research paper on media culture

The French Journal of Media Studies

Accueil Numéros 5 Media and Diversity The Concept of Culture in Media S...

The Concept of Culture in Media Studies: A Critical Review of Academic Literature

This study examines the way culture has been researched in media studies and suggests how critical intercultural communication could contribute to the field. A literature review was conducted and articles (N=114) published in peer-reviewed journals between 2003 and 2013 were collected. Results show that studies dealing with media and culture do not systematically define the concept of culture. Findings also indicate that culture is oftentimes taken for granted instead of being problematized and addressed as a source of struggle. Advantages of using a critical intercultural communication framework to examine culture are discussed.

Entrées d’index

Keywords: , texte intégral.

• 1 Debra L. Merskin, Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction (New York: Peter Lang Pub (...)
• 2 Robert M. Entman, “Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power,” Journal of Communication 57, (...)
• 3 Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes, “The Dangers of Normativity – The Case of Minority Languag (...)
• 4 Isabelle Rigoni, “Intersectionality and Mediated Cultural Production in A Globalized Post-Colonial (...)

1 Recent directions in the field of media studies have turned culture into a significant object of study. Strong emphasis has been put on representations of minorities in media 1 and their potential biases, 2 minority-language media 3 and ethnic media. 4 However, the increasing attention given to culture has not gone hand in hand with an overall clarification of the concept itself. Defining culture remains a difficult exercise, especially because of its multifaceted nature. The importance of the concept in media studies and its blurry theoretical grounds highlight the need to look back at how it has been used in studies. The present article is built around three main questions. First, it looks at how culture has been researched in media studies . Second, it examines possible limitations of these approaches. Third, it investigates ways in which a critical intercultural communication framework can be beneficial to media studies dealing with culture. For this purpose, this study explores recent academic discourse on media and culture by reviewing studies dealing with issues of cultural diversity, representations of culture, and discourse of culture. In addition to examining approaches to culture and their potential limitations, this article also presents ways in which critical intercultural communication can be used by researchers from different disciplines interested in culture.

2 This article starts by presenting some of the main arguments raised in discussing the use and conceptualization of culture. The way critical intercultural communication contributes to this discussion is presented, followed by reasons why it can be a relevant framework for media studies. This article then looks at previous reviews of academic discourse, especially focusing on the fields of communication and media. Methods for collecting data are detailed before discussing the findings and main implications of this study .

The Concept of Culture

• 5 Robert Brightman, “Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification,” Cultural Anthropolo (...)
• 6 William H. Sewell Jr, “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Histori (...)
• 7 Ingrid Piller, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh Universit (...)
• 9 Fred Dervin, “Approches dialogiques et énonciatives de l’interculturel : Pour une didactique des la (...)
• 10 Fred Dervin, “A Plea for Change in Research on Intercultural Discourses: A “Liquid” Approach to the (...)
• 11 Sylvie Poirier, “La (dé)politisation de la culture? Réflexions sur un concept pluriel, ” Anthropolog (...)
• 12 Ryuko Kubota, “Critical Approaches to Intercultural Discourse and Communication,” in The Handbook o (...)

3 Culture is a concept that has been discussed extensively, giving rise to multiple approaches and uses of the term across fields of study. As the concept of culture became increasingly important and pervasive, it also became increasingly questioned. Across different fields of studies, scholars discuss whether to keep, change or altogether discard the concept of culture. Brightman brought together some of the main criticisms addressed to culture. 5 His work reveals the variety of arguments used against the concept and the lack of convergence on how to revise it or what to use instead. Sewell also goes through some of the cornerstone issues in conceptualizing culture. 6 The first distinction he mentions, and which he argues is not always explicitly made by researchers, is the one between the use of culture and cultures . The singular use refers to the theoretical approach used for research while the plural use refers to the object of study . Culture is used in contrast to other academic disciplines or analytical tools (e.g. politics, economics) whereas cultures is used when examining different forms of culture and is therefore more concrete (e.g. regional culture, hipster culture). Another distinction which has had a strong impact on the study of culture is the understanding of culture as practice or culture as a system of symbols and meanings . Critical intercultural scholars regard culture as a discursive construction, emphasizing the role played by individuals in performing culture. Inherited from constructionism, this approach emphasizes culture as something people do rather than something people have. 7 Regarding culture as practice is the dominant approach in critical intercultural communication, which tends to be used in opposition to culture as a system of symbols and meanings. This latter approach to culture is often associated with essentialist and positivist views that describe culture as an identifiable and fixed item. 8 Essentialist views of culture have been criticized for pinpointing aspects of cultures (typically reduced to the idea of national cultures) and presenting such characteristics as truths rather than constructions. 9 On the other hand, critical intercultural scholars argue for an approach to culture that is largely embedded within social constructionism. 10 Such an approach emphasizes culture as constructed, political, intertwined with ethics 11 and related to power both within and between societies. 12 From that perspective, culture is understood to be situated rather than objective, and ever changing as opposed to stable.

• 13 Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices , (...)

14 Shi-Xu, A Cultural Approach to Discourse (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 1–13.

• 15 William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Con (...)
• 16 Nancy K. Rivenburgh, “Media Framing of Complex Issues: The Case of Endangered Languages,” Public Un (...)
• 17 Ulrika Olausson, “Global warming – Global Responsibility? Media Frames of Collective Action and Sci (...)

4 As Hall stresses, culture is about meaning and as such “permeates all of society.” 13 Representations, practices, values and identities have cultural meanings that are discursively constructed and tap into previous cultural discourses to be meaningful. Critical intercultural communication casts light on ways in which meanings echo cultural knowledge and are therefore difficult to identify and question – even for researchers themselves, hence a strong emphasis placed on reflexivity. 14 The importance of “cultural resonance” has also been pointed out by scholars examining media frames. 15 Rivenburgh stresses the way “media frames that reflect cultural common sense, values, or ideology are both instinctually employed by journalists and easily accepted by the public”. 16 Tapping into cultural resonance may be done consciously or out of habit by journalists and editors who see their cultural environment as natural. The use of culturally resonant frames in media discourse increases their taken-for-grantedness, which enhances their power. Cultural markers create a sense of common sense because of their presence in everyday life experiences which contributes to normalizing them, making them “well-nigh impossible to recognize, question, or resist”. 17 The emphasis that critical intercultural communication puts on culture as having the propensity to normalize representations and practices thus appears especially relevant to media studies.

• 18 Marianne Jørgensen and Louise J. Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage Pu (...)

19 Chris Barker, The Sage Dictionary of Cultural Studies (London: Sage Publications, 2004), 64–65.

5 Another aspect where interests of both disciplines meet is the extent to which discursive practices can be ethnocentric. To different extents, critical scholars agree on the idea that discourses construct the way societies represent themselves. 18 Media discourse is probably one of the discursive practices most often cited as constitutive of people’s worldviews, representations of themselves and others. One question put forward by critical intercultural communication is the extent to which such discourses rely on ethnocentric representations. Ethnocentrism refers to people’s tendency to use the standards of their own culture to judge other cultural groups, which is concurrent with people’s tendency to regard their culture as superior to others. 19 Ethnocentrism thus refers to the way cultural standards can pass as implicit norms for people identifying with that culture. As much emphasis is now put on ethnic media, cultural diversity and the effects of globalization on developing transnational media spaces, it is important not to overlook the extent to which national media discourse can still be limited and convey ethnocentric representations. The emphasis put on ethnocentrism in media has strong practical implications for professionals and audiences by encouraging them to be more critical towards news content.

Examining Academic Discourse

• 20 Keith V. Erickson, Cathy A. Fleuriet and Lawrence A. Hosman, “Prolific Publishing: Professional and (...)
• 21 Michael W. Kramer, Jon A. Hess and Loren D. Reid, “Trends in Communication Scholarship: An Analysis (...)

22 Jørgensen and Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method , 175–177.

• 23 Maggie MacLure, Discourses in Educational and Social Research ( Buckingham: Open University Press, 2 (...)

6 Conferences and publications are the main venues for academics to discuss the latest developments and findings from all disciplines. Nowadays, academic debate mostly takes place in journals, whose number has kept on increasing throughout the last decades. 20 It is through these journals that most ideas are expressed, hence the importance of examining their content. Publishing is central for scholars, not only as a way of contributing to the development of their fields of study but also to the development of their career. The notorious “publish or perish” phrase provides an efficient summary of what publications nowadays represent in the academic world. 21 As journal articles have become the main venue for academic discourse, they have also turned into common and natural venues. Such development can be problematic if academic discourse comes to be granted too much legitimacy instead of having its status, form and content constantly challenged. Like other discursive practices, journal articles create and validate certain meanings that progressively become the norm and can, as such, easily pass as natural instead of constructed and contingent. 22 Knowledge expressed in academic discourse is therefore not objective but is, like any other form of knowledge, “‘situated’ – that is, produced by and for particular interests, in particular circumstances, at particular times”. 23 Reflexivity, a central ethical component of research, is therefore especially important when looking at academic discourse as a whole.

• 24 Ronald D. Gordon, “Beyond the Failures of Western Communication Theory,” Journal of Multicultural D (...)
• 25 Molefi Kete Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication, (...)
• 26 Yoshitaka Miike, “Non-Western Theory in Western research? An Asiacentric Agenda for Asian Communica (...)
• 27 Yoshitaka Miike, “An Asiacentric Reflection on Eurocentric Bias in Communication Theory,” Communica (...)

28 Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication,” 10.

• 29 Shi-Xu, “Reconstructing Eastern Paradigms of Discourse Studies ,” Journal of Multicultural Discourse (...)
• 30 Hui-Ching Chang, Rich Holt and Lina Luo, “Representing East Asians in Intercultural Communication T (...)
• 31 Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Chicago: African American Images, (...)
• 32 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routl (...)
• 33 Eric Kit-Wai Ma, “Rethinking Media Studies: The Case of China,” in De-westernizing Media Studies , e (...)

7 Recently, increasing attention has been paid to cultural bias in academic discourse. Some scholars especially criticize the general lack of attention paid to such bias. Gordon, for instance, has looked at communication theories, which he describes as an example of a Western-oriented or Eurocentric approach to research. 24 Gordon highlights the way communication theories have typically been elaborated by Caucasian researchers from the United States who mostly used university students as participants. Western-oriented theories have been criticized for being taken as universally valid despite being anchored in European academic traditions, especially the heritage of the Enlightenment period. In response, some scholars have suggested using different approaches. Asante has, for instance, put forth Afrocentricity as an ideological and methodological approach to conduct research from an African standpoint. 25 Similarly, Miike encourages using Asiacentricity to examine Asian contexts from an Asian perspective. 26 Miike details ways in which the concept of “communication” is defined differently by Asiacentric and Eurocentric approaches, as different aspects and outcomes are emphasized. 27 Afrocentricity and Asiacentricity illustrate ongoing efforts to diversify analytical tools that would help research human activity and capture its plurality. These approaches are meant to open up new perspectives in research by providing scholars with different outlooks on their objects of study. For some scholars, developing new approaches is also meant to create legitimate alternatives to Western theories. Back in 1983, Asante, for instance, pointed out the difficulty for some African scholars to be published in Eurocentric journals because of their different, and non-valued, academic tradition. 28 Shi-Xu advocates the emergence of various academic paradigms that would work “as equal but distinctive interlocutors” and help “redress this cultural imbalance”. 29 However, other voices among academics are more reserved when it comes to developing culture-specific approaches, fearing that it will only turn the problem around instead of solving it. Chang, Holt and Luo raise the question as they discuss Asiacentricity: “If every version of a cultural writing of other is at the same time also the construction of self , might our call for an Asiacentric perspective in explaining communication not fall into the same trap as the often-blamed Eurocentric perspective? Might the reversal of the situation – prioritizing Asians – encounter the same predicament?” 30 Supporters of culture-specific approaches, however, embrace this criticism. From their perspective, culture-specific approaches are beneficial because they are explicitly situated and do not try to reach universal validity. They point out that it is not so much Western-oriented theories being biased and situated that triggered critics as the lack of reflexivity about these limitations. 31 Similar debates are also taking place among media scholars, with issues of “de-Westernizing” media studies being increasingly discussed. 32 Critics claim that Western-oriented media theories are too limited as they are based on European and North American political, economic and media models. Looking specifically at China, Ma argues for a compromise. 33 He questions the benefits of new theories that would risk “essentializing and exoticizing the Asian experience” and proposes adjusting existing theories to fit the Chinese context.

Methods and Results

8 A literature review was conducted in fall 2013 using the academic search engines EBSCO and Web of Science. The keywords “media representation”, “media discourse”, “diversity”, and “cultur*” (the asterisk was used to include other possible endings in the data search) were used to collect peer-reviewed articles published in English between 2003 and 2013. Only articles dealing with issues of cultural diversity and media were included. Some articles in which culture was understood from an agricultural perspective were, for instance, left out. The search was ended once saturation was reached, that is when the same keywords used in different search engines brought up the same articles. In total, 114 articles were collected and reviewed for the purpose of this study. The literature review was conducted inductively and kept as open as possible. The search was not limited to any specific journals because the scope of topics covered by media studies on cultural diversity was expected to be very wide. One aim of this literature review being to see what types of issues were encompassed, it would have been detrimental to limit the search to certain journals.

• 34 See for example Gordon, “Beyond the Failures of Western Communication Theory,” and Miike, “An Asiac (...)
• 35 Annelies Verdoolaege, “Media representations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commissi (...)
• 36 Jawad Syed, “The Representation of Cultural Diversity in Urdu-Language Newspapers in Pakistan: A St (...)
• 37 Yasmin Jiwani, “War Talk Engendering Terror: Race, Gender and Representation in Canadian Print Medi (...)
• 38 Fabienne Darling-Wolf, “Sites of Attractiveness: Japanese Women and Westernized Representations of (...)
• 39 Maria Andrea Dos Santos Soares, “Look, Blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the Grotesquerie of Racial (...)
• 40 Anna Bredström, “Gendered Racism and the Production Of Cultural Difference: Media Representations a (...)
• 41 Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, “Ghetto Kids Gone Good: Race, Representation, and Authority in the Scri (...)

9 Short descriptions were written about each article to describe their content, which later helped identify recurrent themes, similar approaches and unusual topics. Articles were collected within a 10-year time frame in order to get an overall picture of the state of recent research. No particular evolution or trends were noticed, however, regarding approaches or topics tackled. Oftentimes, authors used eclectic theoretical and/or methodological approaches that, for instance, combined cultural studies and critical discourse analysis (CDA) or feminist theories and CDA. Among studies that explicitly presented their theoretical and/or methodological frameworks, CDA (9%), feminist theories (10%) and cultural/critical frameworks relying on Foucault’s, Gramsci’s or Hall’s theories (29%) were recurrent approaches. As regards analytical tools from journalism or media studies, results indicated that framing theory (10%) was often used as opposed to gatekeeping or agenda-setting theory (2%). Similarly to results from previous reviews of academic discourse, 34 studies from this data set appeared to be mainly conducted from a Western-oriented perspective. This was the case even for strongly situated studies that focused on particular cultures and were published in specific journals. For instance, the article “Media Representations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and Their Commitment to Reconciliation” 35 was published in the Journal of African Cultural Studies using CDA, and the article “The Representation of Cultural Diversity in Urdu-Language Newspapers in Pakistan: A Study of Jang and Nawaiwaqt” 36 was published in the South Asia Journal of South Asian Studies and used Hodder’s approach. In comparison, articles looking at representations of women were found to use various trends of feminist theories such as standpoint theory, 37 postcolonial theory 38 and black feminism. 39 Similarly, articles explicitly dealing with race, for instance, used postcolonial theory 40 and Jackson’s (2006) theory of scripting and media framing of black bodies. 41

42 Kathryn Woodward, Identity and Difference (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 35.

10 As regards the scope of topics tackled, results indicated that the majority of articles investigated representation of minorities in the media (67%), most often dealing with ethnic or religious groups. Articles within this category oftentimes raised the issue of media stereotyping and othering minorities. That is, studies investigated ways in which media discourse sometimes supports the construction of minorities as “Others”, which can emphasize differences between groups and convey negative stereotypical representations. 42 Among articles exploring representations of minorities, several studies dealt with sport and representations of athletes (8%). A significant number of studies examined discourses of diversity (23%), with some focusing exclusively on European discourses of diversity (3%). Other studies investigated what diversity stands for in the media and how it can be approached by newsrooms. On the other hand, some topics appeared to be scarcely tackled, which was the case of foreign-news coverage (4%), newsroom diversity (2%) or integration and acculturation issues (2%). Regarding the type of media investigated, the majority of studies examined newspapers and television (70%), while entertainment and advertisement (19%) were less considered.

Culture: Between Main Focus and Transparent Background

11 Despite explicitly dealing with culture, many articles did not provide a clear definition of the term. Nor did many researchers position themselves as regards the different schools of thought on culture. Instances of culture taken for granted particularly occurred in the literature when (1) culture was associated with nations or (2) the so-called Western world, or (3) when the concepts of race or ethnicity were used.

43 Michael Billig, Banal Nationalism (London: Sage Publications, 1995), 6.

• 44 Rona T. Halualani, S. Lily Mendoza and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, “‘Critical’” Junctures in Intercultur (...)

12 Results from the literature review conducted for this study indicate the recurrent association of culture with that of nation. However, the use of countries as cultural contexts and embodiments of cultures can be problematic for several reasons. A main pitfall is the homogeneous and reduced picture of culture that it conveys. Culture is a multilayered notion and reducing it to the single aspect of nationality can be detrimental to both the idea of nation and culture. Nations are multicultural, in the literal meaning of the word: that is, made out of multiple cultures. Studies that use nation as the unit of reference to talk about culture, language and identity tend to homogenize national cultures and therefore increase chances of being stereotypical instead of deconstructing stereotypes. A second important drawback is the way national culture tends to be presented as normal instead of artificial. This contributes to discourses of “banal nationalism” where individuals are brought up with the idea that the world is divided between nations. 43 It also overlooks the fact that culture is constructed and thus intertwined with power and struggle. When culture is understood as the equivalent of nation, it typically hints at the culture of the dominant group within that nation. Such representation leaves out or even marginalizes other forms of culture within that country, therefore maintaining existing hierarchy instead of deconstructing it. Halualani, Mendoza and Drzewiecka point out the danger of blurring the lines between the concepts of culture and nation: “To accept cultures as nations as inherently and naturally truthful and accurate at a surface level would be to risk reproducing external framings of cultural groups advanced by colonialist governments, dominant nationalist parties, and ruling power interests that benefit from such ‘status quo’ thinking.” 44

45 Piller, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction , 66–69.

46 Dervin, “A Plea For Change in Research on Intercultural Discourses,” 41.

13 Associating culture to nation thus tends to sustain hierarchy between cultural practices and those who practice or identify to them. By maintaining hierarchical order between cultures, the nation approach implicitly contributes to preserving the persistent dichotomy between “us” and “them”, whether within or between nations. The nation approach to culture is tightly related to essentialist views of culture in that it provides a static and homogeneous picture of culture. Essentialism regards culture as a one-dimensional concept and therefore leaves out issues of race, religion, gender, social status and larger historical and political structures. Critical intercultural communication endeavors to go beyond such limitations by taking into account the multidimensional, constructed, contingent and dynamic facets of culture. The critical intercultural communication approach does not dismiss nations as possible instances of cultures. However, it focuses on exploring which representations of culture and nation are associated, through which processes, and whether such associations vary in time or depending on the context. Critical intercultural scholars emphasize culture as raising questions rather than providing answers that would help predict people’s behaviors. 45 Through its conceptualization of culture, a critical intercultural communication framework helps focus on ways in which people construct their sense of cultural belonging and identity. 46 This approach is relevant to media studies in many ways. It is strongly related to research exploring the relation individuals make between their media consumption and their identity, or research dealing with the way media discourse is intertwined with discourses of (national) identity. The emphasis put on constructing cultural identity and belonging can also help focus on who is represented as “belonging” and who is not, which is a significant aspect of studies on minority media and cultural diversity.

• 47 Malcom D. Brown, “Comparative Analysis of Mainstream Discourses, Media Narratives and Representatio (...)
• 48 Margarida Carvalho, “The Construction of the Image of Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in Two Portu (...)

14 As mentioned beforehand, results indicated that culture can be taken for granted when it is about “us”. In many cases, “our” culture is used as a background for research, making it look normal and neutral. “Our” culture also appears homogeneous because examining diversity oftentimes consists of examining the “Other”. For instance, the article entitled “Comparative Analysis of Mainstream Discourses, Media Narratives and Representations of Islam in Britain and France Prior to 9/11” examines the construction of Islam, notably referring to the switch from exoticism before 9/11 to terrorism afterwards. 47 The article, however, does not discuss the construction of “British” and “French” but uses them as taken-for-granted cultural representations. Similarly, the article “The Construction of the Image of Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in two Portuguese Daily Newspapers” discusses the way “their” image is fabricated and thus artificial but does not discuss the construction of the “Portuguese” identity. 48 Of course, focusing on minorities’ identities is highly relevant, but it could be beneficial to consider both majorities’ and minorities’ identities and cultures. Such an approach could help examine diversity among “us” rather than embodied only by “them”. Examining both majority and minority could enable researchers to go beyond this dichotomous opposition and not only look at differences but also cast light on shared cultural representations, practices or identities. Looking at differences and similarities, as well as how those are negotiated, can also help examine the way cultural meanings and identities are constructed in relation to one another. Overall, it would be a way to put all cultural practices and representations on an equal footing by explicitly defining them as constructed and contingent. This could in turn contribute to challenge taken-for-granted perceptions we have of ourselves as well as of others.

49 Anthony P. Browne, “Denying Race in the American and French Context,” Wadabagei 12 (2009): 83.

15 Findings also indicate that the concept of culture tends to be used in different ways depending on whose culture is examined. The “us” is often associated with nationality and presented as legitimate, neutral, acultural, aethnical and aracial while the “them” is often referred to in terms of religious or ethnic denominations. Oftentimes, culture is not directly problematized when the concepts of race and ethnicity are used. Eventually, this paints a picture where “we” seem to be acultural and unproblematic while “they” are described in terms of struggle, race, ethnicity or religious affiliations. The imbalance in such representations is problematic in that it reproduces stereotypical representations of minorities even though most studies intend to deconstruct them. Using alternatives to Western and Eurocentric approaches in media studies could help dismiss such a vicious circle. Enhancing geographical diversity as regards research location could also encourage study of various minority groups. Indeed, findings suggest that numerous studies are located in Europe, North America or Australia: parts of the world that embody the idea of “Western culture”. The lack of diversity in the location of research is a strong shortcoming of academic discourse, especially when it examines representation of minorities. Going through numerous articles dealing with ethnic or religious minorities living in the so-called Western world nourishes the idea that majority and dominant groups are white Europeans while struggling minorities are black, Asians or Muslims. Using a critical intercultural communication framework can discourage researchers from using or describing, even implicitly, certain groups or practices as acultural and neutral and others as only racial or ethnic. This issue has also been raised by scholars working on colorblind ideology. Browne, for instance, argues that in both the United States and France, being white is “the invisible norm against which all other cultural and racial groups are defined and subordinated”. 49 The notion of invisible norm raised by Browne is particularly relevant when it comes to seeing oneself as aracial or acultural and seeing others mostly through their skin color, religious affiliations or cultural practices. The way concepts of race and ethnicity can sometimes be used instead of the one of culture conveys the idea that they refer to different aspects. Nevertheless, race and ethnicity are forms of culture, as gender, nationality or social class can also be. Dismissing culture and using only race and ethnicity can be a drawback in that it contributes to presenting culture as unproblematic and natural, while race and ethnicity are sources of struggle. Using a critical intercultural communication framework is a way to be inclusive and critically tackle all aspects of culture. Bridging the gap between culture, race and ethnicity is also a way to bring together schools of thought (for instance, scholars from the United States and scholars from Europe) that have different stances on the concept of race itself. Examining critically the way race, ethnicity, social status, religious, sexual and gender identities are constructed and conveyed can thus enrich our understanding of culture. Generally speaking, using a critical approach to the concept of culture would help address problematic representations of minority/majority and us/them in academic discourse. Understanding culture as a construction that involves power relations and struggle contributes to include every individual, group and practice, since all aspects and members of societies are cultural. This therefore takes away the pervasive and implicit idea that some people or practices are neutral to some extent. Reflexivity is a central component in order to be able to detach oneself from ethnocentric representations and look at oneself, one’s culture, practices and values as cultural and therefore constructed and ideological. Focusing on cultural identity as constructed is also an asset in decreasing ethnocentrism or cultural bias in academic discourse. Encouraging researchers to be reflexive about their cultural backgrounds can help them problematize what they could otherwise take for granted about their own cultural identities and belongings. As Rorty points out, no one is ahistorical or acultural and therefore “everybody is ethnocentric when engaged in actual debate”. 50 The best way to overcome ethnocentric representations is to make them and the way they are constructed salient. Ethnocentrism in academic discourse is particularly problematic because research aims at being, if not entirely unbiased, at least critical towards its inherent subjectivity. Ethnocentrism as a form of bias is difficult to overcome if not addressed directly. Researchers should therefore aim at being critical towards their personal background as well as their philosophical, theoretical and methodological heritage. Cultural baggage has to be reflected upon at the individual level, that is, in the way personal choices affect the way researchers tackle a topic or analyze data, but also at the academic level, that is, the way they can be blind to the overall schools of thought to which they belong.

