The 2013 Steubenville, Ohio, rape case featured a sadly familiar story of juvenile acquaintance rape involving star football players; what captured national interest in the case, however, was how the rapists and peer witnesses alike captured video and photos of the sexual assault and disseminated them swiftly and publicly via social media sites. This qualitative textual analysis utilizes framing theory to explore how national news coverage framed new media technology in relation to the Steubenville rape case, particularly how technology was framed as witness, galvanizer, and threat during the rape and its aftermath. Implications of these frames, as well as a lack of broader sexual assault context in the media coverage, are considered.

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Entertainment programming such as the television satire The Office relies upon audience members’ understanding of both Western gender norms and stereotypes as well as corporate codes of behavior and management within an office space. This qualitative analysis of The Office utilizes real-world workplace scholarship on gender as a framework to explore the ways in which the show addresses workplace gender issues, including male and female workplace hierarchies, corporate initiatives serving as an unintended catalyst for gendered tensions, and mixed-gender interactions in the form of informal office interaction and office romances. Though the show’s satire does effectively ridicule facets of patriarchal authority and hegemonic masculinity in the American workplace through its mockumentary production style and use of “excess as hyperbole,” the lack of repercussions for offending characters and stereotypical portrayals of women in the workplace undercut the The Office’s transgressive potential.

This article analyzes customer reviews of Fareed Zakaria’s best-selling book, The Post-American World posted on Amazon.com . Zakaria’s book explores the emergence of a new world order in which the “rise of the rest,” particularly China and India, threatens the geopolitical dominance of the United States. Drawing on reception studies of print culture, debates over the virtual public sphere, and sponsorship of literacy, our article’s textual analysis of 281 customer reviews offers a window into audience reactions to this public intellectual’s deliberations on the beginning of a possible decentering of America in certain realms of globalization. Our analysis of consumer citizenship in Amazon.com ’s reviewer space identifies three dominant frameworks or “horizons of expectations” that structured interpretations of The Post-American World: readers’ framing of the book as a tool to foster enlightened citizenship, reviewers’ affective rhetoric of nation building, and the impact of Zakaria’s status as an immigrant intellectual on readers’ responses.

During the more than three days stretching between the 2020 U.S. election day and when the presidential race was officially “called” for Democratic candidate Joe Biden, a blizzard of memes snowed down across social media. This project analyzes more than 500 of these “election week limbo” memes, created and shared during a prolonged moment of collective political anticipation and anxiety. What emerged in this sample was a spontaneous, collaborative and evolving moment of meme-based storytelling that mirrored a classic five-act storytelling structure. Meme-ers sustained this narrative for most of a week, not simply to generate new, humorous takes on an iconic photo. Rather, they collectively evolved the shared tale of a distinct political moment during an isolating pandemic, capturing the “election limbo” story memetically as moods shifted, plot twists emerged and unlikely heroes came to the forefront, creating a distinctly collaborative, narrative, and evolving meme storytelling experience.