FREEMAN SHANE TILTON TILTON HONORED AT NATIONAL COMMUNICATION ASSOCIATION'S ANNUAL CONFERENCE
16 JULY 2024
Associate Professor of Writing and Multimedia Studies at Ohio Northern University and Freeman for the Worshipful Company of Stationers and Newspaper Makers Shane Tilton was honored twice during the 109th annual conference of the National Communication Association (NCA) for his scholarship in the field of game studies and human communication & technology.
Dr. Tilton was awarded the Top Paper for Innovative Presentation Design during the Game Studies' Preconference session. "Bumping the Stats:A pilot study of the impact of TTRPGs on the emotional grounding and psychological well-being of gamers" was a paper co-written by Tilton, Anthony Bean (from Framingham State University), and Joe Locante (from Texas Christian University) on a pilot study that used eight different psychological instruments to determine if playing face-to-face a tabletop role-playing game could address anxiety, depression, and other aspects of college students' mental health.
The Human Communication and Technology interest division honored Dr. Tilton on Thursday with their Top Book Award for "Meme Life: The social, cultural, and psychological aspects of memetic communication." The award committee noted the interdisciplinary nature of the work as one of the main reasons for their selection of the book for this honor. Dr. David Roaché from Christopher Newport University, in his role as the chair of the Book Award committee, noted that Meme Life provides a solid theoretical foundation for studying memes now and in the near future. Shane is the fifth scholar to be awarded this honor (Zizi Papcharissi [2015] for “Affective Publics: Politics, emotion, and Twitter;" Bree McEwan [2017] for "Navigating New Media Networks: Understanding and managing communication challenges in a networked society;" Keri Stephens [2019] for "Negotiating Control: Organizations and mobile communication;" and Jeffrey A. Hall [2021] for "Relating Through Technology").
Dr. Tilton was also recognized for his service as a parliamentarian for the Game Studies, Human Communication and Technology, Mass Communication, & the Communication and the Future interest divisions for the past seven years. He has been a member of NCA since 2005. The NCA's mission is to advance "communication as the discipline that studies all forms, modes, media, and consequences of communication through humanistic, social scientific, and aesthetic inquiry.
NCA serves the scholars, teachers, and practitioners who are its members by enabling and supporting their professional interests in research and teaching. Dedicated to fostering and promoting free and ethical communication, NCA promotes the widespread appreciation of the importance of communication in public and private life, the application of competent communication to improve the quality of human life and relationships, and the use of knowledge about communication to solve human problems."