Search

Intelligent transportation systems (ITS) have been steadily becoming part of our reality. For their successful integration, studying and understanding public opinions and acceptance is important. Social media platforms offer an extensive opportunity for opinion mining. While there have been studies on people’s attitudes towards automated driving, another important ITS concept—connected driving—has received little to no attention. In the current study, data on how connected driving is represented and perceived were collected from German(-speaking) Reddit and Twitter. In relevant Reddit entries, the necessity of communication between vehicles was discussed almost exclusively in the context of automated driving. On Twitter, mostly shared news and information on the topic are presented, while the number of personal opinions is low. The most concerning subtopic seems to be cybersecurity, which reflects a general trend of data protection issues discussed in society.

Nowadays day-to-day digital communication and social life has only fortified with the ongoing pandemic. People enjoy communication and information across various (direct) messaging platforms and accepted its ever-increasing impact on public discourse and society. While traditional platforms implement user profiles enabling social credit, the landscape also includes anonymity. Yet, a new type of application combining anonymity with a strong spatial focus, hyperlocality, emerged over recent years. To this point, platform implications of both uniquely combined design properties largely remain unknown. In this thesis, we provide a first data-driven holistic view on Jodel that combines both properties. We leverage unbiased complete ground truth information to dissect a plethora of communities across two different countries: Germany and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. This work follows a platform perspective identifying four major essentially important areas revolving around the individual. That is, we begin with a broad analysis of three User Adoption processes along three different applications. After discussing our measurements of the user base adoption of the German COVID-19 digital contact tracing application, we provide evidence of well-established platforms being re-purposed as a side channel to evade censorship in the ongoing Russo-Ukrainian hybrid war. We further showcase that the very same platform ingredients may yield vastly different outcomes on the messaging app Jodel. While any online platform builds upon User Interactions, we structurally characterize Jodel behavior across both countries. We discuss structural disparities and detail platform implications - solely induced by local user behavior. An in-depth look into the Saudi community landscape closes a research gap to platform usage in a different society, identifying differences. Further, we discuss User Content analyzing information diffusion. Taking content to the next level, we developed a multidimensional classification scheme for intents (why) and topics (what) of social media messages and provide details of a crowdsourced campaign for Saudi Arabian contents. With neural word embeddings as a tool for making text tangible and the prevalence of emoji in social media communication, we discuss quantitative and qualitative insights to word-emoji embeddings reflecting semantics. Additionally, we make such embeddings interpretable and provide evidence that our method is well in line with human judgement. In terms of User Management, we detail insights to distributed moderation processes and model the threat of abusive content. In the long term, platforms need to establish a sustainable, preferably growing, environment. That is, we next discuss user lifetime and possibly early churn factors, while modeling user lifetime from metadata. We finish with a blueprint of data-driven long-term quality of experience analyzes in a controlled massively multiplayer online game (MMOG) environment., Heutzutage hat sich die alltägliche Kommunikation im digitalen sozialen Leben durch die Pandemie nur noch verstärkt. Kommunikation und Informationen sind verfügbar über verschiedene (direkte) Nachrichtenplattformen. Der immer stärker werdende Einfluss auf den öffentlichen Diskurs und Gesellschaft wird weitläufig akzeptiert. Während die meisten Plattformen auf Nutzerprofile setzen und damit soziale Anerkennung ermöglichen, bleiben andere anonym. Eine neue Art von Anwendung kombiniert Anonymität mit einem starken räumlichen Fokus, der Hyperlokalität. Auswirkungen dieser einzigartigen Kombinationen auf die Plattform weitgehend unbekannt. In dieser Arbeit zeigen wir eine erste datengetriebene ganzheitliche Sicht auf die Jodel Plattform, die beide Eigenschaften kombiniert. Wir nutzen Ground-Truth-Informationen, um eine Fülle von Gemeinschaften in zwei verschiedenen Ländern zu analysieren: Deutschland und dem Königreich Saudi-Arabien. Das Werk folgt einer Plattform-Perspektive bestehend aus vier großen Bereichen rund um das Individuum. Wir beginnen mit einem breit angelegten Diskurs zu drei User Adoption-Prozessen verschiedenerAnwendungen. Nachdem wir Messungen des zur Nutzerakzeptanz der deutschen Anwendung zur digitalen Ermittlung von Kontaktpersonen erörtert haben, zeigen wir auf, wie etablierte Plattformen als Seitenkanal zur Umgehung von Zensur im aktuellen russisch-ukrainischen Hybridkrieg genutzt werden. Ferner zeigen wir insbesondere, dass identische Plattformeigenschaften bei der Nachrichtenanwendung Jodel zu sehr unterschiedlicher Nutzung führen können.Da jede Online-Plattform auf User Interactions aufbaut, charakterisieren wir im Weiteren das Nutzerverhalten auf Jodel in beiden Ländern. Wir erörtern strukturelle und Nutzungsunterschiede, die ausschließlich auf das lokale Nutzerverhalten zurückzuführen sind. Mit einem detaillierten Blick in die saudische Gemeinschaftslandschaft schließen wir eine geografische und gesellschaftliche Forschungslücke zur Plattformnutzung. Darüber hinaus erörtern wir User Content und analysieren die Informationsverbreitung. Wir entwickeln ein mehrdimensionales Klassifizierungsschema für Intentionen (warum) und Themen (was) innerhalb sozialer Medien und stellen unseren Crowdsourced-Vergleich saudi-arabischer Inhalte vor. Mit neuronalen Worteinbettungen als Werkzeug diskutieren wir quantitative und qualitative Erkenntnisse zu Wort-Emoji-Einbettungen, die Semantik widerspiegeln. Ferner interpretieren wir diese Einbettungen algorithmisch und zeigen menschliche Akzeptanz. Im Hinblick auf User Management geben wir detaillierte Einblicke in verteilte Moderationsprozesse und modellieren die Bedrohung durch missbräuchliche Inhalte. Um plattformweit ein gesundes Klima zu erhalten, erörtern wir weiter die Nutzer-Lebensdauer und modellieren diese anhand von Metadaten. Wir schließen mit einem Entwurf für datengestützte QoE-Langzeitanalysen in kontrollierten Massively Multiplayer Online Game (MMOG)-Umgebungen.

