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Locative media art has been a popular topic to study, yet the focus tends to be on examining the artworks themselves, which have challenged us to think about the complex interrelations of space, place and time in novel ways. In this paper we offer a different view of locative media art by examining the community practices that can emerge through the production of this work. By highlighting how the social media platform, WhatsApp, facilitated communication and arts practice during a recent summer school on the theme of locative media, we demonstrate how cultures of enthusiasm can emerge from the adjacent digital spaces of locative media art. Our reflections highlight the ways that enthusiasm for locative media art and towards other participants was produced through WhatsApp spaces, through both enthusiastic language practices and atmospheres of enthusiasm. Ultimately, we aim to reveal that locative media is not only a technology that is used to shape our relationship to space, place and time, but that it is also a technology which encourages a set of community driven practices. In doing so we contribute to the literature on locative media art by giving attention to the communities of practice that form around it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The 'community' of community media has long been a contentious question in the field. Given the wide range of interpretations of community and the ongoing fragmentation of media audiences, it has never been more important for community media to define and delineate their audiences. One approach to this is developing and maintaining a sense of mediatized community identity through content production. Community identity represents an under-researched area in community media studies. While community media audiences and broadcasters have themselves been the subject of research, how a sense of community identity is created through content production is less understood. This article details a critical discourse analysis of programming from ten different community radio stations within the same geographic location. The findings of this research reveal the very different approaches that stations take to developing a mediatized community identity. Several stations approach identity expression by engaging in overt performances of 'localness', while the growing influence of commercialization was also observed among many stations. What this research highlights is that the performance of community identity on community radio is integral in shaping the listening communities, as well as delineating community radio from its commercial and state-run counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to empirical evidence, immigration is seen as increasing rates of crime among the public. However, most people draw from secondary sources—including local news media—to form such opinions. We examine the contextual factors impacting whether and how local media describe the immigration–crime nexus. Using data constructed from content analysis of over 3,800 news articles, we find that the likelihood of local media providing coverage of immigration and crime varies as a function of the violent crime rate, minority population size and growth, and religious and political conservatism. Additionally, news "frames" depend on contextual factors too: Articles in more affluent communities with growing minority populations link immigration to higher rates of crime but are less likely to discuss the protective effects of immigration or immigrant refugees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes and evaluates the "Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) in Schools" project; which was designed as a public health intervention to explore the extent to which focusing on schools as community assets can promote well-being for pupils, their school and the local community. The paper reviews the literature in relation to the background and context of the ABCD model within the field of community development, where the focus is identifying and mobilising the positive capabilities, skills, talents and strengths of individuals, associations and communities in order to bring about social change. As such, this project was established using the principles of ABCD. It was designed to ascertain the extent to which ABCD could be feasibly utilised in the school environment and to explore its possibilities in terms of being a force for change. The project piloted two practical pupil-led ABCD initiatives to develop the life skills, resilience, well-being and future employability of the pupils involved. This ABCD project focused on Year 9 pupils in the foundation learning tier in two secondary academies and also involved, as mentors, undergraduate students from two local universities. The location for the project is a city in the North Midlands of England which experiences areas of high levels of socio-economic disadvantage. Following a rationale for the project and description of the two initiatives which evolved, the authors highlight the lessons learned and suggest the ABCD approach can be regarded as promising practice for any (school) community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction to the special issue considers how independent research on mis/disinformation campaigns can be conducted in a corporate environment hostile to academic research. We provide an overview of the disinformation landscape in the wake of the Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal and social platforms' decision to enforce access lockdowns and the throttling of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) for data collection. We argue that the governance shift from user communities to social media algorithms, along with social platforms' intensive emphasis on generating revenue from user data, has eroded the mutual trust of networked publics and opened the way for dis/misinformation campaigns. We discuss the importance of open, public APIs for academic research as well as the unique challenges of collecting social media data to study highly ephemeral mis/disinformation campaigns. The introduction concludes with an assessment of the growing data access gap that not only hinders research of public interest, but that may also preclude researchers from identifying meaningful research questions as activity on social platforms becomes increasingly more inscrutable and unobservable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The future of the traditional news media in the changing digital landscape is a topic of much scholarship and debate as newspaper circulations and advertising revenues plummet across the globe and audiences become increasingly spoilt for choice when it comes to accessing news and information. At the same time there has been a flurry of interest in the role and place of small news outlets dubbed local, community and regional publications. This paper aims to theorise the role and place of small newspapers to connect people with each other. In doing so, it reconceptualises the theory of social capital as it relates to small newspapers. It argues that the small-town press is in a particularly powerful position to actively connect people with each other, across physical and digital spaces and public/private domains. It also argues the need to recognise and study the more subtle ways news outlets foster connections between everyday, ordinary people. I draw on the concept of “mediated social capital” and its associated prisms of bonding, bridging and linking as a way of understanding this in regards to small newspapers. “Mediated social capital”, repositions social capital theory to consider the small newspaper's ability to connect people as a resource of advantage which it may utilise to build or maintain its position of power. The concept provides scope to consider the role of local media to consciously and unconsciously connect people within its networks with one another, across digital and physical spaces, to control the information that connects people, and to benefit from that power. It also acknowledges the inequalities that may arise from this. Importantly, mediated social capital extends beyond discussions about the democratic ideal of the press to acknowledge the role of the news media in shaping the everyday interactions and situations in which people might connect with one another. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study examines whether the Internet is increasingly a part of everyday neighborhood interactions, and in what specific contexts Internet use affords the formation of local social ties. Studies of Internet and community have found that information and communication technologies provide new opportunities for social interaction, but that they may also increase privatism by isolating people in their homes. This paper argues that while the Internet may encourage communication across great distances, it may also facilitate interactions near the home. Unlike traditional community networking studies, which focus on bridging the digital divide, this study focuses on bridging the divide between the electronic and parochial realms. Detailed, longitudinal social network surveys were completed with the residents of four contrasting neighborhoods over a period of three years. Three of the four neighborhoods were provided with a neighborhood email discussion list and a neighborhood website. Hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) was used to model over time the number of strong and weak ties, emailed, met in-person, and talked to on the telephone. The neighborhood email lists were also analyzed for content. The results suggest that with experience using the Internet, the size of local social networks and email communication with local networks increases. The addition of a neighborhood email list further increases the number of weak neighborhood ties, but does not increase communication multiplexity. However, neighborhood effects reduce the influence of everyday Internet use, as well as the experimental intervention, in communities that lack the context to support local tie formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]