KeywordsParadoxical though it may seem, neglect of the past entails imperfect understanding of the present. Lasswell, Lerner, and Speier (1979)

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Twitter has been cited as a key factor behind a number of recent protest movements. Through interviews with heavy users of the #wiunion hashtag, this study examines the motivations and perceptions behind its usage during the 2011 Wisconsin labor protests. Findings suggest these users see a blurred boundary between citizen journalism and activism, but that their Twitter behavior is driven in part by distrust of traditional news sources and a desire to present an alternative. Notably, most do not see themselves as citizen journalists because they see journalism as an institutional, rather than individual, practice. Their orientation toward information credibility also diverges from traditional journalism, relying on interpersonal trust and the availability of visual evidence. These findings are discussed in the broader context of protest mobilization through information gathering and sharing.

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As digital media technologies have evolved and become more powerful, the prevalence of mixed-media content-that is, content that mixes multiple media such as text and video-has increased considerably. Perhaps nowhere is this more apparent than YouTube, now the Web's third most trafficked site. YouTube provides for video sharing in an environment otherwise dominated by textual titles, descriptions, and comments. As such, it is an ideal venue in which to examine the impact of intramedium interaction on message evaluation. This study uses a survey experiment to test first-person and third-person evaluations of campaign ads from the Obama and Romney campaigns, and the comments posted about them on YouTube, using two real ads and one set of fake comments. Findings suggest that partisan perceptions of the manipulated ads transfer to the constant comments, and that the contextual cue of the YouTube environment reciprocally impacts partisan evaluation of the ads themselves.