Mass media digitization is an unfolding phenomenon, posing novel societal opportunities and challenges that researchers are beginning to note. We build on and extend MIS research on process digitization and digital versus traditional communication media to study how and to what extent social media-one form of digital mass media-are emancipatory (i.e., permitting widespread participation in public discourse and surfacing of diverse perspectives) versus hegemonic (i.e., contributing to ideological control by a few). While a pressing concern to activists and scholars, systematic study of this issue has been elusive, owing partially to the complexity of the emancipation and hegemony concepts. Using a case study approach, we iteratively engaged with data on the discourse surrounding the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) and source literature to identify six facets of interpretive media packages (i.e., competing social constructions of an issue) as measurable constructs pertinent to emancipation and hegemony. These facets included three structural constraints (on authorship, citation, and influence) and three content restrictions (on frames, signatures, and emotion). We investigated propositions regarding effects of social versus traditional media and lean versus rich social media on these interpretive media package facets by comparing the SOPA discourse across two lean traditional and social media (newspapers and Twitter), and two rich traditional and social media (television and YouTube). Our findings paradoxically revealed social media to be emancipatory with regard to structural constraints, but hegemonic with regard to an important content restriction (i.e., frames). Lean social media mitigated structural advantages and exacerbated content problems. These findings suggest that, as with traditional media, some inevitable evils accompany the societal benefits of social media and that mass media is having a detrimental effect on public discourse. We offer practical steps by which private and public institutions may counter this effect, theoretical implications for wider consideration of the six interpretive media package facets proposed here, and encouragement to MIS researchers to increase efforts to compare different digitized processes so that a more comprehensive theory of the effects of different forms of digitized processes can be developed.

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This research examines how an oppressed group, the Klamath Tribes of Oregon, used an information communication technology (ICT) for the human development objective of cultural identity restoration, one component of emancipation. Within this manuscript is depicted a process model of how ICT tools can be used for human development through emancipatory pedagogy, ie, the communication of knowledge in a way that promotes critical reflection and collective action. Combining interpretive and critical methods, I describe how the Klamath's ICT reflected the emancipatory journey of those creating it and empowered the Klamath to lead ICT users toward emancipation. An interpretive approach revealed that ICT framing tools promoted awareness of the Klamath, awareness of the problem the Klamath sought to address, and awareness of societal systems of power that enforced the Klamath's problem, while ICT tactic tools enabled “the aware” to engage in solutions. Notably, the Klamath shirked prevailing practices in ICT for development. Consistent with my critical approach, I use the Klamath case to suggest normative recommendations for the use of ICT for social good.

The prospect of exposure to TCDD from Agent Orange in ground troops in Vietnam seems unlikely in light of the environmental dissipation of TCDD, little bioavailability, and the properties of the herbicides and circumstances of application that occurred. Photochemical degradation of TCDD and limited bioavailability of any residual TCDD present in soil or on vegetation suggest that dioxin concentrations in ground troops who served in Vietnam would have been small and indistinguishable from background levels even if they had been in recently treated areas. Laboratory and field data reported in the literature provide compelling evidence on the fate and dislodgeability of herbicide and TCDD in the environment. This evidence of the environmental fate and poor bioavailability of TCDD from Agent Orange is consistent with the observation of little or no exposure in the veterans who served in Vietnam. Appreciable accumulation of TCDD in veterans would have required repeated long-term direct skin contact of the type experienced by United States (US) Air Force RANCH HAND and US Army Chemical Corps personnel who handled or otherwise had direct contact with liquid herbicide, not from incidental exposure under field conditions where Agent Orange had been sprayed.

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