Although freedom of speech is a Constitutionally protected and widely endorsed value, political tolerance research finds that people are less willing to protect speech they dislike than speech they like (Gibson, 2006). Research also suggests liberal-conservative differences in political tolerance (Davis & Silver, 2004). We measured U.S. citizens’ political tolerance for speech acts, while manip...

Political blogs as a form of social media allow for an uniquely interactive form of political discourse. This is especially evident in focused blogs with a strong ideological identity. We investigate techniques to identify topics within the context of the community, which when discussed in a blog post evoke a discernible positive or negative collective opinion from readers who respond to posts ...

Shahnameh of Ferdowsi has been continuously studied by numerous researchers and scholars from literary, mythological and cultural aspects. One of the rarely and less noticed issues in this regard is investigating the ideological role and function of language in this piece of literature based on a certain adopted theory and method. In other words, the writers of this article try to understand ho...

The current paper examines the ways the concepts of ̳home‘ and ̳belonging‘ are conceived, accepted, and imagined by the characters of Sam Selvon‘s The Lonely Londoners (1956) and Hanif Kureishi‘s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990). Taken from two different but close-knit periods in twentieth-century Eng- land, the 1950s and the late 1970s, the novels represent the socio-political circumstances that fo...

This paper is a retrospective critique of the sociological theory of Symbols of Ethnic Identity and Core Values developed by Jerzy Smolicz, and the social milieu in which it took place. The theory claimed to be based on the inductive, humanistic sociology approach of Florien Znaniecki. It was concerned with ascribing language and ideological values to the identity of students from migrant famil...

Using an interdisciplinary perspective, this study provides a hyperlink and content analysis of 44 U.S. domestic and 40 Middle Eastern extremist groups’ websites to analyze their use of computer-mediated communication (CMC) to support collective identity and mobilization. The findings contrast Middle Eastern extremist groups’ use of the Internet to develop virtual communities and support their ...

The James Bond phenomenon has been approached to discuss notions of British identity, imperialistic ethos, issues of masculinity and commodified middle-class. However, the critical canon of the James Bond mythos has not delved into the ideological origins of the myth, namely Thomas Carlyle’s (1795-1881) myth of the Hero, the “blueprint” of Victorian ideology. The article explores Sam Mendes’ Sk...

We use different text-processing algorithms to gain insight into the political rhetoric used in conservative and liberal weblogs. We specifically focus on the online debate regarding the issue of the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which has been one of the most controversial political issues in U.S. politics in the last several years. Overall, our results show that there are significant differences in t...