Media, Communication and Production

Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://eresearch.qmu.ac.uk/handle/20.500.12289/13

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AlcoLOLs Project: Final report, March 2016
(Queen Margaret University, Edinburgh, 2016-03-31) Pieczka, Magda; Wood, Emma; Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
This report evaluates the AlcoLOLs project, funded by the Robertson Trust and conducted in Edinburgh 2013-2015. The project was designed to tackle the issues alcohol presents for young people and worked by combining insights from dialogue, peer education, and a harm reduction approach. The intervention was co-designed by young people and implemented by them in six secondary schools in the North East of Edinburgh, eventually reaching over 3000 young people. The AlcoLOLs, a name they chose for themselves, were volunteers who experienced dialogue at Queen Margaret University where they received training in facilitation and education about alcohol. Subsequently, the AlcoLOLs ran their own dialogue groups in schools, meeting each group of approximately 15 pupils twice and reaching on average 1000 pupils a year. School dialogue groups were designed to problematize alcohol, question participants’ attitudes and behaviours, offer useful knowledge, develop new communication skills to support learning, resilience, and, where appropriate, aspire to change behaviours. Our approach was: to treat alcohol consumption as a social, cultural practice; to acknowledge that persuasion and information-giving were insufficient communication methods to tackle the issue: and to adopt a harm reduction — pragmatic and non-judgmental — way of working. The AlcoLOLs project, consequently, was designed around dialogue and peer-learning and it demonstrably delivered a range of beneficial outcomes for participants: new skills and knowledge, change of attitudes and behaviours (effective self-regulation), and the promise of a potentially larger-scale cultural transformation.
AlcoLOLs, Re-thinking Drinking: Developing a shared leadership approach for alcohol education
(SAGE, 2019-11-13) Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo; Pieczka, Magda
Objective: The aim of this article is to extend and elaborate ways of conceptualising, enabling and practising peer leadership in whole-school alcohol education programmes.
Facebook and Political Information in Italy and the UK: An Antidote against Political Fragmentation and Polarisation?
(2014-01-25) Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
Due to the rise of digital technologies citizens can today counton innumerable and diverse sources of political information. Arguably such a proliferation of media choices in conjunction with a structural aspect of the internet, namely the presence of a pro-active and self-selecting audience, offers the conditions most conducive to selective exposure (Bimber & Davis 2003). The tendency for selectivity of the internet audience has raised serious concerns as it maylead to a more polarised and less informed electorate (Sunstein 2001, Polat 2005, Bennett & Iyengar 2008). However, despite many theoretical speculations, the relationship between the internet and the exposure to politically diverse information is still unclear. The present paper aims to contribute to this debate. Through a sequential explanatory mixed methods strategy, it examines the impact of Facebook on the consumption of political information in Italy and the United Kingdom and argues thatthis social networking website could reduce the risks of selective exposure and operate as an antidote against political fragmentation and polarization.
Facebook and political participation: Virtuous circle and participation intermediaries
(Intellect, 2016-09-01) Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
Drawing from the results of a mixed-methods cross-national study focusing on Italy and the United Kingdom, this article explores how the contribution of Facebook to citizens' political participation varies in relation to pre-existing levels and different dimensions of political activity - namely, political expression and information vs political mobilization. The findings indicate that politically active individuals are the ones who take more advantage of the mobilization affordances of Facebook, whereas less politically active participants employ this social networking site mainly for political information. Activists consider Facebook as a key tool for the organization of political initiatives, enabling them to quickly communicate and coordinate, and to operate independently from traditional political institutions such as parties and trade unions. With regard to citizens who engage to a lesser degree in offline and online political activities, the informative power of Facebook and its ease of use come into play. Facebook can, in fact, lower the thresholds of participation by making it more flexible. In addition, political information can reach less engaged users through the activity of participation intermediaries, activating a virtuous circle and potentially producing, in the long run, a mobilization effect.