16 The concept of culture is regarded by many as ambiguous, difficult to conceptualize, and even non-operational by some scholars. In spite of its difficult reputation, culture remains a prominent object of study. Influences from critical theories and social constructionism make critical intercultural communication a relevant framework for examining representations and discursive constructions of culture. The premise that culture is constructed provides a solid ground to examine ways in which certain representations seem more powerful or natural than others. It also emphasizes the fact that we live in webs of cultural discourses – some invisible to us, depending on contexts – that are intertwined with other discourses. The main aim of using a critical intercultural communication framework is not to uncover what culture really is but to uncover what representations of culture come to appear real, and through which processes. Studies therefore primarily focus on the way we navigate these webs and make sense of them, the way they are constructed, interrelated and empowered. The main asset of this framework is its emphasis on problematizing culture, which reduces risks of taking it for granted. As such, critical intercultural communication also encourages researchers to be reflexive about their academic and cultural background. This can help one be aware of the extent to which one’s knowledge is situated, and therefore contributes to decreasing cultural bias in academic discourse. Generally, being aware of the representations we have of ourselves and others, as well as the reasons why these representations are constructed and conveyed, is central to developing understanding and tolerance towards others. This is especially relevant now that more and more people cross borders and that communication between cultures is faster, easier, and therefore increasingly common.

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Jiwani, Yasmin. “War Talk Engendering Terror: Race, Gender and Representation in Canadian Print Media.” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 1(1) (2005): 15 – 22.

Jørgensen, Marianne and Louise J. Phillips. Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method . London: Sage Publications, 2002.

Kramer, Michael W., Jon A. Hess, and Loren D. Reid. “Trends in Communication Scholarship: An Analysis of Four Representative NCA and ICA Journals over the Last 70 Years.” The Review of Communication 7(3) (2007): 229 – 240.

Kubota, Ryuko. “Critical Approaches to Intercultural Discourse and Communication.” In The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication , edited by Christina Bratt Paulston, Scott F. Kiesling, and Elizabeth S. Rangel, 90 – 109. Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2012.

Ma, Eric Kit-Wai. “Rethinking Media Studies: The Case of China.” In De-westernizing Media Studies , edited by James Curran and Myung-Jin Park, 17 – 28. London: Routledge, 1994.

MacLure, Maggie. Discourses in Educational and Social Research . Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003.

Merskin, Debra L. Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction . New York: Peter Lang, 2011.

Miike, Yoshitaka. “Non-Western Theory in Western Research? An Asiacentric Agenda for Asian Communication Studies.” The Review of Communication 6(1 – 2) (2006): 4 – 31.

—. “An Asiacentric Reflection on Eurocentric Bias in Communication Theory.” Communication Monographs 74(2) (2007): 272 – 278.

Olausson, Ulrika. “Global warming – Global Responsibility? Media Frames of Collective Action and Scientific Certainty.” Public Understanding of Science 18(4) (2009): 421 – 436.

Pietikäinen, Sari, and Hellen Kelly-Holmes. “The Dangers of Normativity – The Case of Minority Language Media.” In Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity and Normality , edited by Jan Blommaert et al ., 194–204. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.

Piller, Ingrid. Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction . Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011.

Poirier, Sylvie. “ La (dé)politisation de la culture ? Réflexions sur un concept pluriel.” Anthropologie et sociétés 28(1) (2004): 7–21.

Reid-Brinkley, Shanara Rose. “Ghetto Kids Gone Good: Race, Representation, and Authority in the Scripting of Inner-City Youths in the Urban Debate League.” Argumentation & Advocacy 49(2) (2012): 77 – 99.

Rigoni, Isabelle. “Intersectionality and Mediated Cultural Production in a Globalized Post-Colonial World.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35(5) (2012): 834 – 849.

Rivenburgh, Nancy K. “Media Framing of Complex Issues: The Case of Endangered Languages.” Public Understanding of Science 22(6) (2013): 704 – 717.

Rorty, Richard. “Solidarity or Objectivity.” In Knowledge and Inquiry. Readings in Epistemology , edited by K. Brad Wray, 422 – 437. Peterborough, ON, Canada: Broadview Press, 2002.

Sewell Jr, William H. “The Concept (s) of Culture.” In Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing After the Linguistic Turn , edited by Gabrielle M. Spiegel, 76 – 95. New York: Routledge, 2005.

Shi-Xu. A Cultural Approach to Discourse . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

—. “Reconstructing Eastern Paradigms of Discourse Studies.” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4(1) (2009): 29 – 48.

Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. Unthinking Eurocentrism. Multiculturalism and the Media . New York: Routledge, 1994.

Soares, Maria Andrea Dos Santos. “Look, Blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the Grotesquerie of Racial Representation in Brazilian Visual Culture.” Cultural Dynamics 24(1) (2012): 75 – 101.

Storey, John. What is Cultural Studies? A Reader . London: Arnold, 1996.

Syed, Jawad. “The Representation of Cultural Diversity in Urdu-Language Newspapers in Pakistan: A Study of Jang and Nawaiwaqt.” South Asia: Journal of South Asian Studies 31(2) (2008): 317 – 347.

Verdoolaege, Annelies. “Media Representations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and their Commitment to Reconciliation.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 17(2) (2005): 181 – 199.

Woodward, Kathryn ed., Identity and Difference . London: Sage Publications, 1997.

Note de fin

1 Debra L. Merskin, Media, Minorities, and Meaning: A Critical Introduction (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2011).

2 Robert M. Entman, “Framing Bias: Media in the Distribution of Power,” Journal of Communication 57, (2007).

3 Sari Pietikäinen and Helen Kelly-Holmes, “The Dangers of Normativity – The Case of Minority Language Media,” in Dangerous Multilingualism: Northern Perspectives on Order, Purity And Normality , ed. Jan Blommaert et al . (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), 194–204.

4 Isabelle Rigoni, “Intersectionality and Mediated Cultural Production in A Globalized Post-Colonial World,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 35 (2012).

5 Robert Brightman, “Forget Culture: Replacement, Transcendence, Relexification,” Cultural Anthropology 10, (1995).

6 William H. Sewell Jr, “The Concept(s) of Culture,” in Practicing History: New Directions in Historical Writing after the Linguistic Turn , ed. Gabrielle M. Spiegel (New York: Routledge, 2005), 76–95.

7 Ingrid Piller, Intercultural Communication: A Critical Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011), 15.

9 Fred Dervin, “Approches dialogiques et énonciatives de l’interculturel : Pour une didactique des langues et de l’identité mouvante des sujets,” Synergies Roumanie 4 (2009): 166–167.

10 Fred Dervin, “A Plea for Change in Research on Intercultural Discourses: A “Liquid” Approach to the Study of the Acculturation of Chinese Students,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 6 (March 2011): 38.

11 Sylvie Poirier, “La (dé)politisation de la culture? Réflexions sur un concept pluriel, ” Anthropologie et sociétés 28 (2004): 10 – 13.

12 Ryuko Kubota, “Critical Approaches to Intercultural Discourse and Communication,” in The Handbook of Intercultural Discourse and Communication , ed. Christina Bratt Paulston et al . (Malden, USA: John Wiley & Sons, 2012), 95.

13 Stuart Hall, “Introduction,” in Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices , ed. Stuart Hall (London: Sage Publications, 1997), 3.

15 William A. Gamson and Andre Modigliani, “Media discourse and Public Opinion on Nuclear Power: A Constructionist Approach,” American Journal of Sociology 95 (1989): 5.

16 Nancy K. Rivenburgh, “Media Framing of Complex Issues: The Case of Endangered Languages,” Public Understanding of Science 22 (2011): 706.

17 Ulrika Olausson, “Global warming – Global Responsibility? Media Frames of Collective Action and Scientific Certainty,” Public Understanding of Science 18 (2009): 423.

18 Marianne Jørgensen and Louise J. Phillips, Discourse Analysis as Theory and Method (London: Sage Publications, 2002), 175–177.

20 Keith V. Erickson, Cathy A. Fleuriet and Lawrence A. Hosman, “Prolific Publishing: Professional and Administrative Concerns,” The Southern Communication Journal 58 (Summer 1993): 328–329.

21 Michael W. Kramer, Jon A. Hess and Loren D. Reid, “Trends in Communication Scholarship: An Analysis of Four Representative NCA and ICA Journals over the Last 70 Years,” The Review of Communication 7 (July 2007): 229–230.

23 Maggie MacLure, Discourses in Educational and Social Research ( Buckingham: Open University Press, 2003), 175.

24 Ronald D. Gordon, “Beyond the Failures of Western Communication Theory,” Journal of Multicultural Discourse 2 (2007).

25 Molefi Kete Asante, “The Ideological Significance of Afrocentricity in Intercultural Communication,” Journal of Black Studies 14 (1983).

26 Yoshitaka Miike, “Non-Western Theory in Western research? An Asiacentric Agenda for Asian Communication Studies,” The Review of Communication 6, (2006).

27 Yoshitaka Miike, “An Asiacentric Reflection on Eurocentric Bias in Communication Theory,” Communication Monographs 74 (2007).

29 Shi-Xu, “Reconstructing Eastern Paradigms of Discourse Studies ,” Journal of Multicultural Discourses 4 (2009): 33.

30 Hui-Ching Chang, Rich Holt and Lina Luo, “Representing East Asians in Intercultural Communication Textbooks: A Select Review,” The Review of Communication 6 (2006): 325–326.

31 Molefi Kete Asante, Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (Chicago: African American Images, 2003), 61.

32 Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994); James Curran and Myung-Jin Park, De-westernizing Media Studies (London: Routledge, 2000).

33 Eric Kit-Wai Ma, “Rethinking Media Studies: The Case of China,” in De-westernizing Media Studies , ed. James Curran et al . (London: Routledge, 1994), 32.

34 See for example Gordon, “Beyond the Failures of Western Communication Theory,” and Miike, “An Asiacentric Reflection on Eurocentric Bias in Communication Theory”.

35 Annelies Verdoolaege, “Media representations of the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission and their Commitment to Reconciliation,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 17 (2005).

36 Jawad Syed, “The Representation of Cultural Diversity in Urdu-Language Newspapers in Pakistan: A Study Of Jang And Nawaiwaqt,” Journal of South Asian Studies 31 (2008).

37 Yasmin Jiwani, “War Talk Engendering Terror: Race, Gender and Representation in Canadian Print Media,” International Journal of Media & Cultural Politics 1 (2005).

38 Fabienne Darling-Wolf, “Sites of Attractiveness: Japanese Women and Westernized Representations of Feminine Beauty,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 21 (2004).

39 Maria Andrea Dos Santos Soares, “Look, Blackness in Brazil!: Disrupting the Grotesquerie of Racial Representation in Brazilian Visual Culture,” Cultural Dynamics 24 (2012).

40 Anna Bredström, “Gendered Racism and the Production Of Cultural Difference: Media Representations and Identity Work among ‘Immigrant Youth’ In Contemporary Sweden,” Nora: Nordic Journal of Women’s Studies 11 (2003).

41 Shanara Rose Reid-Brinkley, “Ghetto Kids Gone Good: Race, Representation, and Authority in the Scripting of Inner-City Youths in the Urban Debate League,” Argumentation & Advocacy 49 (2012).

44 Rona T. Halualani, S. Lily Mendoza and Jolanta A. Drzewiecka, “‘Critical’” Junctures in Intercultural Communication Studies: A Review,” The Review of Communication 9 (January 2009): 24.

47 Malcom D. Brown, “Comparative Analysis of Mainstream Discourses, Media Narratives and Representations of Islam in Britain and France Prior to 9/11,” Journal of Muslim Minority Affairs 26 (2006).

48 Margarida Carvalho, “The Construction of the Image of Immigrants and Ethnic Minorities in Two Portuguese Daily Newspapers,” Portuguese Journal of Social Science 9 (2010).

Richard Rorty, “Solidarity or Objectivity,” in Knowledge and Inquiry. Readings in Epistemology , ed. K. Brad Wray (Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2002), 432.

Pour citer cet article

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Mélodine Sommier , «  The Concept of Culture in Media Studies: A Critical Review of Academic Literature  » ,  InMedia [En ligne], 5 | 2014, mis en ligne le 17 octobre 2014 , consulté le 17 avril 2024 . URL  : http://journals.openedition.org/inmedia/768 ; DOI  : https://doi.org/10.4000/inmedia.768

Mélodine Sommier

Mélodine Sommier is a doctoral student in intercultural communication at the University of Jyväskylä in Finland. She has particular interests in migration and acculturation issues as well as discourses of culture in the media.

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Media, Culture & Society

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Media, Culture & Society provides a major international forum for the presentation of research and discussion concerning the media, including the newer information and communication technologies, within their political, economic, cultural and historical contexts.

The journal is interdisciplinary, regularly engaging with a wider range of issues in cultural and social analysis. Its focus is on substantive topics and on critique and innovation in theory and method.

All issues of  Media, Culture & Society are available to browse on SAGE Journals .

Media, Culture & Society provides a major international, peer-reviewed forum for the presentation of research and discussion concerning the media, including the newer information and communication technologies, within their political, economic, cultural and historical contexts. It regularly engages with a wider range of issues in cultural and social analysis. Its focus is on substantive topics and on critique and innovation in theory and method. An interdisciplinary journal, it welcomes contributions in any relevant areas and from a worldwide authorship.

Crosscurrents is a dialogic space within Media, Culture & Society for debate, critique and reflection on current issues in media and communications research and aims to stimulate discussion around emerging questions, trends, themes and concepts in the field. This involves providing an arena for critical engagement with theoretical and empirical developments and trajectories in research on media and its social, political economic and cultural contexts.

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Manuscript Submission Guidelines: Media, Culture & Society

Please read the guidelines below then visit the Journal’s submission site https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/mcs  to upload your manuscript. Please note that manuscripts not conforming to these guidelines may be returned.

Only manuscripts of sufficient quality that meet the aims and scope of Media, Culture & Society will be reviewed.

There are no fees payable to submit or publish in this Journal. Open Access options are available - see section 3.3 below.

As part of the submission process you will be required to warrant that you are submitting your original work, that you have the rights in the work, that you are submitting the work for first publication in the Journal and that it is not being considered for publication elsewhere and has not already been published elsewhere, and that you have obtained and can supply all necessary permissions for the reproduction of any copyright works not owned by you.

• What do we publish? 1.1 Aims & Scope 1.2 Article types 1.3 Writing your paper
• Editorial policies 2.1 Peer review policy 2.2 Authorship 2.3 Acknowledgements 2.4 Funding 2.5 Declaration of conflicting interests
• Publishing policies 3.1 Publication ethics 3.2 Contributor's publishing agreement 3.3 Open access and author archiving
• Preparing your manuscript 4.1 Formatting 4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics 4.3 Supplementary material 4.4 Reference style 4.5 English language editing services
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• On acceptance and publication 6.1 Sage Production 6.2 Online First publication 6.3 Access to your published article 6.4 Promoting your article
• Further information

1. What do we publish?

1.1 Aims & Scope

Before submitting your manuscript to Media, Culture & Society , please ensure you have read the  Aims & Scope .

1.2 Article Types

Media, Culture and Society publishes main articles of between 6000 and 8000 words, including notes and references - Submissions which are outside this range will not be considered for refereeing until suitably revised. End notes, if necessary, should not exceed more than 6. Acknowledgement of receipt will be given and they will then be refereed anonymously. Articles should be in English. Authors are responsible for obtaining permissions from copyright holders for reproducing any previously published material.

For its Crosscurrents section, Media, Culture & Society also welcomes short pieces of no more than 5000 words in total (including all references). We particularly encourage articles which stimulate debate, reflect on current theoretical or empirical trends in the field, or respond in novel ways to issues, debates and developments in media, culture and society more broadly. Crosscurrents is open to contributions which do not adhere to a conventional article format.

Please note that we no longer publish book reviews. However, we occasionally publish review essays that involve the examination of a number of texts to provide a critical contribution to the subject.

1.3 Writing your paper

The Sage Author Gateway has some general advice and on how to get published, plus links to further resources. Please note that your manuscript must conform to our guidelines with regards to length (which depends on article type) and to our policy on anonymity; self-citations must not be included (the recommended procedure is to put “Author removed” before the date in the text citation and at appropriate points in the references section). Similarly, any acknowledgements and/or funding information must not be included in the main body of the text (this information can be uploaded in a separate text file or can be inserted at proof stage). Manuscripts that do not conform cannot be processed for peer review and will be returned to the author.

1.3.1 Make your article discoverable

When writing up your paper, think about how you can make it discoverable. The title, keywords and abstract are key to ensuring readers find your article through search engines such as Google. For information and guidance on how best to title your article, write your abstract and select your keywords, have a look at this page on the Gateway:  How to Help Readers Find Your Article Online .

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2.1 Peer review policy

Sage does not permit the use of author-suggested (recommended) reviewers at any stage of the submission process, be that through the web-based submission system or other communication. Reviewers should be experts in their fields and should be able to provide an objective assessment of the manuscript. Our policy is that reviewers should not be assigned to a paper if:

•  The reviewer is based at the same institution as any of the co-authors

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•  The reviewer has provided a personal (e.g. Gmail/Yahoo/Hotmail) email account and an institutional email account cannot be found after performing a basic Google search (name, department and institution). 

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All parties who have made a substantive contribution to the article should be listed as authors. Principal authorship, authorship order, and other publication credits should be based on the relative scientific or professional contributions of the individuals involved, regardless of their status. A student is usually listed as principal author on any multiple-authored publication that substantially derives from the student’s dissertation or thesis.

Please note that AI chatbots, for example ChatGPT, should not be listed as authors. For more information see the policy on Use of ChatGPT and generative AI tools .

2.3 Acknowledgements

All contributors who do not meet the criteria for authorship should be listed in an Acknowledgements section. Examples of those who might be acknowledged include a person who provided purely technical help, or a department chair who provided only general support.

Please supply any personal acknowledgements separately to the main text to facilitate anonymous peer review.

2.3.1 Third party submissions

Where an individual who is not listed as an author submits a manuscript on behalf of the author(s), a statement must be included in the Acknowledgements section of the manuscript and in the accompanying cover letter. The statements must:

• Disclose this type of editorial assistance – including the individual’s name, company and level of input
• Identify any entities that paid for this assistance
• Confirm that the listed authors have authorized the submission of their manuscript via third party and approved any statements or declarations, e.g. conflicting interests, funding, etc.

Where appropriate, Sage reserves the right to deny consideration to manuscripts submitted by a third party rather than by the authors themselves .

2.5 Declaration of conflicting interests

Media, Culture & Society encourages authors to include a declaration of any conflicting interests and recommends you review the good practice guidelines on the  Sage Journal Author Gateway .

3. Publishing Policies

3.1 Publication ethics

Sage is committed to upholding the integrity of the academic record. We encourage authors to refer to the Committee on Publication Ethics’ International Standards for Authors  and view the Publication Ethics page on the  Sage Author Gateway .

3.1.1 Plagiarism

Media, Culture & Society and Sage take issues of copyright infringement, plagiarism or other breaches of best practice in publication very seriously. We seek to protect the rights of our authors and we always investigate claims of plagiarism or misuse of published articles. Equally, we seek to protect the reputation of the journal against malpractice. Submitted articles may be checked with duplication-checking software. Where an article, for example, is found to have plagiarised other work or included third-party copyright material without permission or with insufficient acknowledgement, or where the authorship of the article is contested, we reserve the right to take action including, but not limited to: publishing an erratum or corrigendum (correction); retracting the article; taking up the matter with the head of department or dean of the author's institution and/or relevant academic bodies or societies; or taking appropriate legal action.

3.1.2 Prior publication

If material has been previously published it is not generally acceptable for publication in a Sage journal. However, there are certain circumstances where previously published material can be considered for publication. Please refer to the guidance on the Sage Author Gateway  or if in doubt, contact the Editor at the address given below.

3.2 Contributor's publishing agreement

Before publication, Sage requires the author as the rights holder to sign a Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement. Sage’s Journal Contributor’s Publishing Agreement is an exclusive licence agreement which means that the author retains copyright in the work but grants Sage the sole and exclusive right and licence to publish for the full legal term of copyright. Exceptions may exist where an assignment of copyright is required or preferred by a proprietor other than Sage. In this case copyright in the work will be assigned from the author to the society. For more information please visit the  Sage Author Gateway .

3.3 Open access and author archiving

Media, Culture & Society offers optional open access publishing via the Sage Choice programme and Open Access agreements, where authors can publish open access either discounted or free of charge depending on the agreement with Sage. Find out if your institution is participating by visiting Open Access Agreements at Sage . For more information on Open Access publishing options at Sage please visit Sage Open Access . For information on funding body compliance, and depositing your article in repositories, please visit Sage’s Author Archiving and Re-Use Guidelines and Publishing Policies .

4. Preparing your manuscript for submission

4.1 Formatting

Preferred formats for the text and tables of your manuscript are Word DOC, RTF, XLS. LaTeX files are also accepted. The text should be double-spaced throughout and with a minimum of 3cm for left and right hand margins and 5cm at head and foot. Text should be standard 10 or 12 point. Word and (La)Tex templates are available on the Manuscript Submission Guidelines  page of our Author Gateway.

4.2 Artwork, figures and other graphics

For guidance on the preparation of illustrations, pictures and graphs in electronic format, please visit Sage’s Manuscript Submission Guidelines .   

Figures supplied in colour will appear in colour online regardless of whether or not these illustrations are reproduced in colour in the printed version. For specifically requested colour reproduction in print, you will receive information regarding the costs from Sage after receipt of your accepted article.

4.3 Supplementary material

This journal is able to host additional materials online (e.g. datasets, podcasts, videos, images etc) alongside the full-text of the article. For more information please refer to our guidel guidelines on submitting supplementary files .

4.4 Reference style

Media, Culture & Society adheres to the Sage Harvard reference style. View the Sage Harvard  guidelines to ensure your manuscript conforms to this reference style.

If you use EndNote   to manage references, you can download the  Sage Harvard EndNote output file .

4.5 English language editing services

Authors seeking assistance with English language editing, translation, or figure and manuscript formatting to fit the journal’s specifications should consider using Sage Language Services. Visit Sage Language Services  on our Journal Author Gateway for further information.

5. Submitting your manuscript

Media, Culture & Society is hosted on Sage Track, a web based online submission and peer review system powered by ScholarOne™ Manuscripts. Visit https://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/MCS to login and submit your article online.

IMPORTANT: Please check whether you already have an account in the system before trying to create a new one. If you have reviewed or authored for the journal in the past year it is likely that you will have had an account created.  For further guidance on submitting your manuscript online please visit ScholarOne  Online Help .

As part of our commitment to ensuring an ethical, transparent and fair peer review process Sage is a supporting member of ORCID, the Open Researcher and Contributor ID . ORCID provides a unique and persistent digital identifier that distinguishes researchers from every other researcher, even those who share the same name, and, through integration in key research workflows such as manuscript and grant submission, supports automated linkages between researchers and their professional activities, ensuring that their work is recognized.

The collection of ORCID iDs from corresponding authors is now part of the submission process of this journal. If you already have an ORCID iD you will be asked to associate that to your submission during the online submission process. We also strongly encourage all co-authors to link their ORCID ID to their accounts in our online peer review platforms. It takes seconds to do: click the link when prompted, sign into your ORCID account and our systems are automatically updated. Your ORCID iD will become part of your accepted publication’s metadata, making your work attributable to you and only you. Your ORCID iD is published with your article so that fellow researchers reading your work can link to your ORCID profile and from there link to your other publications.

If you do not already have an ORCID iD please follow this link to create one or visit our ORCID homepage to learn more.

5.2 Information required for completing your submission

You will be asked to provide contact details and academic affiliations for all co-authors via the submission system and identify who is to be the corresponding author. These details must match what appears on your manuscript. At this stage please ensure you have included all the required statements and declarations and uploaded any additional supplementary files (including reporting guidelines where relevant).

5.3 Permissions

Please also ensure that you have obtained any necessary permission from copyright holders for reproducing any illustrations, tables, figures or lengthy quotations previously published elsewhere. For further information including guidance on fair dealing for criticism and review, please see the Copyright and Permissions page on the  Sage Author Gateway .

6. On acceptance and publication

6.1 Sage Production

Your Sage Production Editor will keep you informed as to your article’s progress throughout the production process. Proofs will be sent by PDF to the corresponding author and should be returned promptly.  Authors are reminded to check their proofs carefully to confirm that all author information, including names, affiliations, sequence and contact details are correct, and that Funding and Conflict of Interest statements, if any, are accurate.

6.2 Online First publication

Online First allows final articles (completed and approved articles awaiting assignment to a future issue) to be published online prior to their inclusion in a journal issue, which significantly reduces the lead time between submission and publication. Visit the Sage Journals help page  for more details, including how to cite Online First articles.

6.3 Access to your published article

Sage provides authors with online access to their final article.

6.4 Promoting your article

Publication is not the end of the process! You can help disseminate your paper and ensure it is as widely read and cited as possible. The Sage Author Gateway has numerous resources to help you promote your work. Visit the Promote Your Article  page on the Gateway for tips and advice.

