Digital Shifts


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Perceptual Responses to Female Speakers Using Modal Register, Vocal Fry, or Uptalk View Digital Media

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Celia Stewart,  Irene Kling  

Our anonymous online survey captured the subjective responses of young American female listeners to 5-second audio-only samples of female celebrities during conversations. The listeners assigned attributes, including physical attractiveness, trustworthiness, competence, and level of education, as well as possible occupations that included law, speech pathology, and theater based on these audio samples. A higher percentage of listeners associated these attributes and occupations with speakers using modal register than those same speakers using vocal fry or uptalk. The modal register includes the range of pitches typically used in speaking when statements end in a downward inflection, and questions usually have an upward inflection or rising pitch. The popularity of vocal fry and uptalk is often demonstrated in the voices of American female celebrities. Furthermore, vocal fry has been identified in Japanese, Finnish, and Swedish speech production. Vocal fry is a low-pitched, popping sound in the voice and is often associated with a relaxed "laid-back" personality. Uptalk gained popularity in the 1980s and 1990s and is associated with California's youth culture. It is referred to as Valley Girl speech, as depicted in the Paul Zappa song Valley Girl and the film Valley Girl. Uptalk has been identified in female speakers in Australia, Britain, Canada, Ireland, and New Zealand and is characterized by an upward infection or rising pitch at the end of a statement. Given the widespread use of vocal fry and uptalk, our findings were unexpected because our listeners frequently use vocal fry and uptalk during their communication exchanges.

How Can Apps Support Fact Checking and Cyber Security Skills? : A Qualitative Study on Technical Assistance Systems for Vulnerable Groups

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Mario Anastasiadis,  Mariana Ochoa Moreno,  Kathrin Keller,  Hektor Haarkötter  

Political disinformation significantly impacts public discourse, destabilizing democratic foundations, and cyber security problems represent an increasing challenge for users, which is why empowering fact checking skills and a competent approach to cyber security issues is essential for social participation, particularly for vulnerable groups (Ruokolainen & Widén, 2020; Keel & Weber, 2021). The paper reports on two research projects in which technical assistance systems (a mobile app and a browser plug in) for detecting disinformation and empowering fact checking and cyber security skills for the vulnerable groups of migrants, young people, and seniors are being developed. Based on the technology-ethical approach of Value Sensitive Design (Hillerbrand 2021), the projects integrate the target groups' needs and expectations into the development process. This contributes to the research field of media technologies and media literacies. The research consists of three stages: (1) Qualitative interviews with target groups to assess their needs and expectations (n=30); (2) Implementing findings into the apps development process; (3) Mixed-methods app prototype testing phase in all three target groups The results of this process are presented. The results, which cannot be generalized, show that vulnerable groups have specific expectations and needs, especially focusing on transparency, easy usability, language and trust. The research also shows the importance of empowering vulnerable groups to navigate digital society in a resilient way and to foster a safer, more inclusive society.

AI, Post-Truth Realities, and Thai Students’ Information-Seeking Behavior View Digital Media

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Pavel Slutskiy  

This paper investigates how AI challenges traditional verification, citation, and evaluation principles, thereby eroding truth. AI-generated content, lacking verifiable citations, operates on probabilistic models that present information as probable rather than factual. The widespread reliance on AI for information-seeking risks diminishing critical evaluation, blending fact with fiction, and compromising academic integrity. To explore these effects, a mixed-method study was conducted involving 240 Chulalongkorn University students who used various online resources like Google, Wikipedia, or ChatGPT to research Rudolf Carnap's verificationism views. Their choices were analyzed to assess dependency patterns on these platforms. Further, a qualitative analysis compared AI-generated responses with verified sources to gauge their accuracy. This comprehensive approach revealed significant insights into students' preferences for information sources and the critical importance of validating AI outputs in academic settings, underscoring the nuanced impacts of digital tools on traditional knowledge standards.

Body as Platform : Tracking Intimacy and Estrangement in Feminine Technologies

Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Lindsay Balfour  

This paper explores the ways in which communications are increasingly being created, disseminated, and received by and through the body, and often in intimate and relational ways, leading to a recognition of the body as a communications platform. Platforms are no longer things external to us, hand-held or screen mediated; instead, they are now embedded, both literally and figuratively in our lives and bodies. Concerns over how bodies are increasingly leveraged in social, cultural, and political forms of communication such as news and social media suggests that the body (and the intersectionally raced, classed, and gendered body in particular) is not only a site of contestation, politics, and biopower, but is a platform – producing data assemblages that are bought and fought over in ways that make a “medium” (to borrow from McLuhan) out of the body itself. In what follows, then, I turn to the relationship between bodies and selves, and the burgeoning industry of feminine health technologies (i.e., “FemTech”) such as menstruation and ovulation trackers as a particularly fraught domain of the platform economy. This contribution, then, explores three interrelated critiques of platform intimacy in the context of reproductive tracking technologies I organize this critique around the central theme of biometric tracking to ask a series of questions: How is the body leveraged as a platform for intimate surveillance? To what extent do biopolitics and governmentality reproduce through body platforms? And what happens when the promises of digital intimacies collapse into patriarchy, data brokerage, or even violence?

Digital Media

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