional media.
Cool et al 2015
Social media was used for the first time by WHO in the Philippines as part of the emergency risk communication (ERC) strategy in the response to Typhoon Haiyan. Creating a social media presence and organically generating a follower base was challenging, especially amidst such a large-scale humanitarian emergency. However, that the number of Facebook and Twitter followers increased over time suggested that these social media channels did allow for increased reach. Lessons learnt included having an evaluation strategy as part of the campaign, establishing the social media platforms during non-emergency times and improving collaboration between partners in the dissemination of social media content. The power of social media is that users can leverage existing social networks to generate discussion or provide information on important issues, and it represents a cost-effective tool for ERC. The ability to communicate in real-time enhances traditional ERC as it allows for rapid dissemination of public health information. Using social media in an emergency response should be part of all ERC strategies.
Psychological conceptions of trust
The ascendance of new media platforms as an outlet for information and discussion regarding health raises the issue of trust Psychological conceptions of trust in particular actors or institutions suggest it is constituted by three factors: i. competence (is there appropriate technical expertise?) ii. faith (is the actor/institution perceived as acting out of good will?) iii. objectivity (are messages free from bias/personal interests?) iv. (Slovic, 2000). Given the user-generated and personalised nature of new media, it is important to consider how trust, or lack thereof, might shape responses to the information they purvey. Trust is particularly important because when the source of information is not trusted, people are unlikely to act on that information (Joffe et al., 2013).
Official health sources and new media
The use of the new media is not merely the province of lay people. Official sources of health information have also begun to use social media. These include government organisations such as the CDC and WHO, as well as corporate organisations affected financially by swine flu such as airline, pharmaceutical and food related industries (Liu and Kim 2011). The CDC created eCards that friends and relatives could send to offer a 'gentle nudge' to wash hands or get a flu shot. Swine flu videos posted by the CDC on YouTube attracted 3 million views between April and December 2009.
Ipsos MORI 2016
There is an irony here; polls suggest that trust in journalists to tell the truth is relatively low (24%: Ipsos MORI 2016) and indeed much lower than trust in 'the ordinary person on the street' (65%: Ipsos MORI 2016) yet traditional journalistic sources are not shunned in new media while simultaneously, the 'ordinary person' is also granted considerable authority One possibility is that, as reports of emerging infectious diseases typically convey information passed on from medical science, such journalism is granted greater perceived reliability on account of the high trust placed in doctors (91%: Ipsos MORI 2016).
social representations of EID agenda setting theory
There is indeed evidence of this, shown convincingly within the social representations literature on biotechnology (e.g. Bauer 2005). However, evidence for such 'mirroring' has been more equivocal in social representations of EID. In the rare studies that analyse both the mass media and lay thinking pertaining to a particular infectious disease, there is evidence of cultivation but also of publics holding a divergent perspective on the EID to that found in the mass media (Washer, Joffe and Solberg, 2008). In line with agenda setting theory (McComb, 1976), it may be that the mass media shape what people think about, but not necessarily what they think. The mass media's images, in particular, have been found to play a key role in people's conceptualisations of an issue (Joffe and Haarhoff, 2002).
Chowell et al 2016
To test the reliability of alternative data streams, researchers tracked and analyzed reports from public health authorities and reputable media outlets posted via social media or their websites during the 2014-2015 Ebola epidemic in West Africa and the 2015 Middle East Respiratory Syndrome outbreak in South Korea. Researchers used the reports to collect data on the viruses' exposure patterns and transmission chains. Researchers also noted the West African Ebola outbreak was a particularly interesting case study because early data were limited to basic weekly case counts at the country level. They were able to use Internet reports describing Ebola cases in the three hardest hit countries -- Guinea, Sierra Leone and Liberia -- to glean detailed stories about cases arising in clusters within families or through funerals or hospital exposure. "Our analysis of the temporal variation in exposure patterns provides useful information to assess the impact of control measures and behavior changes during epidemics," they said.
Kim et al (2013)
Tracking the Spread of Disease with Twitter - Developed a regression model to track the levels of actual influenza activity in South Korea - Also used the model to predict where the disease would spread next - Shows that new media tools can not only be used for the dissemination of risk to the public, but can also be used by experts to track disease rates at a fast pace among the public
Morgan and Shanahan (1996)
Traditional media dominated the symbolic environment during the 20th century and thereby shaped people's beliefs about events, particularly those removed from direct experience
Fung et al (2014)
Twitter and Ebola - State that during the outbreak there was significantly greater twitter activity concerning Ebola in the US than countries actually effected by the breakout - Suggests that social media anxiety may not always reflect the actual risk that is posed - Authors say that despite the risk to Americans being negligible, anxiety was high - They say that this is because social media amplified anxiety in the case of Ebola - Also observed peaks in social media activity with breaking news: eg. first case of Ebola in the US - Thematic analysis of selected tweets showed that tweets about Ebola were associated with negative emotions: anxiety, anger and death
Chew and Eysenbach (2010)
Twitter and swine flu - Also noted how retweeting of traditional news and information resources formed the bulk of H1N1 related tweets (52.6%) - Furthermore, several Twitter activity peaks coincided with major news stories carried in the traditional media about the pandemic - Thus, the traditional media's status as a trusted source was possibly augmented by people's need to seek out reliable information in the face of multiple strands of diverse information - At that time, the traditional media's power was still evident, which was somewhat ironic, since journalists have not been a trusted source of information historically
Lenhart & Fox, 2009 Huang, 2011
Twitter has been used to help organise and disseminate information during major events such as the 2008 Californian wildfires, the terrorist attack in Mumbai in the same year (Lenhart & Fox, 2009) and the 'Arab spring' of 2011 (Huang, 2011).