7. Further information

Any correspondence, queries or additional requests for information on the manuscript submission process should be sent to the Media, Culture & Society editorial office as follows:

[email protected]

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Science and Information Conference

SAI 2020: Intelligent Computing pp 491–501 Cite as

Social Media: Influences and Impacts on Culture

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• Eang Teng Chan 17  
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• First Online: 04 July 2020

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Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1228))

Advanced technologies of communication have brought influences and impacts on cultures. There are views that the influences and impacts are brought forward by social media which has been a powerful tool that can affect and form human behaviors as well as culture. Social media may have crossed the boundaries of culture due to the concept of borderless. Facebook may have been the social media that connects people around the world with massive cultural backgrounds to meet at the platform. The media content uploaded may spark the invasion of culture. There are many other social media which come with influencers that may shout about different values and practices around. Local cultures had therefore slowly lost their identities and replaced with a cross-cultural phenomenon. The cultural values invaded may include human behaviors, beliefs, values or even fashion and lifestyle. This research is to examine the factors of cross cultural communication, the reasons of culture being influenced by foreign countries through social media and the possibility of cultural invasion through social media. Social Influence theory is used in this research. Social influence occurs when a person’s emotions, opinions or behaviors are affected by others intentionally or unintentionally. Online survey Google Form is used at the target of 150 respondents aged between 18 to 25 years old. There is a contradicting view that people will lose their own culture after viewing too much of online content. The online activities and actions will slowly lead them to the change without their realization.

The authors acknowledged the raw material provided by Khoo Rose Lyn and Yong Zheng Wai.

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Section B – Culture

In your opinion, how has the local culture been influenced?

□ Overseas media/social media content through internet

□ Foreign culture is better than local culture

□ Did not practice own culture well

□ Other than the above:   _______________________

Section C – Social Media and Culture

What is your view if local culture is influenced?

(If POSITIVE , proceed to 7a ; NEGATIVE , proceed to 7b )

If positive, why?

□ It is good if we accept other culture

□ It is more educational

□ Other cultures are better

□ Others:   ________________________________________________________

If negative, why?

□ Culture makes us who we are in identity

□ Culture is important

Section D – Effects of Social Media on Culture

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Tang, M.J., Chan, E.T. (2020). Social Media: Influences and Impacts on Culture. In: Arai, K., Kapoor, S., Bhatia, R. (eds) Intelligent Computing. SAI 2020. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1228. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-52249-0_33

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• Published: 29 July 2022

Effect of social media usage on the cultural identity of rural people: a case study of Bamha village, Egypt

• Mostafa Radwan 1  

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications volume  9 , Article number:  248 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Cultural and media studies

Cultural identity refers to the identical compound of reminiscences, impressions, ideologies, images, idioms, inventions, and ambitions that maintains a human set’s civilizational identity within the framework of what it knows of developments due to its internal dynamism and its ability to communicate or give and take. Social Media’s deep effect on cultural identity is a matter of constant concern. Therefore, the main aim of this research was to recognize the effect of social media on some components of rural people’s cultural identity. This study was conducted on 360 respondents from rural people in Bamha village, Egypt. Our data were collected using a questionnaire in December 2021 and then analyzed using descriptive statistics, Pearson’s simple correlation coefficient, chi-square, and the ascending multiple regression correlation analysis model (Stepwise). The results showed that for two-fifths of the respondents (40%) the level of change in cultural identity was high in relation to their use of social media; there is a significant relationship between some independent variables of respondents and the degree of change in their cultural identity. These results have important implications for policy, practice, and subsequent research, the most important of which are: working on developing thinking skills and self-learning among students in schools and universities, as well as the need to activate the role of the media in providing meaningful content that preserves societal values, in addition to employing social media to support community participation of young people on the ground by organizing awareness, volunteer and charitable activities, and finally the need to increase cooperation and coordination between all parties, whether they are media, schools, religious or civil institutions, youth centers, or other institutions to maximize the positive use of social media and to reduce its negative effects.

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Introduction and research problem

There is no doubt that the diversity of cultures influences how individuals comprehend themselves and others, as well as how they arrange their dwelling places (Zhukova and Schrenk, 2016 ). Individuals’ cultural frame is crucial as social, economic, ethnic, lingual, and spiritual disparities can contribute to cultural discord and imbalanced personalities. In general, getting to know the cultural identity of people and their associated characteristics is important and will positively reflect on achieving stability in communities. When discussing cultural features, it is impossible to avoid mentioning the cultural experiences of individuals. Social encounter refers to both personal and collective occasions that are characteristic of a gathering of individuals with common convictions, ideas, languages, traditions, and norms. Inner change occurs within the setting of different socio-cultural elements and has a remarkable capacity for forming personalities (Samoylova and Marita, 2013 ).

Looking at the subject of cultural identity in Arab, African, or Middle Eastern philosophy, studies on this are few, but Western philosophy focuses on the issue of what it implies for an individual to know himself progressively through a specific period of time. Therefore, how a person’s personality continues through time is the most important of these issues, which Western philosophy has historically concentrated on. Persistence of ideas, practices, and reminiscences is thought to represent the individual on a personal level. In any case, ideas are formed in a social setting, which is ordinarily interceded through social standards. Cultural Identity refers to the individual’s character that includes specific experiences, socializing, abilities, aptitudes, convictions, views and information. What kind of person is he, then? What is his or her position in the home, job, school, and college in the community and the nation? Moreover, another meaning of such a term as identity might be the obvious and hidden parts of the self, which influence an individual’s character building (Dzhurinskii, 2014 ). These contain race, sex, subordination, and physical and mental capacity. Identity factors are not steady or anticipated but rather they react to both a specific time outline and a readiness to alter. As a result, multicultural identity is seen as a multilateral, interconnected combination of social class, idioms, progeny, norms, customs, and practices that penetrate and influence nearly all aspects of our life. Each of these dimensions has an impact on how people perceive the universe and their own convictions (Popov, 2013 ).

Hence, culture which may be characterized as a society’s way of life, including elements like how people see birth and death, is thus a crucial component of the social structure. Culture has more than 160 logical definitions. Therefore, it is so hard to define culture because this concept has so many different meanings. Firstly, culture could be a social item that each individual creates over the course of his lifetime. There are four definitions of identity for a term like personality, including individual distinctions, tenacity, steadiness, and demeanor of the person to his action. In contrast, common components of culture include ethnicity, sex, religion, nation, dialect, knowledge, profession, time, belonging, and position. These categories create a clear perception of cultural identity and indicate definite social structures of culture (Voronina, 2019 ).

Self-esteem is a term used to describe a person’s set of self-perceptions. Upbringing variables, including peer sets, media, family, and teachers have an impact on whether a person develops high or low self-esteem. Given that the average person’s world has shrunk in the current era, it is more challenging to comprehend this phenomenon (Kamalova and Valiullina, 2019 ).

When we examine our modern life, it is clear that media appears as a very potent platform that has defined our value framework, cogitation method, and viewpoint on life. Today, the media serves as a powerful instrument to influence societies rather than just being a means of communication. Without a doubt, the media presently play a noteworthy portion within the acculturation operation.

Modern technological development has produced new virtual areas of interaction, resulting from technological developments, which are represented in social networks that have transformed reality into circles full of daily developments, which provided the opportunity for broad and branching communication despite the distances, resulting in a new culture that differs from the culture of the traditional society that is based on customs and traditions (Zemmouri, 2011 ), where communication technologies and information transfer are considered an important pillar in building the human social, economic, political, and cultural system, as ages developed through the first stages, including agricultural, industrial, and informatics (Gates, 1998 ).

Thus, social networks played a key role in social and human relations, and the delivery of fast news, text messages, video clips, and various information of interest to a person in his daily life, which helped spread its use in abundance, such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube (Rabeh, 2010 ). These networks also represent spaces for building individual identity and displaying oneself in the public sphere. They are a window through which individuals who use them view the subjective worlds of others through the self-portraits that they publish on their personal pages or through narrating the facts of their lives daily (Lolly, 2017 ). This overlap between the subjective world of the individual and the external public world of others leads to reshape the cultural norms that determine the identity of individuals (Al-Hamami, 2012 ), and therefore, every nation must preserve its identity in light of the spread of communicative globalization, by learning about other cultures while maintaining cultural pluralism within a framework of balance and integration, to work to support the national identity and establish its primacy (Muhammad, 2010 ). In this context, this research tries to identify the effect of using social media on some components of the cultural identity of rural people.

The means of communication have multiplied in recent years as a result of scientific progress and the technological revolution, and the Internet revolution is the most prominent manifestation of technology that has outperformed all other means of communication, due to the freedom and ability it provides to create a virtual world in which the individual feels comfortable and interacts with others, and thus, it has become a fundamental role in the behavior of individuals. The percentage of Internet users in the world increased, reaching about 48% of the total population, and in Egypt, the number of Internet users via mobile phone reached about 32.76 million users, and via USB Modem about 3.27 million users, in addition to ADSL high-speed Internet subscribers, whose number reached about 4.95 million subscribers (The National Telecommunications Regulatory Agency, 2017 ). From these statistics we note the development of the spread of modern means of communication, and despite the many advantages of these means, they also have many negative effects, most notably their impact on the cultural identity of individuals and the value system to which they adhere.

Accordingly, the Media’s profound affect could be a worrisome issue, an issue which has extensively been discussed. The uneasiness is more around the line in which societies follow. Due to these issues, it is hard to develop a fair methodology to evaluate the influence of media on societies. Yet, finding out how much our socio-cultural features, values, and attitudes are being impacted is more crucial.

Based on this general question of the study, some other questions were formulated as follows: What are the social, economic and communication characteristics of the respondents in the research area? What are the causes behind respondents’ utilization of social media? What is the effect of respondents’ utilization of social media on the respondents’ cultural identity components? What is the relationship between some of the respondents’ social, economic and communication characteristics and the degree of change in their cultural identity? How about the positives and drawbacks of utilizing social media, according to respondents’ opinion?

Research objectives

In light of the research problem, the objectives were determined as follows: the main and general objective of the research is to identify the effect of respondents’ use of social media on their cultural identity with its following components: language and method of the dialog, community participation, belongingness, time respect, freedom, and family cohesion. Each component includes five statements that reflect its content.

This objective was achieved and measured through a scale consisting of three levels: increased, did not change, decreased, and grades were given 3, 2, and 1 respectively in the case of positive statements and vice versa in negative statements, and total scores were collected to express the change in all components of the respondents’ cultural identity as a consequence of their utilization of social media; That is, the effect in this research means the amount of change in the cultural identity of rural people after their use of social media.

In order to achieve this objective, several sub-objectives have been formulated to help in that, either directly and fundamentally or in an indirect and auxiliary manner, which are:

Identifying the social, economic, and communication characteristics of the respondents in the research area.

Identifying the reasons for respondents’ social media utilization.

Identifying respondents’ utilization of social media effect their cultural identity components (language and method of the dialog, community participation, belongingness, time respect, freedom, and family cohesion).

Determining the relationship between some of the following social, economic, and communication characteristics of respondents: age, gender, educational status, marital status, number of family members, occupation, monthly income of the family, number of years of using social media, number of hours of daily use of social networking sites, number of websites used in social networks, and finally the means of accessing social networking sites, and the degree of change in their cultural identity.

Determining the relative contribution of the studied independent variables in explaining the total variance in the degree of change in the cultural identity of the respondents.

Identifying the positives and drawbacks of utilizing social media, according to respondents’ opinions.

Academic and practical contributions

The contemporary family is exposed to many pressures that require new cultural and social visions and policies that keep pace with the requirements of this technology and its ability to impose itself on society with the means of attraction and temptation that carries to prevent its resistance, which seeks to penetrate the cultural and social structure, the value system and work to weaken it with the aim of replacing it with strange values on society and patterns of behavior.

Whatever the case, and whether we acknowledge the importance of modern technological means or underestimate the size of their importance, we cannot overlook the change that occurs to individuals as a result of their use of these means, including this change of various aspects of human life from acquiring skills, self-learning, controlling information sources, changing social relations and influencing value.

The importance of the research can be summarized in the following points:

It discusses an important topic that is characterized by rapid change and development in what it presents and the matters related to the values, standards, and behavior of society.

Society needs to raise awareness of the dangers embodied in this technology, especially in light of malicious propaganda and blind imitation.

Presenting a scientific study on social media and its impact on preserving cultural identity in the Egyptian countryside, the field in which there are not many studies.

Presenting a media scientific study that reinforces the previous studies, and contributes by adding a research issue and a new experience in study and analysis, especially with regard to an important topic like this.

In light of the research results, measures can be developed through which people can ration the use of social media if it negatively affects their ideas and values.

Theoretical framework

Firstly: concepts related to the research.

Identity represents that spiritual bond that binds individuals to their societies so that they seek to build it and raise their status, by preserving the most important components of the nation represented in religion, language, dynasty, history, and culture, as individuals organize the meanings of their lives and experiences around a central identity characterized by relative continuity through time and space, (Giddens, 2005 ), and Rashad ( 1997 ) defines identity as “the code through which an individual can identify himself in his relationship with the social and cultural group to which he belongs, and through which he is recognized as belonging to that group.”

Cultural identity

Cultural identity refers to that identical compound of reminiscences, impressions, ideologies, images, idioms, inventions, and ambitions that maintains a human set’s civilizational identity within the framework of what it knows of developments due to its internal dynamism and its ability to communicate and give or take (Al-Jabri, 1998 ), as Al-Mahrouqi ( 2004 ) defined it as “individuals’ belonging to a local, regional or national linguistic group, with its ethical and esthetic values that distinguish it, and this also includes the history, traditions, customs, and way of life of the group, and individuals’ sense of belonging to and participating in the community, and it is for each individual a kind of basic equation by which he decides in a positive or negative way - The way in which he belongs to his group”, while Al-Tuwaijri ( 2015 ) defined it as the fixed, essential and common destiny of the general features that distinguish the nation’s civilization from other civilizations, and which makes the national character a character that distinguishes it from other national personalities.

The cultural identity has several components (Lesly, 2009 ), which are:

The national language and dialects are associated with the existence and development of a people.

Religious and national values formed through the ages.

Customs, traditions, norms, and values.

The history of people struggling to preserve their identity as land, values, customs, traditions, and norms.

Virtual communities

It means “a group of people who share common interests, and are not necessarily bound by geographic boundaries, ethnic, tribal, political, or religious ties, interacting through social networking sites. They are social groupings that arise from the network, where enough people continue their discussions in public for a sufficient amount of time with enough human feelings to form networks of personal relationships in cyberspace (Chan et al., 2004 ).

Bodhan ( 2009 ) defines it as “a virtual space for the exchange of discussions, dialog and meetings between individuals and it is called a public space open to all, in which individuals live with each other a symbolic life away from real life, and do not feel any barriers and communicate among themselves freely”, while Jaber defined it ( 2003 ) as “communities consisting of geographically separated people who communicate through electronic networks, and a kind of feeling, loyalty and participation results between them”.

Among the most important features that distinguish the virtual community are (Mazeed, 2012 ):

The fall of the reference to community in its classical meaning, as the online community is specified through the joint benefits that collect individuals who had never met previously.

The boundaries of geography do not play a role in the formation of virtual communities.

An individual can find someone to communicate with in virtual communities around the clock, as they are societies that do not sleep.

It is not based on compulsion, but on choice.

Social media

Social media plays a significant role in our lives since it encourages our global community’s association and interconnecting across cultures. Individuals can communicate and interact with data that are effectively available on the Internet thanks to media for social interaction. Social media is now increasingly prevalent in everyday schedules and designs due to the rising number of Web clients in today’s society. The communication that takes place in these online settings encourages interactive discussions that deepen comprehension of other points of view. Everyone in the internet is a publisher and a reviewer because social media gives users the chance to share their thoughts with the world and engage in debates and dialog through a common virtual platform (Georgetown University, 2010 ).

There are cultural contrasts among societies, and these contrasts have an impact on how individuals connect on social media (Rosen et al., 2010 ).

Control space, selfhood/collective, virility/womanhood, instability evasion, and current/future trend are cultural aspects. Control space means the degree to which less effective individuals of organizational entities admit and anticipate that control is allocated unevenly. The level of a person’s combining with a group is indicating to selfhood/collective. Virility/womanhood clarifies the tasks divided among sexes; for illustration, self-assured and competitive in contrast with upbringing and sustaining. Instability evasion transacts with a society’s resilience to instability and confusion, and current/future trends outline the culture center and values (Hofstede, 2001 ).

Users’ connection and action patterns differ between individual and collective cultures when it comes to social media as persons from individual cultures prefer recognizing new friends and getting noticed by lots of people more than preserving their current relationships on social media. In contrast, individuals from collective societies use social networking sites to keep in touch with intimate friends or family instead of forming new ones (Rosen et al., 2010 ).

Since social media is empowered by data and communication innovation and intensely relies on constant user contribution, its dissemination worldwide may appear as distinctive impacts on cultures and eventually cause the advancement of integration and perception among worldwide nations (Veltri and Elgarah, 2009 ).

Through the presentation of some previous studies related to the topic of the research, it can be said that the current study differs from them in the following:

Previous studies did not focus on studying the topic in rural areas, which are governed by their own cultures.

Lack of focus on the Middle East area, specifically a country like Egypt.

The previous studies did not deal with all the components of cultural identity. Rather, each study dealt with one or some of those components.

Therefore, this study, with its focus on the Egyptian countryside and its treatment of the impact of social media on cultural identity with all its components, is considered a good addition to this field, and an important entry point for future studies on this topic.

Secondly: Theoretical orientations

The social theories explaining the topic of the research are as follows.

Symbolic Interactivity Theory

Symbolic interactivity refers to the process of symbolic social interaction in which the individual has a relationship and contact with the minds of others, their latent needs and desires, and their means to achieve their goals (Lotfy and El-Zayat, 1999 ). By applying this theory to the current research, it can be said that the virtual society is one in which individual and collective actions with common meanings are produced and reproduced, and coded symbols are circulated among its pioneers as social actors, and they have connotations that they understand. They form the social reality in which they live through symbolic interaction processes among them, which is also reshaping and defining their identity.

Anthony Giddens’ Structural Formation Theory

This theory emphasizes that individuals are the ones who establish their lives through their social practices, and the form and direction of social change are determined through social practices, which results in maintaining, reproducing, or changing established practices (Giddens, 2000 ). The cultural heritage of the pioneers of virtual communities is shaped according to their practices in these communities, which results in the preservation of identity or the occurrence of changes in it and its reproduction in a new way.

Marshall McLuhan’s Technological Determinism Theory

This theory indicates that technology has the power to change the nature of social relations and social reality. Proponents of this theory believe that technology controls the progress of humanity, as individuals in various parts of the earth have failed to reach a solution that keeps them in constant contact, until technology intervened to provide them with radical solutions which eliminate all the problems that bother them, and works to bridge the distances between the east and the west of the earth, as others see that technology is only a tool to impose hegemony and control over weak peoples and to control the convictions of individuals as it invades the personal life of the individual, and works to break up his real relationships (El-Sayed, 2013 ), and by applying this theory to the current research, it can be said that browsing social networking sites has a set of positives that benefit the individual, whether at the personal level, the family level, or the societal level, but it also has a set of negatives. Therefore, the pros and cons of social networking sites must be weighed.

Social Determinism theory.

This theory is based on the fact that social relationships are the basis for creating social networking sites, and it is the strongest motive for creating these sites (Radi, 2003 ). It also indicates that social relationships have great strength and influence that pushes people to try to create an environment that brings them together, trying to create a unified framework for them, which led them to build and configure those social networks, whether it is the Internet, mobile phones or audio-visual media, in an attempt to bring them closer and bridge distances between each other, and this theory is the opposite of the theory of “technological determinism”, which indicates that technology is the owner of the credit for creating an atmosphere that combines all those social relationships in one framework through several applications so that each individual chooses what suits his needs and personal convictions (Sadiq, 2011 ).

Through the previous narrative of the theories that explain the processes of communication between individuals, it became clear that the theory of symbolic interaction, the theory of structural formation by Anthony Giddens, and the theory of technological determinism by Marshall McLuhan are the most closely related to the interpretation of the identity of individuals and; therefore, the current study relied on them to explain its results.

Research hypotheses

There is no doubt that the process of change in general and the change in cultural elements is greatly affected by people’s social, economic, and communicative characteristics. A young man is not like an old man, a married person is not like a single, a university graduate is not like a doctorate, an employee is not like the one who does not work, and a high-income earner is not like someone who is poorly paid, and also someone who uses social media for a year is not like someone who uses it for ten years, and someone who sits daily on social media for hours is not like someone who uses it every week. All these variables and characteristics are expected to affect in the end the degree of change in the personalities of the respondents and their cultural identities. Some of the previous studies, which were mentioned here in the current research, have referred to some of these aspects. It may be difficult to trace the change to these characteristics, but without a doubt, the correlational relationships between them provide results and indications that greatly clarify the importance of these characteristics in the interpretation of the change in the degree of personalities of the respondents and their cultural identities. Therefore, the following hypotheses are formulated:

There is a relationship between some of the following social, economic, and communication characteristics of respondents: age, gender, educational status, marital status, number of family members, occupation, monthly income of the family, number of years of using social media, number of hours of daily use of social networking sites, number of websites used in social networks, and finally the means of accessing social networking sites, and the degree of change in their cultural identity.

There is a relative contribution of the studied independent variables in explaining the total variance in the degree of change in the cultural identity of the respondents.

To test the two previous research hypotheses, they were put in their null hypothesis.

Research methods

This study relied on the descriptive approach through the social survey method. The descriptive approach was an adequate tool for achieving the current study’s aims and questions, which were to precisely and efficiently depict a sociocultural problem and responding to the different questions about it.

In addition, it is valuable as little is known about the effect of social media on cultural identity in Egypt. Expressive measurements described and grouped the features of a data package that were collected from a random sample of respondents via a questionnaire (Bhandari, 2021 ).

Sample size, sampling techniques, and data collection

This study was conducted in the village of Bamha in Al-Ayat district, Giza Governorate, which has a population of 16,128 according to the Central Agency for Public Mobilization and Statistics ( 2017 ). The research sample was randomly selected from the users of social media, specifically “Facebook”, as it is the most used means in the study area. The population of the study comprised all members of the “Bamha Village News” group on the Facebook website, which includes 5708 members. The sample was also determined through the Kergcie and Morgan table, and it amounted to 360 respondents, and the data was collected after dividing the village into four residential sectors, and from each sector, 90 respondents were selected in a systematic random manner.

Data collection procedure

Major data of the study were gathered from rural people during December 2021. Information was gathered by interview and through a questionnaire. The Questionnaire has been tested for validity and reliability. The respondents were interviewed face-to-face. The research tools were pre-tested before the factual survey to make sure they were appropriate and to adapt them to rural people’s circumstances.

The questionnaire form contained five sections as follows:

The first section : It included seven questions to know the social and economic characteristics of the respondents, namely: age, gender, educational status, marital status, how many members in the family, occupation, and the family’s monthly income.

The second section : It included 10 questions to know the communication characteristics of the respondents, namely: the years number of social networking websites utilizing, the number of hours of daily use of social networking sites, the number of sites used in social networks, the means of accessing social networking sites, the validity of the data recorded on the communication sites Social, trusting what social media offers, how to learn to use and surf the Internet, favorite site, feeling while away from social media, and login name for social media.

The Third Section : It included an open question to find out the reasons for rural people’s use of social media.

The fourth section : It included a question to measure the effect of social media utilization on the cultural identity components of rural people, which are six components on a scale consisting of three levels: increased, did not change, decreased, and grades were given 3, 2 and 1, respectively, in the case of positive statements and vice versa in the case of negative statements, and total scores were collected to express the change in the components of the respondents’ cultural identity as a consequence of their utilization of social media; That is, the effect in this research means the amount of change in the cultural identity of rural people after social media utilization. As for the first component, this is concerned with language and the method of dialog with others, the second component is concerned with community participation; the third component is concerned with affiliation, the fourth component is concerned with respect for time, and the fifth component is concerned with freedom, while the sixth component is concerned with family cohesion, and each component includes 5 items.

The Fifth Section : It was related to identifying the positives and drawbacks of utilizing social media.

Data analysis

The statistical analysis was carried out through SPSS version 20. Based on the characteristics of the respondents, descriptive statistics were generated. The weighted average was also used to help in arranging the respondents according to their reasons for using social media and also arranging them according to their opinions about the positive and negative effects of using social media. Pearson’s simple correlation coefficient and (chi-square) were used to measure the relationship between some of the social, economic, and communication characteristics of respondents and the degree of change in their cultural identity. Finally, the ascending multiple regression correlation analysis model (Stepwise) was used to measure the relative contribution of the studied independent variables in explaining the total variance in the degree of the cultural identity of the respondents.

Validity and reliability

The validity of the questionnaire was measured by the method of content validity, whereby the questionnaire was presented to a group of professors specialized in the field of research to express their opinion on the questionnaire, who gave a set of observations, and the researcher committed and responded to their opinions and made the necessary adjustments in the light of their proposals. The stability of some measures was also measured using (Cronbach’s alpha), and its values for all measures were >0.8, which indicates the high stability of the questionnaire tool.

After completing the preparation of the questionnaire, a (Pretest) was conducted for it. Data have been collected during December 2021, after that data has been discharged, tabulated, and analyzed using tables, percentages, frequencies, weighted average, Pearson’s simple correlation coefficient, (chi-square), and the ascending multiple regression correlation analysis model (Stepwise).

Results and discussion

Firstly: description of the research sample.

The results (Table 1 ) which show the social and economic characteristics of the respondents showed that the age mode of the respondents falls in the age group 18–33 years, and their percentage reached (55%). With regard to the sex of the respondents, it was found that the majority of them (85%) are males. For the educational status of the respondents, the results showed that two-fifths of the respondents (40%) hold a secondary certificate, as well as those with higher qualifications, the same percentage, and that 10% of them have a preparatory certificate, and that 5% of them have an elementary certificate, as well as those who read and write the same. As for the marital status of the respondents, it was found from the results that three-quarters of them (75%) are married.

