The Challenges of Democratizing News and Information: Examining Data on Social Media, Viral Patterns and Digital Influence

The advent of social media and peer-to-peer technologies offers the possibility of driving the full democratization of news and information, undercutting the agenda-setting of large media outlets and their relative control of news and information flows. We are now about a decade into the era of the social Web. What do the data indicate about changing news flows and access/consumption patterns in the United States? Are we witnessing a paradigm shift yet, or are legacy patterns reasserting themselves? This paper brings together media industry data and perspective—from NPR, the Boston Globe and the Wall Street Journal—with a growing body of social science and computational research produced by universities and firms such as Microsoft Research and the Facebook data science team, as well as survey findings from the Pew Research Center. The bulk of the evidence so far complicates any easy narrative, and it very much remains an open question if we can expect a more radically democratized media ecosystem, despite promising early trends and anecdotes. As I review the evidence, I aim to highlight lessons and insights that can help those thinking about and operating in the social media space. This paper also aims to serve as an accessible survey of news media-related topics within social science and social network analysis scholarship

Globalizing Curriculum and Introducing Diplomacy: Wright College’s Participation in the Diplomacy Lab Program

In 2016, Wright College became a partner in the U.S. Department of State’s Diplomacy Lab program, which provides students the opportunity to undertake research projects that further U.S.’s foreign policy goals. Through Diplomacy Lab, students not only gain a rich educational opportunity working on real-world problems, but the Department of State can utilize an untapped source of intellectual talent. Since becoming a partner, Wright faculty have worked on 20 separate projects with over 350 students participating. In this article three students will discuss the projects they worked on and how it changed their perceptions of the Department of State, the various global challenges the world faces, and their own career aspirations

The Aesthetic Politics of Unfinished Media: New Media Activism in Brazil

This article analyzes the role of key visual technologies in contemporary media activism in Brazil. Drawing on a range of media formats and sources, it examines how the aesthetic politics of activists in protests that took place in 2013 opened the way for wider sociopolitical change. The forms and practices of the media activists, it is argued, aimed explicitly at producing transformative politics. New media technologies were remediated as a kind of equipment that could generate new relationships and subjectivities, and thereby access to intentionally undetermined futures

Your Smart Phones Are Hot Pockets to Us: Context Collapse in a Mobilized Age

A key guarantor of social trust and a necessary feature of democratic societies is a stable sense of social distance. Social distance is the cultural imaginary within which an individual’s coordinates of social status and contingent social location allow or inhibit contact with similarly and dissimilarly located others. The rearrangement of customary social distances by new communication technologies is a source of considerable social anxiety. In mobile communication, this context collapse is instigated by a distinctive combination of affordances: deep connectivity, the accelerated speed and volume of communicative exchange, enhanced social legibility and asymmetric communicative transparency. Robust and effective levels of social trust depend on a political will to build strong democratic accountability and civil rights guarantees into emerging mobile architectures. Identifying specific recalibrations of familiar social distances by regimes of mobile communication and assessing the effects of these recalibrations in democratic terms is a central task of mobile research

Cities at risk? Exploring the synergies between smartphones and everyday vulnerabilities

Smartphones present new forms of spatiality and sociality for cities worldwide. The sudden outburst in smartphone technologies has revolutionised human relations creating new possibilities of encounter and connectivity. This paper examines people's smartphone usage patterns and highlights how this is increasing human vulnerabilities in cities with resultant wider societal implications. Drawing on the theory of vulnerability, Hofstede's cultural dimension theory and carrying out semi-structured interviews in the United Kingdom and Ghana, the paper reveals that the current scale of usage and addiction to smartphones and social media are fostering emerging forms of everyday vulnerabilities. Victimisation, privacy breach, home emergencies and road accidents are prevalent vulnerabilities in both Accra and London. By comparing participants' smartphone usage patterns and their motives for adopting or ignoring certain social media practices, the study illustrates how the concept of attitudinal vulnerability extends our understanding of Hofstede's theory of collectivism and individualism. While the finding from Accra complicates Hofstede's collectivism label as there seems to be a loss of genuine sense of care and people-centeredness among participants it confirms individualism tendencies among the participants in London though some tendencies of ‘virtual collectivism’ were observed. In conclusion, the study emphasises how significant behavioural changes among smartphone users can reduce human-induced vulnerabilities in cities. By so doing, we add weight to the literature that focuses on the importance of developing context-specific cutting edge ICT policies vis-a-vis building smart, safe and sustainable cities

Leveraging Natural Language Processing to Analyse the Temporal Behavior of Extremists on Social Media