In today’s global and digitalized world, the investigation of relational trust as part of social connections has remained a popular and interdisciplinary academic topic. This book explores the idea of trust as a basic type of information processing that might be as old as human existence but has gained new attention with the emergence of online communication channels. The result is a strategic reconsideration of the brain’s role in the formation of social relationships and a new look at how information might shape our confidence in others., Introduction 1 Social Relationships and Trust 2 Between Social and Mental States 2.1 Theoretical Assumptions on the Functionality of Trust 2.1.1 The Role of Trust in the Experience of Others 2.1.2 The Role of Trust in Social Interactions 2.1.3 The Role of Trust in Social Ties and Networks 2.1.4 The Role of Trust in Social Structuring and Information Exchanges 2.2 Empirical Approaches to the Formation of Trust 2.2.1 Behavioral Approaches to Trust 2.2.2 Unidimensional Cognitive Approaches to Trust 2.2.3 Two-Dimensional Cognitive Approaches to Trust 2.2.4 Transformational Cognitive Approaches to Trust 2.2.5 Process-Oriented Approaches to Trust 2.2.6 Network Approaches to Trust 2.3 Trust through the Framework of Human Information Processing 3 Social Presence 3.1 Traditional Views of the Social Environment as a Social Universe 3.2 The Social Environment as a Social Multiverse 3.3 Social Presence and Our Implicit Awareness of Others 3.4 Social Presence in the Context of Information Processing 3.5 The Processing of Social Presence in Direct Copresence 3.6 The Processing of Social Presence in Mediated Interactions 3.6.1 The Processing of Social Presence in Unidirectional Channels 3.6.2 The Processing of Social Presence in Bidirectional Channels 3.6.3 The Processing of Social Presence in Multidirectional Channels 3.7 Social Presence as the Main Stimulus to the Experience of Social Relationships 4 Social Interference 4.1 The Significance of Memory for the Information Processing of Social Presence 4.2 A Simplified Model of the Information Processing of Social Presence 4.3 The Significance of Long-Term Memory for the Processing of Social Presence 4.4 The Memorization of Actor-Related Information Deriving from the Processing of Social Presence 4.5 Intersubjectivity and the Memorization of Relational Information 4.6 Social Interference 4.6.1 Interfering Experience of Interaction 4.6.2 Interfering Character Traits and Features 4.6.3 Interfering Sense of Belonging 4.7 Relational Knowledge as the Foundation for the Perception of Social Relationships 4.8 Relational Knowledge as the Foundation for Trust 5 Trust and Relational Confidence 5.1 Conductional Vigilance 5.2 Conductional Risk and the Inability to Process Contingencies of Social Interaction 5.3 Additional Factors Influencing the Experience of Conductional Vigilance 5.4 Conductional Vigilance as Part of Trust’s Operating Range and Efficacy 5.5 Trust and Its Supply of Relational Confidence 5.6 Trust as Prior to Cognitive Evaluation, Rationality, and the Building of Expectations 5.7 Trust as a Mental Algorithm 6 Trust and Social Interaction 6.1 Trust’s Ease of Conduct and Dynamic Range 6.2 Trust’s Functionality for the Social Performance and Navigation of Individuals 6.3 Trust’s Ease of Conduct as an Attribute of Individuals in Social Ties 6.4 Trust and Multirelationality 6.5 Trust’s General Impact on the Emergence and Disruption of Social Structures 6.6 Trust as Susceptible to Mass Communication 7 Trust and Mass Communication 7.1 Trust in the Light of Expanding Human Communication Networks 7.2 Trust and Public Mediators 7.3 Reliability, Consistency, and Transparency in the Reception of Public Mediators 7.4 Trustworthiness as a Substitute to Trust in Social Interactions 7.5 Trustworthiness as a Product of Collective Memory 7.6 Interdependencies between Trust and Trustworthiness 8 Conclusion Glossary Bibliography Figures, Finanziert durch den Open-Access-Publikationsfonds 2021 der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU Münster).

Online media offer unprecedented access to digital public spheres, largely enhancing users’ opportunities for participation and providing new means for strengthening democratic discourse. At the same time, the last decades have demonstrated that online discourses are often characterised by so-called ‘dark participation’ the spreading of lies and incivility. Using ‘problematic behaviour theory’ as framework and focusing on incivility as a specific form of dark participation, this article investigates the role of users’ personal characteristics, media use, and online experiences in relation to offensive and hateful online behaviour. Using a random-quota survey of the German population, we explored how dark personality traits, political attitudes and emotions, the frequency and spaces of online-media use, and users’ experiences with both civil and uncivil online discourses predicted participants own uncivil behaviour, such as posting, sharing, or liking uncivil content. We found that 46% of the participants who had witnessed incivility in the last three months also engaged in uncivil participation. A hierarchical logistic regression analysis showed that incivility was associated with manipulative personality traits as measured by the dark triad, right-wing populist voting intentions, and frequent social-media use. Experiences with both civil comments and hate speech predicted higher levels of uncivil participation. The strongest predictor was participants’ personal experiences with online victimisation. Overall, the results confirmed that dark participation in the sense of uncivil engagement results from the interplay of personality traits, an online environment that allows for deviant engagement, and, most importantly, participants’ experiences in said environment., Finanziert durch den Open-Access-Publikationsfonds der Westfälischen Wilhelms-Universität Münster (WWU Münster).