With regard to the number of family members, the results showed that half of the respondents (50%) had an average family size, as the number of their family members ranged from 5 to 6 individuals, which is in line with the respondents’ educational level. With regard to the respondents’ profession, the results showed that two-fifths of the respondents 40% are employees, and that one-fifth of them (20%) work as craftsmen, that 15% of them work as self-employed, and 10% of them are students. With regard to the distribution of respondents according to their monthly income, the results showed that more than half of the respondents (55%) fall in the middle-income category, where their income ranges between 2000 and 3000 Egyptian pounds, and this is in line with the nature of their professions.

Also, the results (Table 1 ) which show the communication characteristics of the respondents showed that the mode of the number of years of use variable falls in the two time categories 1–3 years and 4–6 years, with a percentage of 35%, while it became clear that 30% of the respondents have used social media for a period ranging from 7 to 10 years. With regard to the number of hours of use, it was found that nearly half of the respondents (45%) use social media between 2 and 3 h per day, while more than a third of them (35%) use social media between 4 and 5 h a day, and a fifth of respondents (20%) use social media between 6 and 8 h a day.

As for the number of websites used by the respondents, the results showed that half of the respondents (50%) use one or two websites at most, that nearly half (45%) use 3–4 websites, and that only 5% of them use 5–6 Sites, and as for the means of accessing social media, it was found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents (60%) use both the mobile and the computer to enter, while two-fifths of the respondents (40%) of them access via mobile only. Regarding the validity of the respondents’ data on social media, it was found that the majority of the respondents (80%) use data, some of which are true and others are incorrect, and that for 15% of them all their data are correct, and that for only 5% of respondents’ their data is incorrect, and this is logical in light of the multiplicity of problems that may occur as a result of disclosing all data.

With regard to trusting the websites used by the respondents, the results showed that the majority of respondents (80%) trust to some extent, while 15% of them fully trust, and 5% of them do not trust those websites. As for the learning method variable, nearly two-thirds of the respondents (60%) learned to utilize the communication methods through friends, while one-fifth of the respondents (20%) learned themselves, and that (15%) of them learned through their brothers, while 5% of them only learned through training courses. As for the preferred site, it was found that the majority of respondents (90%) prefer Facebook, while 5% of them prefer WhatsApp, and the same percentage prefer YouTube.

As for the respondents’ feelings during their absence from social media, it was found that nearly two-thirds of the respondents (60%) feel empty during their absence from the means of communication, while one-fifth of the respondents (20%) feel nothing when they are absent from these means, and the same percentage reported feeling anxiety and turmoil. As for the name of access to social networking sites, the majority of respondents (85%) enter with real names, while 15% of them enter under pseudonyms.

Secondly: Reasons for using social media

The results (Table 2 ) showed the following: Communicating with others, in general, came in the first rank of the reasons for respondents’ utilization of social media by 88%, then within the second rank searching for old friends and getting to know new friends by 75%, then in the third rank spending leisure time by 73.8%, then in the fourth rank entertainment by 72%, then in the fifth rank accessing to political and religious news by 70.5%, and then in the sixth rank following up on sports news by 60%, then in the seventh rank searching for a job by 42.7%, then in the eighth rank being one of the work requirements by 36.1%, then in the ninth rank buying and selling by 22.5%, then in the tenth rank the reason of addiction by 16.4%, and finally in the last rank for social appearance among people (10.3%).

Thirdly: The effect of social media utilizing on the respondents’ cultural identity

The component of language and method of dialog with others

The results (Table 3 ) showed the following:

Paying attention to speaking and writing in a spoken language:

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (60%) reported that taking into account speaking and writing in a spoken language has decreased in light of their use of social media.

Paying attention to correct linguistic errors:

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (60%) reported that interest in correcting linguistic errors had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Using colloquial language in conversation with others:

All respondents (100%) reported that their use of the colloquial dialect increased in light of their use of social media.

Use of new and common terms among young people:

The vast majority of respondents (95%) reported that their use of new and circulating words among young people has increased in light of their use of social media.

Using Franco Arabic in writing:

The majority of respondents (90%) stated that their use of Franco Arabic in writing had increased in light of social media utilization.

Component of community participation:

The results (Table 4 ) showed the following:

Attending social events:

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (60%) reported that their attendance at social events had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Exchanging visits with relatives and friends:

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (60%) stated that their exchange of visits with their relatives and friends had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Participation in development projects and initiatives:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) reported that their participation in development projects and initiatives had increased in light of their use of social media.

Contributing to providing social assistance to the needy:

Nearly two-thirds of the respondents (60%) stated that their contribution to providing social assistance to the needy had not changed in light of their use of social media.

Participation in associations and parties:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) stated that their participation in associations and parties had increased in light of social media utilization.

Affiliation component:

The results (Table 5 ) showed the following:

Follow-up to the national team matches:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) stated that their follow-up to the national team matches had increased in light of their use of social media.

Buying Egyptian products even if their quality is lower:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) stated that their purchase of Egyptian products had not changed in light of their use of social media.

Boycotting the products of any country that harms Egypt:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) stated that their boycott of the products of countries offensive to Egypt had not changed in light of their use of social media.

Feeling of sacrificing one’s life in order to preserve the homeland:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) reported that their feeling of sacrificing for the sake of the homeland had not changed in light of their use of social media.

Thinking about traveling abroad and emigrating:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) stated that their thinking about traveling abroad had not changed in light of their use of social media.

Component of time respect:

The results (Table 6 ) showed the following:

Organizing the time:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) stated that their time management had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Paying attention to waking up early:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) reported that their keenness to wake up early had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Paying attention to use time in everything that is useful:

Nearly three-quarters of the respondents (70%) stated that their eagerness to use time in all that is useful had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Commitment to appointments with others:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) stated that their commitment to appointments with others had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Postponing today’s work until tomorrow:

Three-quarters of the respondents (75%) reported that their postponement of today’s work until tomorrow had increased in light of social media utilizing.

Freedom component:

Results (Table 7 ) showed the following:

Expressing opinion freely:

All respondents (100%) reported that their free expression of their opinion had increased in light of their use of social media.

Discussing issues and events with colleagues and friends:

All respondents (100%) reported that their discussion of issues and events with colleagues and friends had increased in light of their use of social media.

Claiming rights through legitimate means:

All respondents (100%) reported that their demand for their rights through legitimate means had increased in light of their use of social media.

Friendship with people of other religions:

Half of the respondents (50%) stated that their friendship with people of other religions had increased in light of their use of social media.

Criticizing development programs and policies:

All respondents (100%) reported that their criticism of development programs and policies had increased in light of social media utilization.

Component of family cohesion:

The results (Table 8 ) showed the following:

Paying attention to eat with the family:

Nearly three-quarters of the respondents (70%) stated that their eagerness to eat with the family had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Paying attention to allocate time to discuss family matters:

Nearly three-quarters of the respondents (70%) stated that their eagerness to allocate time to discuss family matters had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Watching football matches with the family:

Nearly half of the respondents (45%) stated that their eagerness to watch football matches with the family had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Paying attention to know the affairs of all family members:

More than a third of the respondents (35%) stated that their eagerness to know the affairs of all family members had decreased in light of their use of social media.

Standing by any family member in times of crisis:

All respondents (100%) stated that their standing next to any family member in times of crisis had not changed in light of their use of social media.

In order to determine the level of change in the components of cultural identity in general, the results (Table 9 ) showed that two-fifths of the respondents (40%) had a high level of change in the components of cultural identity in light of their use of social media.

Fourthly: The relationship between the independent variables of the respondents and the degree of their cultural identity

The first statistical hypothesis indicates that there is no connection between some of the social, economic, and communication characteristics of rural people: age, gender, educational status, marital status, number of family members, occupation, family monthly income, number of years of social media utilizing, of hours number utilizing social media sites daily, the number of sites used in social networks, and finally the means of accessing social networking sites and the degree of their cultural identity.

To test the validity of this hypothesis, the simple correlation coefficient was used for variables of continuous type, and chi-square for variables of nominal type, and the results (Table 10 ) showed the following:

There is a positive relationship at a significant level of 0.01 between the age of the respondents and the degree of their cultural identity, and the calculated value of the simple correlation coefficient is (0.396), which is greater than its tabular counterpart.

There is a positive relationship at a significant level of 0.01 between the number of family members and the degree of their cultural identity, and the calculated simple correlation coefficient value is (0.147), which is greater than its tabular counterpart.

There is a positive relationship at a significant level of 0.01 between the monthly income of the respondents and the degree of their cultural identity, and the calculated value of the simple correlation coefficient is (0.264), which is greater than its tabular counterpart.

There is a significant relationship at a significant level of 0.01 between the gender of the respondents and the degree of their cultural identity, and the value of the chi-square is (122.648), which is greater than its tabular counterpart.

There is a significant relationship at a significant level of 0.01 between the educational status of the respondents and the degree of their cultural identity, and the value of the chi-square is (656.725), which is greater than its tabular counterpart.

There is a significant relationship at a significant level of 0.01 between the marital status of the respondents and the degree of their cultural identity, and the value of the chi-square is (620.437), which is greater than its tabular counterpart.

There is a significant relationship at a significant level of 0.01 between the respondents’ profession and the degree of their cultural identity, and the value of the chi-square is (1314.019), which is greater than its tabular counterpart.

There is a significant relationship at a significant level of 0.01 between the means of accessing social networking sites and the degree of their cultural identity, and the value of the chi-square is (126.304), which is greater than its tabular counterpart.

Based on these results, the previous statistical hypothesis could not be rejected entirely, but could only be rejected with respect to some variables, i.e. age, number of family members, income, gender, educational status, marital status, profession, means of access to social networking sites, and the possibility of accepting the alternative theoretical hypothesis for these variables.

The positive relationship between age and the degree of change in cultural identity can be explained by the fact that a person’s age, in light of his use of social media and increased exposure to it, makes him more affected than others by it and its repercussions in relation to cultural identity, especially the components of language, respect for time, family cohesion and social participation.

Regarding affirmative relationship among both of family members’ number and the cultural identity degree, it might be clarified that the larger the family size, the more problems and concerns it has, and therefore, in light of the use of social media and the increase in exposure to it, this leads to affecting the components of cultural identity, especially the components of language, respect for time, family cohesion, and social participation.

As for the positive relationship between monthly income and the cultural identity degree, it maybe is illustrated that the higher the income, the more it is reflected in the ability of people to financially immerse themselves in technology and its applications, especially social media, and thus lead to affecting the components of cultural identity, especially the language components, time respect, family cohesion, and social participation.

As for the significant relationship between gender and the degree of change in cultural identity, it can be explained that females mostly, especially in the research sample, have more free time than males, which gives them the opportunity to increase their social media utilizing, and therefore their cultural identity degree with its various components is more subject to change than males.

As for the significant relationship between educational status and the degree of change in the cultural identity, it can be explained that those with higher educational qualifications are more open to technology and social media, and therefore the degree of their cultural identity with its various components is more vulnerable to change than less educated people.

As for the significant relationship between marital status and the degree of change in cultural identity, it can be explained by the fact that married people are often exposed to more living pressures, and therefore social media represents for them as a primary haven to escape from these pressures, and therefore the degree of their cultural identity with its various components is more vulnerable to change than others.

As for the significant relationship between the profession and the degree of change in cultural identity, it can be explained that there are professions that require more use of the Internet and technology, and therefore the degree of cultural identity with its different components for people with these professions is more vulnerable to change than others.

As for the significant relationship between the means of accessing social networking sites and the degree of change in cultural identity, it can be explained that for people who use both mobile phones in addition to computers, the degree of their cultural identity with its various components is more vulnerable to change than people who use mobile phones only or Computers only.

Fifth: The relative contribution of the studied independent variables in explaining the total variance in the degree of cultural identity of the respondents

The second statistical hypothesis states that “there is no relative contribution of the studied independent variables in explaining the total variance in the degree of the cultural identity of the respondents.” And to test the validity of this hypothesis, the multiple regression correlation analysis model was used, and through (Table 11 ) the results showed that there are four variables that collectively contribute to the explanation of this variance by 43.7%, which are the variables of profession, age, gender, and monthly income, this contribution was significant, as the calculated “ F ” values for the significant contribution amounted to 127.77, 101.25, 79.65, and 7.74, all of which were significant at the 0.01 probability level, which means the importance of these four studied variables in the degree of the cultural identity of the respondents.

Sixth: The positives and drawbacks of utilizing social media, according to respondents’ opinion

As for the positive effects of social media, the results (Table 12 ) showed the following: Facilitating rapprochement and knowing the news came in the first rank with a percentage of 89.1%, and then came in the second rank to help in charitable work such as searching for missing children with a rate of 86.9%, Then in the third rank it helps to know the behavior of the people living in my village with a percentage of 84.7%, then in the fourth rank it helps in mobilizing public opinion on public issues with a percentage of 75.2%, and then in the fifth rank it helps in searching for cultural and religious matters with a percentage of 73%, and then in the sixth rank to benefit from it in searching for job opportunities by 69.1%, then in the seventh rank paying bills electronically easily with a rate of 65.5%, then in the eighth rank it is a good way to have fun and spend time by 64.2%, then in the ninth and last rank, developing skills and displaying talents to others to prove oneself, with a percentage of 56.4%.

As for the negative effects of social media, the results (Table 12 ) showed the following: wasting time and inability to organize came in the first rank with a percentage of (83.6%), then in the second rank it increases the spread of negative values and corruption of morals by (74.7%), then in the third rank the development of laziness and lethargy among individuals by (71.1%), then in the fourth rank weakens direct communication skills by (65.3%), then in the fifth rank is a falsification of information by (63.3%), and then in the sixth rank is an addiction to its use by (58). %), then in the seventh and last rank is neglect in religious rites, such as establishing prayer, at a rate of (55%).

The responses to the meeting queries give a wealth of data with respect to the relationship between the effects of social media utilization on individuals’ cultural identity. The responses can be used to infer three crucial ideas for this study, including communication, acculturation, and society.

The study findings confirm the significance of how searching for communication through networking websites affects cultural identity. According to the participant information, social media is used by individuals to develop, construct, and keep up connections. The contacts and discussions create a sense of connection, which is crucial for interacting with persons both locally and globally.

These ties are imperative for eliminating self-improvement obstacles and building up a feeling of community.

Acculturation is a crucial component of cultural identity, and social media has an impact on this procedure. To connect with contacts, social media provides a forum for dialog and interaction locally and internationally.

Moreover, acculturation operation includes being conscious of stereotypes. Whether respondents are convinced to avoid stereotypes or even forced through social media, they admit patterns and prejudices and maybe form their awareness about the different sources.

Communication also affects an individual’s feeling of belonging to the community while dealing with cultural elements and components. After the spread of social media, the interviewees contacted people from different cultural backgrounds locally and internationally. Forming these relationships and interactions created a space for the occurrence of cultural processes such as the process of acculturation, cultural assimilation, and cultural integration in new different cultures, where social media contributed to this development. Simultaneously, social media offers a platform for users to connect with friends and remain updated, conscious, and knowledgeable about present occasions. Users discussed how social media enhances their sense of belonging to their community.

Figure 1 illustrates a paradigm that can be utilized to clarify the possible connections between these terms, showing how social media links individuals, and as a result of utilizing social media, their relationships are strengthened, which helps people to overcome the acculturation process effects and establish a sense of community.

This figure represents the full structural model to demonstrate the potential relationships among the concepts of communication/relationship, acculturation, and community, in which social media connects people, and through social media utilizing, connections are increased, which aids individuals to avoid acculturation process effects and establish a sense of community.

It is worthwhile to talk about two extra study results. To begin with, the design that emerged from the respondents was the timing of using social media. With the advent of social media, people utilize social media a lot to remain in touch with others inside their local community. However, as the people’s length of time on social media increased, their use was oriented more to interacting with individuals from other communities, whether local or international. This change in social media usage demonstrates how cultural identity was influenced by that. Secondly, the findings demonstrate that the concept “friend” might be seen as vague in online contexts. On social networking platforms, a lot of users have many friends, yet in reality, they may only have known these users once. Hence, the concept “friend” takes on a different meaning when everyone is referred to as a friend on social media. As a result, some persons feel the need to accompany persons they already know, whether they are near companions or not, in order to broaden their connections.

What’s more, in the current study it was found that there is a positive relationship between each of the following variables; age, monthly income, the number of family members, and the cultural identity degree, which might be clarified through the fact that a person’s age, in light of his use of social media and increased exposure to it, makes him more affected than others by it and its repercussions in relation to cultural identity. Also the larger the size of the family, the more problems and concerns it has, and therefore, in light of social media utilization as well as the increased exposure to it, this leads to affecting the components of cultural identity. In addition, the higher the income, the more it is reflected in the ability of people to financially immerse themselves in technology and its applications, especially social media, and thus lead to affecting the components of cultural identity.

The findings from this study also showed that gender, educational status, marital status, profession, and means of accessing social networking sites affect the cultural identity degree, which may be illustrated through females mostly, having more free time than males, which gives them the opportunity to increase their social media utilizing, and therefore their cultural identity degree with its various components is more subject to change than males. Also, those with higher educational qualifications are more open to technology and social media, and therefore the degree of their cultural identity with its various components is more vulnerable to change than less educated people. In addition, married people are often exposed to more living pressures, and therefore social media represents them a primary haven to escape from these pressures, and therefore the degree of their cultural identity with its various components is more vulnerable to change than others. There are also professions that require more use of the Internet and technology, and therefore the degree of cultural identity with its different components for people with these professions is more vulnerable to change than others. Also, for people who use both mobile phones in addition to computers, the degree of their cultural identity with its various components is more vulnerable to change than people who use mobile phones only or Computers only. Overall, the results showed that there are four variables that collectively contribute to the explanation of this variance by 43.7%, which are the variables of profession, age, gender, and monthly income, which mean the importance of these four studied variables in the degree of the cultural identity of the respondents.

In general, and through the results, it can be said that social means of communications, a “phenomenon” has spread over the world over the past few decades and is now omnipresent, having effects that range from the local to the global. Social means of communication are located socially because the internet environment makes it possible to forge new relationships through time and location; online connecting is moreover affected by offline. Social standards, designs, and structures: the social media utilizing in an Egyptian setting that existed previously may differ from other countries and settings. And a few speculations have been presented to assist in comprehending the characteristics, capacities, and control of social media. In other words, it is clear from spanning the majority of studies on social media that it gives a raised perception of social existence, as the distinction between the online and offline world gets to be progressively unclear.

Eventually, the study had some shortcomings. Firstly, it has been conducted on just 360 respondents. It would be helpful to interview or survey more people in order to have a better perception of the connection between social media utilizing and cultural identity. Furthermore, all respondents were rural people. For additional research, people from a greater variety of different communities may be met to get a more diversified viewpoint on social media and cultural identity. Lastly, the age run of the members might be extended to incorporate more individuals. There is great potential for studying and interviewing people across the world to further understand the influences social media has on cultural identity. The scope of subjects presented in this study which can be described as deficient will definitely be covered extensively in future research on social media. Users will discover more applications that affect propensities, exercises, connections, and societies as social media advances proceed to spread. In the coming eras, new conditions will exist and definitely, and the next generation will be affected positively or vice versa. Undoubtedly, there is a lot more to be found.

Recommendations

Developing students’ thinking and self-learning skills in schools and universities to develop their research skills, broaden their horizons in general culture, and not leave them prey to the negatives of electronic cultural openness.

Developing the pride of learners in various educational levels in the Arabic language, by accustoming teachers to their students to speak Standard Arabic, in addition to creating pages on social networking sites to support the Arabic language.

Activating the role of the media, especially film, drama, and song makers, in providing meaningful content that preserves societal values and raises public taste in order to limit the spread of unacceptable terms commonly used on social media as a matter of humor and imitation.

Employing social media to support the community participation of young people by organizing awareness, voluntary and charitable activities, and thus benefiting from the integration of young people in the virtual world to provide real activities in the real world.

The need to increase cooperation and coordination between all parties, whether the media, schools, religious institutions, NGOs, youth centers, and other institutions, to maximize the use of social media and reduce its negative effects.

Data availability

The datasets analyzed during the current study are available in the Dataverse repository: https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/EPWBDY .

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Mostafa Radwan

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Radwan, M. Effect of social media usage on the cultural identity of rural people: a case study of Bamha village, Egypt. Humanit Soc Sci Commun 9 , 248 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-022-01268-4

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Article contents

Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity.

• Travis L. Dixon , Travis L. Dixon Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• Kristopher R. Weeks Kristopher R. Weeks Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
•  and  Marisa A. Smith Marisa A. Smith Department of Communication, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.502
• Published online: 23 May 2019

Racial stereotypes flood today’s mass media. Researchers investigate these stereotypes’ prevalence, from news to entertainment. Black and Latino stereotypes draw particular concern, especially because they misrepresent these racial groups. From both psychological and sociological perspectives, these misrepresentations can influence how people view their racial group as well as other groups. Furthermore, a racial group’s lack of representation can also reduce the group’s visibility to the general public. Such is the case for Native Americans and Asian Americans.

Given mass media’s widespread distribution of black and Latino stereotypes, most research on mediated racial portrayals focuses on these two groups. For instance, while black actors and actresses appear often in prime-time televisions shows, black women appear more often in situational comedies than any other genre. Also, when compared to white actors and actresses, television casts blacks in villainous or despicable roles at a higher rate. In advertising, black women often display Eurocentric features, like straight hair. On the other hand, black men are cast as unemployed, athletic, or entertainers. In sports entertainment, journalists emphasize white athletes’ intelligence and black athletes’ athleticism. In music videos, black men appear threatening and sport dark skin tones. These music videos also sexualize black women and tend to emphasize those with light skin tones. News media overrepresent black criminality and exaggerate the notion that blacks belong to the undeserving poor class. Video games tend to portray black characters as either violent outlaws or athletic.

While mass media misrepresent the black population, it tends to both misrepresent and underrepresent the Latino population. When represented in entertainment media, Latinos assume hypersexualized roles and low-occupation jobs. Both news and entertainment media overrepresent Latino criminality. News outlets also overly associate Latino immigration with crime and relate Latino immigration to economic threat. Video games rarely portray Latino characters.

Creators may create stereotypic content or fail to fairly represent racial and ethnic groups for a few reasons. First, the ethnic blame discourse in the United States may influence creators’ conscious and unconscious decision-making processes. This discourse contends that the ethnic and racial minorities are responsible for their own problems. Second, since stereotypes appeal to and are easily processed by large general audiences, the misrepresentation of racial and ethnic groups facilitates revenue generation. This article largely discusses media representations of blacks and Latinos and explains the implications of such portrayals.

• content analysis
• African American portrayals
• Latino portrayals
• ethnic blame discourse
• structural limitations and economic interests
• social identity theory
• Clark’s Stage Model of Representations

Theoretical Importance of Media Stereotypes

Media constructions of culture, race, and ethnicity remain important to study because of their potential impact on both sociological and psychological phenomena. Specifically, researchers have utilized two major theoretical constructs to understand the potential impact of stereotyping: (a) priming and cognitive accessibility (Dixon, 2006 ; Scheufele & Tewksbury, 2007 ; Shrum, 2009 ), and (b) social identity and social categorization theory (Mastro, 2004 ; Mastro, Behm-Morawitz, & Kopacz, 2008 ; Tajfel & Turner, 2004 ).

Priming and Cognitive Accessibility

Priming and cognitive accessibility suggests that media consumption encourages the creation of mental shortcuts used to make relevant judgments about various social issues. For example, if a news viewer encounters someone cognitively related to a given stereotype, he or she might make a judgment about that person based on repeated exposure to the mediated stereotype. As an illustration, repeated exposure to the Muslim terrorist stereotype may lead news viewers to conclude that all Muslims are terrorists. This individual may also support punitive policies related to this stereotype, such as a Muslim ban on entry to the United States. Therefore, this cognitive linkage influences race and crime judgments (e.g., increased support for criminalizing Muslims and deporting them).

Social Identity Theory and Media Judgments

Other scholars have noted that our own identities are often tied to how people perceive their groups’ relationships to other groups. Social categorization theory argues that the higher the salience of the category to the individual, the greater the in-group favoritism one will demonstrate. Media scholars demonstrated that exposure to a mediated out-group member can increase in-group favoritism (Mastro, 2004 ). For example, researchers found that negative stories about Latino immigrants can contribute to negative out-group emotions that lead to support for harsher immigration laws (Atwell Seate & Mastro, 2016 , 2017 ).

Both the priming/cognitive accessibility approach and the social identity approach demonstrate that cultural stereotypes have significant implications for our psychology, social interactions, and policymaking. It remains extremely important for us to understand the nature and frequency of mediated racial and ethnic stereotypes to further our understanding of how these stereotypes impact viewers. This article seeks to facilitate our understanding.

Stage Model of Representation

In order to provide the reader with an introduction to this topic, this article relies on the published content-analytic literature regarding race and media. Clark’s Stage Model of Representation articulates a key organizing principle for understanding how media may construct various depictions of social groups (Clark, 1973 ; Harris, 2013 ). This model purports that race/ethnic groups move through four stages of representation in the media. In the first stage, invisibility or non-recognition , a particular race or ethnic group rarely appears on the screen at all. In the second stage, ridicule , a racial group will appear more frequently, yet will be depicted in consistently stereotypical ways. In the third stage, regulation , an ethnic group might find themselves depicted primarily in roles upholding the social order, such as judges or police officers. Finally, a particular social group reaches the respect stage in which members of the group occupy diverse and nuanced roles. Given Clark’s model, this article contends that Native Americans and Asian Americans tend to fall into the non-recognition stage (Harris, 2013 ). It follows that few empirical studies have investigated these groups because empirical content analyses have difficulty scientifically assessing phenomena that lack presence (Krippendorff, 2004 ).

