Currents 2012 will address the challenges of new media, new trends and new audience behaviours with an emphasis on PR trends and technologies.
We are pleased to announce the following presentations for the 2012 Poster Session:
Understanding Gen Y communicators inside and outside of the public service
Jeremy Berry, APR
Associate professor of public relations
Mount Royal University
Abstract:
Government communicators, in a democracy, are an essential link between a government and the people who elected it. As such, staffing such positions will be important moving forward, particularly relating to Generation Y. My presentation will focus on the results of a study I did with Mount Royal University public relations students and three working generations in the Alberta Public Affairs Bureau. The information presented outlines what would be attractive to Gen Y communicators in a government communications context and determines what, if anything, government and other public sector communications departments can do to be more appealing to Generation Y so as to insure an adequate workforce.
The Grammar of Our Demands: The Zuccotti Park General Assembly and the Media
Gilbert Vanburen Wilkes IV, PhD
Professor
Royal Road University
Andrea Klassen
Program Associate
Royal Roads University
Abstract:
On October 16, 2011 a U.S. centre-right website titled 'Big Government' released a cache of email correspondences purported to consist of a discussion between Occupy Wall Street organizers and journalists about how to develop a coherent message to connect with wider U.S. audiences and interests groups on the model of the U.S. Tea Party movement. The email cache is available here: http://owsmail.dc406.com/. The writers at 'Big Government' intended to discredit both the journalists and the Occupy Wall Street Organizers by showing evidence of collusion. For the purposes of this study the email cache becomes the data to develop a description of the value predicates, which means the way that either side in the discussion develops its understanding of the issues at hand, and address the question of how those issues should be presented to the public. Textual analysis of key words and word collocations using computer concordancer tools provide the empirical basis of the study. The object of the study is to provide insight into the professional practice of journalists confronted with the special case of reporting on a community that resists, on its face, the propagation of a coherent message as this contradicts Occupier practices of direct action through bottom-up direct democracy.
Stop Creeping On Me: How do Humber public relations students' notions of online privacy influence their use of social networking sites for academic and business purposes?
Andrea Tavchar, PhD candidate
Professor and program co-ordinator
Humber College
Abstract:
Today's young people are heralded as ‘digital natives', native speakers of digital technology. Yet, these 'digitally native' students exhibit tension when using social media academically. Although familiar with Facebook, relatively few of my college-level public relations students ventured beyond this application to discover Twitter, LinkedIn or to blog. Keeping in touch with friends was their primary interest. They demonstrated resistance at using social media, perceived by them as a 'private' social tool, for academic or business purposes. This research project set out to determine how public relations students' notion of online privacy influenced their use of social networking sites for academic and business purposes.
The research conducted at a college in the summer of 2010 suggested that "public" and "private" may not be the most suitable distinctions of social media use. A better definition emerged that differentiated between "living technologies" (Kennedy, et. al.) to describe social-entertainment uses of Facebook and "learning technologies" (Kennedy, et. al.) such as Twitter.
Although labeled ‘digital natives' because of their skills with living technologies, young people find that these skills are not necessarily valorized in the classroom or the workplace. This presentation addresses the notion that today's young people are not born speaking the language of learning technologies and that they need to be taught. I would like to demonstrate that this is one of the pressing learning innovations required in the connected 21st century world.
2011 Research abstracts