„Russland“ und „Feminismus“ scheinen eine fragliche Kombination zu sein. Russland ist eher für neopatriarchale Politik bekannt, die für Feminismus kaum Platz lässt. Doch in den letzten 15 Jahren ist in Russland eine feministische Basisbewegung entstanden. Was tut sie? Wie kann sie sich in einem ungünstigen Kontext durchsetzen? Wie massenhaft und inklusiv ist diese Bewegung und wie geht sie mit inneren Konflikten um? Kerndaten dieser Studie sind qualitative Interviews mit Feminist*innen aus vier Städten in Russland, ergänzt durch mehrjährige Beobachtung der feministischen Szenen. Aufgrund dieser Daten behaupte ich, dass die zeitgenössische feministische Bewegung in Russland eine dezentrale Basisbewegung ist, welche Macht auf mehreren Ebenen der sozialen Organisation herausfordert. Neben dem öffentlichen Protest übt sie diskursive Politik aus und wirkt durch die Einführung neuer Definitionen und Denkweisen direkt auf die Gesellschaft. Intersektional betrachtet wird die Bewegungsbeteiligung durch Mehrfachmarginalisierung aufgrund des Ressourcenmangels und Disempowerment beeinträchtigt. Kollektive Lösungen können Ressourcenumverteilung und Berücksichtigung von Differenz darstellen. Debatten um Differenz und Inklusion sind ein zentraler Bereich, in welchem die feministische Bewegung soziale Innovation herstellt. Schließlich verortet diese Studie die zeitgenössische feministische Bewegung in Russland in einem globalen postkolonialen Kontext. Ich behaupte, dass ein lineares Fortschrittsnarrativ, welches Feminismus als Kennzeichen der westlichen Moderne konstruiert, die Beziehung zwischen russländischen und westlichen Feminismen sowie die Machtdynamiken zwischen Feminist*innen in Metropolen, (post-)kolonialen und nichtkolonialen Peripherien Russlands prägt. An scheinbar für eine feministische Praxis ungeeigneten Orten widerstehen Feminist*innen kolonialen und imperialen Narrativen und betreiben eine auf lokalen Erfahrungen basierende feministische Politik., The words “Russia” and “feminism” seem to be an unlikely combination. Russia is better known for neopatriarchal policies leaving little room for feminism. Yet a grassroots feminist movement has been growing in Russia since the last 15 years. What kind of movement is this? What does it do? How does it sustain itself and grow in a largely unfavorable context? How mass and inclusive is this movement and how does it deal with internal conflicts? The core data in this research are qualitative interviews with feminists in four cities across Russia complemented by direct and online observation of feminist scenes. Drawing upon this data, I argue that the contemporary feminist movement in Russia is a decentralized grassroots movement that challenges power on various levels of social organization. Besides public protest, it notably uses discursive politics that act directly upon society by introducing new definitions and ways of thinking. Feminist communities serve as platforms where these innovations are developed and tried out. From an intersectional perspective, I argue that due to lack of resources and disempowerment, multiple marginalization negatively affects participation in the movement. A collective way to address this can be resource redistribution and consideration of difference. Debates over difference and inclusion are, I argue, a crucial area in which the feminist movement produces social innovation. Finally, this research places the contemporary feminist movement in Russia in a global postcolonial context. I argue that a linear progress narrative that constructs feminism as a hallmark of Western modernity impacts both the relationship between Russian and Western feminisms and power dynamics between feminists in Russian metropolitan centers, (post)colonial and non-colonial peripheries. In places deemed unsuited for feminist practice, I argue, feminists resist colonial and imperial narratives and do feminist politics rooted in local experience.

“How can we understand female gang membership in areas of urban insecurity?” Arising in urban deprived areas where state structures are weak, gangs establish parallel orders pertained by deeply entrenched gender perceptions. The girls in the gangs come from the same precarious backgrounds and participate also in the gangs´ activities. Nonetheless, unlike their male counterparts, female gang members have not received considerable attention in research yet. Little is known about the gang girls in the urban conflict zones and what membership means for them. To understand female membership, this dissertation examines the interplay between the state, the community, the gang and the individual gang girls with regard to deprivation structures that influence the phenomenon of gang girls. Based on a case study in Medellín, Colombia, it illustrates the meaning and consequences of gang life and illuminates the benefits and vulnerabilities membership implies for the girls. The study draws on field work data gained through interviews with state officials, academics, NGO workers and former gang members, both women and men. Revealing insights on intertwining economic, social and security situations of the girls, the study provides a typologisation of female gang membership that acknowledges the diverse appearances of the girl´s belonging to gangs. Female membership is a crucial component that impacts the internal structure of gangs as well as it shapes the dynamics of violence. By considering the role of girls in gangs, a comprehensive analysis of urban insecurity structures is possible. Therefore, this dissertation contributes to the understanding of how violent actors trigger gender dynamics and enforce their coercive orders against the background of fragile statehood., „Welche Rolle übernehmen Frauen in Gangs und welche Bedeutung birgt ihre weibliche Gang-Mitgliedschaft für sie?“ In urbanen marginalisierten Räumen, welche von schwacher staatlicher Ordnung geprägt sind, etablieren Gangs Parallelstrukturen, die von spezifischen Gender-Dynamiken und -Rollenverteilungen geprägt sind. Frauen, die Teil einer Gang sind, kommen meist aus solch prekären Kontexten und partizipiren in vielfältigerweise an Gangaktivitäten. Dennoch erhielten weibliche Gangmitglieder im Gegensatz zu männlichen bisher kaum Beachtung in der Forschung. Es gibt wenig wissenschaftliche Erkenntnisse über Gangfrauen oder die welche Bedeutung ihrer Mitgliedschaft in urbanen Konfliktkontexten zukommt. Um das Phänomen der Zugehörigkeit weiblicher Mitglieder zu Gangs umfassend zu verstehen, untersucht diese Doktorarbeit das Zusammenspiel zwischen staatlicher Ordnung, lokalen Gesellschaftstrukturen, Gangsdynamiken und individuellen Lebensrealitäten der Frauen unter Berücksichtigung der Beeinflussung geschlechter-basierender Deprivationsverhältnisse. Mittels einer Fallstudie in Medellín, Kolumbien, veranschaulicht diese Arbeit die Bedeutung sowie die Konsequenzen weiblicher Gangmitgliedschaft und beleuchtet sowohl Vulnerabilitäten als auch aus der Gangzugehörigkeit entstehende Vorteile für die betreffenden Frauen. Die Erkenntnisse dieser Forschung basieren auf Daten, die im Rahmen von Expert*inneninterviews mit Staatsangestellten, NGO Arbeiter*innen und aktiven wie ehemaligen weiblichen und männlichen Gangmitgliedern durchgeführt wurden. Einblicke in die vielfältigen Verflechtungen ökonomischer, sozialer und sicherheitsbezogener Aspekte im Leben der Frauen bilden hierbei die Basis für eine Typologisierung weiblicher Gangmitgliedschaft, welche die Vielfältigkeit weiblicher Zugehörigkeit zu Gangs analysieren. Die Mitgliedschaft von Frauen in Gangs ist eine nicht nur für die interne Gangstruktur maßgeblich prägende Komponente, sondern wirkt sich auch auf die auftretenden Gewaltdynamiken aus. Die Untersuchung der Rolle von Frauen in Gangs ermöglicht daher ein umfassenderes Verständnis urbaner Unsicherheitsstrukturen, der durch Gewaltakteure verfochtenen Gender-Rollen und der Art, wie diese durch Zwang eigene Ordnungsstrukturen vor dem Hintergrund einer fragilen Staatlichkeit durchsetzen.

