Filtering by
- All Subjects: Social Media
- All Subjects: Women
- Creators: School of International Letters and Cultures
- Status: Published
Social media is a tool widely used by many organizations for purposes of spreading ideas, influencing users politically, and promoting products for purchase. Among the ideas spread on social media is religious belief, a task undertaken by religious officials and members alike, in both widespread and personal communication. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints has promoted its religion online for years through official webpages and the testimonies of members, but now seeks to spread knowledge of its beliefs and increase membership by involving its full-time missionaries on Facebook and Instagram. The initiative to add online-proselytizing to a missionary’s list of duties began in 2020 at the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic and has been through multiple changes to arrive at the present function of social media in full-time missionary work. Despite these positive changes, missionaries still feel that they lack the necessary knowledge and skills to conduct productive conversations online that lead to opportunities to share their message. Two separate missions are analyzed through Bolman & Deal’s Four Frames to gain a complete perspective of missionary work through social media and how it can be improved. By implementing visual symbols that relate to the importance of social media missionary work and increasing the social media training that missionaries receive, they would feel better prepared to host conversations on online platforms and share their messages. Additionally, by updating the leadership position associated with social media in a mission, more missionaries would ultimately gain expertise in this skill and better fulfill their purpose as missionaries.
As projections of climate change effects in the media persist, current research suggests that threatening climate change content circulating social media and knowledge of threats to the Earth system and human health may lead to the development of eco-anxiety. If social media exposure to climate change content influences eco-anxiety, there is a need for psychological interventions to help manage climate change-related negative affect. A systematic review was conducted 1) to investigate the relationship between the use of social media and eco-anxiety in young adults and 2) to explore methodological factors involved in eco-anxiety research, including measurements and potential moderating factors. The review included seventeen articles that studied the measurements of eco-anxiety, the relationship between social media and eco-anxiety, or negative affect related to climate change and potentially moderating risk factors. A thematic analysis of the included articles yielded four central themes: (1) The Operationalization of Eco-anxiety, (2) Climate Change Perceptions and their Effects on Impairments, (3) The Relationship between Social Media Usage and Eco-anxiety, and (4) Potential Factors Influencing Climate Change Perceptions. The results suggest that eco-anxiety is real and common, especially amongst young people, and that it may be reliably measured using the Climate Change Anxiety Scale. Due to the limited and heterogeneous literature on the problem, no definitive conclusions can be drawn about how potential factors influence eco-anxiety. Future research should further explore the relationship between social media and eco-anxiety. In addition, the problem of eco-anxiety should be studied in underrepresented, vulnerable populations at higher risk for weather-related events.
A reflection on my diverse educational experience as a sports journalism student, key lessons I learned about specific forms of communication and content creation within social media, written reporting and radio/podcasting and the demand for versatility among all modern journalists.
Our online world has benefits such as ease of connectedness across geographical and temporal boundaries, and the sheer size of an information firehouse which lets us access effectively anything we could want to know. With increased dependence on smartphones and laptops, they steadily integrate more into daily life. But without cogent thought to each online action, however small, we fall victim to a splintering of attention. Switching from one app or task to the next becomes involuntary. In pursuit of connection, we ironically become dissociated instead.
Tracing the use of Revolutionary heritage rhetoric over a fifty-year span reveals that activists’ invocations of the founding were inseparably connected to their willingness to work for racial and class equality along with woman's rights. References to the Revolution and such slogans as “no taxation without representation” could be inclusive or exclusionary, depending upon how they were used and who used them. In the opening decades of the organized woman’s rights movement, claims to a shared Revolutionary heritage reflected larger commitments to racial, class, and gender equality. As organizations within the movement fractured around competing ideas about how to best improve women's lives, activists’ rhetoric changed as well. When the commitment to universal equality gave way to ideologies of race, class, and nativity privilege, references to the founding era morphed into justifications for limited, rather than equal rights. Revolutionary heritage rhetoric largely disappeared from suffrage, education, and pay equity arguments by the late 1880s, replaced by arguments grounded in white, Protestant, female moral superiority.
Social media today is a major source of not only communication, but also news and entertainment. This year, people everywhere have had to embrace virtual environments as their main sources of communication. For students, especially, the move to virtual schoolwork in 2020 has increased the amount of time spent on technology. This observational study examined, through an anonymous online survey, how college students spend their time on social media and how it affects their mental health. The 25-question survey was open to current ASU students as of 2021, and 2020 ASU graduates. Respondents’ results concluded that while students actively use social media for communication and entertainment, it can present a burden on their mental health and their productivity.