Africa is in a deep and persistent malaise. It is by far the least developed continent economically, and the most conflict-prone politically. In policy-making circles and media characterisations, it is „the hopeless continent‟ (The Economist May 13-19, 2000). Such pessimism is driven in part by the failure to manage — much less resolve — the destructive consequences of multiple violent conflict...

The aim of this paper is to examine how conflict begins, unfolds and ends in a massive, new media polylogue, specifically, a YouTube polylogue. Extant research has looked into how conflict begins, unfolds and/or ends. However, to our knowledge, the models and taxonomies developed so far have not been applied to the analysis of the mediated conflict of massive polylogues. Drawing on the differen...

This article on the civic struggles of residents of the demolished Bedouin village of Al-’Arakeeb in Israel demonstrates how social media have helped marginalized communities acquire a voice. It is based on site visits to the village over the course of a year beginning in July 2010, and on interviews with residents, Bedouin and Jewish activists, and journalists covering the conflict. Media stra...

Findings conflict as to whether thin-ideal media affect women's body satisfaction. Meta-analyses of experimental studies reveal small or null effects, but many women endorse appearance-related media pressure in surveys. Using a novel approach, two samples of women (Ns=656, 770) were exposed to bikini models, fashion models, or control conditions and reported the effects of the images their body...

This paper reports on an experiment that uses the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a natural laboratory for studying how recipients make sense of escalation vs. de-escalation oriented news articles. The results of the study indicate that media frames and individual frames have both a direct effect and complex interaction effects on participants' text understanding. Particularly the effect of med...