Amateur cycling enthusiasts are increasingly engaged in digital media ecosystems that serve as mediating platforms for both indoor and outdoor cycling activities. The rationale for using particular solutions, technological affordances of the platforms and social media discourses all actively shape cycling narratives. This study critically examines practices associated with the Zwift and Strava platforms among a selected group of Eastern Europeans, based on an extended online questionnaire with open and closed questions (n = 80) and individual in-depth interviews (n = 10). Auxiliary data features analysis of social media and YouTube content closely related to the questionnaire's respondents. Building on the notions of mHealth technologies, the findings include an in-depth analysis of four main frames of reference emerging from the analyzed discourses on amateur cycling: social, hardcore, exploration, and training.
The paper examines the role of quotation in shaping social attitudes and reinforcing norms and values within the discourse on issues such as abortion, hate speech, and LGBT+ rights of the Polish ultraconservative organization Centrum Życia i Rodziny. The aim of the paper is to classify and analyze the use of different varieties of quotation, with a particular focus on the distancing and expressive functions of scare quotation. It also examines instances of non-standard uses of name-informing, direct, and mixed quotation, and how these can be transformed into scare quotes and employed as a rhetorical strategy to support or delegitimize ideological stances and elicit action or emotional responses from the reader. Through corpus-based qualitative analysis, the paper attempts to identify the possible goals and motivations behind the use of quotation – especially scare quotes – and illustrate its strategic use in discourse.
Pozostałe osiągnięcia naukoweArtykuły (zamknięty dostęp)Journal article
People vary in their tolerance for uncertainty, and this motivation—known as Need for Cognitive Closure (NFC)—can shape social behavior. Individuals high in NFC are driven to avoid ambiguity and quickly resolve uncertainty. Because interacting with similar others (homophily) tends to reduce uncertainty, while engaging with dissimilar others (heterophily) can increase it, we examined whether NFC predicts preferences for homophilous over heterophilous interactions. Across four correlational studies and a preregistered experiment, we found that higher NFC was consistently associated with lower heterophily. Meta-analytic results confirmed the robustness of this association across samples. High-NFC individuals also reported fewer acquaintances and fewer people to discuss important matters with. To investigate whether uncertainty reduction motivates these patterns, we experimentally induced uncertainty and assessed participants’ social preferences. As predicted, uncertainty reduced interest in interacting with dissimilar others, especially among individuals high in NFC. These findings suggest that a fundamental motivation to reduce uncertainty influences the diversity and composition of people’s social networks. This has broader implications for social support, the construction of shared realities, and the persistence of group-based stereotypes.
This paper proposes a theory for design as an alternative to constructing a universal theory of design. Design is presented not as an abstract construct but as a pragmatic process of problem-solving, transforming existing situations into preferred ones through communicative offers—artefacts, systems, and practices that orient humans within their social and environmental contexts.
Grounded in constructivist epistemology (Maturana, Varela, von Foerster, von Glasersfeld), the argument treats cognition as an individual, non-transferable process of meaning-making, while communication provides the mechanism linking these cognitive worlds. Following Luhmann and Fleischer, communication is seen as self-reproducing, generating society as a system of repeated and connectable interactions. Design thus appears as a communicative practice: stimulating cognition, offering products
for meaning negotiation, and shaping social reproduction. Examples such as the redesign of signage in transport hubs show that design extends beyond artefacts, initiating processes of adaptation, critique, and meaning reproduction. Every design is ultimately a design of communication, raising strategic questions of what, how, to whom, and when to communicate.
The paper argues that “effective communication” is an operative fiction: useful for practice yet impossible to guarantee. Accordingly, design cannot directly steer social change but creates conditions for awareness and collective negotiation of meanings. A theory for design provides a neutral, knowledge-based framework for intentional, communication-oriented practices, placing the human being and their environment at the center.
Pozostałe osiągnięcia naukoweMonografia (zamknięty dostęp)Monograph Chapter (Conference proceedings)
