拓展傳播研究的知識疆域

As an effort to expand the communication studies frontier, this issue contains five research articles and one ICA annual bilingual paper. They demonstrate the solid research process in studying the societal changes and media/communication logic from a wide array of conceptual frameworks and through various methodologies. The first research article explicates the shift in researchers' attention from mass media to mobile devices as opposed to mere ＂old wine in new bottle.＂ It is further calling for new mobilities paradigms to delineate and configure contemporary social life, where people's physical space is intertwined with emerging technologies. The manuscript on the reproduction of images of such media events as Mao's funeral transcends the conventional discourse involving the entrance of media events into collective memories and institutional arrangement. Instead, the article delineates the dynamics between media events and political ecology via an interpretive approach towards the image reproduction of perpetuated Chinese contemporary history. The article on ＂TV and News integrated with APP,＂ offering comparative perspectives on TV networks' app convergence, transitioning to mobile portals, enriches the ongoing debates on the collaborations between visual images and texts and their restrictions. Undoubtedly, the findings help generalize the extant theories into a wider scope of areas. This issue also features more contextualized framing analyses on the declining cultural and creative industry news in Taiwan. The results portend the prospects of mediated construction of cultural industry and economic values. The bilingual research paper on the influence of news on perception and prevention practices of Covid-19 by Americans not only well exemplifies the enriching trend of the third person effect theory in the pandemic contexts, but also is meaningful to a wide range of fields, such as the crisis communication; whereas the study on TV mediated quasi-interaction reveals the values of renewing debates on traditional media for its affordability to prompt more social interactions. In ＂Dialogue＂ section, two distinguished scholars in health communication, Prof. Thompson and Prof. Dutta share their insights and experiences in theory development and Asian imaginaries of health communication studies.