Volume 5 (2019): Issue 2 (December 2019)

With the arrival of the Internet the already-existing mass media have undergone a complete revolution. Among the most affected subtypes one could easily distinguish the press, which had to find its own place within the new medium. The fierce competition in the realm of online publishing has engendered a number of idiosyncratic linguistic devices used to lure the readers. One of the most popular ones is the phenomenon recognized as clickbait, i.e. an umbrella term for a number of techniques used to attract attention and arouse curiosity. In the following paper, we shall investigate the presence of the said phenomenon in online headlines. In order to do that we shall perform a corpus-based analysis of the data acquired from the most popular American social news outlets on the Internet, namely Buzzfeed, TMZ and E!Online. Apart from establishing the extent to which clickbait has dominated online headlines, we shall also pinpoint and discuss the specific linguistic techniques used to attract potential readers.

The information world is full of labeled quantitative data, in which a number of qualitative categories are to be compared based on a quantitative variable. Their graphical representations are various and serve different audiences and purposes. Based on a simple data set and its different visualizations, we will play with the data and their visual representation. We will use well-known charts, such as a regular table, a bar plot, and a word cloud; less-know, such as Cleveland’s dot plot, a fan plot, and a text-table; and new ones, constructed for the very aim of this essay, such as a labeled rectangle plot and a ruler-like graph. Our discussion will not aim to choose the best graph but rather to show the different faces of visualizing labeled quantitative data. I hope to convince the readers that it is always worth spending a minute on pondering how to present their data.

The following article is devoted to the discussion about the structure, linguistic phenomena and genres occurring in the newspaper edited by the students of Polish Philology at the University of Rzeszów, who belong to the Student Journalists’ Club. Besides discussing topics of interest to young people, the article also describes the language used by the editors of the magazine, including references to poetry, songs or advertising slogans. Furthermore, press genres presented in the journal are briefly discussed. Finally, the article also draws attention to the readership of the press in Poland.

One of the roles of media research is to explain social phenomena. The Internet became a place where society expresses itself and where society could be influenced or even manipulated. Therefore, online communication analysis becomes a tool that is expected to guarantee the transparency of the social communication process. Unfortunately, the size of the Internet makes analysis difficult, and traditional methods of analysing communication are not always enough or force the researcher to focus on a fragmentary data. The author asks a question which research methods are suitable for Internet research and allow to improve transparency. It focuses on the method group referred to in the article as Mass Automated Internet Analysis. In the final part, the author shows examples of several – existing or being developed – research methods and techniques (including data collection and data analysis field), what research methods can improve the quality of digital communications research.

The dissemination of the media has led to the phenomenon of the mediatization of social reality, which in the era of new media has become dominant, because the new media have infiltrated almost every aspect of human functioning. The surprising paradox of the new media is the fact that on the one hand they give access to almost unlimited information, on the other hand they narrow it down extremely. The modern media user, often without realizing it, “uses” only the information that is offered to him by specially selected internet algorithms. Created in this way the so-called “information/filter bubble” condemns him to the only vision of reality - and in the absence of the possibility of verifying his observations what results from the way the new media works - in his opinion the only true one. This is particularly important in creating the vision of social order and the functioning of the state. The mediatisation of Polish social reality - especially in the context of social media - led to the emergence of polarized groups isolated from each other and caused a lack of rational political debate on a number of important social issues.

The article focuses on a hashtags as a tool of networked culture and networked social movements, and – at the same time – on self-expression phenomenon of a selfie. Although today hashtags, in particular, can been seen as a frequently used weapon in information wars and a tool of propaganda 2.0, seen from historical perspective, this very tool aligns itself first and foremost with emancipatory forces in the Internet history. These forces, expressed in A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace and in participatory ideals of Web 2.0 are now in withdrawal.

As the Internet is now in a peculiar development phase, ruled by the logic of surveillance capitalism, those early ideals of free speech and exchange of ideas are now overshadowed by a “darkening of the digital dream (Shoshana Zuboff).

The central argument suggests that the “Kardashian moment” on the one hand, and Occupy Wallstreet, on the other hand, constituted a point in time where new media affordances and social phenomena were aligned. At the same time, both hashtag and selfie can be viewed as a response to the betrayalof individualization processes started in the 1960s, then carried on and amplified by the early Internet, and in the end commodified by the growing Internet giants and established structures of power.

Organisational communication in the age of artificial intelligence (AI) development is an opportunity but also a challenge. Thanks to the changing media space and the development of technology, it is possible to automate work, increase the effectiveness and power of influence and distribution of content. However, they also raise questions concerning risks, ranging from those associated with the social area (reducing the number of jobs) to the ethics of communication and the ethics of the professional profession of public relations (still PR ethics or the AI ethics in PR). The article will outline the opportunities and concerns resulting from the use of AI in communication of an organisation.

Fear of Missing Out is mainly a subject of psychological research; however, due to its specific nature, it gains an interdisciplinary character. Thanks to this, it can also be analysed from the perspective of media or business. This paper focuses on the threads of the relationship between FOMO and marketing communication online. It realizes the following objectives: it presents the scale of FOMO in Poland; it analyses the phenomenon in the context of consumers’ reactions to basic brand activity on social and it shows differences between the answers given by all the respondents and those with high FOMO. In order to clarify the scope of the research work, four research questions are answered: how do social media users react to the use of particular features of social platforms by brands? What form of posts coming from brands are preferred by Polish Internet users? What is the attitude of the respondents towards advertisements posted on social media portals? Does FOMO influence the answers in any way? The research was based on the nationwide, representative sample of Internet users aged 15+ (N=1060). The tool was the CAWI questionnaire.

In the presented article, the author explains the need for reflection on the use of a smartphone or tablet by the youngest media users. It presents current research on the use and impact of mobile devices on children, as well as the destructive dimension of the consequences caused by their excessive use as well as the need and scope of education of media competence of preschoolers. The author also presents the results of her own research regarding parents’ opinions on the role and impact of a smartphone / tablet in children’s everyday life. It also presents the teachers’ view on the role of educators in the process of acquiring media competence by children.

Polish pedagogical and psychological literature as well as mass media more and more often inform about disorders of competences and social relations of teenagers, as a result of abuse of digital technologies, especially smartphones. The authors analysed 31 cases of patients with cyberabuse and addictions at the Social Prevention Centre in terms of the occurrence, intensity and character of the disappearance of their real social contacts, as well as their behaviour in small natural peer groups. The obtained results were compared with 49 groups of adults and parents of patients. Research based on participatory observation and in-depth interviews showed that teenagers devote over 62% less time to personal social relations than their parents, their time of real social relations with parents is about 38 minutes per day, create atomistic attitudes towards family (e.g. refusal to participate in common meals), have shallow and narrow groups of friends, and prefer borrowed contacts (through social media). The average declared number of teenagers’ friends in social media exceeds 540, while their parents use smartphones in less than 140. Young respondents use smartphones in almost every social and life context (e.g. in toilets, in church, at school, during meals). The research confirmed the occurrence of digital technology abuse. The article ends with preventive delegations.

The goal of the article is to declare and describe the methodology of research about Internet and mobile applications in work life and private life of digitals marketers. This article is a reflection on the research methods used, their adequacy and potential results that the research team should achieve during the research. The article is the justification for the selected research method (both quantitative and qualitative), describes the research group. The authors, based on the pilot study, also make some conclusions, which will then be verified using subsequent - more extensive and implemented on a larger scale research tools.