When a high-ranking British politician was falsely accused of child abuse by the BBC in November 2012, a wave of short messages followed on the online social network Twitter leading to considerable damage to his reputation. However, not only did the politician’s image suffer considerable damage, moreover, he was also able to sue the BBC for £185,000 in damages. On the relatively new media of the internet and specifically in online social networks, digital wildfires, i.e., fast spreading, counterfactual or even intentionally misleading information occur on a regular basis and lead to severe repercussions. Although the example of the British politician is a simple digital wildfire that only damaged the reputation of a single person, there are more complex digital wildfires whose consequences are more far-reaching. This thesis deals with the capture, automatic processing, and investigation of a complex digital wildfire, namely, the Corona and 5G misinformtionsevent - the idea that the COVID-19 outbreak is somehow connected to the introduction of the 5G wireless technology. In this context, we present a system whose application allows us to acquire large amounts of data from the online social network Twitter and thus create the database from which we extract the digital wildfire in its entirety. Furthermore, we present a framework that provides the playing field for investigating the spread of digital wildfires. The main findings that emerge from the study of the 5G and corona misinformation event can be summarised as follows. Although published work suggests that a purely structure-based analysis of the information spread allows for early detection, there is no way of predictively labelling spreading information as probably leading to a digital wildfire. Digital wildfires do not emerge out of nowhere but find their origin in a multitude of already existing ideas and narratives that are reinterpreted and recomposed in the light of a new situation. It does not matter if ideas and explanations contradict each other. On the contrary, it seems that it is the existence of contradictory explanations that unites supporters from different camps to support a new idea. Finally, it has been shown that the spread of a digital wildfire is not the result of an information cascade in the sense of single, particularly influential short messages within a single medium. Rather, a multitude of small cascades with partly contradictory statements are responsible for the rapid spread. The dissemination media are diverse, and even more so, it is precisely the mix of different media that makes a digital wildfire possible. Als ein hochrangiger britischer Politiker im November 2012 von der BBC fälschlicherweise des Kindesmissbrauchs beschuldigt wurde, folgte eine Welle von Kurznachrichten im sozialen Online-Netzwerk Twitter, die zu einer erheblichen Schädigung seines Rufs führte. Doch nicht nur das Image des Politikers erlitt erheblichen Schaden, er konnte die BBC auch auf 185.000 Pfund Schadensersatz verklagen. In den relativ neuen Medien des Internets und speziell in den sozialen Online-Netzwerken kommt es regelmäßig zu sogenannten Digital Wildfires, d.h. zu sich schnell verbreitenden, kontrafaktischen oder sogar bewusst irreführenden Informationen, mit schwerwiegenden Folgen. Obwohl es sich bei dem Beispiel des britischen Politikers um ein einfaches Digital Wildfire handelt, welches nur den Ruf einer einzelnen Person schädigte, gibt es komplexere Digital Wildfires, deren Folgen weitreichender sind. Diese Arbeit befasst sich mit der Erfassung, automatischen Verarbeitung und Untersuchung eines komplexen Digital Wildfires, nämlich dem Corona- und 5G-Misinformationsevent - der Idee, dass der COVID-19-Ausbruch irgendwie mit der Einführung der 5GMobilfunktechnologie zusammenhängt. In diesem Zusammenhang stellen wir ein System vor, dessen Anwendung es uns ermöglicht, große Datenmengen aus dem sozialen Online-Netzwerk Twitter zu erfassen und so die Datenbank zu erstellen, aus der wir den digitalen Flächenbrand in seiner Gesamtheit extrahieren. Außerdem stellen wir ein Framework vor, welches das Spielfeld für die Untersuchung der Ausbreitung von Digital Wildfires bietet. Die wichtigsten Erkenntnisse, die sich aus der Untersuchung des 5G- und Corona-Misinformationevents ergeben, lassen sich wie folgt zusammenfassen. Obwohl veröffentlichte Arbeiten darauf hindeuten, dass eine rein strukturbasierte Analyse der Informationsausbreitung eine frühzeitige Erkennung ermöglicht, gibt es keine Möglichkeit, die Informationsausbreitung im Voraus als wahrscheinlich zu einem digitalen Flächenbrand führend zu kennzeichnen. Digital Wildfires entstehen nicht aus dem Nichts, sondern haben ihren Ursprung in einer Vielzahl bereits bestehender Ideen und Erzählungen, die im Lichte einer neuen Situation neu interpretiert und zusammengesetzt werden. Dabei spielt es keine Rolle, ob sich Ideen und Erklärungen gegenseitig widersprechen. Im Gegenteil, es scheint, dass gerade das Vorhandensein widersprüchlicher Erklärungen die Befürworter aus verschiedenen Lagern dazu bringt, eine neue Idee zu unterstützen. Schließlich hat sich gezeigt, dass die Ausbreitung eines digitalen Flächenbrandes nicht das Ergebnis einer Informationskaskade im Sinne einzelner, besonders einflussreicher Kurznachrichten innerhalb eines einzigen Mediums ist. Vielmehr ist eine Vielzahl von kleinen Kaskaden mit zum Teil widersprüchlichen Aussagen für die rasante Ausbreitung verantwortlich. Die Verbreitungsmedien sind vielfältig, mehr noch, es ist gerade der Mix aus verschiedenen Medien, der zu einem Digital Wildfire führt.

When Igbo men from Nigeria gathered in a scrap yard in an industrial estate in the Ruhr city of Essen to dissemble cars, refrigerators, and other technical waste, surrounded by the sounds of unfamiliar music and the wafts of exotic foods, they met with incomprehension and mistrust from their neighbouring German citizens and the municipal authorities. The present study offers the very insights into these immigrants’ socio-cultural identity that enable one to overcome such ill-informed responses. It is an ‘ethnography of transnational transactions’ – of managing the trade between the scrap yard and the markets in Lagos and Onitsha and interacting with their German co-citizens in various social and religious contexts. Als Igbo-Männer aus Nigeria sich auf einem Schrottplatz in einem Industriegebiet in der Ruhrstadt Essen versammelten, um Autos, Kühlschränke und anderen technischen Abfall zu zerlegen, umgeben von den Klängen ungewohnter Musik und den Düften exotischer Köstlichkeiten, stießen sie auf Unverständnis und Misstrauen bei ihren deutschen Nachbarn und den städtischen Behörden. Die vorliegende Studie bietet genauere Einblicke in die soziokulturelle Identität dieser Zuwanderer an, die es ermöglichen, solche unreflektierten Reaktionen zu überwinden. Sie ist eine "Ethnographie der transnationalen Transaktionen" - des Handelsprozess zwischen dem Schrottplatz und den Märkten in Lagos und Onitsha und der Interaktion mit den deutschen Mitbürgern in verschiedenen sozialen und religiösen Kontexten.

