Jesse King

In this article the authors offer an analysis of Jean-Paul Sartre’s 1946 play Huis Clos (No Exit) and Reginald Rose’s 1954 play Twelve Angry Men, with particular attention paid to exploring the insights from each theatrical text about communication. The process of communication may be ambivalent or Janus-faced, and one of the objectives of this analysis is to consider communication in terms of its duality and incisive power. In doing so, the aim is to explore its antithetical tensions by amplifying the mythological, deliberative and philosophical dimensions of communication praxis. In particular, the archetype of the knife provides a useful metaphor for understanding the potentials and pitfalls of communication in human interaction. Scott Haden Church is an Assistant Professor in the School of Communications at Brigham Young University. He has recently published in Critical Studies in Media Communication. Jesse King Jones is in the Masters Programme of the School of Communications at Brigham Young University.

Using Hall’s essential work on encoding/decoding as a theoretical framework, this research analyzes “snaps” posted during a two-week period on the Snapchat Story at Brigham Young University, a religious institution of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Further, college students, who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, are creating negotiated religious readings of Snapchat and secular college culture as a response to a perceived hegemonic moral relativism. The results indicate three categories of snaps: a) Hegemonic platform usage with oppositional messages, b) Oppositional platform usage with negotiated messages, and c) Oppositional platform usage with modified hegemonic meanings of signifiers within the message. Minority cultures can use social media to enhance minority values and behaviors in ways not envisioned by mainstream social media use.