A Comprehensive Model of Cancer-Related Information Seeking Applied to Magazines

This article examines a comprehensive model of information seeking (CMIS) resulting from the synthesis of three theoretical research streams: the health belief model, uses and gratifications research, and a model of media exposure and appraisal. The model postulates that four health-related factors—demographics, direct experience, salience, and beliefs—determine two information carrier factors—perceptions of information carrier characteristics and utility—which, in turn, determine information-seeking actions. A sample of 366 adult women drawn from a medium-size midwestern city was surveyed by telephone on the issue of mammography use and cancer-related information seeking. The model resulted in an excellent fit to the data received. However, the values of the paths associated with the health-related factors were extremely low, suggesting that models of information seeking from mass media, such as magazines, should focus on purely communicative factors. These results are discussed in terms of future research and the pragmatic benefits of this theoretical framework.     

The Comic in the Midst of Tragedy's Grief with Tig Notaro,Hannah Gadsby,and Others

The function of the comic in the midst of tragedy is not clear. After all, is it simply comic relief that wounded nations, communities, or individuals seek? Tragedy has long been cast as memory and mourning while comedy offers for the masses a Nietzschean moment of joyful forgetting and for the Stoic mind a measure of transcendence from our grief. The latter view came into prominence for modern American culture with the nineteenth-century satirist Mark Twain, who wrote that “the secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow,” which has been interpreted through the often-quoted formula: comedy is tragedy plus time. The assumption is that we need some distance emotionally in order to mock or transcend the tragic. While we grant the humor of transcendence can produce some momentary relief through emotional distance, we wonder if there might be another way that humor can deal with suffering? Popular psychology often speaks of five stages of grief, and while that progression seems too linear and simplistic, we find that the now much more inclusive comic stage has something to offer their audiences struggling to make sense of a volatile world.     

A Formal Model for the Study of Communication Support Systems

The lack of conceptual frameworks available for integrating research on organizational computer-based communication technologies is documented. An integrated model for studying communication support phenomena in organizations is formalized from a knowledge management perspective using set-theoretic notation. Key constructs for understanding and exploring communication support systems are identified, such as knowledge workers, knowledge management activities, communicate-abilities, and knowledge management episodes. The implications associated with the identification and formalization of each of the foregoing constructs is discussed and further research avenues are explored. The model provides researchers and system developers with a means of studying both human and computer-based knowledge workers in organizations. Two types of communication support systems are defined.