Mormon Media Studies Symposium

I attended the Young Scholars Speed Session on Thursday.

The first presentation was pretty neat. Trent Boulter and Kevin Nielsen presented their paper, “People Watch Conference Like This: Male and Female Viewing Styles During LDS General Conference,” via PowerPoint composed of their research methods and findings. Boulter and Nielsen designed a survey for single adults ages 18-31 in the Wasatch front. 320 people responded and Boulter and Nielsen analyzed General Conference viewership based on gender and media type. They found that overall, the most influential motive to pay attention is topic, and that viewers do not pay as much attention to auxiliaries though women pay more attention than men.

The second paper, “The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News' Coverage of the 1978 Revelation: An Historical Analysis” by Malinda J. Miller, I thought could have been more interesting, but Miller’s presentation style was lacking. Miller researched news articles from The Salt Lake Tribune and Deseret News that ran in the few months before and after the 1978 Priesthood revelation was announced. Miller found that all reactions were positive, and that the two newspapers devoted the same amount of space to the topic, though The Salt Lake Tribune took on a slightly different tone regarding the issue most likely due to the nature of the newspaper and the LDS ownership of Deseret News.

Dai Newman’s paper “Games Mormons Play” was really intriguing; I found the trends amongst Mormon board games very interesting. His primary argument was that Mormon games have become much simplified in recent years as opposed to the in-depth questions of previous generations. Newman claimed that the reason for this shift is due to the growth of the church, therefore less emphasis on Mormon personalities and a return to simple truths.

Danny Duerden’s paper “Viral Mormonism: A case study in why videos go viral using the MormonMessages YouTube channel” proposed that studying which videos go viral will allow people to understand why certain videos catch on, and therefore enable producers to construct videos that will go viral.

“From Foe to ‘Friend’: Shifting the Portrayal of Older Characters through a Religious Children’s Magazine” by Jessica L. Danowski analyzed the church magazine, The Friend, and its portrayal of the elderly. Danowski found that The Friend casts older characters in a significantly more positive light that most media.