Twitter is a microblogging service that allows users to send and read 140 character text-based messages, or 'tweets'. As of July 2015, Twitter has been reported to have 304 million active users monthly (Twitter, 2015a), with 500 million tweets sent each day (Twitter, 2015b). This places Twitter as the second biggest social networking site after Facebook. More than three quarters of Twitter accounts are outside of the United States, and more than 35 languages are supported by the platform. Survey research suggests that over one third of internet using young adults (18-29) use Twitter, with older age groups being less likely to use Twitter (though still a quarter of adults aged 30-49). College educated individuals also index higher in Twitter use than those with lower educational qualifications. Likewise, the proportion of those using Twitter appears to increase with increasing income (Pew Research Center, 2015).
Vega (2009)
Twitter-based swine flu conspiracy theories - Eg. that swine flu was a human-made virus deliberately released as a bio-weapon/to increase drug company profits - President Obama's presidency was the reason for the outbreak
Sutter (2009)
Twitter-based swine flu conspiracy theories - While Googleblogs estimated 9404 posts on 'swine flu' and 'conspiracy' in the period of the epidemic, such theories were often challenged by other users
Rodriguez-Morales et al (2015)
What makes people talk about Ebola on twitter? - There was an 11-fold increase in the number of tweets containing the word 'Ebola' when an individual returned to the States and was diagnosed with Ebola
When the Internet started to gain widespread public penetration...
When the Internet started to gain widespread public penetration in the early to mid-1990s, available web content was similar to what had previously been available in print. This content was primarily produced by professional journalists, film makers, writers, advertisers, governments and non-governmental organisations.
Why is it important?
Why do we need to analyse media to understand human response to risk? - Why is an understanding of either type of media important in relation to risks? - Theoretically because social representations theory (SRT) and social amplification of risk framework (SARF) see the media as major players in the societal response - The growth of the new media puts into question the specific way that the media may impact their audiences
Sayre et al. (2010)
Finally, in addition to simply sharing traditional media content to the point that a story can gain importance or newsworthiness that it might not otherwise have had, research in areas outside of EID have shown that entirely user-generated content can provide an opportunity for social groups to shape the agenda when they feel their outlook is not represented by traditional media. This is apparent in Sayre and colleagues' (2010) media analysis regarding Proposition 8 (to outlaw gay marriage in California), where the relationships between traditional media, online coverage and thousands of videos posted on YouTube were traced. Sayre et al. (2010) found that initially, traditional media clearly set the agenda for the other two media forms. However, by the time of the 2009 Californian Supreme Court Decision, YouTube video content predicted what emerged in the traditional media and online media coverage. In contrast to the more equal pro/anti balance of videos posted before the decision, following the legal decision to ban gay marriage, opponents of Proposition 8 accounted for nearly all of the activity on YouTube. This led to the tentative conclusion that this new media form was being used as a platform for people to register opinions that they felt were not being represented in the traditional media. This exemplifies how social media platforms can now be used to bring attention to issues that the traditional media are felt to be neglecting. It will be interesting to see if minority groups take to new media outlets in future EID outbreaks if they find that their group is unfairly stigmatised, potentially providing a means to manage how their identity is treated in traditional media.
Bowes et al. 2012
Finally, it should also be noted that although internet resources clearly played a prominent role for those seeking information regarding swine flu, this does not of itself indicate a radical shift in the way people take action regarding health issues in the new media age. A recent, small-scale study of patients who had experience of taking internet information to their general practitioner (GP) showed that, unless GPs patronised or dismissed such efforts, the final opinion of the GP was given much greater weight than internet resources (Bowes et al. 2012). When it comes to taking action upon health, traditional sources of health advice may be retaining their importance, due to trust issues, despite the penetration of new media.
new media platforms and defining concerns
Firstly, new media platforms provide a means by which public activity can define what becomes of concern for health authorities. A number of studies have used internet search activity on keywords such as 'flu' as a proxy measure for epidemiological tracking of the influenza epidemic, even before the swine flu pandemic (Eysenbach, 2006; 2009; Ginsberg et al., 2009; Polgreen et al. 2008). Twitter posts made during the swine flu pandemic have been successfully used to track or predict the course of the epidemic in the US (Signorini et al. 2011) and UK (Lampos & Cristianini, 2010). On a more global scale, public health systems such as the Global Public Health Intelligence Network (GPHIN) now continually trawl both formal and informal sources of information across the Internet for 'buzz' about potential new outbreaks of EID (Brownstein et al 2010; Keller et al 2009). Contrary to information flowing from science to mainstream sources and then into the public domain, these examples demonstrate that information originating in the activity of the lay public on new media platforms can shape the focus of public health organisations.
2 prominent strands from new media and EID
From the research reviewing use of new media in relation to emerging infectious diseases, two strands appear prominent. On the one hand, a large volume of information was composed of retweets and sharing of content originally reported by traditional media or 'official' sources such as the CDC. Conversely, there was also a stream of content that was genuinely user-generated. That the greatest volume of Twitter content was made up by retweets of traditional media and official sources suggests that these are deemed reliable sources of information by the new media using public. Indeed, when reporting such information, 90.2% of tweets provided direct links to the original source when necessary (Chew & Eysenbach, 2010).