Bearing in mind Clark’s stages, Latinos appear to vacillate between non-recognition and ridicule. Meanwhile, blacks move between the ridicule and regulation stages, while whites remain permanently fixed in the respect stage. In other words, in this article, our lack of deep consideration of Native Americans and Asian Americans is rooted in a lack of representation which generates few empirical studies and thus leaves us little to review. The article offers a quick overview of their portrayal and then moves on to describe the social groups that receive more media and empirical attention.

Native American and Asian American Depictions

Although severely underrepresented, there are a few consistent stereotypical portrayals that regularly emerge for these groups. In some ways, both Native American and Asian Americans are often relegated to “historical” and/or fetishized portrayals (Lipsitz, 1998 ). Native American “savage” imagery was commonly depicted in Westerns and has been updated with images of alcoholism, along with depictions of shady Native American casino owners (Strong, 2004 ). Many news images of Native Americans tend to focus on Native festivals, relegating this group to a presentation as “mysterious” spiritual people (Heider, 2000 ). Meanwhile, various school and professional team mascots embody the savage Native American Warrior trope (Strong, 2004 ).

Asian Americans overall have often been associated with being the model minority (Harris, 2009 ; Josey, Hurley, Hefner, & Dixon, 2009 ). They typically represent “successful” non-whites. Specifically, media depictions associate Asian American men with technology and Asian American women with sexual submissiveness (Harris & Barlett, 2009 ; Schug, Alt, Lu, Gosin, & Fay, 2017 ).

Overall, scholars know very little about how either of these groups are regularly portrayed based on empirical research, although novelists and critical scholars have offered useful critiques (Wilson, Gutiérrez, & Chao, 2003 ). Hopefully, future quantitative content analyses will further delineate the nature of Native American and Asian American portrayals. Consider the discussion about entertainment, news, and digital imagery of blacks, Latinos, and whites presented in the next section.

Entertainment Constructions of Race, Culture, and Ethnicity

Entertainment media receives a great deal of consideration, given that Americans spend much of their time using media for entertainment purposes (Harris, 2013 ; Sparks, 2016 ). This section begins with an analysis of black portrayals, then moves on to Latino portrayals to understand the prevalence of stereotyping . When appropriate, black and Latino representations are compared to white ones. Two measures describe a group’s representation: (a) the numerical presence of a particular racial/ethnic group, and (b) the distribution of roles or stereotypes regarding each group. When researchers have often engaged in examinations of race they typically begin by comparing African American portrayals to white portrayals (Entman & Rojecki, 2000 ). As a result, there is a substantial amount of research on black portrayals.

Black Entertainment Television Imagery

Overall, a number of studies have found that blacks receive representation in prime-time television at parity to their actual proportion in the US population with their proportion ranging from 10% to 17% of prime-time characters (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000 ; Signorielli, 2009 ; Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015 ). African Americans currently compose approximately 13% of the US population (US Census Bureau, 2018 ). When considering the type of characters (e.g., major or minor) portrayed by this group, the majority of black (61%) cast members land roles as major characters (Monk-Turner, Heiserman, Johnson, Cotton, & Jackson, 2010 ). Black women also fare well in these representations, accounting for 73% of black appearances on prime-time television (Monk-Turner et al., 2010 ).

However, recent content analyses reveal an instability in black prime-time television representation over the last few decades. Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) found that the prevalence of black characters dropped in 1993 and remain diminished compared to previous decades. Similarly, Signorielli ( 2009 ) found a significant linear decrease in the proportion of black representation from 2001 (17%) to 2008 (12%). Signorielli ( 2009 ) attributes this decrease in black representation to the decrease in situation comedy programming. Indeed, African Americans appear most frequently in situation comedies. Sixty percent of black women featured in prime-time television are cast in situation comedies, and 25% of black male prime-time portrayals occur in situation comedies (Signorielli, 2009 ). However, between 2001 and 2008 , situational comedies decreased, while action and crime programs increased.

The previously discussed analyses describe the frequency of black representation. However, frequent depictions do not equate to favorable representation. Considering role quality (i.e., respectability) and references made to stereotypes, entertainment media offers a mixed bag. On the one hand, some recent analyses found that the majority of blacks are depicted as likable, and as “good characters,” as opposed to “bad character”-like villains (Tukachinsky, Mastro, & Yarchi, 2015 ). In addition, the majority of black characters are depicted as intelligent (Tukachinsky et al., 2015 ). On the other hand, the rate of blacks shown as immoral and despicable (9%) is higher than that of whites (2% and 3%, respectively) (Monk-Turner et al., 2010 ). In addition, black depictions exhibiting high social status and professionalism trended downward. Between 2003 and 2005 , higher status depictions reached their peak at 74.3% but sharply fell in subsequent years to 31.5%, with black women faring worse than black men (Tukachinsky et al., 2015 ). Classic studies of entertainment representations found that blacks tend to be the most negatively represented of any race or ethnic group, often being depicted as lazy and disheveled (Mastro & Greenberg, 2000 ). Overall, black characters tend to be portrayed in less respectful ways compared to whites in content intended for general audiences, although they sometime fare better when the targeted audience is African American (Messineo, 2008 ). For example, crime drama television frequently depicts white women as at risk for murder, but FBI statistics demonstrate that murder victims are more often likely to be black males (Parrott & Parrott, 2015 ).

Black Representations in Magazines and Advertising

African Americans remain well represented in magazines, though they are not as prominent in this medium as in television (Schug et al., 2017 ). Moreover, the trend in the representation of African Americans, particularly women, appears to be improving (Covert & Dixon, 2008 ). Images of black women represent 6% of advertisements in women’s magazines and 4% of advertisements in men’s magazines (Baker, 2005 ). However, both black-oriented and white-oriented magazines appear to advance portrayals of black women with Eurocentric rather than Afrocentric features, referencing whiteness as a beauty standard. Overall, compared to black-oriented magazines, white-oriented magazines feature more black women with fair skin and thin figures. Black-oriented magazines feature more black women with straight hair. Moreover, straight hair textures outnumber other natural styles (i.e., wavy, curly, or braided) in both white- and black-oriented magazines.

Conversely, black men typically assume unemployed, athletic, or entertainment roles in these ads (Bailey, 2006 ). Moreover, mainstream magazines are most likely to depict black men as unemployed. Meanwhile, black-oriented magazines tend to portray African Americans in more managerial roles.

Black Representations in Sports Entertainment

Besides prime-time television, black stereotypes in sports coverage and music receive substantial attention in the literature. The unintelligent or “dumb” yet naturally talented black athlete remains a programming staple (Angelini, Billings, MacArthur, Bissell, & Smith, 2014 ; Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005 ). For example, Angelini et al. ( 2014 ) found that black athletes receive less success-based comments related to intelligence than white athletes (Angelini et al., 2014 ). The findings echo previous research arguing that black athletes receive fewer positive comments regarding their intelligence than do white athletes (Rada & Wulfemeyer, 2005 ). Fairly similar depictions exist in broadcast commentary (Primm, DuBois, & Regoli, 2007 ). For example, Mercurio and Filak ( 2010 ) content-analyzed descriptions of NFL quarterback prospects featured on the Sports Illustrated website from 1998 to 2007 . The descriptions portray black athletes as possessing physical abilities while lacking intelligence . Conversely, Sports Illustrated described white prospects as intelligent but lacking in athleticism.

Black Representations in Music Videos

Music videos tend to sexualize black women, reinforcing the black jezebe l stereotype (i.e., a sassy African American woman who is sexually promiscuous) (Givens & Monahan, 2005 ). Also, black men appear aggressive and violent in music videos (e.g., like a criminal, thug, or brute ) (Ford, 1997 ). According to rap research, blacks appear in provocative clothes at a higher rate than whites, and black women are the most provocatively dressed in music videos (Turner, 2011 ). Even black female artists are twice as likely to wear provocative clothing than are white female artists (Frisby & Aubrey, 2012 ). Furthermore, Zhang, Dixon, and Conrad ( 2010 ) and Conrad, Zhang, and Dixon ( 2009 ) found that black women appeared in rap videos as sexualized, thin, and light-skinned while black men appeared dark-skinned and threatening .

Latino Entertainment Television Representation

Unlike African Americans, Latinos remain significantly underrepresented in English-language television outlets. For instance, Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) found that of all characters, the number of Latino characters was less than 1% in the 1980s and increased to over 3% in the 2000s. However, these numbers fall significantly below the proportion of people who are Latino within the United States (about 18%) (U.S. Census Bureau, 2018 ). Similarly, Signorelli ( 2009 ) also found that the percentage of Latinos in the United States Latino population and the percentage of Latino characters in prime-time programming differed by approximately 10%.

Latinos continue to be underrepresented in a variety of genres and outlets. For instance, Latinos remain consistently underrepresented in gay male blogs. For example, Grimm and Schwarz ( 2017 ) found that white gay models (80.2%) were most prevalent, followed by black gay models (4.5%). However, Latino models were the least prevalent (1.5%). In addition, Hetsroni ( 2009 ) found that the Latino population makes up 14% of patients in real hospitals, yet they only comprise 4% of the patients in hospital dramas. Conversely, whites make up 72% of real patients but comprise 80% of hospital drama patients.

Latino Underrepresentation in Advertising

Latino underrepresentation extends to the advertising realm. For example, Seelig ( 2007 ) determined that there was a significant difference between the Latino proportion of the US population and the Latino proportion of models found in mainstream magazines (1%). Another study that investigated Superbowl commercials conducted by Brooks, Bichard, and Craig ( 2016 ) found that only 1.22% of the characters were Latino.

Prominent Stereotypes of Latinos in Entertainment Media

Although underrepresented, Latinos are also stereotypically represented in entertainment media. For example, Tukachinsky et al. ( 2015 ) discovered that over 24% of Latino characters were hypersexualized in prime-time television. Furthermore, Latinos tended to occupy low-professional-status roles. This trend also occurred more often with Latina females than Latino males.

Spanish-language television also reinforced stereotypes. For instance, Mastro and Ortiz ( 2008 ) studied the portrayals of characters in prime-time Spanish-language television broadcasts by Azteca America, Telefutura, Telemundo, and Univision. They found rich Latina women reinforced the harlot stereotype . They were sexualized , were provocatively dressed, and had slim body types (Mastro & Behm-Morawitz, 2005 ). Similar to the findings for African Americans and rap music, colorism was also part of these depictions, with idealized Latinos having more European features. Men with a dark complexion were depicted as aggressive (e.g., the criminal stereotype) , while men with a fair complexion were portrayed as intelligent and articulate.

Entertainment Imagery Summary

Blacks appear to be well represented in entertainment imagery, often in favorable major roles as professionals. However, their positive portrayals appear to be on the decline as situation comedies become displaced by other genres where blacks are less prominent. Although well represented, black depictions continue to embody many stereotypes. African American males are portrayed as unintelligent or “dumb” athletes whose only assets are their inbred athletic abilities. Black men tend to appear as aggressive criminals or brutes in music videos while black women appear as sexualized jezebels with European features.

Latinos, on the other hand, face substantial obstacles related to their lack of representation. They tend to be grossly underrepresented across a number of entertainment outlets including television, magazines, and advertising. When they are seen, they tend to occupy two primary stereotypes, the harlot stereotype and the criminal stereotype. This appears to be a constant across both Spanish-language and English-language outlets.

News Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

News remains an important area to consider when it comes to media stereotypes for two reasons. First, news can be considered a powerful purveyor of social truth (Romer, Jamieson, & Aday, 2003 ; Tewksbury & Rittenberg, 2012 ). While entertainment can be considered by lay audiences to have a weak relationship with social reality given its fictional nature, news is rooted in actual events, and therefore seems more real. Stereotypes found in news content may seem believable, increasing these stereotype’s influence on audiences’ perceptions of reality. Second, citizens rely on news to form opinions about policies and politicians (Iyengar, 1987 ; Price & Tewksbury, 1997 ). News reports contain the reservoir of information that citizens utilize to make decisions within our representative democracy (Iyengar, 1991 ). If the news falsely points to racial groups as the cause of social problems, these citizens may advocate for ineffective and misguided policies. The next section explores how the news purveys racial and ethnic stereotypes.

Blacks in the News

A number of early studies suggested that the news often stereotyped blacks as violent criminals , consistently overrepresenting them in these roles by large margins (Dixon, Azocar, & Casas, 2003 ; Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ; Entman, 1992 , 1994 ). At the same time, many of these studies showed blacks underrepresented in more sympathetic roles, such as victims of crime (Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ).

However, recent research suggests that the criminal stereotype has not remained consistently part of the news landscape. For example, Dixon ( 2017b ) found that current depictions of blacks in local news reflect actual percentages of blacks in these various roles, including as criminals. Similarly, Dixon and Williams ( 2015 ) found African Americans underrepresented as both criminals and victims. On the other hand, another recent content analysis that investigated black family depictions in the news, conducted by Dixon ( 2017a ), found that black family members were overrepresented as criminal suspects compared to crime reports.

Furthermore, Mastro, Blecha, and Atwell Seate ( 2011 ) content-analyzed articles pertaining to athletes’ criminal activity published in newspapers and found that mentions of black athletes’ criminal activity outnumber white and Latino athletes. Furthermore, mentions of criminal activity among black athletes outnumber their real-world proportion in professional sports (Mastro et al., 2011 ). In addition, crime articles discussing black athletes provide more explicit details of the crime and mention more negative consequences (e.g., jail or fines) than articles regarding white athletes. News narratives also present less sympathetic coverage for black athletes, more support for the victim, a less respectful tone, and fewer thematic frames (i.e., situating the crime in a larger context) for black athletes compared to white athletes.

Besides criminality , news tends to also depict blacks as part of the underserving poor . For example, van Doorn ( 2015 ) content-analyzed images depicting poverty in news magazines (i.e., Time, Newsweek , and USNWR ). News magazines picture blacks as the majority of persons in poverty (52%), while blacks only account for around 25% of Americans in poverty (van Doorn, 2015 ). Blacks experience similar misrepresentations as welfare recipients . Based on magazine depictions, black people comprise 55% of all welfare recipients. However, in reality, blacks only account for 38% of welfare recipients. Furthermore, the black elderly are depicted as only accounting for 1% of poor elderly persons pictured, while the true percentage is 6%. In addition, during times of economic stability, African American association with poverty increases, but during times of economic upheaval (e.g., the Great Recession) white association with poverty goes up.

Latinos in the News

If there is an overarching issue to consider regarding Latino depictions in news, it would again be their perpetual underrepresentation. Overall, Latinos remain severely underrepresented on television news, especially in sympathetic roles. For example, early studies by Dixon and Linz ( 2000a , 2000b ) found Latinos were underrepresented as perpetrators, victims, and police officers in the news. In one of these studies, Latinos were 54% of the homicide victims in Los Angeles County but were depicted as homicide victims only about 19% of the time on television news. A recent update to this study found that Latinos were accurately represented as perpetrators, but continued to be underrepresented as victims and police officers (Dixon, 2017b ). This invisibility extends to newspapers and magazines (Sorenson, Manz, & Berk, 1998 ). For example, Latinos are underrepresented in Time and Newsweek as part of the obese population, 5% in these magazines versus 18% according to medical statistics (Gollust, Eboh, & Barry, 2012 ).

When we considered the pervasive stereotype that is present with Latinos, it revolved around the issue of immigration and Latino immigrants as criminal or cultural threats . For instance, a meta-analysis (i.e., a type of method that unearths patterns of academic research) by Rendon and Johnson ( 2015 ) on studies that analyzed media coverage of Mexican affairs in the United States revealed a Threat Phase, from 2010 to 2014 . During this phase, reporters investigated the notion that immigrant Mexicans imperil the United States. Furthermore, Chavez, Whiteford, and Hoewe ( 2010 ) found that more than half of analyzed stories concerning Mexican immigration from the New York Times , Washington Post , Wall Street Journal , and USA Today focused on illegal immigration. Furthermore, within these immigration stories, crime was addressed most often (50.6%), followed by economics (e.g., job competition) (30.6%), and legislative deliberations (28.1%). Similarly, Branton and Dunaway ( 2008 ) found that English-language newspapers were almost twice as likely as Spanish-language news to depict immigration in a negative light.

Kim, Carvahlo, Davis, and Mullins ( 2011 ) found that illegal immigration stories produced by the media focus on the negative consequences of crime and job competition. A more recent study conducted by Dixon and Williams ( 2015 ) appears to confirm the media link between immigration, Latinos, and criminal behavior. They found that criminal suspects identified as immigrants in news stories were greatly overrepresented as Latino. In addition, almost all of the illegal or undocumented immigrants appearing in the news were depicted as Latino, which is a great overrepresentation based on official government reports. Dunaway, Goidel, Krizinger, and Wilkinson ( 2011 ) confirm that news coverage encourages an immigration threat narrative, meaning that the majority of immigration stories exhibit a negative tone.

Whites as the “Good Guys”

While black representations as criminal suspects does appear to vary in intensity and Latinos tend to be depicted as either invisible or threatening immigrants, white portrayals remain consistently positive in this domain. Classic studies of both news and reality-based programming show whites overrepresented as officers and victims (Dixon et al., 2003 ; Dixon & Linz, 2000a , 2000b ; Oliver, 1994 ). This includes network and local news programs. More recent studies show that this continues to occur regularly and remains a news programming staple (Dixon, 2017b ). When contrasted with black and Latino representations, this reinforces the notion that whites resolve social problems and people of color create social problems.

Summary of News Constructions of Culture, Race, and Media

Based on this literature review, three significant findings that summarize news’ construction of race and ethnicity emerge. First, African Americans tend to be overly associated with criminality and poverty . However, the intensity of these portrayals depends on context (e.g., a focus on families, athletes, or general economic conditions). Second, Latinos tend to be largely underrepresented, but when they are seen, they tend to be overly associated with problematic illegal immigration , especially immigrants who may pose a threat or be prone to criminality. Third, news depicts whites most favorably, overrepresenting them as victims (e.g., innocent portrayals) and officers (e.g., heroic portrayals).

Digital Media Constructions of Culture, Race, and Media

The vast majority of research detailing the portrayal of people of color in the media relied on the analysis of traditional media sources including television and magazines. However, increasingly, people turn to digital media for both entertainment and news. This section provides an overview of this growing industry that will eventually dominate our media landscape. The discussion first entails video games and Internet news websites. Speculation about the role social media will play with regard to these depictions follows.

Black Depictions in Video Games

An abundance of research focuses on racial representation within video games (Burgess, Dill, Stermer, Burgess, & Brown, 2011 ; Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory, 2009 ). Similar to traditional entertainment media, African Americans comprise approximately 11% of popular video game characters for major game systems (e.g., Xbox 360, PlayStation 2, Nintendo GameCube) (Williams et al., 2009 ). Conversely, blacks are underrepresented in massive multiplayer online games (MMO) in which players customize their own avatars’ features, including gender and skin tone (Waddell, Ivory, Conde, Long, & McDonnell, 2014 ). In this environment only 3.84% of all unique characters within MMOs are black.

When considering gender differences in portrayals, more problematic depictions exist. For instance, black women are underrepresented in gaming magazines and almost completely absent from video game covers (Burgess et al., 2011 ). Meanwhile, black men are typically portrayed as either athletic and/or violent . Black aggression does not occur in socially sanctioned settings (e.g., war). Instead, many black males appear as outlaws (e.g., street fighters).

Black Depictions in Digital News Sources

There is limited research on news depictions and race within digital media contexts, but this will most likely become the focus of future scholarship over the next few years. This focus will be fueled by the rise of political figures, such as Donald Trump, who utilize media stereotypes to advance their political agendas (Dixon, 2017a ). Much of what we do know stems from research on websites and digital news sources. One earlier study of this phenomena found that African Americans were underrepresented as part of images and headlines used in these web news stories (Josey et al., 2009 ). They were also more strongly associated with poverty than what the actual poverty rates suggest. A more recent analysis of a wide variety of online news sources similarly found that black families were overrepresented as poor and welfare dependent (Dixon, 2017a ). In addition, black fathers were misrepresented as excessively absent from the lives of their children. Finally, African American family members were overrepresented as criminal suspects. These findings complement the traditional news conclusions reached by previous scholars.

Latino Depictions in Video Games

Waddell, Ivory, Conde, Long, and McDonnell ( 2014 ) found that the trend of Latino underrepresentation in media extends to the video game industry. Latino avatars were not observed in the highest grossing MMO games in 2010 (0%). Williams, Martins, Consalvo, and Ivory ( 2009 ) also assessed the racial characteristics of video game characters across 150 games and found that white characters were observed more often (59.32%) than Latino (1.63%) characters. Furthermore, Latino characters were never observed assuming primary roles.

Latino Depictions in Digital News Sources

In terms of digital news sources, the research presents extremely similar findings between Latinos and African Americans. Latinos continue to be largely underrepresented across a variety of roles in web news (Josey et al., 2009 ). They are underrepresented in both headlines and images. They are also likely to be overassociated with poverty (Dixon, 2017a ; Josey et al., 2009 ).

Summary of Digital Constructions of Culture, Race, and Ethnicity

In summary, underrepresentation remains the norm for both African Americans and Latinos in digital media. At the same time, digital news overly associates these groups with poverty . Clearly, as traditional media and its audience migrate to new digital platforms, this area will continue to be researchers’ focus well into the future. One digital platform not mentioned is social media. Many users receive, consume, and share entertainment and news content via social media. This includes music and music fandom content (Epps & Dixon, 2017 ). Social media’s specific and unique characteristics may contribute to media stereotype cultivation and prevent positive intergroup contact (Dixon, 2017c ). Much work needs to be undertaken in the future to explore these possibilities.

Conclusions

This article began with a discussion of the possible impact of mediated stereotypes to contextualize our discussion. Social categorization theory, social identity theory, and priming/cognitive accessibility suggest that the prominent black stereotypes of black laziness , criminality , innate athleticism , jezebel, and poverty would be embraced by heavy media consumers. Similarly, even though Latinos remain underrepresented, the reinforcement of Latino stereotypes like poverty , harlot , criminal , and illegal immigrant would result from regular media consumption. While underrepresented, Latinos receive enough mainstream media attention for scholars to conduct quantitative social research. Asian and Native Americans’ underrepresentation in mainstream media, however, indicates these groups’ general absence.

When educators teach these topics in class, they are often asked: Why? Why does media perpetuate these stereotypes? Consider these two prominent answers. First, media creators suffer from mostly unconscious, and sometimes conscious bias, that scholars believe facilitates an ethnic blame discourse (Dixon & Linz, 2000a ; Romer, Jamieson, & de Coteau, 1998 ; Van Dijk, 1993 ).

This discourse tends to occur within groups (e.g., whites conversing with one another) and leads them to blame social problems on ethnic others (e.g., Latinos and blacks). Given that media producers remain overwhelmingly white, this explanation appears plausible. As white people engage in these discussions, their way of thinking manifests in their content. The second explanation revolves around the structural limitations and economic interests of news agencies (Dixon & Linz, 2000a ). This explanation suggests that media agencies air material most appealing to audiences in the simplest form possible to increase ratings. This process heavily relies on stereotypes because stereotypes make processing and attending to media messages easier for audience members. In turn, profits increase. This points to problems related to the relationship between media content creation and the media industry’s profit motives. Skeptics may question these explanations’ plausibility, but overall, mediated stereotypes remain a persistent part of the media environment. Digital media exacerbate the negative effects of mediated stereotype consumption.

Further Reading

• Dixon, T. L. (2011). Teaching you to love fear: Television news and racial stereotypes in a punishing democracy. In S. J. Hartnett (Ed.), Challenging the prison industrial complex: Activism, arts & educational alternatives (pp. 106–123). Chicago: University of Illinois Press.
• Dixon, T. L. (2016). Rap music and rap audiences revisited: How race matters in the perception of rap music . In P. Hall (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Music Censorship (pp. 1–10). New York: Oxford University Press.
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Cross-Cultural Communication on Social Media: Review From the Perspective of Cultural Psychology and Neuroscience

1 School of International Economics and Management, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, China

Liu Xiaokun

2 School of Economics, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, China

3 Institute of the Americas, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Introduction

In recent years, with the popularity of many social media platforms worldwide, the role of “virtual social network platforms” in the field of cross-cultural communication has become increasingly important. Scholars in psychology and neuroscience, and cross-disciplines, are attracted to research on the motivation, mechanisms, and effects of communication on social media across cultures.

Methods and Analysis

This paper collects the co-citation of keywords in “cultural psychology,” “cross-culture communication,” “neuroscience,” and “social media” from the database of web of science and analyzes the hotspots of the literature in word cloud.

Based on our inclusion criteria, 85 relevant studies were extracted from a database of 842 papers. There were 44 articles on cultural communication on social media, of which 26 were from the perspective of psychology and five from the perspective of neuroscience. There are 27 articles that focus on the integration of psychology and neuroscience, but only a few are related to cross-cultural communication on social media.

Scholars have mainly studied the reasons and implications of cultural communication on social media from the perspectives of cultural psychology and neuroscience separately. Keywords “culture” and “social media” generate more links in the hot map, and a large number of keywords of cultural psychology and neuroscience also gather in the hot map, which reflects the trend of integration in academic research. While cultural characteristics have changed with the development of new media and virtual communities, more research is needed to integrate the disciplines of culture, psychology, and neuroscience.

