Bill Dutton will be traveling to Lisbon, Portugal, for a couple of events on 9 April 2018. Before lunch, he will present his work on the role of search and social media in shaping public opinion. This will be at the Palace Foz on the 9th of April for a couple of dozen invitees from the media companies and regulators. The work he will discuss is based on his research in seven nations, reported here: https://quello.msu.edu/research/the-part-played-by-search-in-shaping-political-opinion-the-quello-search-project/ along with related work on fake news. That evening, he will be speaking to faculty and students of ISCTE – Instituto Universitário de Lisboa, abbreviated ISCTE-IUL, on […]
Professor Bill Dutton, Director of the Quello Center, in the College of Communication Arts and Sciences, has signed a contract with Oxford University Press for a book on his concept of the Fifth Estate. He has been speaking and conducting research over the last decade on the role of the Internet in empowering a Fifth Estate that can hold other ‘estates’ accountable, including the press, as the Fourth Estate. The book will develop the concept of the Fifth Estate, provide empirical evidence of its rise, and its implications across nearly every sector of society. While a growing tide of criticism […]
As a member of their advisory board, I would also like to invite scholarly and original submissions that broadly relate to the 2017 conference theme on “Social Media for Social Good or Evil.” The organizers welcome both quantitative and qualitative work which crosses interdisciplinary boundaries and expands our understanding of the current and future trends in social media research. See the call for proposals at https://socialmediaandsociety.org/2016/cfp-2017-international-conference-social-media-society/
Rob Ackland, a professor at the Australian National University, was able to visit the Quello Center in early May. In addition to kicking off a valuable roundtable discussion of digital social science, he also gave a very useful talk on social media and development at a Quello Seminar on 5 May 2016. His talk, which you can view here, was based on a background paper he co-authored (with Kyosuke Tanaka) for the World Bank. The key contribution of the talk by Rob was his offering a number of competing and complementary theoretical perspectives on how social media might link to […]
Quello Professor Steve Wildman and Dr Jonathan Obar, a Quello Research Associate, organized a workshop on the governance of social media that has yielded an excellent special issue of Telecommunications Policy (Volume 39, Issue 9, October 2015). It features articles by the editors, as well as Philip Napoli, Laura DeNardis, Milton Mueller, and Katherine Montegomery, among others. It is a brilliant signpost of how the Quello Center is moving fully into the digital age of policy and regulation issues. You may find the special issue at: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/03085961/39/9
Using the Media, Internet and Debates to Inform Voters: A Series of Blogs Bill Dutton of the Quello Center, and Tracy Westen, founder of The Democracy Network and founder and CEO of The Center for Governmental Studies, have posted a series of blogs that take a critical look at the way in which the GOP primary debates have been handled by Fox News and Facebook. Reflecting on the challenges of televised and Internet orchestrated debates, they come up with suggestions combining the media to improve the ways in which voters can obtain information about the issue positions, personalities, and endorsements […]
The Quello Roundtable on Powerful (Social) Media Effects generated an odd juxtaposition of positions in the discussion: on the one hand the premise for the roundtable was rooted in the old (irrelevant?) theoretical conceptions of the traditional media and its influence on private and public life alike, while on the other hand the discussants – at least most of them – are deeply involved, personally as well as professionally, in the technology of the new media in general and social media in particular. Therefore, at least intuitively, most of them feel and understand that this is a new world which […]
This video presents a talk by Garlin Gilchrist, the Deputy Technology Director for Civic Engagement in Detroit, with Kat Hartman, and Professor Marc Kruman responding. The presentation is about 20 minutes, followed the responses and about 15 minutes of discussion. Quello Center Seminar on the Internet and Civic Engagement in Detroit from Quello Center on Vimeo. Garlin focused on the launch of Detroit’s Open Data initiative, and the work of his office on the role of the Internet and related information and communication technologies in supporting civic and community engagement. He discusses initiatives the City of Detroit has been fostering, […]