Aiming at achieving sustainability and quality of life for citizens, future smart cities adopt a data-centric approach to decision making in which assets, people, and events are constantly monitored to inform decisions. Public opinion monitoring is of particular importance to governments and intelligence agencies, who seek to monitor extreme views and attempts of radicalizing individuals in society. While social media platforms provide increased visibility and a platform to express public views freely, such platforms can also be used to manipulate public opinion, spread hate speech, and radicalize others. Natural language processing and data mining techniques have gained popularity for the analysis of social media content and the detection of extremists and radical views expressed online. However, existing approaches simplify the concept of radicalization to a binary problem in which individuals are classified as extremists or non-extremists. Such binary approaches do not capture the radicalization process\u27s complexity that is influenced by many aspects such as social interactions, the impact of opinion leaders, and peer pressure. Moreover, the longitudinal analysis of users\u27 interactions and profile evolution over time is lacking in the literature. Aiming at addressing those limitations, this work proposes a sophisticated framework for the analysis of the temporal behavior of extremists on social media platforms. Far-right extremism during the Trump presidency was used as a case study, and a large dataset of over 259,000 tweets was collected to train and test our models. The results obtained are very promising and encourage the use of advanced social media analytics in the support of effective and timely decision-making

Is Information Systems Research Concerned with Societal Grand Challenges?

“Grand challenges” can provide an important orientation regarding whether research deals with societally relevant problems. Yet, many IS scholars have claimed that IS research is often dealing with issues that are of rather little relevance to societal grand challenges. In this “research-in-progress” study, we examine to which degree IS research is concerned with societal grand challenges. We approach this question by thus far analyzing 329 papers published in the leading AIS ‘Basket of Eight’ (AIS 8) IS journals in the year 2020. Using coding analysis rooted in justification theory to clarify why IS research was performed, we map the justifications given in those papers against the grand challenges as set out in the United Nations (UN) Sustainable Development Goals. The findings indicate that IS research seems to be contributing to some societal challenges (e.g., industrial innovation, economic growth or health), while neglecting many others (e.g., societal equality, environmental sustainability and challenges in developing countries)

New mobile visualities and the social communication of photography : Instagram as a case study

This research intends to show how visuality, through the mobility of Instagram (a social media platform designed for photo sharing), is modifying individuals’ perception of the world and their mediated lives. It examines how Instagram transforms individuals’ perception of interpersonal relationships, marketing, privacy and surveillance, identity and memory, and communication. It attempts a critical re-reading of the combined interrelations between the concept of mobility (smart mobile devices) and the thematic areas mentioned above. Conducting an empirical examination, it delineates the changing dynamics that digitality determines within the contemporary experience of visual communication. In order to understand visual practices it is important to consider how relationships develop among individuals, visual technologies, practices and images, society and culture (Pink, 2007: 35). A qualitative research method informed by netnography, computer-mediated interviews and visual analysis (Rose, 2007) is employed in this study. Findings show that the ubiquitous use of smart mobile devices guides us towards the development of new forms and conceptions of mobile mediated visualities.The critical analysis of the (embedded) multiple-case study presents the innovative transformations that the mediation and mobility of Instagram bring into everyday relations between human-technologies. Findings show that now that daily life is experienced as a succession of photo opportunities that allow the creation of social networks but do not replace physical relationships. Images figure as a fair means of communication although they cannot fulfil verbal ones. However, the connections that images establish become a valuable part of new social media marketing strategies. With the widespread use of the platform, companies start to monitor users and influence their online behaviour without causing concern in relation to privacy and surveillance issues. The protection of personal information instead is related to the visibility that the contents of images acquire within the virality of the Internet. Within this, the voyeuristic spirit that animates the platform affects individuals’ interest in disclosing self-identity through visual metaphors. The disclosure of visual narrations of the self, at the same time, models the sharing of new networked archives of personal and collective memories.The ephemerality of digital culture is embraced by smart mobile technologies considering the importance that individuals give to the act of producing multimedia contents more than the content itself. Smart mobile devices represent the element of mediation in social instances and they strongly represent the foundation of a new mobile visualities aesthetic. Societies produce peculiar forms of expression and communication that are shaped by the co-presence of individual demands and the current typology of means of communication. Every alteration in the structure of societies has influence on individuals and on means of expression. This thesis shows that in contemporary life visualities have crucial functions in different environments such as business, leisure, and surveillance. Lastly, the triangulation of mediation-mobility-visuality produces a snapshot aesthetic, which radically transforms traditional functions of photography