Cross-cultural communication refers to communication and interaction among different cultures, involving information dissemination and interpersonal communication as well as the flow, sharing, infiltration, and transfer of various cultural elements in the world ( Carey, 2009 ; Del Giudice et al., 2016 ). With more than half of the world’s population using social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat, communication across culture has become smoother and more frequently ( Boamah, 2018 ; Chin et al., 2021 ). Subsequently, cultural exchanges, collisions, conflicts, and integration among various nationalities, races, and countries on these platforms have become obvious, and related research articles by scholars in different disciplines have increased ( Papa et al., 2020 ). In traditional cross-cultural research, experts often divide different cultures based on their boundaries, such as countries, races, languages, and so on. However, with the development of digitalization, new cultural relationships have been formed both within and outside geopolitical boundaries, and new understanding and theories are needed to explain the motivation, process, and implications of cross-cultural communications in the digital era ( Chin et al., 2020 ). Research in this field is an emerging area, and scholars are studying from different perspectives ( Xu et al., 2016 ; Santoro et al., 2021 ). Cultural psychology and neuroscience are two main base theories, and they show a trend of integration, such as cultural neuroscience and cultural neuropsychology. In this case, it is important to highlight the important achievements of this field and identify potential research gaps to provide potential directions for further research. This review aims to provide an overview of cross-cultural communication research from the perspective of cultural psychology and neuroscience and identify the integrating trend and potential directions.

Method and Source

We used the Web of Science (WoS) database to select relevant articles published between January 2010 and December 2021. The following inclusion criteria were used:

• The document types should be articles rather than proceedings papers or book reviews. And the articles should be included in the Web of Science Core Collection.
• When searching for articles, the topic should include at least two keywords: “cultural psychology,” “neuroscience,” “social media.”
• Articles must be published after 2010 to ensure the content of the literature is forward.
• This study should investigate the integration of cultural psychology and neuroscience or explore cultural issues in social media from the perspective of cultural psychology or neuroscience. The content could be cultural conflict and integration on social platforms, explanations of cultural conflict and integration on social platforms, or integration of neuroscience and cultural psychology.

Based on the above inclusion criteria, 85 relevant studies were searched, analyzed, and evaluated. These documents were identified according to the procedure illustrated in Figure 1 . The following combinations of keywords were used: (cultural psychology AND social media), (neuroscience AND social media), (cultural psychology AND neuroscience), [social media AND (cross-cultural communication OR cultural conflict OR cultural integration)], and (neuroscience, cultural psychology, and cross-cultural). The number of studies was further reduced by limiting the document type and time range. Consequently, we obtained an initial pool of 544 articles. To ensure the relevance of the literature in the initial pool, we reviewed the titles and abstracts of these articles. Articles targeting pure neuroscience and information technology were excluded and 72 articles were retained. We selected 65 articles after reviewing the full text. For most papers excluded from the initial pool, cultural issues on social media were not the main topic but digital media or culture itself. The most typical example of irrelevant articles was that culture or cultural psychology was only briefly mentioned in the abstracts. Moreover, 20 additional relevant articles were identified via full-text review of citations and first author searches. Using the above steps, 85 articles were selected for the literature review.

Schematic representation of literature search and selection procedure.

Overview of Selected Articles

Here, frequency refers to the percentage of occurrences of an item in the total number of studies. The keywords “acculturation,” “cultural evolution” occurred frequently together with “social media,” “culture,” and “neuroscience.” This is as expected because psychologists and economists have long known that human decision-making is influenced by the behavior of others and that public information could improve acculturation and lead to cultural evolution. The popularity of social media clearly gives public information an opportunity to spread widely, which has caused an increase in research on the cross-cultural communication of social media. In the last decade, the link between cultural issues and social media research has grown. This is reflected in the knowledge graph ( Figure 2 ). Keywords “culture” and “social media” generate lots of links with “social media” and “mass media,” which is shown in blue node groups and white node groups. “Social media” and “cultural globalization,” “biculturalism,” “acculturation” also form node convergences. The integration of neuroscience and cultural psychology is also represented in Figure 2 as an orange node group. These integration trends can also be verified in the time dimension. As time passes, keyword frequencies have changed from a single component of “social media” or “culture” to a multi-component of “social media,” “culture,” “acculturation,” “neuroscience,” “cultural evolution.” The frequency of all keywords is presented through the overall word cloud.

Keywords knowledge graph.

We identified three different research topics from the 85 selected articles: cross-cultural communication on social platforms, explanation of cultural conflict and integration on social platforms, and the integration of neuroscience and cultural psychology. Existing literature has analyzed and studied the interaction between cross-cultural users, enterprises, and countries on social media. For instance, some scholars have found that social media play a significant role in negotiating and managing the identity of transient migrants relating to the home and host culture during the acculturation process ( Cleveland, 2016 ; Yau et al., 2019 ). Social media usage by expatriates also promotes cultural identity and creativity ( Hu et al., 2020 ). In addition to the discussion of existing phenomena, many articles have discussed the causes of social media cultural transmission. A new research field, cultural neuroscience, indicates the integration of neuroscience and cultural psychology. These issues are reviewed in the following sections.

There were 44 articles on cultural communication on social media, which accounted for 51.76% of the 85 selected papers. Among these, there were 26 studies on cultural communication on social media from the perspective of psychology, five articles from the perspective of neurology, four articles about enterprises using social media for cross-cultural operations, and nine articles about how governments use social media for cross-cultural communication. Although there are 27 articles that discuss the trend of integration of psychology and neuroscience, few use integrated methods to analyze the behavior of cross-cultural communication.

From Perspective of Cultural Psychology

Cultural psychology researchers have focused on why information is shared. Some scholars have divided the reasons into individual and network levels ( Wang et al., 2021 ). Studies have explored information sharing within a specific domain, such as health information and news dissemination ( Hodgson, 2018 ; Li et al., 2018 ; Wang and Chin, 2020 ). Cultural psychology provides a rich explanation for the factors that influence cultural communication. Cultural background affects the process of cultural communication, such as self-construal, which the host country may alter it ( Huang and Park, 2013 ; Thomas et al., 2019 ). This may influence communication behaviors, such as people’s intention to use social media applications, attitudes toward social capital, social media commerce, and sharing behavior itself ( Chu and Choi, 2010 ; Han and Kim, 2018 ; Li et al., 2018 ).

Factors other than culture cannot be ignored: public broadcast firms and fans promote communication, controversial comments may draw more attention, the sociality of the social media capsule expands the scope of information communication, and how news is portrayed has changed ( Meza and Park, 2014 ; Jin and Yoon, 2016 ; Hodgson, 2018 ). Demographic factors, such as sex and age, are not ineffective ( Xu et al., 2015 ). The experiential aspects have also been noted ( Wang et al., 2021 ). Scholars have also noted the importance of cultural intelligence ( Hu et al., 2017 ).

The topic that researchers are most interested in is the relationship between society and individuals. Many studies have focused on the influence of collectivist and individualist cultures, such as social media users’ activity differences, attentional tendencies, and self-concept ( Chu and Choi, 2010 ; Thomas et al., 2019 ). There are some other interesting topics, such as the relationship among multicultural experiences, cultural intelligence, and creativity, the evaluation of the validity of the two measures, the changing status of crucial elements in the social system, and the government effect in risk communication ( Hu et al., 2017 ; Ji and Bates, 2020 ). Extending to the practical level, mobile device application usability and social media commerce were evaluated ( Hoehle et al., 2015 ; Han and Kim, 2018 ).

At the methodological level, researchers have bridged the gap between reality and online behaviors, and the feasibility of social media dataset analysis has been proven ( Huang and Park, 2013 ; Thomas et al., 2019 ). Some new concepts have been examined and some models have been developed ( Hoehle et al., 2015 ; Li et al., 2018 ). The most common method is to quantify questionnaire information ( Chu and Choi, 2010 ; Hu et al., 2017 ; Han and Kim, 2018 ; Li et al., 2018 ; Wang et al., 2021 ). The online survey accounted for a large proportion of respondents. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to evaluate other measures ( Ji and Bates, 2020 ). Researchers are particularly interested in the metric approach ( Meza and Park, 2014 ). Some combine other methods, such as profile and social network analyses ( Xu et al., 2015 ). Scholars have used qualitative research to obtain detailed feedback from respondents ( Jin and Yoon, 2016 ; Hodgson, 2018 ). Content analysis was also used ( Yang and Xu, 2018 ).

From Perspective of Neuroscience

Neuroscientific explanations focus on understanding the mechanisms of cultural conflict and integration. Neuroscience researchers are concerned about the effects of the brain on cultural communication and the possible consequences of cultural communication on human behavior and rely on the study of the brain as a tool. Neuroscience can be used to study how people behave in reality. Given the similarity between offline and online behaviors, neuroscience can study online behaviors and link them to cultural communication ( Meshi et al., 2015 ). Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, both inside and outside the laboratory, have become the subject of neuroscience studies. One example of long-term studies outside the laboratory is the study of natural Facebook behavior that was recorded for weeks ( Montag et al., 2017 ).

Motivation research is a well-documented topic. The reason for using social media, motivation to share information, and neural factors related to sharing behavior have been discussed ( Fischer et al., 2018 ). Many scholars have connected motivation with social life based on the inseparable relationship between online behaviors and social life. Some academics hope to provide predictions of real life, such as forecasting marketing results, while some warned of the risks, in which tremendous attention has been paid to the situation of adolescents ( Motoki et al., 2020 ). They are susceptible to acceptance and rejection ( Crone and Konijn, 2018 ). Behavioral addiction and peer influence in the context of risky behaviors also lead to public concern ( Meshi et al., 2015 ; Sherman et al., 2018 ).

On a practical level, neuroscience studies have made predictions possible through the findings of activity in brain regions linked to mentalizing ( Motoki et al., 2020 ). Judgments of social behavior are also warranted, and peer endorsement is a consideration ( Sherman et al., 2018 ). Thus, the dangers of cultural communication can be alleviated.

At the methodological level, the feasibility of linking directly recorded variables to neuroscientific data has been proven, which provides a methodological basis for further studies linking neuroscience and cultural communication ( Montag et al., 2017 ). Neuroscience researchers have shown a preference for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods, which include functional and structural MRI scans ( Montag et al., 2017 ; Sherman et al., 2018 ). Although some scholars have pointed out the shortcomings of MRI research and attempted to use the electroencephalographic (EEG) method, most scholars still use MRI and combine it with other methods, such as neuroimaging ( Motoki et al., 2020 ). Despite the similarities in the methods used, there were differences in the scanned areas. Some researchers scan multiple regions, such as the ventral striatum ( VS ) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), while others focus on analyzing the content of a single region, such as the nucleus accumbens (NAcc; Baek et al., 2017 ). Related characteristics have been discussed, such as theta amplitudes that affect information sharing ( Fischer et al., 2018 ). Some inquire whether the different properties of brain regions can lead to different results ( Montag et al., 2017 ).

Integration of Neuroscience and Cultural Psychology

Of the 85 papers we selected, 27 discussed the integrated development of psychology and neuroscience, and the number of articles in this discipline increased. Cultural psychology has made remarkable progress in identifying various cultural traits that can influence human psychology and behavior on social media. Cultural neuroscience as a cross-subject of the rise in recent years, through the integration of psychology, anthropology, genetics, neuroscience, and other disciplines, explains the interaction of culture and the human brain, and how they jointly affect the neural mechanism of cognitive function. At an early stage, scholars presented the interactive dynamic evolutionary relationship between the brain and culture from multiple perspectives ( Moffittet et al., 2006 ). However, with technological improvements in brain imaging, it is possible to solve and explore interactions between the human brain, psychology, and cultural networks using an empirical approach.

Cultural characteristics have dramatically changed during the last half-century with the development of new media and new virtual ways of communication ( Kotik-Friedgut and Ardila, 2019 ). Existing research has shown that the neural resources of the brain are always adapted to the ever-increasing complexity and scale of social interaction to ensure that individuals are not marginalized by society ( Dunbar and Shultz, 2007 ). The interaction between biological evolution and cultural inheritance is a process full of unknowns and variables. Therefore, research on the relationships between culture, psychology, and neuroscience will progress together.

At the methodological level, communication on social media by users from different backgrounds provides a new research environment and massive data for cross-disciplinary research. Big data on social media and AI technology can analyze not only the reactions, emotions, and expressions of an individual but also the relevant information of an ethnic group or a cultural group. A number of neurological and psychological studies are beginning to leverage AI and social media data, and the two disciplines are intertwined with each other ( Pang, 2020 ; Wang et al., 2021 ). This quantitative analysis also helps enterprises and government departments to understand and affect cultural conflicts and integration ( Bond and Goldstein, 2015 ).

Different Schools of Thoughts

Social media provides platforms for communication and facilitates communication across cultures; however, the specific content exchanged is considered from the perspective of cultural proximity. Although some scholars think that social media can significantly promote mutual acceptance and understanding across cultures, others have realized that digital platforms actually strengthen the recognition and identity of their respective cultures ( Hopkins, 2009 ). To study the motivations, results, and implications of cross-cultural communication in virtual communities and conduct an empirical analysis, psychologists and neuroscientists provide their grounds and explanations.

Current Research Gaps

Although there are many articles discussing the trend of integration of psychology and neuroscience, few of them use integrated methods to analyze the behavior and implications of cross-cultural communication, mainly on cultural evolution and social effects. There are both practical and theoretical needs to be addressed to promote deep integration. For example, both private and public departments urgently need to learn scientific strategies to avoid cultural conflicts and promote integration. Further, a systematic and legal theory is also needed for scholars to conduct research in the sensitive field, which may be related to privacy protection and related issues.

Potential Future Development

For the research object, the classification of culture in emerging research is general, while with the development of big data methods on social media, cross-cultural communication among more detailed groups will be a potential direction. For the research framework, although cultural neuroscience is already a multidisciplinary topic, the ternary interaction among the brain, psychology, and culture in a virtual community will be very important. For the research method, brain imaging technology-related data and social media data may cause issues, such as privacy protection, personal security, informed consent, and individual autonomy. These legal and ethical issues require special attention in the development process of future research.

Cross-cultural communication research in the digital era not only needs to respond to urgent practical needs to provide scientific strategies to solve cultural differences and cultural conflicts, but also to promote the emergence of more vigorous theoretical frameworks and methods. Existing articles have mainly studied the reasons and implications of cultural communication on social media from the perspectives of cultural psychology and neuroscience separately. The CiteSpace-based hot topic map also shows the clustering trend of keywords related to cultural psychology and neuroscience, reflecting the intersection of the two fields. At the same time, there are many links between the two keyword nodes of “culture” and “social media,” which indicates that there is no lack of studies on cultural communication on social media from the perspective of cultural psychology. While cultural characteristics have changed with the development of new media and big data and related technologies have improved significantly, more research is needed to integrate the disciplines of culture, psychology, and neuroscience both in theory and methods.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

This paper was funded by the Beijing Social Science Fund, China (Project No. 21JCC060).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Introduction

1 Understanding Media and Culture

Learning Objectives

• Distinguish between mass communication and mass media.
• Define culture.

The media and culture are so much a part of our daily activities that sometimes it is difficult to step back and appreciate and apprehend their great impact on our lives.

Our class begins with a focus squarely on media. Think of your typical day. If you are like many people, you wake to a digital alarm clock or perhaps your cell phone. Soon after waking, you likely have a routine that involves some media. Some people immediately check the cell phone for text messages. Others will turn on the computer and check Facebook, email, or websites. Some people read the newspaper. Others listen to music on an iPod or CD. Some people will turn on the television and watch a weather channel, cable news, or Sports Center. Heading to work or class, you may chat on a cell phone or listen to music. Your classes likely employ various types of media from course management software to PowerPoint presentations to DVDs to YouTube. You may go home and relax with video games, television, movies, more Facebook, or music. You connect with friends on campus and beyond with text messages or Facebook. And your day may end as you fall asleep to digital music. Media for most of us are entwined with almost every aspect of life and work. Understanding media will not only help you appreciate the role of media in your life but also help you be a more informed citizen, a more savvy consumer, and a more successful worker. Media influence all those aspects of life as well.

This title of this chapter has links to a highly influential book in media studies, Understanding Media , by the social theorist and critic, Marshall McLuhan. [1]   In the midst of the 20th century and the rise of television as a mass medium, McLuhan foresaw how profoundly media would shape human lives. His work on media spanned four decades, from the 1950s to his death in 1980. In the 1960s and 1970s, during the height of television’s popularity and the emergence of computers, he became an international celebrity. He appeared on magazine covers and television talk shows. He had a cameo appearance in the Woody Allen film, Annie Hall .  Wired  magazine listed him on its masthead as “patron saint.” In universities, however, McLuhan was often dismissed, perhaps because of his celebrity, his outlandish style, and his broad and sweeping declarations. Yet as media continued to develop in ways anticipated by his writings, McLuhan again found an audience in media studies.

In  Understanding Media , McLuhan offered some provocative thoughts. He said that the media themselves were far more important than any content they carried. Indeed, he said, each medium, such as print or broadcast, physically affects the human central nervous system in a certain way. Media influence the way the brain works and how it processes information. They create new patterns of thought and behavior. Looking back over time, McLuhan found that people and societies were shaped by the dominant media of their time. For example, McLuhan argued, people and societies of the printing press era were shaped by that medium. And, he said, people and societies were being shaped in new ways by electronic media. Summing up, in one of his well-known phrases, he said, “The medium is the message.”

This chapter’s title uses McLuhan’s title—and adds culture. McLuhan well understood how media shape culture. However, one weakness in McLuhan’s work, especially his early work, is that he did not fully account for how culture shapes media. Culture can be a vague and empty term. Sometimes culture is defined in a very narrow sense as “the arts” or some sort of fashionable refinement. Another definition of culture is much more expansive, however. In this broader sense, culture is a particular way of life and how that life is acted out each day in works, practices, and activities. Thus, we can talk about Italian culture, Javanese culture, or the culture of the ancient Greeks. Another communication theorist, James Carey, elegantly captures this expansive view of culture. In “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” Carey wrote the following:

“We create, express, and convey our knowledge of and attitudes toward reality through the construction of a variety of symbol systems: art, science, journalism, religion, common sense, mythology. How do we do this? What are the differences between these forms? What are the historical and comparative variations in them? How do changes in communication technology influence what we can concretely create and apprehend? How do groups in society struggle over the definition of what is real?” [2]

That large sense of culture will be used in this book. The chapters to come will provide an in-depth look at the relationship of media and culture. We will look at many kinds of media and how those media shape and are shaped by culture. Media and culture shape each other around the globe, of course. The focus in this book primarily will be on the United States. This focus is not because U.S. media have such global reach but because understanding media and culture in one setting will allow you to think about media and culture in other settings. This intellectual journey should be interesting and fun. You live, study, work, and play with media in culture. By the book’s end, you should have a much deeper appreciation and understanding of them.

Intersection of American Media and Culture

We use all kinds of terms to talk about media. It will be useful to clarify them. It will be especially important to distinguish between mass communication and mass media, and to attempt a working definition of culture. Let’s start with mass communication first. Note that adjective: mass . Here is a horrible definition of  mass  from an online dictionary: Of, relating to, characteristic of, directed at, or attended by a large number of people. But the definition gets the point across. Communication can take place just between two people, or among a few people, or maybe even within one person who is talking to himself.  Mass  communication is communication of, relating to, characteristic of, directed at, or attended by a large number of people. That’s pretty ugly. Let’s try the following: Mass communication refers to communication transmitted to large segments of the population.

How does that happen? The transmission of mass communication happens using one or more of many different kinds of media (people sometimes forget that media is the plural of the singular,  medium ). A medium is simply an instrument or means of transmission. It can be two tin cans connected by a string. It can be television. It can be the Internet. A mass medium is a means of transmission designed to reach a wide audience. It is not tin cans on a string, unless you have a lot of cans, but it can be television or the Internet. Media are more than one medium. So mass media refers to those means of transmission that are designed to reach a wide audience. Mass media are commonly considered to include radio, film, newspapers, magazines, books, and video games, as well as Internet blogs, podcasts, and video sharing.

Lastly, let’s define culture a bit more. All this mass communication over mass media takes place among people in a particular time and place. Those people share ideas about reality and the world and themselves. They act out those ideas daily in their lives, work, and creative expressions, and they do so in ways that are different from other people in other places and other times. We can use culture to refer to the acting out of these shared ideas.

One of the great scholars of culture, anthropologist Clifford Geertz, offered this definition. He said, culture is “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life.” [3] That’s difficult language, but you can get the idea—culture is historically transmitted knowledge and attitudes toward life expressed in symbolic form. Or perhaps more simply, culture is the expressed and shared values, attitudes, beliefs, and practices of a social group, organization, or institution. It is OK if that still seems broad and fluid. Scholars too wrestle with the term because it must capture so much. Culture should not be easy to define.

Key Takeaways

• Mass communication refers to a message transmitted to a large audience; the means of transmission is known as mass media. Many different kinds of mass media exist and have existed for centuries. Mass communication and mass media both have an effect on culture, which is a shared and expressed collection of behaviors, practices, beliefs, and values that are particular to a group, organization, or institution. Culture and media exert influence on each other in subtle, complex ways.

[1] Marshall McLuhan,  Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man . New York: McGraw Hill, 1964.

[2] James Carey, “A Cultural Approach to Communication,” in  Communication as Culture: Essays on Media and Society . 2nd ed. New York: Taylor & Francis, 2006, p. 24.

[3] Geertz, Clifford, “Thick Description: Towards an Interpretive Theory of Culture,” in The Interpretation of Cultures . New York: Basic Books, 1973, p.89.

This chapter is adapted from Chapter 1 of Understanding Media and Culture: An Introduction to Mass Communication by The Saylor Foundation.

Media and Cultural Studies Copyright © by Cathie LeBlanc is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Special Issue: Propaganda

This essay was published as part of the Special Issue “Propaganda Analysis Revisited”, guest-edited by Dr. A. J. Bauer (Assistant Professor, Department of Journalism and Creative Media, University of Alabama) and Dr. Anthony Nadler (Associate Professor, Department of Communication and Media Studies, Ursinus College).

Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques

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This essay argues that the recent scholarship on misinformation and fake news suffers from a lack of historical contextualization. The fact that misinformation scholarship has, by and large, failed to engage with the history of propaganda and with how propaganda has been studied by media and communication researchers is an empirical detriment to it, and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem they are trying to solve is unclear.

School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds, UK

Introduction

Propaganda has a history and so does research on it. In other words, the mechanisms and methods through which media scholars have sought to understand propaganda—or misinformation, or disinformation, or fake news, or whatever you would like to call it—are themselves historically embedded and carry with them underlying notions of power and causality. To summarize the already quite truncated argument below, the larger conceptual frameworks for understanding information that is understood as “pernicious” in some way can be grouped into four large categories: studies of propaganda, the analysis of ideology and its relationship to culture, notions of conspiracy theory, and finally, concepts of misinformation and its impact. The fact that misinformation scholarship generally proceeds without acknowledging these theoretical frameworks is an empirical detriment to it and serves to make the solutions and remedies to misinformation harder to articulate because the actual problem to be solved is unclear. 

The following pages discuss each of these frameworks—propaganda, ideology, conspiracy, and misinformation—before returning to the stakes and implications of these arguments for future research on pernicious media content.

Propaganda and applied research

The most salient aspect of propaganda research is the fact that it is powerful in terms of resources while at the same time it is often intellectually derided, or at least regularly dismissed. Although there has been a left-wing tradition of propaganda research housed uneasily within the academy (Herman & Chomsky, 1988; Seldes & Seldes, 1943), this is not the primary way in which journalism or media messaging has been understood in many journalism schools or mainstream communications departments. This relates, of course, to the institutionalization of journalism and communication studies within the academic enterprise. Within this paradox, we see the greater paradox of communication research as both an applied and a disciplinary field. Propaganda is taken quite seriously by governments, the military, and the foreign service apparatus (Simpson, 1994); at the same time, it has occupied a tenuous conceptual place in most media studies and communications departments, with the dominant intellectual traditions embracing either a “limited effects” notion of what communication “does” or else more concerned with the more slippery concept of ideology (and on that, see more below). There is little doubt that the practical study of the power of messages and the field of communication research grew up together. Summarizing an initially revisionist line of research that has now become accepted within the historiography of the field, Nietzel notes that “from the very beginning, communication research was at least in part designed as an applied science, intended to deliver systematic knowledge that could be used for the business of government to the political authorities.” He adds, however, that

“this context also had its limits, for by the end of the decade, communication research had become established at American universities and lost much of its dependence on state funds. Furthermore, it had become increasingly clear that communication scientists could not necessarily deliver knowledge to the political authorities that could serve as a pattern for political acting (Simpson, 1994 pp. 88–89). From then on, politics and communication science parted ways. Many of the approaches and techniques which seemed innovative and even revolutionary in the 1940s and early 1950s, promising a magic key to managing propaganda activities and controlling public opinion, became routine fields of work, and institutions like the USIA carried out much of this kind of research themselves.” (Nietzel, 2016, p. 66)

It is important to note that this parting of ways did  not  mean that no one in the United States and the Soviet Union was studying propaganda. American government records document that, in inflation-adjusted terms, total funding for the United States Information Agency (USIA) rose from $1.2 billion in 1955 to $1.7 billion in 1999, shortly before its functions were absorbed into the United States Department of State. And this was dwarfed by Soviet spending, which spent more money jamming Western Radio transmissions alone than the United States did in its entire propaganda budget. Media effects research in the form of propaganda studies was a big and well-funded business. It was simply not treated as such within the traditional academy (Zollman, 2019). It is also important to note that this does not mean that no one in academia studies propaganda or the effect of government messages on willing or unwilling recipients, particularly in fields like health communication (also quite well-funded). These more academic studies, however, were tempered by the generally accepted fact that there existed no decontextualized, universal laws of communication that could render media messages easily useable by interested actors.

