In the month since a Liberian man infected with Ebola traveled to Dallas, where he later died, the nation has marinated in a murky soup of understandable concern, wild misinformation, political opportunism and garden-variety panic. … The panic in some way mirrors what followed the anthrax attacks of 2001 and […] Read more »
Social Media and the ‘Spiral of Silence’
A major insight into human behavior from pre-internet era studies of communication is the tendency of people not to speak up about policy issues in public—or among their family, friends, and work colleagues—when they believe their own point of view is not widely shared. This tendency is called the “spiral […] Read more »
America’s cultural segregation fault lines
… We don’t live in America anymore. We live in thousands of Americas, many no farther away than our computer screens and the Internet. These are self-identified Americas. … The fact that we have different interests, different perspectives, is certainly not new, nor is the fact that we band together, […] Read more »
World Cup Fan Migration
The FIFA World Cup is the largest event in sports, with an estimated audience of more than 750 million people worldwide. With 1.2 billion users around the globe, Facebook is the main social platform where people express their support for teams and players. Through the end of the semi-finals, over […] Read more »
Participant Index Seeks to Determine Why One Film Spurs Activism, While Others Falter
… For the last year Participant, an activist entertainment company that delivers movies with a message, has been quietly working with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Knight Foundation and the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism to answer a question vexing those who would […] Read more »
The Web at 25: Net Threats
As Internet experts look to the future of the Web, they have a number of concerns. This is not to say they are pessimistic: The majority of respondents to this 2014 Future of the Internet canvassing say they hope that by 2025 there will not be significant changes for the […] Read more »