In the past few decades, self-help books on communication have ranked among the top titles on bestseller lists. Offering advice about improving communication skills in a variety of contexts, they both reflect and promote a widespread discourse about the importance of good communication in everyday life, in what is in fact a paradoxical endeavor – solving flawed communication with more communication. Based on an analysis of 18 bestselling self-help books, the paper examines the meaning of three recurring themes – “listening,” “awareness” and “practice” – and analyzes the paradoxical relationship between what the books say about communication and how they say it. The findings serve to illuminate the relationship between communication and metacommunication more broadly, which, in turn, helps to explain the conditions by which authors express their ideas – their selection of textuality, despite, and precisely because of, its difference from oral talk.

This paper explores trust-building strategies in future-oriented news discourse, marked by a high degree of uncertainty. While current research mainly focuses on audiences’ perceptions of news credibility, this study addresses news trust from a production standpoint. We examine the trust-building efforts of media actors, focusing on their discursive labor within the context of election projections. Drawing on rich data from five election rounds in Israel and the US, we qualitatively analyzed 400 news texts and 400 tweets that were produced by 20 US and 20 Israeli media actors. This textual analysis was supplemented by 10 in-depth interviews with Israeli journalists. Our findings demonstrate three types of journalistic trust-building rhetoric in election coverage: facticity, authority, and transparency. These strategies result in a two-fold form of trust, which re-affirms traditional notions of accuracy and validity, while also challenging the ability of newspersons to obtain them in contemporary political and media cultures. Overall, these strategies hold unique opportunities and challenges for sustaining public trust in journalism and illuminate the complex communicative labor involved in building trust with news audiences. Our findings also highlight the importance of studying trust not only in relation to the past and the present, but also in future-oriented discourse.

Previous research on political representation mainly focused on representatives but has overlooked individuals’ sense of inclusion within the greater group: the nation. Building on narrative theory, we propose a novel mechanism that fosters a feeling of political representation—a similarity between individuals’ personal-national stories and the collective-national metanarrative of the polity. Metanarratives are shared dominant stories that present a community with desirable social conventions. While they seek to represent the nation, metanarratives are not entirely inclusive and do not appeal to all citizens. We argue that individuals who do internalize the metanarrative feel more represented. To demonstrate our theoretical expectations, we use election surveys and constitutive texts to capture national stories and metanarratives. We find that indeed respondents whose national story is closer to a nation’s metanarrative feel more represented by the political system.

A global boom in mainly documentary films interviewing perpetrators recognizes the current shift from the era of the witness to that of the perpetrator. Post Khmer-Rouge Cambodian cinema (1989–present) is a unique and highly important case of perpetrator cinema. It proposes for the first time in cinema direct confrontation between first-generation survivor-filmmakers and perpetrators, a new form of genocidal interview: the documentary duel. Enabled both by the intimate horror of the autogenocide and the Khmer Rouge tribunal (the ECCC), dueling with high-ranking perpetrators shifts power relations between the two. In contrast, dueling with low-ranking perpetrators and collaborators, never to be tried, does not generate this much-desired shift. Thus, Cambodian collaboration revealed through cinema stresses the immense importance of the law in promoting familial-social-cultural processes of acknowledgement of accountability. Further, Cambodian duel documentaries constitute the ethics of “moral resentment” (my term), while objecting to and disrupting the political view that reconciliation is the only legitimate response to the atrocious past.

Recipe videos are among the most viral genres of videos on social media. Yet, little research has been done on their aesthetic and formal attributes, especially on how they operate within the frameworks of the attention economy and embodied interaction specific to social media interfaces. This paper examines recipe videos published on Tasty, one of the most popular Facebook pages in the world. We analyze these videos through a three-dimensional model that integrates their semiotic characteristics (visual, auditory, and textual), their interactive and haptic qualities, and their invitation to perceptual engagement and sensorimotor response. We conclude that Facebook recipe videos are exemplary of a broader category of social media videos which we call hyper-sensory videos: these create heightened multisensory experiences that take precedence over informational use or narrative involvement. Hyper-sensory videos present a cultural response to broader questions regarding materiality, presence, and embodied relations within a highly mediated social reality.

Reminiscing during foreign state visits serves as a discursive means for building interstate relationships. When political leaders strategically narrate their states’ historical legacies, they construct a collective memory that serves as a resource for creating and sustaining amicable relations between states. Studying evocations of past events in 455 speeches delivered during foreign state visits between 2010 and 2020, we demonstrate the prevalence and significance of the practice of reminiscing in interstate politics. We suggest bonding narratives as a device through which a connection is generated between two collectives to create and sustain positive relations. Despite the unique nature of bonding narratives, the constructed collective memory mostly relies on shared memories of wars, once again underlining the link between nations and violence.

As social media scholarship pervades the communication discipline, it is time to reflect on the good, bad, and ugly of social media. The theme for this special issue is inspired in part by the 1966 film, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Like its portrayal of the American Civil War, we again face deep divisions. The question is what role is social media helping us to heal those divides versus fragmenting us further? The seven articles in this issue reflect the complexity of the answer. Although we aimed for diversity, this issue focuses on the Global North. This reflects the field and the need to decenter Western epistemology. Nevertheless, the articles help us see that social media is not easily reduced to simplistic framings, but instead enables new connections and collective action, while also risking further fragmentation of our information environment and greater polarization—while technology companies profit.

Taking the screenshot as a primary object to think with about some of the contours and dynamics of photography’s contemporary expanded field, this chapter argues that the very elasticity of photography’s identity in the smartphone and social media era is epistemically, existentially and aesthetically productive. It enables the relocation of photography to new digital arenas of human experience, action, and being. Such an expansion needs to be theorized as a consequence of processes of active recollection and reconfiguration: in other words, of cultural memory. The paper does not dwell, however, on the extensively researched insight that photography is an agent of cultural memory; rather, it emphasizes a converse proposition: that cultural memory is an agent of photography, that photography’s expansion is enabled by our remembrance of the medium. The screenshot is a key manifestation of that memory, helping to anchor and reconfigure cultural practices, epistemologies and experiences in an era of ubiquitous media.

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the number of East Jerusalem Palestinian students studying at Israeli higher education institutions in Israel and in preacademic preparatory programs. This study examines how spontaneous encounters with Jewish students while attending an Israeli academic institution are associated with young East Jerusalem Palestinian students’ attitudes toward the integration of East Jerusalem Palestinians into the city of Jerusalem and cooperation with Israeli Jews. We analyze the responses to an online survey of 106 East Jerusalem Palestinian students attending a 1-year preparatory program at an Israeli academic institute. We find that Palestinian students who report spontaneous contact with Jewish students on campus during the year express more favorable attitudes toward the integration of East Jerusalem Palestinians into the city of Jerusalem and more positive attitudes toward Jewish Israelis in general. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved)

The migration of images related to the visual history of the Holocaust occurs all the time. Even as one reads these lines, Holocaust images are migrating. One such image is the Number Tattoo, which has already established itself as a common visual trope of Auschwitz, or more precisely, of the figure of the survivor. Focusing on the ‘Auschwitz Tattoo’, and in particular on a sequence showing children presenting their number tattoos to a Soviet cameraman shortly after the camp’s liberation, this interactive visual research collection analyses the migration of this visual trope into popular culture: its historical origin, its iconisation process, and the reasons it has become such a popular object of visual migration. Emphasizing the movement of the trope between a representative selection of cultural products with the help of annotated images and sequences, as well as through explorative audiovisual essays, this collection reveals a network of visual relations that exist between the various uses of the image and offers new options for curating these relations by digital means.