Mormon Media Studies Symposium

Instead of class last week, I attended a session of the Mormon Media Studies Symposium.  This symposium was made up of many different sessions.  The session I attended was the Young Scholars Speed Session.  During this session, five different student-written papers were presented.

The first paper presented was entitled "People Watch Conference Like This: Male and Female Viewing Styles During LDS General Conference".  This paper described research that two students did to study the differences between the ways males and females watch General Conference.  The conclusions of their research were:

1. TV is the most used medium to view/listen to conference.
2. The topic of the address is the most influential motive for watching a certain talk.
3. Less attention is paid to the talks of auxiliary leaders.
4. Females watch more sessions of conference, pay more attention to Relief Society and Primary speakers, and  were more influenced by speaking style.

The second paper was entitled "The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News’ Coverage of the 1978 Revelation: An Historical Analysis".  This paper discussed how right before the revelation that allowed all worthy males to receive the priesthood, much of the media coverage of the church shifted from praise of its welfare program to highlighting its seemingly "racist" policy.  After the revelation, both the Salt Lake Tribune and the Deseret News dedicated about the same amount of space to the story.  Both portrayed the revelation as positive.  There was not much opposition to the stories.  One of the only differences was that the Deseret News had more of an LDS perspective while the Salt Lake Tribune was slightly more skeptical.

The third paper was entitled "Games Mormons Play".  It discussed two different Mormon trivia games: Celestial Pursuit and 3P2K.  Celestial Pursuit's game board mirrored the Plan of Salvation and six different categories of questions.  Many of the questions were extremely difficult which brought up the question of whether or not Mormons were expected to know such things.  In the newer game, 3P2K, the fact that it was a Mormon game is not explicitly stated on the box.  This game focuses more on gospel principles and is much simpler than Celestial Pursuit.

The fourth paper was entitled "Viral Mormonism: A Case Study in Why Videos Go Viral Using the MormonMessages YouTube Channel".  It discussed the different elements of certain MormonMessages and why they go viral or not.  It was determined that timing and topic were two of the main factors that influenced how many views a video got.  For example Thanksgiving or Easter videos posted during the respective seasons got a high number of views.  Likewise, the broader the topic, the broader the audience.  Thus, those with more general or nondenominational topics got more views.  For example, this video on the war in heaven only has 45,174 views while this video on marriage and divorce has 245,829 views.

The final paper was entitle "From Foe to ‘Friend’: Shifting the Portrayal of Older Characters Through a Religious Children’s Magazine".  This paper discussed how elderly people are depicted in the Friend Magazine.  Through research, it was discovered that in comparison to other media, the elderly are depicted in a more positive manner in the Friend.  The paper talked about how there is an "ageist" tone in much media today.  However, the opposite was found in the Friend.  Older people were often viewed as children of our Heavenly Father in the Friend.