The main aim of this paper is to investigate how sexist ideology distorts our conceptions of sexual violence and the hermeneutical gaps such an ideology yields. I propose that we can understand the problematic issue of hermeneutical gaps about sexual violence with the help of Fricker’s theory of hermeneutical injustice. By distinguishing between hermeneutical injustice and hermeneutical misfire, we can distinguish between the hermeneutical gap and its consequences for the victim of sexual violence and those of the perpetrator of such violence. I then argue that perpetrators are both morally responsible and accountable for their acts, even if they are the result of a hermeneutical misfire. Ultimately, I show that with regard to sexual violence, we should opt for accountability to change the behaviour of the perpetrator and the social structure. Content warning: The paper discusses sexual violence and difficulties conceptualising experiences of such violence.

This thesis proposes a novel way to describe habit learning and the resulting balancing of goal-directed and habitual behavior using cognitive computational modeling. This approach builds on experimental evidence that habits may be understood as context-dependent automated sequences of behavior embedded in a hierarchical model. These assumptions were implemented in a Bayesian model, where goal-directed action sequences are encoded using a Markov decision process, and habits are interpreted to arise from a Bayesian prior over such sequences. Simulations show that this modeling approach yields key properties of habit learning, such as increased habit strength with increased training duration. This novel mechanistic description may lead to an improved understanding of habit learning mechanisms and individual learning trajectories, which may have implications for mental disorders which are believed to be accompanied by a maladapted balance between goal-directed an habitual control. Diese Arbeit stellt eine neue mechanistische Beschreibung von Gewohnheitslernen und der daraus resultierenden Balance zwischen zielgerichtetem und habituellem Verhalten vor, die auf einem mathematischen kognitiven Modell aufbaut. Der Ansatz beruht auf experimenteller Evidenz, dass Gewohnheiten als kontext-abhängige, automatisierte Verhaltenssequenzen verstanden werden können, die in ein hierarchisches Modell eingebettet sind. Diese Annahmen werden mathematisch in einem Bayes'schen Modell umgesetzt, in dem zielgerichtetes Handeln als ein Markov'scher Entscheidungsprozess implementiert ist und Gewohnheiten aus einer Bayes'schen a-priori Wahrscheinlichkeit von Verhaltenssequenzen entstehen. Simulationen zeigen, dass dieser Ansatz wichtige Eigenschaften von Gewohnheitslernen reproduzieren kann, wie beispielsweise dass längere Trainingsdauern zu stärkeren Gewohnheiten führen. Diese neue mechanistische Beschreibung kann zu einem besseren Verständis individueller Lerntrajektorien und der Mechanismen beitragen, die dem Gewohnheitslernen zugrundeliegen. Dies könnte auch Auswirkungen auf das Verständnis psychischer Erkrankungen haben, bei denen davon ausgegangen wird, dass sie von einer maladaptiven Balance zwischen zielgerichtetem und habituellem Verhalten begleitet werden.

Discourse pervades all areas of human activity. Beyond the use of verbal communication, discourse also extends to non-verbal elements such as body language, facial expressions, intonation and laughter. Despite the wide range of studies that examine the structures and nature of political discourse, very few have looked at the ways in which politicians use non-verbal elements and, in particular, laughter as part of their discourse strategies. This study looks at the use of laughter in the German Bundestag by analysing 16,000 observations of laughter taken from the transcripts of 847 plenary sessions spanning four electoral terms. The study finds that laughter can be used by politicians as a non-verbal means of expressing opinion and making a statement without breaking the stringent rules of conduct. The use of laughter in parliament can provide information on party alliances, both current and traditional, as well as the general ‘mood’ of the electoral period. Due to the changing nature of political debates and the increasing rejection of ‘traditional’ means of doing politics, fascinating changes are taking place in the political landscape.:1 Introduction 2 Discourse analysis 2.1 Political discourse analysis 2.2 Parliamentary debates 2.2.1 According to Klein 2.2.2 Parliamentary discourse as monologue, dialogue or trialogue? 2.2.3 Interjections as parliamentary discourse 2.3 Non-verbal communication 3 Humour 3.1 Humour in politics 3.2 The study of humour in politics 4 Background 4.1 The German Bundestag 4.2 Stenographic reports 4.2.1 Written or spoken language? 4.2.2 The difference between Lachen and Heiterkeit 4.3 Electoral term specifics 5 Data 5.1 Hypotheses 5.2 Description of the analysis 6 Results 7 Discussion 7.1 Reflections 7.2 Outlook 8 Conclusion References

We introduce the concept of social sustainability, intertwined with ecological and economic aspects, to the field of service robots and comparable automation technology. It takes a first step towards a comprehensive guideline that operationalizes and applies social sustainability. By applying this guideline to the project MURMEL we offer a concept that collects and rates social key issues to visualize their individual importance. Social sustainability is an important and often overlooked aspect of sustainable technology development which should be considered in the early development phase.

Background: Prior research focused on the impact of being in a partnership on quality of life from a cross-sectional perspective; the impact of partnership histories has not yet been investigated. Objective: Based on the life-course paradigm and the theory of cumulative (dis)advantages, we address this research gap. Methods: Using pairfam data, we analyse the influence of partnership histories between ages 14 and 41 on depressiveness, overall life satisfaction, and partnership expectations. We demonstrate the additional value of using life-course clusters over simple sequence characteristics by showing that more detailed and accurate conclusions can be drawn. Results: Results highlight that both men and women benefited from being in a stable cohabitational union. Gender differences were found among those who were negatively affected by not establishing a stable cohabitational union. Among men, long-term singles were significantly more depressed, less satisfied, and had more negative partnership expectations than their cohort peers. Among women, those with a history of unstable relationships were less satisfied and had more negative partnership expectations. Conclusions: In line with the theory of cumulative (dis)advantages, the benefits of stable cohabitations were shown to accumulate over time for both genders. The differences found between men and women are convincing in light of research on unequal gender roles within partnerships. Contribution: We add to prior research by demonstrating the value of conducting a gender-sensitive longitudinal analysis of the impacts of partnership trajectories on quality of life.