Mediating the contributions of Facebook to political participation in Italy and the UK: The role of media and political landscapes
(Palgrave, 2018-05-15) Pieczka, Magda; Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
Over the last decade, an increasing number of academic studies have examined how digital technologies can contribute to political participation, with numerous publications focusing on social networking websites. This article adds to this strand of research by tackling the scarcity of cross-national comparative studies in the field. Drawing from an original dataset acquired by combining a cross-national comparative approach and a mixed-methods methodology, this paper explores how media and political landscapes mediate the contributions of Facebook to citizens’ political participation in Italy and the United Kingdom. A participatory gap between Italian and British participants, with Italians displaying higher levels of political participation through Facebook, is found and explained with reference to three contextual factors: the greater diffusion and relevance of other online platforms such as Twitter in the UK; Italian participants’ more negative perception of traditional media linked to the high level of political parallelism typical of the Italian media system; and the presence in Italy of a political party such as the Five Stars Movement making full use of the communicative and organizational affordances of Facebook. The findings indicate that the contributions of Facebook, and digital technologies in general, to political participation must be analysed in context, within the larger patterns they fit into, and cannot be examined in isolation. Such contributions are better understood if considered within the hybrid media system in which different digital platforms interact, merge and compete. Similarly, the political scenarios in which citizens and political parties operate need to be accounted for when looking at the links between the Internet and politics.
The Internet, social networking Web sites and political participation research: Assumptions and contradictory evidence
(2015-03-02) Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
Over the last decade there has been a proliferation of academic studies addressing the relationship between the Internet and politics, with an increasing number of publications focusing on the impact of such a medium on political participation. Within this specific sub-field research has produced contrasting evidence and generated an intense academic debate. Some scholars stressed the positive impact of the Internet on political participation (i.e., optimists), while others minimised its mobilising power, emphasising its tendency to reinforce existing participatory trends (i.e., normalisers) or highlighting its limited or even negative influence on political participation (i.e., pessimists). Similar findings also emerged in relation to social networking Web sites (SNSs), digital platforms that have been the subject of much research in recent years. This paper discusses how two assumptions characterising many studies focusing on the Internet, SNSs and political participation have contributed to the contradictory findings produced by optimists, pessimists and normalisers. The first assumption is the consideration of political participation as an activity aimed exclusively at affecting governments' actions, either directly or indirectly. This conceptualisation has arguably prevented scholars from grasping the multidimensional nature of political participation and from assessing how the influence of the Internet on this phenomenon can vary according to the different types of political activity. The second assumption is the perception of the Internet as a homogeneous platform and an over-generalised notion of Internet usage. This, in turn, has led researchers to concentrate on the online/off-line distinction and to overlook the impact of different digital tools and various usage practices. This paper argues for a shift in the ways political participation, Internet and SNSs usage are conceptualised and operationalised in academia. It suggests moving away from the polarised debate between optimists, pessimists and normalisers, and adopting a more differential approach through which examining the effects of digital technologies on political participation.
Twitter, Politics, and the Pandemic: An Analysis of Government and Political Communication About Covid in Scotland
(University of Zurich, 2024-05-23) Casteltrione, Isidoropaolo
This article examines the intersection of politics, government, and health communication in the Scottish Twittersphere during the Covid-19 outbreak. It captures two phases of the pandemic: the beginning of the health crisis, and the rollout of the vaccination programme, coinciding with the emergence of the Delta variant in Scotland. A combination of thematic, quantitative content and social network analyses is employed to identify key themes emerging from the tweets of selected government and politicians' accounts, and to explore the formation of social networks communities. The thematic analysis reveals that Twitter has primarily been used for disseminating information about the virus, preventative measures, and government interventions, with limited efforts towards public engagement. Twitter communications became increasingly partisan as the pandemic progressed, with users frequently using the crisis as a political proxy. Five major clusters were detected in the Twitter network: two highly partisan and polarised clusters; a group containing numerous news media accounts reporting on the pandemic, and two clusters focusing primarily on the vaccination programme and the provision of health information, where the First Minister and the Scottish Government operate. Implications of these findings for government and political communication in health crises are discussed.