Ideology, economics, and false consciousness

If academics have been less interested than governments and health scientists in analyzing the role played by propaganda in the formation of public opinion, what has the academy worried about instead when it comes to the study of pernicious messages and their role in public life? Open dominant, deeply contested line of study has revolved around the concept of  ideology.  As defined by Raymond Williams in his wonderful  Keywords , ideology refers to an interlocking set of ideas, beliefs, concepts, or philosophical principles that are naturalized, taken for granted, or regarded as self-evident by various segments of society. Three controversial and interrelated principles then follow. First, ideology—particularly in its Marxist version—carries with it the implication that these ideas are somehow deceptive or disassociated from what actually exists. “Ideology is then abstract and false thought, in a sense directly related to the original conservative use but with the alternative—knowledge of real material conditions and relationships—differently stated” (Williams, 1976). Second, in all versions of Marxism, ideology is related to economic conditions in some fashion, with material reality, the economics of a situation, usually dominant and helping give birth to ideological precepts. In common Marxist terminology, this is usually described as the relationship between the base (economics and material conditions) and the superstructure (the realm of concepts, culture, and ideas). Third and finally, it is possible that different segments of society will have  different  ideologies, differences that are based in part on their position within the class structure of that society. 

Western Marxism in general (Anderson, 1976) and Antonio Gramsci in particular helped take these concepts and put them on the agenda of media and communications scholars by attaching more importance to “the superstructure” (and within it, media messages and cultural industries) than was the case in earlier Marxist thought. Journalism and “the media” thus play a major role in creating and maintaining ideology and thus perpetuating the deception that underlies ideological operations. In the study of the relationship between the media and ideology, “pernicious messages” obviously mean something different than they do in research on propaganda—a more structural, subtle, reinforcing, invisible, and materially dependent set of messages than is usually the case in propaganda analysis.  Perhaps most importantly, little research on media and communication understands ideology in terms of “discrete falsehoods and erroneous belief,” preferring to focus on processes of deep structural  misrecognition  that serves dominant economic interests (Corner, 2001, p. 526). This obviously marks a difference in emphasis as compared to most propaganda research. 

Much like in the study of propaganda, real-world developments have also had an impact on the academic analysis of media ideology. The collapse of communism in the 1980s and 1990s and the rise of neoliberal governance obviously has played a major role in these changes. Although only one amongst a great many debates about the status of ideology in a post-Marxist communications context, the exchange between Corner (2001, 2016) and Downey (2008; Downey et al., 2014) is useful for understanding how scholars have dealt with the relationship between large macro-economic and geopolitical changes in the world and fashions of research within the academy. Regardless of whether concepts of ideology are likely to return to fashion, any analysis of misinformation that is consonant with this tradition must keep in mind the relationship between class and culture, the outstanding and open question of “false consciousness,” and the key scholarly insight that ideological analysis is less concerned with false messages than it is with questions of structural misrecognition and the implications this might have for the maintenance of hegemony.

Postmodern conspiracy

Theorizing pernicious media content as a “conspiracy” theory is less common than either of the two perspectives discussed above. Certainly, conspiratorial media as an explanatory factor for political pathology has something of a post-Marxist (and indeed, postmodern) aura. Nevertheless, there was a period in the 1990s and early 2000s when some of the most interesting notions of conspiracy theories were analyzed in academic work, and it seems hard to deny that much of this literature would be relevant to the current emergence of the “QAnon” cult, the misinformation that is said to drive it, and other even more exotic notions of elites conspiring against the public. 

Frederic Jameson has penned remarks on conspiracy theory that represent the starting point for much current writing on the conspiratorial mindset, although an earlier and interrelated vein of scholarship can be found in the work of American writers such as Hofstadter (1964) and Rogin (1986). “Conspiracy is the poor person’s cognitive mapping in the postmodern age,” Jameson writes, “it is a degraded figure of the total logic of late capital, a desperate attempt to represent the latter’s system” (Jameson, 1991). If “postmodernism,” in Jameson’s terms, is marked by a skepticism toward metanarratives, then conspiracy theory is the only narrative system available to explain the various deformations of the capitalist system. As Horn and Rabinach put it:

“The broad interest taken by cultural studies in popular conspiracy theories mostly adopted Jameson’s view and regards them as the wrong answers to the right questions. Showing the symptoms of disorientation and loss of social transparency, conspiracy theorists are seen as the disenfranchised “poor in spirit,” who, for lack of a real understanding of the world they live in, come up with paranoid systems of world explanation.” (Horn & Rabinach, 2008)

Other thinkers, many of them operating from a perch within media studies and communications departments, have tried to take conspiracy theories more seriously (Bratich, 2008; Fenster, 2008; Pratt, 2003; Melley, 2008). The key question for all of these thinkers lies within the debate discussed in the previous section, the degree to which “real material interests” lie behind systems of ideological mystification and whether audiences themselves bear any responsibility for their own predicament. In general, writers sympathetic to Jameson have tended to maintain a Marxist perspective in which conspiracy represents a pastiche of hegemonic overthrow, thus rendering it just another form of ideological false consciousness. Theorists less taken with Marxist categories see conspiracy as an entirely rational (though incorrect) response to conditions of late modernity or even as potentially liberatory. Writers emphasizing that pernicious media content tends to fuel a conspiratorial mindset often emphasize the mediated aspects of information rather than the economics that lie behind these mediations. Both ideological analysis and academic writings on conspiracy theory argue that there is a gap between “what seems to be going on” and “what is actually going on,” and that this gap is maintained and widened by pernicious media messages. Research on ideology tends to see the purpose of pernicious media content as having an ultimately material source that is rooted in “real interests,” while research on conspiracies plays down these class aspects and questions whether any real interests exist that go beyond the exercise of political power.

The needs of informationally ill communities

The current thinking in misinformation studies owes something to all these approaches. But it owes an even more profound debt to two perspectives on information and journalism that emerged in the early 2000s, both of which are indebted to an “ecosystemic” perspective on information flows. One perspective sees information organizations and their audiences as approximating a natural ecosystem, in which different media providers contribute equally to the health of an information environment, which then leads to healthy citizens. The second perspective analyzes the flows of messages as they travel across an information environment, with messages becoming reshaped and distorted as they travel across an information network. 

Both of these perspectives owe a debt to the notion of the “informational citizen” that was popular around the turn of the century and that is best represented by the 2009 Knight Foundation report  The Information Needs of Communities  (Knight Foundation, 2009). This report pioneered the idea that communities were informational communities whose political health depended in large part on the quality of information these communities ingested. Additional reports by The Knight Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and this author (Anderson, 2010) looked at how messages circulated across these communities, and how their transformation impacted community health. 

It is a short step from these ecosystemic notions to a view of misinformation that sees it as a pollutant or even a virus (Anderson, 2020), one whose presence in a community turns it toward sickness or even political derangement. My argument here is that the current misinformation perspective owes less to its predecessors (with one key exception that I will discuss below) and more to concepts of information that were common at the turn of the century. The major difference between the concept of misinformation and earlier notions of informationally healthy citizens lies in the fact that the normative standard by which health is understood within information studies is crypto-normative. Where writings about journalism and ecosystemic health were openly liberal in nature and embraced notions of a rational, autonomous citizenry who just needed the right inputs in order to produce the right outputs, misinformation studies has a tendency to embrace liberal behavioralism without embracing a liberal political theory. What the political theory of misinformation studies is, in the end, deeply unclear.

I wrote earlier that misinformation studies owed more to notions of journalism from the turn of the century than it did to earlier traditions of theorizing. There is one exception to this, however. Misinformation studies, like propaganda analysis, is a radically de-structured notion of what information does. Buried within analysis of pernicious information there is

“A powerful cultural contradiction—the need to understand and explain social influence versus a rigid intolerance of the sociological and Marxist perspectives that could provide the theoretical basis for such an understanding. Brainwashing, after all, is ultimately a theory of ideology in the crude Marxian sense of “false consciousness.” Yet the concept of brainwashing was the brainchild of thinkers profoundly hostile to Marxism not only to its economic assumptions but also to its emphasis on structural, rather than individual, causality.” (Melley, 2008, p. 149)

For misinformation studies to grow in such a way that allows it to take its place among important academic theories of media and communication, several things must be done. The field needs to be more conscious of its own history, particularly its historical conceptual predecessors. It needs to more deeply interrogate its  informational-agentic  concept of what pernicious media content does, and perhaps find room in its arsenal for Marxist notions of hegemony or poststructuralist concepts of conspiracy. Finally, it needs to more openly advance its normative agenda, and indeed, take a normative position on what a good information environment would look like from the point of view of political theory. If this environment is a liberal one, so be it. But this position needs to be stated clearly.

Of course, misinformation studies need not worry about its academic bona fides at all. As the opening pages of this Commentary have shown, propaganda research was only briefly taken seriously as an important academic field. This did not stop it from being funded by the U.S. government to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars a year. While it is unlikely that media research will ever see that kind of investment again, at least by an American government, let’s not forget that geopolitical Great Power conflict has not disappeared in the four years that Donald Trump was the American president. Powerful state forces in Western society will have their own needs, and their own demands, for misinformation research. It is up to the scholarly community to decide how they will react to these temptations. 

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Cite this Essay

Anderson, C. W. (2021). Propaganda, misinformation, and histories of media techniques. Harvard Kennedy School (HKS) Misinformation Review . https://doi.org/10.37016/mr-2020-64

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Anderson, C. W. (2010). Journalistic networks and the diffusion of local news: The brief, happy news life of the Francisville Four. Political Communication , 27 (3), 289–309. https://doi.org/10.1080/10584609.2010.496710

Anderson, C. W. (2020, August 10). Fake news is not a virus: On platforms and their effects. Communication Theory , 31 (1), 42–61. https://doi.org/10.1093/ct/qtaa008

Anderson, P. (1976). Considerations on Western Marxism . Verso.

Bratich, J. Z. (2008). Conspiracy panics: Political rationality and popular culture. State University of New York Press.

Corner, J. (2001). ‘Ideology’: A note on conceptual salvage. Media, Culture & Society , 23 (4), 525–533. https://doi.org/10.1177/016344301023004006

Corner, J. (2016). ‘Ideology’ and media research. Media, Culture & Society , 38 (2), 265 – 273. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443715610923

Downey, J. (2008). Recognition and renewal of ideology critique. In D. Hesmondhaigh & J. Toynbee (Eds.), The media and social theory (pp. 59–74). Routledge.

Downey, J., Titley, G., & Toynbee, J. (2014). Ideology critique: The challenge for media studies. Media, Culture & Society , 36 (6), 878–887. https://doi.org/10.1177/0163443714536113

Fenster (2008). Conspiracy theories: Secrecy and power in American culture (Rev. ed.). University of Minnesota Press.

Herman, E., & Chomsky, N. (1988). Manufacturing consent: The political economy of the mass media. Pantheon Books. 

Hofstadter, R. (1964, November). The paranoid style in American politics. Harper’s Magazine.

Horn, E., & Rabinach, A. (2008). Introduction. In E. Horn (Ed.), Dark powers: Conspiracies and conspiracy theory in history and literature (pp. 1–8), New German Critique , 35 (1). https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033x-2007-015

Jameson, F. (1991). Postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism . Duke University Press.

The Knight Foundation. (2009). Informing communities: Sustaining democracy in the digital age. https://knightfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/Knight_Commission_Report_-_Informing_Communities.pdf

Melley, T. (2008). Brainwashed! Conspiracy theory and ideology in postwar United States. New German Critique , 35 (1), 145–164. https://doi.org/10.1215/0094033X-2007-023

Nietzel, B. (2016). Propaganda, psychological warfare and communication research in the USA and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. History of the Human Sciences , 29 (4 – 5), 59–76. https://doi.org/10.1177/0952695116667881

Pratt, R. (2003). Theorizing conspiracy. Theory and Society , 32 , 255–271. https://doi.org/10.1023/A:1023996501425

Rogin, M. P. (1986). The countersubversive tradition in American politics.  Berkeley Journal of Sociology,   31 , 1 –33. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41035372

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This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original author and source are properly credited.

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NPR defends its journalism after senior editor says it has lost the public's trust

David Folkenflik

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust. Saul Loeb/AFP via Getty Images hide caption

NPR is defending its journalism and integrity after a senior editor wrote an essay accusing it of losing the public's trust.

NPR's top news executive defended its journalism and its commitment to reflecting a diverse array of views on Tuesday after a senior NPR editor wrote a broad critique of how the network has covered some of the most important stories of the age.

"An open-minded spirit no longer exists within NPR, and now, predictably, we don't have an audience that reflects America," writes Uri Berliner.

A strategic emphasis on diversity and inclusion on the basis of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation, promoted by NPR's former CEO, John Lansing, has fed "the absence of viewpoint diversity," Berliner writes.

NPR's chief news executive, Edith Chapin, wrote in a memo to staff Tuesday afternoon that she and the news leadership team strongly reject Berliner's assessment.

"We're proud to stand behind the exceptional work that our desks and shows do to cover a wide range of challenging stories," she wrote. "We believe that inclusion — among our staff, with our sourcing, and in our overall coverage — is critical to telling the nuanced stories of this country and our world."

NPR names tech executive Katherine Maher to lead in turbulent era

She added, "None of our work is above scrutiny or critique. We must have vigorous discussions in the newsroom about how we serve the public as a whole."

A spokesperson for NPR said Chapin, who also serves as the network's chief content officer, would have no further comment.

Praised by NPR's critics

Berliner is a senior editor on NPR's Business Desk. (Disclosure: I, too, am part of the Business Desk, and Berliner has edited many of my past stories. He did not see any version of this article or participate in its preparation before it was posted publicly.)

Berliner's essay , titled "I've Been at NPR for 25 years. Here's How We Lost America's Trust," was published by The Free Press, a website that has welcomed journalists who have concluded that mainstream news outlets have become reflexively liberal.

Berliner writes that as a Subaru-driving, Sarah Lawrence College graduate who "was raised by a lesbian peace activist mother ," he fits the mold of a loyal NPR fan.

Yet Berliner says NPR's news coverage has fallen short on some of the most controversial stories of recent years, from the question of whether former President Donald Trump colluded with Russia in the 2016 election, to the origins of the virus that causes COVID-19, to the significance and provenance of emails leaked from a laptop owned by Hunter Biden weeks before the 2020 election. In addition, he blasted NPR's coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict.

On each of these stories, Berliner asserts, NPR has suffered from groupthink due to too little diversity of viewpoints in the newsroom.

The essay ricocheted Tuesday around conservative media , with some labeling Berliner a whistleblower . Others picked it up on social media, including Elon Musk, who has lambasted NPR for leaving his social media site, X. (Musk emailed another NPR reporter a link to Berliner's article with a gibe that the reporter was a "quisling" — a World War II reference to someone who collaborates with the enemy.)

When asked for further comment late Tuesday, Berliner declined, saying the essay spoke for itself.

The arguments he raises — and counters — have percolated across U.S. newsrooms in recent years. The #MeToo sexual harassment scandals of 2016 and 2017 forced newsrooms to listen to and heed more junior colleagues. The social justice movement prompted by the killing of George Floyd in 2020 inspired a reckoning in many places. Newsroom leaders often appeared to stand on shaky ground.

Leaders at many newsrooms, including top editors at The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times , lost their jobs. Legendary Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron wrote in his memoir that he feared his bonds with the staff were "frayed beyond repair," especially over the degree of self-expression his journalists expected to exert on social media, before he decided to step down in early 2021.

Since then, Baron and others — including leaders of some of these newsrooms — have suggested that the pendulum has swung too far.

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Legendary editor marty baron describes his 'collision of power' with trump and bezos.

New York Times publisher A.G. Sulzberger warned last year against journalists embracing a stance of what he calls "one-side-ism": "where journalists are demonstrating that they're on the side of the righteous."

"I really think that that can create blind spots and echo chambers," he said.

Internal arguments at The Times over the strength of its reporting on accusations that Hamas engaged in sexual assaults as part of a strategy for its Oct. 7 attack on Israel erupted publicly . The paper conducted an investigation to determine the source of a leak over a planned episode of the paper's podcast The Daily on the subject, which months later has not been released. The newsroom guild accused the paper of "targeted interrogation" of journalists of Middle Eastern descent.

Heated pushback in NPR's newsroom

Given Berliner's account of private conversations, several NPR journalists question whether they can now trust him with unguarded assessments about stories in real time. Others express frustration that he had not sought out comment in advance of publication. Berliner acknowledged to me that for this story, he did not seek NPR's approval to publish the piece, nor did he give the network advance notice.

Some of Berliner's NPR colleagues are responding heatedly. Fernando Alfonso, a senior supervising editor for digital news, wrote that he wholeheartedly rejected Berliner's critique of the coverage of the Israel-Hamas conflict, for which NPR's journalists, like their peers, periodically put themselves at risk.

Alfonso also took issue with Berliner's concern over the focus on diversity at NPR.

"As a person of color who has often worked in newsrooms with little to no people who look like me, the efforts NPR has made to diversify its workforce and its sources are unique and appropriate given the news industry's long-standing lack of diversity," Alfonso says. "These efforts should be celebrated and not denigrated as Uri has done."

After this story was first published, Berliner contested Alfonso's characterization, saying his criticism of NPR is about the lack of diversity of viewpoints, not its diversity itself.

"I never criticized NPR's priority of achieving a more diverse workforce in terms of race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. I have not 'denigrated' NPR's newsroom diversity goals," Berliner said. "That's wrong."

Questions of diversity

Under former CEO John Lansing, NPR made increasing diversity, both of its staff and its audience, its "North Star" mission. Berliner says in the essay that NPR failed to consider broader diversity of viewpoint, noting, "In D.C., where NPR is headquartered and many of us live, I found 87 registered Democrats working in editorial positions and zero Republicans."

Berliner cited audience estimates that suggested a concurrent falloff in listening by Republicans. (The number of people listening to NPR broadcasts and terrestrial radio broadly has declined since the start of the pandemic.)

Former NPR vice president for news and ombudsman Jeffrey Dvorkin tweeted , "I know Uri. He's not wrong."

Others questioned Berliner's logic. "This probably gets causality somewhat backward," tweeted Semafor Washington editor Jordan Weissmann . "I'd guess that a lot of NPR listeners who voted for [Mitt] Romney have changed how they identify politically."

Similarly, Nieman Lab founder Joshua Benton suggested the rise of Trump alienated many NPR-appreciating Republicans from the GOP.

In recent years, NPR has greatly enhanced the percentage of people of color in its workforce and its executive ranks. Four out of 10 staffers are people of color; nearly half of NPR's leadership team identifies as Black, Asian or Latino.

"The philosophy is: Do you want to serve all of America and make sure it sounds like all of America, or not?" Lansing, who stepped down last month, says in response to Berliner's piece. "I'd welcome the argument against that."

"On radio, we were really lagging in our representation of an audience that makes us look like what America looks like today," Lansing says. The U.S. looks and sounds a lot different than it did in 1971, when NPR's first show was broadcast, Lansing says.

A network spokesperson says new NPR CEO Katherine Maher supports Chapin and her response to Berliner's critique.

The spokesperson says that Maher "believes that it's a healthy thing for a public service newsroom to engage in rigorous consideration of the needs of our audiences, including where we serve our mission well and where we can serve it better."

Disclosure: This story was reported and written by NPR Media Correspondent David Folkenflik and edited by Deputy Business Editor Emily Kopp and Managing Editor Gerry Holmes. Under NPR's protocol for reporting on itself, no NPR corporate official or news executive reviewed this story before it was posted publicly.

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Expansion and renewal of Cuyahoga County’s cigarette tax is ‘on track’

An expansion and renewal of Cuyahoga County’s cigarette tax is still slated for the November ballot. The board of Cuyahoga Arts and Culture heard that the process is “on track” at its annual meeting Wednesday afternoon.

CAC Executive Director Jill Paulsen said getting the issue to the ballot starts with a recommendation of the amount and timing to county council. For the last renewal, in 2015, the proposal came in mid-spring.

“I do anticipate we’ll have a special meeting in the coming weeks or months to really move that forward,” she said. “All of these campaigns… have a public ramp-up period that usually happens in the months before the election. So, we’re still on track.”

Jeff Rusnak, CEO of political strategy firm R Strategy Group, has spoken about the levy campaign at several CAC meetings in the past year. He also said the process is “on track,” with a deadline of early August.

“But we’re not going to cut it that close,” he said.

Currently, Rusnak’s team is researching what sort of ask to bring to voters in the fall. The cigarette tax is set to expire in 2027. Last year, the board approved $10.75 million in grants to arts nonprofits, including Ideastream Public Media.

CAC is responsible for distributing public funding for the arts – more than $246 million since 2007. The agency was formed to distribute the proceeds from a 30-cents-per-pack cigarette tax. Revenue has steadily declined since then by more than 50%. So far in 2024, year-over-year revenue is off by nearly 24%.

Shuffling board membership

CAC's board membership also saw some big changes at Wednesday’s meeting.

Leonard DiCosimo, president of the Cleveland Federation of Musicians Local 4, was sworn in an open seat after being officially approved by county council last week. The board also elected him secretary. The former secretary, Karolyn Isenhart, was appointed to another term and is now replacing CAC Board Chair Nancy Mendez. She's stepping down to join the board of MetroHealth. Daniel Blakemore was elected vice president.

Former Playhouse Square CEO Gina Vernaci is expected to be considered by county council this summer for the remaining open seat.

The board on Wednesday also approved application guidelines for CAC's 2025 Project Support grant program. The grants range from about $1,000-20,000. The process will have no major changes this year and applications open on May 2. CAC has been conducting a grantee survey about how the process works.

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We are becoming part machine.

That is the startling observation of Emmy-winning filmmaker Kirsten Johnson , who has been thinking deeply about the ramifications of artificial intelligence for human culture. The director of  Cameraperson  and  Dick Johnson Is Dead  will deliver a keynote at the IDA’s Getting Real conference in Los Angeles this week, addressing what she sees as a fundamental truth about AI that sets it apart from human endeavors: AI “lacks a body,” and as such is disengaged from the fate of humanity.

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The filmmaker also discusses two documentaries she executive produced that are heading to the Hot Docs festival in Toronto later this month:  Helen and the Bear  and  A Photographic Memory . 

Doc Talk co-host John Ridley asks Johnson about the controversy over the AI-altered family photo that Kate Middleton released amid speculation over her health and whereabouts.

The director also shares new details on her upcoming narrative feature on Susan Sontag, an innovative project that will star Kristen Stewart as the famed cultural critic and author of  On Photography ,  Against Interpretation ,  Illness as Metaphor  and more. Johnson explains why she thinks Stewart is perfect for the role.

That’s on the new episode of Deadline’s Doc Talk podcast , co-hosted by Oscar winner Ridley and Matt Carey, Deadline’s documentary editor. Doc Talk is a production of Deadline and Ridley’s Nō Studios, presented with support from National Geographic Documentary Films.

Listen to the episode above or on major podcast platforms including  Spotify ,  iHeart  and  Apple .

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Thankfully, O.J. Simpson Was One of a Kind

Only someone who straddled the fault lines of race, culture, and sports could’ve produced such a spectacle..

This article was featured in One Great Story , New York ’s reading recommendation newsletter. Sign up here to get it nightly.

A few years ago, back when Twitter was a place where you could have debates with reasonable human beings, a discussion arose: Would any modern-day celebrity’s hypothetical murder case match the all-encompassing media circus that was the O.J. Simpson trial ? There were a few possible candidates — the Rock was a popular one, and Tom Brady popped up a couple of times — but the obvious answer was no, there was no equivalent. There couldn’t be.

Part of the reason for this is the diffuse nature of modern culture, in which no single figure or event can command universal attention and obsession the way the Simpson spectacle did in the mid-’90s. But the primary reason is Simpson himself. The Hall of Fame running back/television personality/professional celebrity, who died of cancer on Wednesday at 76, was ubiquitous in American life for decades. His athletic brilliance (he somehow combined the quick-twitch running ability of Barry Sanders with the brute force of Jerome Bettis), along with his savvy, ahead-of-his-time knack for inhabiting the role of empty pitchman and spokesperson, into whom Americans could pour all their beliefs while not knowing anything about him at all (creating a blueprint for Michael Jordan, Derek Jeter, Tiger Woods and Shohei Ohtani to follow), allowed him to be a universally beloved figure during one of the most tumultuous eras in American history.

How everywhere was O.J.? Andy Warhol painted him; he hosted The Muppet Show and Saturday Night Live ; he starred in The Naked Gun and a movie with Elliot Gould; he appeared in Roots . He was aspirational for everyone. We wanted to believe in him so much that three months after he was arrested for beating Nicole Brown Simpson in early 1989, he went on David Letterman’s show and joked about running from the police . Simpson believed he was untouchable because he was.

Simpson’s murder of Nicole and her friend Ron Goldman in 1994, along with the subsequent trial, is all we will ever really remember about him, because how could it be otherwise? But as brilliantly illustrated in the masterpiece , Oscar-winning 2016 ESPN documentary, OJ: Made in America , Simpson’s story was America’s story, one that showcased the ugliness of our infinite contradictions on matters of celebrity, domestic violence, the legal system, and, of course, race, which inevitably took center stage at the trial. Simpson was always an unlikely civil-rights hero. When he was at his football peak, he steadfastly rejected getting involved in the civil-rights movement, unlike fellow athletes Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Jim Brown, famously saying, “I’m not Black, I’m O.J.”; he’s quoted in the documentary as wondering, when he saw protesters showing up to support him outside his home after his arrest, “What are all these n—–s doing in Brentwood?”