Stance can be defined as positively or negatively evaluating persons, things, or ideas (Du Bois, 2007). Understanding the stance that people express through social media has several applications: It allows governments, companies, or other information seekers to gain insights into how people evaluate their ideas or products. Being aware of the stance of others also enables social media users to engage in discussions more efficiently, which may ultimately lead to better collective decisions. Since the volume of social media posts is too large to be analyzed manually, computeraided methods for understanding stance are necessary. In this thesis, we study three major aspects of such computer-aided methods: (i) abstract formalizations of stance which we can quantify across multiple social media posts, (ii) the creation of suitable datasets that correspond to a certain formalization, and (iii) stance detection systems that can automatically assign stance labels to social media posts. We examine four different formalizations that differ in how specific the insights and supported use-cases are: Stance on Single Targets defines stance as a tuple consisting of a single target (e.g. Atheism) and a polarity (e.g. being in favor of the target), Stance on Multiple Targets models a polarity expressed towards an overall target and several logically linked targets, and Stance on Nuanced Targets is defined as a stance towards all texts in a given dataset. Moreover, we study Hateful Stance, which models whether a post expresses hatefulness towards a single target (e.g. women or refugees). Machine learning-based systems require training data that is annotated with stance labels. Since annotated data is not readily available for every formalization, we create our own datasets. On these datasets, we perform quantitative analyses, which provide insights into how reliable the data is, and into how social media users express stance. Our analysis shows that the reliability of datasets is affected by subjective interpretations and by the frequency with which targets occur. Additionally, we show that the perception of hatefulness correlates with the personal stance of the annotators. We conclude that stance annotations are, to a certain extent, subjective and that future attempts on data creation should account for this subjectivity. We present a novel process for creating datasets that contain subjective stances towards nuanced assertions and which provide comprehensive insights into debates on controversial issues. To investigate the state-of-the-art of stance detection methods, we organized and participated in relevant shared tasks, and conducted experiments on our own datasets. Across all datasets, we find that comparatively simple methods yield a competitive performance. Furthermore, we find that neuronal approaches are competitive, but not clearly superior to more traditional approaches on text classification. We show that approaches based on judgment similarity – the degree to which texts are judged similarly by a large number of people – outperform reference approaches by a large margin. We conclude that judgment similarity is a promising direction to achieve improvements beyond the state-of-the-art in automatic stance detection and related tasks such as sentiment analysis or argument mining., Stance (dt: Haltung, Position oder Standpunkt) bezeichnet die positive oder negative Evaluation von Personen, Dingen oder Ideen (Du Bois, 2007). Versteht man den Stance, den Menschen in den sozialen Medien zum Ausdruck bringen, eröffnen sich vielfältige Anwendungsmöglichkeiten: Auf der einen Seiten können Regierungen, Unternehmen oder andere Informationssuchende Einblicke darüber gewinnen, wie Menschen ihre Entscheidungen, Ideen oder Produkte bewerten. Auf der anderen Seite können Social Media Nutzer, denen der Stance anderer Nutzer bekannt ist, effizientere Diskussionen führen und letztendlich bessere kollektive Entscheidungen treffen. Da die Anzahl der in sozialen Medien getätigter Beiträge zu hoch für eine manuelle Analyse ist, sind computergestützte Methoden zum Verständnis von Stance notwen- dig. In dieser Arbeit untersuchen wir drei Hauptaspekte solcher computergestützten Methoden: (i) abstrakte Stance Formalisierungen, die sich über mehrere Social Media Beiträge hinweg quantifizieren lassen, (ii) die Erstellung geeigneter Datensätze, die einer bestimmten Formalisierung entsprechen, und (iii) automatische Systeme zur Erkennung von Stance, die Social Media Beiträgen ein Stance Label zuordnen können. Wir untersuchen vier verschiedene Formalisierungen, die sich darin unterscheiden, wie spezifisch die Erkenntnisse sind, welche sie bei der Analyse von Social Media Debatten liefern: Stance gegenüber einzelnen Targets definiert Stance als ein Tupel, welches aus einem einzigen Target (z.B. Atheismus) und einer Polarität (z.B. für oder gegen das Target sein) besteht. Stance gegenüber mehreren Targets modelliert eine Polarität, die gegenüber einem übergeordneten Target und mehreren logisch verknüpften Targets aus- gedrückt wird. Stance gegenüber nuancierten Targets, modelliert Stance als eine Polarität gegenüber allen Texten in einem bestimmten Datensatz. Darüber hinaus untersuchen wir hasserfüllten Stance als eine Formalisierung, die modelliert, ob ein Text Hass gegenüber einem einzelnen Target (z.B. Frauen oder Flüchtlingen) ausdrückt. Systeme, die auf Methoden des maschinellen Lernens basieren, benötigen eine ausreichende Menge von mit Labeln versehenen Trainingsdaten. Da solche Daten nicht für jede Formalisierung verfügbar sind, wurden im Rahmen dieser Arbeit eigene Datensätze erstellt. Auf der Basis dieser Datensätze führen wir quantitative Analysen durch, welche Aufschluss darüber geben, wie zuverlässig die Annotation der Daten ist und in welcher Weise Social Media-Nutzer Stance kommunizieren. Unsere Analyse zeigt, dass die Zuverlässigkeit unserer Daten durch subjektive Interpretationen der Annotatoren und durch die Häufigkeit, mit der bestimmte Targets auftreten, beeinflusst wird. Unsere Studien zeigen weiterhin, dass die Wahrnehmung von Hass mit dem persönlichen Stance der Annotatoren korreliert, woraus wir folgern, dass Stance Annotationen bis zu einem gewissen Grad subjektiv sind und dass diese Subjektivität bei der Datenerstellung zukünftig berücksichtigt werden sollte. Darüber hinaus schlagen wir einen neuartigen Prozess für die Erstellung von Datensätzen vor, die subjektive Annotationen beinhalten, die der Forma- lisierung Stance gegenüber nuancierten Targets entsprechen und damit umfassende Einblicke in die zugrundeliegende Social Media Debatte liefert. Um den Stand der Technik der automatischen Stance Erkennung zu untersuchen, haben wir relevante shared tasks organisiert und an ihnen teilgenommen, sowie Experimente an eigenen Datensätzen durchgeführt. Unsere Untersuchungen zeigen über alle Experimente und Datensätze hinweg, dass vergleichsweise einfache Methoden eine äußerst wettbewerbsfähige Leistung erbringen. Des Weiteren zeigen unsere Betrachtungen, dass neuronale Ansätze zwar wettbewerbsfähig, aber nicht deutlich besser als herkömmliche Ansätze zur Textklassifizierung sind. Wir zeigen, dass Ansätze, die auf der Beurteilungsähnlichkeit basieren – definiert als das Ausmaß mit dem Texte von einer großen Anzahl von Menschen ähnlich beurteilt werden – die Leistung von Referenzansätzen deutlich übertreffen. Daraus schließen wir, dass diese Beurteilungsähnlichkeit eine vielversprechende Richtung ist, um weitere Verbesserungen in den Bereichen automatischen Erkennung von Stance und verwandten Aufgaben wie Sentimentanalyse oder Argument Mining zu erzielen.

