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The social mediation role of mobile technology is typified by mHealth apps designed to connect individuals to others and support substance use disorder (SUD) recovery. In this study, we examined the use and utility of one such app designed to support people living with HIV (PLWH) and SUD. Drawing on Ling's emphasis on reciprocity and micro-coordination in mobile telephony as a social mediation technology, we gathered digital trace data from app logs to construct two metrics, initiation (i.e. whether a particular feature is engaged on a given day) and intensity (i.e. degree of involvement in the activity when engaged on that day), at three levels of communication—networked (one-to-many), dyadic (one-to-one), and intraindividual (self-to-self). We consider these system features alongside use of information resources, games and relaxation links, a meeting and events calendar, and support tools to address use urges. We found few differences in patterns of use by race, sex, and age, though African Americans were less likely to engage in intraindividual expression, whereas women and older users were more likely to make use of this feature. The initiation and intensity of network and dyadic reception, as well as the intensity of network expression, predicts recovery outcomes as measured on a weekly "check-in" survey, suggesting the utility of mobile log data for digital phenotyping in mHealth. By implementing this app during the COVID-19 pandemic, the study also found the disruption caused by national lockdown was negatively related to the app use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism, as many have observed, is a communication phenomenon as much as a coherent ideology whose mass appeal stems from the fiery articulation of core positions, notably hostility toward "others," bias against elites in favor of "the people," and the transgressive delivery of those messages. Yet much of what we know about populist communication is based on analysis of candidate pronouncements, the verbal message conveyed at political events and over social media, rather than transgressive performances—the visual and tonal markers of outrage—that give populism its distinctive flair. The present study addresses this gap in the literature by using detailed verbal, tonal, and nonverbal coding of the first US presidential debate of 2016 between Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton to show how Trump's transgressive style—his violation of normative boundaries, particularly those related to protocol and politeness, and open displays of frustration and anger—can be operationalized from a communication standpoint and used in statistical modeling to predict the volume of Twitter response to both candidates during the debate. Our findings support the view that Trump's norm-violating transgressive style, a type of political performance, resonated with viewers significantly more than Clinton's more controlled approach and garnered Trump substantial second-screen attention. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How populists engage with media of various types, and are treated by those media, are questions of international interest. In the United States, Donald Trump stands out for both his populism-inflected campaign style and his success at attracting media attention. This article examines how interactions between candidate communications, social media, partisan media, and news media combined to shape attention to Trump, Clinton, Cruz, and Sanders during the 2015–2016 American presidential primary elections. We identify six major components of the American media system and measure candidates' efforts to gain attention from them. Our results demonstrate that social media activity, in the form of retweets of candidate posts, provided a significant boost to news media coverage of Trump, but no comparable boost for other candidates. Furthermore, Trump tweeted more at times when he had recently garnered less of a relative advantage in news attention, suggesting he strategically used Twitter to trigger coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]