But while white people may have been confused why anyone would back him in 1994, no one can harbor any illusions today. The legal system’s inequitable treatment of Black people is far less of a revelation now than it was to white trial observers 30 years ago. Simpson may not have deserved that support then — the case against him was airtight and, if anything, has become even more so as DNA-evidence techniques have advanced — but as the saying goes, Deserve’s got nothing to do with it. Simpson was happy to accept any sympathy he could get: After all, he was always about himself more than anything else. Simpson didn’t care who his followers were, whether civil-rights advocates in the ’90s or Bob Hope and Brentwood Country Club members in the ’80s; he just wanted everything all the time. He was narcissistic in a way that, today, seems even more familiar than it did then.

He was a great football player—arguably the greatest pure running back of all time — a polished pitchman, a professional celebrity, a lousy actor, a philandering louse, a horrific spousal abuser, and a brutal murderer. We will never see anyone else like him in American culture. Thank goodness for that.

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Coachella weekend 1: No Doubt reunites, Blur flops and influencers influence

The first weekend of the iconic Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in Indio, California, has concluded — but social media is still buzzing about all the event’s highs and lows. 

From a much-hyped No Doubt reunion to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce sightings, the influencer-filled festival was full of moments that made headlines.

Here’s what you might have missed.

No Doubt reunites with a surprise guest

It's been roughly nine years since the members of No Doubt, led by Gwen Stefani, performed together. But the quartet reunited in the desert for an electric, nostalgic set.

“I didn’t think this was really going to happen,” Stefani told the crowd at one point, according to social media footage posted by users. “Did you?”

During the song “Bathwater,” singer Olivia Rodrigo surprised the crowd by joining the band onstage.

Blur was a bust

Damon Albarn, best known for his band Gorillaz, performed at Coachella with his band Blur — but was met with a lukewarm reception, according to reports and social media footage from the event. 

Some songs, in which Albarn attempted to get the crowd to sing along, were met with silence from the audience. 

At one point Albarn told the crowd that they should sing along because “you’ll never see us again.”

Swift and Kelce dance in the desert

Typically, Swift is singing on the world’s biggest stage while her boyfriend, Kelce, is on the field playing for the Kansas City Chiefs.

But at Coachella, the couple were spotted in the crowd , singing along and dancing as they watched the set for Bleachers, the band of Swift’s frequent collaborator Jack Antonoff. They were also seen enjoying a performance from rapper Ice Spice, whom Swift featured on her song “Karma.”

Fans shared pictures of them all weekend on social media.

Grimes apologizes for a disastrous set

During her set, Grimes experienced significant technical malfunctions. While the first part of her set appeared to go as planned, the second half was riddled with issues, eventually leading Grimes to scream into the microphone in frustration. 

She later posted on X , apologizing for the mishap and saying that her set for weekend two will be “flawless.”

Kesha changes the lyrics of 'TiK ToK'

Kesha made a guest appearance during Reneé Rapp’s set.

While the pair performed Kesha’s “TiK ToK,” the singer changed the opening lyrics from “Wake up in the morning feeling like P. Diddy” to “Wake up in the morning like, ‘F--- P. Diddy.’” 

Both Rapp and Kesha held up their middle fingers during the line.

Since November, Sean “Diddy” Combs has been hit with five lawsuits in New York accusing him of sexual assault, sexual trafficking and engaging in other criminal activity. Combs has denied all of the allegations, calling them sickening.

Coach-EARLE-a

It wouldn’t be Coachella without influencers abound.

The soda brand Poppi leaned in by tapping the TikTok “It Girl” Alix Earle. She and some friends stayed in the “Poppi house” at Coachella.

Earle posted several photos and videos about the festival, which have racked up millions of views.

Kalhan Rosenblatt is a reporter covering youth and internet culture for NBC News, based in New York.

MINI REVIEW article

Cross-cultural communication on social media: review from the perspective of cultural psychology and neuroscience.

• 1 School of International Economics and Management, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, China
• 2 School of Economics, Beijing Technology and Business University, Beijing, China
• 3 Institute of the Americas, University College London, London, United Kingdom

Introduction: In recent years, with the popularity of many social media platforms worldwide, the role of “virtual social network platforms” in the field of cross-cultural communication has become increasingly important. Scholars in psychology and neuroscience, and cross-disciplines, are attracted to research on the motivation, mechanisms, and effects of communication on social media across cultures.

Methods and Analysis: This paper collects the co-citation of keywords in “cultural psychology,” “cross-culture communication,” “neuroscience,” and “social media” from the database of web of science and analyzes the hotspots of the literature in word cloud.

Results: Based on our inclusion criteria, 85 relevant studies were extracted from a database of 842 papers. There were 44 articles on cultural communication on social media, of which 26 were from the perspective of psychology and five from the perspective of neuroscience. There are 27 articles that focus on the integration of psychology and neuroscience, but only a few are related to cross-cultural communication on social media.

Conclusion: Scholars have mainly studied the reasons and implications of cultural communication on social media from the perspectives of cultural psychology and neuroscience separately. Keywords “culture” and “social media” generate more links in the hot map, and a large number of keywords of cultural psychology and neuroscience also gather in the hot map, which reflects the trend of integration in academic research. While cultural characteristics have changed with the development of new media and virtual communities, more research is needed to integrate the disciplines of culture, psychology, and neuroscience.

Introduction

Cross-cultural communication refers to communication and interaction among different cultures, involving information dissemination and interpersonal communication as well as the flow, sharing, infiltration, and transfer of various cultural elements in the world ( Carey, 2009 ; Del Giudice et al., 2016 ). With more than half of the world’s population using social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, and WeChat, communication across culture has become smoother and more frequently ( Boamah, 2018 ; Chin et al., 2021 ). Subsequently, cultural exchanges, collisions, conflicts, and integration among various nationalities, races, and countries on these platforms have become obvious, and related research articles by scholars in different disciplines have increased ( Papa et al., 2020 ). In traditional cross-cultural research, experts often divide different cultures based on their boundaries, such as countries, races, languages, and so on. However, with the development of digitalization, new cultural relationships have been formed both within and outside geopolitical boundaries, and new understanding and theories are needed to explain the motivation, process, and implications of cross-cultural communications in the digital era ( Chin et al., 2020 ). Research in this field is an emerging area, and scholars are studying from different perspectives ( Xu et al., 2016 ; Santoro et al., 2021 ). Cultural psychology and neuroscience are two main base theories, and they show a trend of integration, such as cultural neuroscience and cultural neuropsychology. In this case, it is important to highlight the important achievements of this field and identify potential research gaps to provide potential directions for further research. This review aims to provide an overview of cross-cultural communication research from the perspective of cultural psychology and neuroscience and identify the integrating trend and potential directions.

Method and Source

We used the Web of Science (WoS) database to select relevant articles published between January 2010 and December 2021. The following inclusion criteria were used:

1. The document types should be articles rather than proceedings papers or book reviews. And the articles should be included in the Web of Science Core Collection.

2. When searching for articles, the topic should include at least two keywords: “cultural psychology,” “neuroscience,” “social media.”

3. Articles must be published after 2010 to ensure the content of the literature is forward.

4. This study should investigate the integration of cultural psychology and neuroscience or explore cultural issues in social media from the perspective of cultural psychology or neuroscience. The content could be cultural conflict and integration on social platforms, explanations of cultural conflict and integration on social platforms, or integration of neuroscience and cultural psychology.

Based on the above inclusion criteria, 85 relevant studies were searched, analyzed, and evaluated. These documents were identified according to the procedure illustrated in Figure 1 . The following combinations of keywords were used: (cultural psychology AND social media), (neuroscience AND social media), (cultural psychology AND neuroscience), [social media AND (cross-cultural communication OR cultural conflict OR cultural integration)], and (neuroscience, cultural psychology, and cross-cultural). The number of studies was further reduced by limiting the document type and time range. Consequently, we obtained an initial pool of 544 articles. To ensure the relevance of the literature in the initial pool, we reviewed the titles and abstracts of these articles. Articles targeting pure neuroscience and information technology were excluded and 72 articles were retained. We selected 65 articles after reviewing the full text. For most papers excluded from the initial pool, cultural issues on social media were not the main topic but digital media or culture itself. The most typical example of irrelevant articles was that culture or cultural psychology was only briefly mentioned in the abstracts. Moreover, 20 additional relevant articles were identified via full-text review of citations and first author searches. Using the above steps, 85 articles were selected for the literature review.

Figure 1 . Schematic representation of literature search and selection procedure.

Overview of Selected Articles

Here, frequency refers to the percentage of occurrences of an item in the total number of studies. The keywords “acculturation,” “cultural evolution” occurred frequently together with “social media,” “culture,” and “neuroscience.” This is as expected because psychologists and economists have long known that human decision-making is influenced by the behavior of others and that public information could improve acculturation and lead to cultural evolution. The popularity of social media clearly gives public information an opportunity to spread widely, which has caused an increase in research on the cross-cultural communication of social media. In the last decade, the link between cultural issues and social media research has grown. This is reflected in the knowledge graph ( Figure 2 ). Keywords “culture” and “social media” generate lots of links with “social media” and “mass media,” which is shown in blue node groups and white node groups. “Social media” and “cultural globalization,” “biculturalism,” “acculturation” also form node convergences. The integration of neuroscience and cultural psychology is also represented in Figure 2 as an orange node group. These integration trends can also be verified in the time dimension. As time passes, keyword frequencies have changed from a single component of “social media” or “culture” to a multi-component of “social media,” “culture,” “acculturation,” “neuroscience,” “cultural evolution.” The frequency of all keywords is presented through the overall word cloud.

Figure 2 . Keywords knowledge graph.

We identified three different research topics from the 85 selected articles: cross-cultural communication on social platforms, explanation of cultural conflict and integration on social platforms, and the integration of neuroscience and cultural psychology. Existing literature has analyzed and studied the interaction between cross-cultural users, enterprises, and countries on social media. For instance, some scholars have found that social media play a significant role in negotiating and managing the identity of transient migrants relating to the home and host culture during the acculturation process ( Cleveland, 2016 ; Yau et al., 2019 ). Social media usage by expatriates also promotes cultural identity and creativity ( Hu et al., 2020 ). In addition to the discussion of existing phenomena, many articles have discussed the causes of social media cultural transmission. A new research field, cultural neuroscience, indicates the integration of neuroscience and cultural psychology. These issues are reviewed in the following sections.

There were 44 articles on cultural communication on social media, which accounted for 51.76% of the 85 selected papers. Among these, there were 26 studies on cultural communication on social media from the perspective of psychology, five articles from the perspective of neurology, four articles about enterprises using social media for cross-cultural operations, and nine articles about how governments use social media for cross-cultural communication. Although there are 27 articles that discuss the trend of integration of psychology and neuroscience, few use integrated methods to analyze the behavior of cross-cultural communication.

From Perspective of Cultural Psychology

Cultural psychology researchers have focused on why information is shared. Some scholars have divided the reasons into individual and network levels ( Wang et al., 2021 ). Studies have explored information sharing within a specific domain, such as health information and news dissemination ( Hodgson, 2018 ; Li et al., 2018 ; Wang and Chin, 2020 ). Cultural psychology provides a rich explanation for the factors that influence cultural communication. Cultural background affects the process of cultural communication, such as self-construal, which the host country may alter it ( Huang and Park, 2013 ; Thomas et al., 2019 ). This may influence communication behaviors, such as people’s intention to use social media applications, attitudes toward social capital, social media commerce, and sharing behavior itself ( Chu and Choi, 2010 ; Han and Kim, 2018 ; Li et al., 2018 ).

Factors other than culture cannot be ignored: public broadcast firms and fans promote communication, controversial comments may draw more attention, the sociality of the social media capsule expands the scope of information communication, and how news is portrayed has changed ( Meza and Park, 2014 ; Jin and Yoon, 2016 ; Hodgson, 2018 ). Demographic factors, such as sex and age, are not ineffective ( Xu et al., 2015 ). The experiential aspects have also been noted ( Wang et al., 2021 ). Scholars have also noted the importance of cultural intelligence ( Hu et al., 2017 ).

The topic that researchers are most interested in is the relationship between society and individuals. Many studies have focused on the influence of collectivist and individualist cultures, such as social media users’ activity differences, attentional tendencies, and self-concept ( Chu and Choi, 2010 ; Thomas et al., 2019 ). There are some other interesting topics, such as the relationship among multicultural experiences, cultural intelligence, and creativity, the evaluation of the validity of the two measures, the changing status of crucial elements in the social system, and the government effect in risk communication ( Hu et al., 2017 ; Ji and Bates, 2020 ). Extending to the practical level, mobile device application usability and social media commerce were evaluated ( Hoehle et al., 2015 ; Han and Kim, 2018 ).

At the methodological level, researchers have bridged the gap between reality and online behaviors, and the feasibility of social media dataset analysis has been proven ( Huang and Park, 2013 ; Thomas et al., 2019 ). Some new concepts have been examined and some models have been developed ( Hoehle et al., 2015 ; Li et al., 2018 ). The most common method is to quantify questionnaire information ( Chu and Choi, 2010 ; Hu et al., 2017 ; Han and Kim, 2018 ; Li et al., 2018 ; Wang et al., 2021 ). The online survey accounted for a large proportion of respondents. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) is used to evaluate other measures ( Ji and Bates, 2020 ). Researchers are particularly interested in the metric approach ( Meza and Park, 2014 ). Some combine other methods, such as profile and social network analyses ( Xu et al., 2015 ). Scholars have used qualitative research to obtain detailed feedback from respondents ( Jin and Yoon, 2016 ; Hodgson, 2018 ). Content analysis was also used ( Yang and Xu, 2018 ).

From Perspective of Neuroscience

Neuroscientific explanations focus on understanding the mechanisms of cultural conflict and integration. Neuroscience researchers are concerned about the effects of the brain on cultural communication and the possible consequences of cultural communication on human behavior and rely on the study of the brain as a tool. Neuroscience can be used to study how people behave in reality. Given the similarity between offline and online behaviors, neuroscience can study online behaviors and link them to cultural communication ( Meshi et al., 2015 ). Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies, both inside and outside the laboratory, have become the subject of neuroscience studies. One example of long-term studies outside the laboratory is the study of natural Facebook behavior that was recorded for weeks ( Montag et al., 2017 ).

Motivation research is a well-documented topic. The reason for using social media, motivation to share information, and neural factors related to sharing behavior have been discussed ( Fischer et al., 2018 ). Many scholars have connected motivation with social life based on the inseparable relationship between online behaviors and social life. Some academics hope to provide predictions of real life, such as forecasting marketing results, while some warned of the risks, in which tremendous attention has been paid to the situation of adolescents ( Motoki et al., 2020 ). They are susceptible to acceptance and rejection ( Crone and Konijn, 2018 ). Behavioral addiction and peer influence in the context of risky behaviors also lead to public concern ( Meshi et al., 2015 ; Sherman et al., 2018 ).

On a practical level, neuroscience studies have made predictions possible through the findings of activity in brain regions linked to mentalizing ( Motoki et al., 2020 ). Judgments of social behavior are also warranted, and peer endorsement is a consideration ( Sherman et al., 2018 ). Thus, the dangers of cultural communication can be alleviated.

At the methodological level, the feasibility of linking directly recorded variables to neuroscientific data has been proven, which provides a methodological basis for further studies linking neuroscience and cultural communication ( Montag et al., 2017 ). Neuroscience researchers have shown a preference for magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) methods, which include functional and structural MRI scans ( Montag et al., 2017 ; Sherman et al., 2018 ). Although some scholars have pointed out the shortcomings of MRI research and attempted to use the electroencephalographic (EEG) method, most scholars still use MRI and combine it with other methods, such as neuroimaging ( Motoki et al., 2020 ). Despite the similarities in the methods used, there were differences in the scanned areas. Some researchers scan multiple regions, such as the ventral striatum ( VS ) and ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), while others focus on analyzing the content of a single region, such as the nucleus accumbens (NAcc; Baek et al., 2017 ). Related characteristics have been discussed, such as theta amplitudes that affect information sharing ( Fischer et al., 2018 ). Some inquire whether the different properties of brain regions can lead to different results ( Montag et al., 2017 ).

Integration of Neuroscience and Cultural Psychology

Of the 85 papers we selected, 27 discussed the integrated development of psychology and neuroscience, and the number of articles in this discipline increased. Cultural psychology has made remarkable progress in identifying various cultural traits that can influence human psychology and behavior on social media. Cultural neuroscience as a cross-subject of the rise in recent years, through the integration of psychology, anthropology, genetics, neuroscience, and other disciplines, explains the interaction of culture and the human brain, and how they jointly affect the neural mechanism of cognitive function. At an early stage, scholars presented the interactive dynamic evolutionary relationship between the brain and culture from multiple perspectives ( Moffittet et al., 2006 ). However, with technological improvements in brain imaging, it is possible to solve and explore interactions between the human brain, psychology, and cultural networks using an empirical approach.

Cultural characteristics have dramatically changed during the last half-century with the development of new media and new virtual ways of communication ( Kotik-Friedgut and Ardila, 2019 ). Existing research has shown that the neural resources of the brain are always adapted to the ever-increasing complexity and scale of social interaction to ensure that individuals are not marginalized by society ( Dunbar and Shultz, 2007 ). The interaction between biological evolution and cultural inheritance is a process full of unknowns and variables. Therefore, research on the relationships between culture, psychology, and neuroscience will progress together.

At the methodological level, communication on social media by users from different backgrounds provides a new research environment and massive data for cross-disciplinary research. Big data on social media and AI technology can analyze not only the reactions, emotions, and expressions of an individual but also the relevant information of an ethnic group or a cultural group. A number of neurological and psychological studies are beginning to leverage AI and social media data, and the two disciplines are intertwined with each other ( Pang, 2020 ; Wang et al., 2021 ). This quantitative analysis also helps enterprises and government departments to understand and affect cultural conflicts and integration ( Bond and Goldstein, 2015 ).

Different Schools of Thoughts

Social media provides platforms for communication and facilitates communication across cultures; however, the specific content exchanged is considered from the perspective of cultural proximity. Although some scholars think that social media can significantly promote mutual acceptance and understanding across cultures, others have realized that digital platforms actually strengthen the recognition and identity of their respective cultures ( Hopkins, 2009 ). To study the motivations, results, and implications of cross-cultural communication in virtual communities and conduct an empirical analysis, psychologists and neuroscientists provide their grounds and explanations.

Current Research Gaps

Although there are many articles discussing the trend of integration of psychology and neuroscience, few of them use integrated methods to analyze the behavior and implications of cross-cultural communication, mainly on cultural evolution and social effects. There are both practical and theoretical needs to be addressed to promote deep integration. For example, both private and public departments urgently need to learn scientific strategies to avoid cultural conflicts and promote integration. Further, a systematic and legal theory is also needed for scholars to conduct research in the sensitive field, which may be related to privacy protection and related issues.

Potential Future Development

For the research object, the classification of culture in emerging research is general, while with the development of big data methods on social media, cross-cultural communication among more detailed groups will be a potential direction. For the research framework, although cultural neuroscience is already a multidisciplinary topic, the ternary interaction among the brain, psychology, and culture in a virtual community will be very important. For the research method, brain imaging technology-related data and social media data may cause issues, such as privacy protection, personal security, informed consent, and individual autonomy. These legal and ethical issues require special attention in the development process of future research.

Cross-cultural communication research in the digital era not only needs to respond to urgent practical needs to provide scientific strategies to solve cultural differences and cultural conflicts, but also to promote the emergence of more vigorous theoretical frameworks and methods. Existing articles have mainly studied the reasons and implications of cultural communication on social media from the perspectives of cultural psychology and neuroscience separately. The CiteSpace-based hot topic map also shows the clustering trend of keywords related to cultural psychology and neuroscience, reflecting the intersection of the two fields. At the same time, there are many links between the two keyword nodes of “culture” and “social media,” which indicates that there is no lack of studies on cultural communication on social media from the perspective of cultural psychology. While cultural characteristics have changed with the development of new media and big data and related technologies have improved significantly, more research is needed to integrate the disciplines of culture, psychology, and neuroscience both in theory and methods.

Author Contributions

All authors listed have made a substantial, direct, and intellectual contribution to the work and approved it for publication.

This paper was funded by the Beijing Social Science Fund, China (Project No. 21JCC060).

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s Note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Keywords: cross-culture communication, social media, cultural psychology, neuroscience, cultural neuropsychology, social neuroscience

Citation: Yuna D, Xiaokun L, Jianing L and Lu H (2022) Cross-Cultural Communication on Social Media: Review From the Perspective of Cultural Psychology and Neuroscience. Front. Psychol . 13:858900. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.858900

Received: 20 January 2022; Accepted: 14 February 2022; Published: 08 March 2022.

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Copyright © 2022 Yuna, Xiaokun, Jianing and Lu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Han Lu, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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Board Member Says Group Declined to Honor Liz Cheney for Fear of Trump

David Hume Kennerly, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer, resigned from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation over what he said was a snub.

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By Neil Vigdor

• April 10, 2024

A Pulitzer Prize winner resigned from the board of the Gerald R. Ford Presidential Foundation on Tuesday, protesting what he said was the group’s snub of former Representative Liz Cheney for its highest honor out of fears that Donald J. Trump would retaliate if he returned to the presidency.

David Hume Kennerly, an acclaimed photographer for his coverage of the Vietnam War, who was also the chief White House photographer for Mr. Ford, criticized the foundation for its decision to bypass Ms. Cheney for the Gerald R. Ford Medal of Distinguished Public Service .

In his resignation letter, which was obtained by The New York Times and first reported by Politico , Mr. Kennerly wrote that Ms. Cheney, one of Mr. Trump’s fiercest critics in the Republican Party, should have been a consensus pick for the honor for her role in the government’s response to the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol. “America is fortunate to have Liz Cheney still out there on the front lines of freedom vigorously defending our Constitution and democratic way of life,” he wrote.

Mr. Kennerly, who worked for United Press International and had been a board member since the early 2000s, nominated Ms. Cheney for the medal last year and said that he had urged the foundation’s executive committee to reconsider her this year. He noted that Ms. Cheney was a board member of the foundation.

“A key reason Liz’s nomination was turned down was your agita about what might happen if the former president is re-elected,” Mr. Kennerly wrote. “Some of you raised the specter of being attacked by the Internal Revenue Service and losing the foundation’s tax-exempt status as retribution for selecting Liz for the award.”

Gleaves Whitney, the executive director of the Ford Presidential Foundation, gave a different reason in a statement about why Ms. Cheney was passed over by the organization: that her name was being bandied about for a potential third-party candidacy for president.

“At the time the award was being discussed, it was being publicly reported that Cheney was under active consideration for a presidential run by No Labels,” Mr. Whitney said, referring to a centrist political group. “Exercising its fiduciary responsibility, the executive committee concluded that giving the Ford medal to Cheney in the 2024 election cycle might be construed as a political statement and thus expose the foundation to the legal risk of losing its nonprofit status with the I.R.S.”

No Labels last week abandoned its plans to run a presidential ticket in the 2024 election after its recruitment of high-profile candidates fizzled.

No Labels’ chief strategist, Ryan Clancy, said in a statement on Wednesday that the group had briefed Ms. Cheney on its 2024 ballot access strategy but that she declined to be involved out of concern it could help the electoral prospects of Mr. Trump. He added that No Labels did not make an offer to Ms. Cheney to appear on its ticket.

Ms. Cheney did not immediately respond to requests for comment left with a spokesman on Wednesday.

The top Republican on the special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, Ms. Cheney has regularly been vilified by Mr. Trump and his supporters. Her criticism and defiance of the former president led to her ouster during the Republican primary in 2022 in her House district in Wyoming, which she represented for six years in Congress.

A spokesman for the Trump campaign did not immediately respond to a request for comment on Wednesday.

Ms. Cheney’s father, former Vice President Dick Cheney, was a White House chief of staff for Mr. Ford and is listed on the foundation’s website as a trustee .

Mr. Kennerly accused those who rejected Ms. Cheney for the honor of pandering to Mr. Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, and said that Mr. Ford, the medal’s namesake, would not have acquiesced.

“Those of you who rejected Liz join many ‘good Republicans’ now aiding and abetting our 45th president by ignoring the genuine menace he presents to our country,” Mr. Kennerly wrote, adding, “Gerald Ford wouldn’t have been intimidated by phantom consequences.”

Neil Vigdor covers politics for The Times, focusing on voting rights issues and election disinformation. More about Neil Vigdor

Our Coverage of the 2024 Election

Presidential Race

As President Biden tours Pennsylvania , his campaign will run a new ad  promoting his commitment to organized labor and attacking the economic policies of former President Donald Trump.

Trump plans to meet with the right-wing president of Poland , the latest in a series of his private interactions with foreign leaders who share an affinity with his brand of politics.

Biden is expected to deny permission for a 211-mile industrial road through the Alaskan wilderness  to a large copper deposit, handing a victory to environmentalists in an election year when he wants to underscore his credentials as a climate leader.

Vice-Presidential Calculations: As Trump sifts through potential running mates, he has peppered some advisers and associates with a direct question: Which Republican could best help him raise money ?

Embracing the Jan. 6 Rioters:  Trump initially disavowed the attack on the Capitol, but he is now making it a centerpiece of his campaign .

Mobilizing the Left: Amid the war in Gaza, the pro-Palestinian movement has grown into a powerful, if disjointed, political force in the United States. Democrats are feeling the pressure .

On a Collision Course:  As president, Trump never trusted the intelligence community. His antipathy has only grown since he left office, with potentially serious implications should he return to power .