What do the relaxed social events held by companies and organizations do for continued gender inequality? This article argues that outings, barbecues and parties offer opportunities for members of an organization to challenge unequal gender regimes. But they can also end up maintaining these inequalities instead. The article draws on Joan Acker’s theory of gendered organizations, and Judith Butler’s notion of gender performativity. Based on 208 accounts of organizations’ social events, it identifies the following four areas of gender performativity and their varying significance in reaffirming or challenging unequal gender regimes: gender images, status differences, the body and sexuality. The findings indicate that practices reaffirming unequal gender regimes outnumber practices that possibly balance or break them. Paradoxically, practices that challenge unequal gender regimes, when joined with powerful responses from the hitherto privileged party, can form a vicious circle which again ends up continuing unequal gender regimes. The article provides a more nuanced understanding of ambivalences and the contested nature of gender regimes which is important in identifying avenues for gender equality.

Media use can be considered as an integral part of virtual communication and thus of present-day human interaction. Nevertheless, research on media use and effects still largely relies on laboratory experiments, treating it as a stable input condition, rather than as a function of human appropriation. In this study, we propose a conceptualization of virtual communication as a dynamic construct dependent on media appropriation, particularly of compensatory adaptation processes. Using longitudinal data gathered from 165 individuals, nested in 34 project teams, we explore compensatory adaptation as a function of communication intensity and physical media richness and develop a continuous score of virtual communication accounting for these compensatory processes. Multilevel analyses demonstrate a significant influence of this communication measure on team performance, increasing over time. These results are discussed with regards to their implications for theories of media use and effects and their relevance for real-life communication processes.

Die Allgemeine Erklärung der Menschenrechte der Vereinten Nationen von 1948 – aber auch frühere Menschenrechtserklärungen – sah sich stets Kritik aus unterschiedlichen Richtungen ausgesetzt. Diese beinhaltete sowohl Einwände z.B. von religiöser, feministischer und kulturrelativistischer Seite als auch Bedenken von Behindertenverbänden. Eine besonders markante Kritik ist jedoch die des Atomismus, welche in unterschiedlichen Variationen mindestens seit Hegel immer wieder vorgebracht wird. Sie besagt, Menschenrechte seien individualistische Rechte mit solidaritätszersetzendem Charakter. Begründet wird dies damit, dass die Betonung des Individuums als Träger unveräußerlicher Rechte hier notwendigerweise den Egoismus des Einzelnen befördere und moralischen Partikularismus zur Folge hätte. Die vorliegende Arbeit begegnet diesem Vorwurf, indem sie aufzeigt, dass es dem ihm zugrundeliegende Solidaritätsbegriff an Komplexität mangelt um das Phänomen adäquat zu beschreiben. Eben jener Mangel ist es jedoch, welcher den Atomismusvorwurf erst ermöglicht, da diejenige Solidarität, welche hier beschrieben wird, notwendigerweise an der Komplexität moderner Gesellschaften scheitern muss. Der Solidaritätsbegriff, welcher im Kontrast dazu im vorliegenden Text vorgestellt wird, überwindet dieses Problem. Er basiert zu großen Teilen auf der Theorie Émile Durkheims, geht aber auch darüber hinaus. Mit Hilfe von Durkheims Konzepten der mechanischen und organischen Solidarität im Zusammenhang mit der – der Menschenrechtsidee nahestehenden – Idee des Kult des Individuums wird gezeigt, dass Menschenrechte keineswegs schädlich für die Solidarität in modernen Gesellschaften sind. Vielmehr fördern sie bereits bestehende Solidaritäten und erzeugen zudem neue Formen menschenrechtlicher Solidarität. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, declared by the United Nations in 1948 but also earlier Human Rights declarations, have always been the target of criticism. Objections to Human Rights include religious criticism, feminist reproval, and cultural relativistic arguments, as well as concerns expressed by associations supporting the disabled. One prominent objection refers to Atomism, which has been a central argument since Hegel introduced it. The objection of Atomism claims that Human Rights are corroding social solidarity, due to a disproportional focus on the individual as bearer of inalienable rights. Thus, Human Rights are said to promote egotistic individuals, along with moral particularism. In the present text, the Atomist objection is rendered irrelevant, as its definition of social solidarity lacks the complexity to describe contemporary societies. Thus, Atomism can be aptly criticized, as the social solidarity it objects to no longer applies. Instead, the concept of social solidarity is redefined by building on the theory of Émile Durkheim. In referring to Durkheim’s ideas, of mechanic solidarity and organic solidarity, as well as the concept of the Cult of the Individual, considered as closely related to Human Rights, it becomes evident that Human Rights do not harm solidarity in contemporary societies after all. Rather, Human Rights promote existing solidarities and, moreover, create new forms of solidarity.

Published in print by Universitätsverlag der TU Berlin, ISBN 978-3-7983-2932-4 Space has to be discussed once one focuses on the commons, the natural and cultural resources securing the well-being of a community. The question of availability of these resources includes asking for the place where they are accessible or where they are made accessible and thus always the question of the spatial organization of this society. This publication wants to provide a first overview about historical types of commons, about contemporary theories on urban commons, and speculate about possible forms of future commoning. Die Beschäftigung mit den Gemeingütern, den elementaren natürlichen und kulturellen Ressourcen, die dem Wohle der Gemeinschaft dienen, fordert auch eine Auseinandersetzung mit Räumen. Denn die Frage nach der Verfügbarkeit von Ressourcen schließt die Frage nach dem Ort, an dem diese für die Gemeinschaft zugänglich sind oder zugänglich gemacht werden, und damit immer auch die Frage nach der räumlichen Organisation dieser Gemeinschaft, ein. Diese Publikation gibt einen ersten Überblick über historische Typen von Allmenden, über die aktuelle Theoriebildung zum Thema des urbanen Gemeingutes und spekuliert über mögliche Formen von zukünftigem Commoning.

