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Digital media is essential to sustaining communication with various types of social ties. However, older adults (aged 65+) are reported to be the least likely to use digital media. While statistics show that older adults are increasingly using more digital media, evidence shows this is predominately aging long-term users of digital media rather than older adults adopting new digital media. To investigate this “grey divide” and adoption of digital media by older adults, this study qualitatively analyses semi-structured interviews of 41 individuals aged 65 and older from the East York region of Toronto, Canada. Our findings suggest that satisfaction with personal digital skill levels and attitudes toward digital media influence the adoption of new digital technology in older adults. Additionally, we discuss the benefits and challenges older adults face when deciding to adopt new digital technologies. Finally, we offer the implications of this research and provide insights for training and policy development.

Chapter in ACRL publication The Data Literacy Cookbook. This recipe is a guide to preparing an instructional session aimed at postsecondary students in the social or health sciences or related disciplines on locating, evaluating, and using secondary data sources as information resources. Who collects data? Where can you access them? Why are data available on some topics and not others? Why are some statistics available at a detailed level of geography and others only nationally? What are some key limitations of official statistics, and where can information be found to fill in the gaps? This recipe uses these questions to encourage students to consider how data are used as information sources

WeChat is a popular Chinese social media platform that emphasizes mobile internet services rather than PC internet services. What further distinguishes WeChat from other social media sites is its multipurpose platform, which integrates a range of applications and features. With its large and diverse user base, vast amounts of user-generated content, and increasing global reach, WeChat provides unique opportunities for researchers to examine Chinese society relying on new data sources that can enhance or even substitute traditional data collection methods such as surveys. WeChat can also provide insights into new digital phenomena including social movements, online groups, propaganda, and e-governance. This chapter aims to serve as a guide for scholars who are interested in conducting either a quantitative or qualitative study of WeChat. First, we briefly overview the history of WeChat, the role of state regulation in WeChat’s development, WeChat’s various features, and the adoption and use of WeChat. Next, we provide a roadmap to the type of scholarship investigating WeChat that has been completed to date to demonstrate both what the pressing research questions are as well as what research gaps need further attention. We then review some of the frequently used methods and discuss challenges and opportunities. We conclude the paper with a summary of best practices on data collection, addressing visual data, and handling relationships between participants and researchers for WeChat scholarship.

Silver compounds may be absorbed through inhalation, but there are no quantitative human data on the extent of this phenomenon. Silver salts may be absorbed by up to 10%–20% after ingestion. After ingestion in humans, the highest concentrations of silver are usually found in the liver and spleen, but also to some extent in the muscles, skin, and brain. Silver may also be absorbed through dermal exposure, especially via wound care. The biological half-time for silver ranges from a few days for animals up to approximately 50days for the human liver; it is possible that skin deposits have an even longer half-time, but there are no quantitative data on this for humans. Silver binds to high molecular weight proteins and metallothionein in tissue cytosol fractions. Excretion of silver from the body is primarily biliary. Silver nanoparticles have been shown to be absorbed by both inhalation and oral routes, and only to a minor extent via the dermal route, resulting in deposition in various organ systems. Monitoring of exposure is possible by determinations of levels in whole blood. High-dose repeated exposure of animals to silver and silver compounds may produce anemia, cardiac enlargement, growth retardation, and degenerative changes in the liver. Water-soluble silver compounds such as silver nitrate have a local corrosive effect and may cause fatal poisoning in humans if injected or infused into the uterus. Chronic exposure of humans leads to argyria, a clinical entity characterized by gray-blue pigmentation of the skin and other body viscera. Similar changes in the eye after local treatment with eye drops containing silver compounds are named argyrosis. Allergic contact dermatitis to silver is rare. Genotoxic effects, in terms of direct DNA strand breaks via oxidative stress, have been reported in vitro. Tests indicating genotoxicity (Comet assay) and oxidative stress were positive in one study on silver-workers.

