Pathways to political (dis-)engagement: motivations behind social media use and the role of incidental and intentional exposure modes in adolescents’ political engagement

Based on the Social Media Political Participation Model (SMPPM), this study investigates the relationship between four key motivations behind the use of Social Network Sites (SNS) and political engagement among adolescents. We collected our data in a paper-pencil survey with 15- to 20-year-old adolescents (N=294), a highly underexplored group, which is most active on social media. We theorize that adolescents’ user motivations are related to political engagement via two modes of exposure: The intentional mode, which is related to active information seeking, and the incidental mode, in which adolescents run into politics only by accident. We found that political information and self-expression motivations were positively related to political engagement via the intentional mode. By contrast, entertainment motivations were negatively related to offline, but not to online engagement via the incidental mode.

Antecedents of intentional and incidental exposure modes on social media and consequences for political participation: a panel study

This study investigates antecedents and consequences of incidental and intentional exposure behavior to political information on social media. Based on the Social Media Political Participation Model (SMPPM), we investigated how political and non-political motivations predict intentional and incidental exposure modes while accounting for moderators (i.e., personal curation skills and the frequency of social media political exposure). We also examined how intentional and incidental exposure modes affect low- and high-effort political participation. We rely on data from a two-wave panel survey based on representative quotas for the Austrian population (N = 559) to run autoregressive models. Political information motivation predicted the intentional mode, and this relationship was stronger with rising levels of curation skills. By contrast, entertainment and social interaction motivations increased individuals’ incidental exposure mode. The intentional mode led to low-effort political participation but not to high-effort participation. However, the incidental mode was unrelated to both low- and high-effort participation.

Another Look at Mode Intentionalism

A central claim in contemporary philosophy of mind is that the phenomenal character of experience is entirely determined by its content. This paper considers an alternative called Mode Intentionalism. According to this view, phenomenal character outruns content because the intentional mode contributes to the phenomenal character of the experience. I assess a phenomenal contrast argument in support of this view, arguing that the cases appealed to allow for interpretations which do not require positing intentional modes as phenomenologically manifest aspects of experience.

Can children with developmental language disorder explain actions in terms of intentions?

This study aimed to establish whether 5- to 7-year-old children with developmental language disorder (DLD) have difficulties explaining actions in terms of intentions and if so, to elucidate the nature of such difficulties. Children with DLD and typically developing chronological age peers (TD group) participated in a production task designed to elicit ‘intentional mode’ explanations (e.g. The girl put a spider in the bed because she wanted to give the boy a fright). The DLD group produced significantly fewer well-formed intentional mode explanations than the TD group, made significantly fewer attempts at producing these explanations, and used a more restricted range of linguistic constructions. However, almost all the children with DLD made at least occasional attempts at producing intentional mode explanations. These findings imply that although children with DLD are likely to require support with the socially important task of explaining actions in terms of intentions, there is a foundation on which intervention and classroom practice can build.

Coupling. Non-Symmetric Behaviour of a Joint Between Multimode Fibers

SummaryWhen two different multimode fibers are jointed together, mode mixing and mode filtering take place, with different characteristics in the two directions, leading to a non-symmetric behaviour. A detailed analysis of the power transitions among the guided modes at the joint is presented here. Explicit formulas for coupling efficiency and intermodal dispersion compensation are derived. The intentional mode mixing which is produced by suitable beam-launchers, in order to reach an optical power distribution independent of that of the optical source, is also investigated.