Users of social networking sites such as Facebook frequently post self-portraits on their profiles. While research has begun to analyze the motivations for posting such pictures, less is known about how selfies are evaluated by recipients. Although producers of selfies typically aim to create a positive impression, selfies may also be regarded as narcissistic and therefore fail to achieve the intended goal. The aim of this study is to examine the potentially ambivalent reception of selfies compared to photos taken by others based on the Brunswik lens model Brunswik (1956). In a between-subjects online experiment (N = 297), Facebook profile mockups were shown which differed with regard to picture type (selfie vs. photo taken by others), gender of the profile owner (female vs. male), and number of individuals within a picture (single person vs. group). Results revealed that selfies were indeed evaluated more negatively than photos taken by others. Persons in selfies were rated as less trustworthy, less socially attractive, less open to new experiences, more narcissistic and more extroverted than the same persons in photos taken by others. In addition, gender differences were observed in the perception of pictures. Male profile owners were rated as more narcissistic and less trustworthy than female profile owners, but there was no significant interaction effect of type of picture and gender. Moreover, a mediation analysis of presumed motives for posting selfies revealed that negative evaluations of selfie posting individuals were mainly driven by the perceived motivation of impression management. Findings suggest that selfies are likely to be evaluated less positively than producers of selfies might suppose. OA Förderung 2017

Sustainable development needs sustainable production and sustainable consumption. During the last decades the encouragement of sustainable production has been the focus of research and policy makers under the implicit assumption that the observable increasing ‘green’ values of consumers would also entail a growing sustainable consumption. However, it has been found that the actual purchasing behaviour often deviates from ‘green’ attitudes. This phenomenon is called the attitude-behaviour gap. It is influenced by individual, social and situational factors. The main purchasing barriers for sustainable (organic) food are price, lack of immediate availability, sensory criteria, lack or overload of information as well as the low-involvement feature of food products in conjunction with well-established consumption routines, lack of transparency and trust towards labels and certifications. The last three barriers are mainly of a psychological nature. Especially the low-involvement feature of food products due to daily purchase routines and relatively low prices tends to result in fast, automatic and subconscious decisions based on a so-called human mental system 1, derived from Daniel Kahneman’s2 model in behavioural psychology. In contrast, the human mental system 2 is especially important for the transformations of individual behaviour towards a more sustainable consumption. Decisions based on the human mental system 2 are slow, logical, rational, conscious and arduous. This so-called dual action model also influences the reliability of responses in consumer surveys. It seems that the consumer behaviour is the most unstable and unpredictable part of the entire supply chain and requires special attention. Concrete measures to influence consumer behaviour towards sustainable consumption are highly complex. This paper presents a review of interdisciplinary research literature on the complexity of sustainable food consumption and an empirical analysis of selected countries worldwide. In a ‘best practice’ case study, it analyses the organic food sector in Denmark, especially in the 80ies and 90ies, where the market share rose to a leading position worldwide. The Danish example demonstrates that common efforts and a shared responsibility of consumers, business, interdisciplinary researchers, mass media and policy are needed. It takes pioneers of change who succeed in assembling a ‘critical mass’ willing to increase its ‘sustainable’ behaviour. Considering the strong psychological barriers of consumers and the continuing low market share of organic food, proactive policy measures would be conducive to foster the personal responsibility of the consumers and offer incentives towards a sustainable production. Also, further self-obligations of companies (Corporate Social Responsibility – CSR) as well as more transparency and simplification of reliable labels and certifications are needed to encourage the process towards a sustainable development., Proceedings in Food System Dynamics, Proceedings in System Dynamics and Innovation in Food Networks 2015

Abe Aamidor, Jim A. Kuypers, Susan Wiesinger: Media Smackdown: Deconstructing the News and the Future of Journalism; Martin Schreiber, Clemens Zimmermann (Hg.): Journalism and Technological Change: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Trends

Book review of Illusions in Motion. Media Archaeology of the Moving Panorama and Related Spectacles. Cambridge, London: MIT Press 2013, 438 S., ISBN 978-0-262-01851-7, 45,- USD / 31,95 GBP

Screen Culture and the Social Question 1880-1914

Elizabeth Evans: Transmedia Television: Audiences, New Media and Daily Life

Subjects in laboratory experiments are prone to effects of social desirability. This reactive behavior is due to the subjects perceived anonymity in the entire experiment. Especially, socially desirable behavior is also triggered by assembling and/or payment procedures that are not anonymous. Indeed, in a laboratory experiments with a one-shot prisoner’s dilemma (PD) and perfect stranger anonymity subjects (n=174) showed significantly different cooperation rates depending on the anonymity conditions during assembling and the payment procedure, ranging from 33.3% to 19.9%. In addition, a first experiment with the PD and anonymous payment and double blind experimenting lead to a cooperation rate of 33.3%. Only after the same subjects (n=34) took part a second time in same, entire experiment, the cooperation rate fell to 8.8%. Therefore this measurement of the cooperation rates in a laboratory experiment failed the test-retest check on reliability. This happened though all manipulations used fulfilled the standards of fully anonymous experimenting. This means that such processes could go unnoticed and bias the results of any standard laboratory experiment on cooperation in one shot decisions. Therefore, in accordance with the textbook logic of laboratory experiments, but in contrast to a common practice (cf. Behavioral Game Theory) marginal totals from cooperation experiments in the laboratory should not be interpreted.

This paper studies if the Minimax theorem holds for the behaviour of trained and untrained actors in the field. This is explored with data from 1043 football penalty kicks from professionals of the German Bundesliga and for 268 penalty kicks from untrained players. Minimax makes good predictions about the collective patterns emerging from the behaviour of experienced actors, as well as about their individual strategic actions. However, this is not true for untrained actors. In the next step it is explored if, the professional players learned their behaviour, or if they were selected into their roles because they had the required abilities. The data suggests that the professionals were selected by the competitive conditions of professional sports.

This essay explores the dynamics of problem page emotion-dialogue by looking at the letters that mid-century magazine readers wrote about heterosexual love, and the advice that they were offered. It focuses in particular on the advice columns of one of Britain’s most popular women’s magazines, “Woman’s Own”, analysing a sample of problem pages drawn from the period 1940 to 1960. Whilst there has been significant historiographical interest in the provision of modern sexual education, historians have paid less attention to the mechanisms through which emotional advice circulated and, crucially,the ways in which it was received. The focus here is upon what we might call ‘everyday’ forms of advice. The article uses a case study of relationships between agony aunts and their readers to map broader shifts in emotional authority. It presents advice columns as a cultural space where authentic personal feeling was in conflict with prescribed standards; where the authority of family could conflict with that of the expert; where the therapeutic state might be set up as a counterpoint to community norms. The article suggests that romantic love lay at the heart of the twentieth century battle between prescription and practice, ideas and experience, and, crucially, between duty and self-expression.