10.1109/SANER50967.2021.00078

Harold Innis is one of the foundational theorists of media and communications studies. In the mid-20th century, he developed his concept of media bias (also called the bias of communication). It remains Innis’s most cited concept, but it is also significantly misunderstood. For example, since his death in 1952, bias has often been applied in ways that are akin to a form of technological or media determinism. This has been an ongoing problem despite the fact that Innis developed his concept as a means of compelling analysts to reject such mechanistic formulations. Indeed, his goal was to promote more self-reflective modes of scholarship and, by extension, a recognition that such intellectual capacities—which he believed were essential for civilization’s survival—would be lost if they were not recognized and defended. More generally, Innis contextualized his work regarding media bias in terms of interrelated historical conditions involving political economic dynamics. Through his application of the concept to over 4000 years of history, he sought to provide his contemporaries with the reflective perspective needed to comprehend the underpinnings of modern biases that stressed present-mindedness and spatial control to the neglect of creativity and duration. Bias was derived from Innis’s studies on Canadian economic development involving the exploitation of its resources (an approach to history called the staples thesis). Several of the insights he garnered in those studies need to be recognized if we are to fully understand his subsequent communications research. Also, tracing the origins of his concept of bias enables us to fully assess the nature of Innis’s supposed media determinism. Typical uses of bias today focus on the spatial or temporal orientations that many assume are compelled through the use of a specific medium or set of media technologies. This misreading, inspired mainly by Marshall McLuhan’s representations of Innis, has led to assumptions regarding Innis’s determinism and a general neglect of the complexity of his original work. To repeat, Innis developed bias in order to redress the mechanistic and unreflective thinking of his day and always conceptualized it in terms of factors that are salient to the place and time being examined. Moreover, he applied bias alongside now largely forgotten concepts ranging from unused capacity to classic power–knowledge dialectics. Lastly, he situated the development and implications of a particular medium in relation to both old and new media (not just technologies, but organizations and institutions also). In sum, to comprehend Innis’s concept of bias, its intellectual and political underpinnings need to be acknowledged, the political economic dynamics of its development and application understood, and the implications of McLuhan’s influence recognized.

This chapter focuses on contractual royalties in the U.S. recording industry. Developing Arewa’s (2019) research on entertainment industry contract accounting and Stahl’s (2015) research on record industry royalty reform, we aim to shed light on contractual accounting practices in the record industry and the structural asymmetries of power that characterize them. Central to our analysis is the crucial but until now unstudied role played by the Health and Retirement Funds (“AFTRA H&R Funds” or “H&R Funds”) of the American Federation of Television and Radio Artists (“AFTRA”) in the economic lives of U.S. recording singers. The activities of this benefits system include monitoring and auditing of singers’ compensation and royalty accounts. Archival and other sorts of evidence documenting these activities provide a new and unique window into otherwise obscure accounting and business practices. In part I, we discuss the life and death of Mary Wells, a highly visible and successful recording artist in the early years of Motown. We discuss how the Mary Wells case exemplifies key aspects of the relationships among record companies, unions, and performing artists. In part II, we discuss contractual accounting in light of the historical development of the cultural industries. In part III, we outline AFTRA’s relationship with its recording singer members, how singers’ recording contracts articulated individual and collective bargaining, and how singers’ healthcare and pension accounts expressed the asymmetries of record company royalty accounting. In part IV, we discuss the standard form and terms of recording contracts of the 1950s and 1960s and some of the manipulative accounting practices brought to light in the 1980s by “royalty reform” activists that were (and may still be) central to business practice. In part V, we briefly examine the Moore case, a major 1993-2002 lawsuit by aging singers against the H&R Funds, drawing on archival evidence as well as contemporaneous trade journal coverage. We conclude by returning to issues related to contractual accounting in the cultural industries. This chapter makes use of unique sources and types of data that have not been utilized in relevant scholarly literature and provides the first comprehensive examination of singers as union members.