Conferences & Invited Lectures
Adjunct Associate Professor Tarleton Gillespie will participate in the opening panel of the “Optimizing for What? Algorithmic Amplification and Society” conference. This panel opens the conference by discussing how platform algorithms work and laying out the issues around algorithmic amplification. Tarleton will be linking contemporary questions about algorithmic recommendation to longstanding questions about the power of media to curate public discourse and highlighting the way tools designed to recommend "good" content are often used also to obscure "bad" content.
Associate Professor Dawn Schrader is chairing the Moral Development and Education Special Interest Group Business Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, which is holding its annual business meeting April 13, 2023. This session is more than a typical business meeting, as Dawn will also lead a workshop on the use and impact of technology in the field of moral development, moral education, and ethical reason in learners in educational settings.
Grants
Grad student Alisius Leong received a $50,000 National Science Foundation Grant for her dissertation project “The Impact of Normative Influence on Competitive Framing of Risks on Social Media.” This Doctoral Dissertation Research Improvement Grant funds work in decision, risk, and management sciences. She will serve as Co-Principal Investigator with Professor Katherine McComas serving as Principal Investigator.
Honors
Sohinee Bera, a first-year Ph.D. student, was recently honored as a winner of the Cornell Libraries Elevator Art Contest. Her painting, titled “Extended Family,” is now displayed on the first-floor elevator doors of Olin Library and will remain there for the next six months.
In the Media
Assistant Professor Monica Cornejo was quoted by WWNO, New Orleans Public Radio, in the article “New Complaint Alleges Sex Assault, Medical Neglect, Abuse of Detainee at Louisiana ICE Facility.”
Professor Lee Humphreys was quoted in the New York Times article “Should College Come with Trigger Warnings? At Cornell, It’s a ‘Hard No.’” She was also interviewed for The Homeless Romantic podcast for the episode “A Brief History of Social Media.”
Publications
Professor Natalie Bazarova et al., April 2023, “Understanding Digital-Safety Experiences of Youth in the U.S.,” CHI 2023. By synthesizing the perspectives of 36 youth and 65 adult participants from the U.S., the researchers provide an overview of today's complex digital-safety landscape. They describe attacks youth experienced, how these moved across platforms and into the physical world, and the resulting harms. They also describe protective practices the youth and the adults who support them took to prevent, mitigate, and recover from attacks, and key barriers to doing this effectively. Their findings provide a broad perspective to help improve digital safety for youth and set directions for future work.
Professor Lee Humphreys & Kathleen Cumiskey, April 2023, “Social, Seamless, Just, and Open: Advancing Mobile Communication Research,”New Media & Society. This is the closing article in an issue about the impact of scholar Rich Ling. It describes generative areas for future research and the means to advance the impact of the field, highlighting reflective practices related to field building and knowledge access for which Ling helped to lay the groundwork.
Grad student Alisius Leong, Professor Katherine McComas,Postdoctoral Associate Dominic Balog-Way & Krysten Schuler, April 2023, “Expanding on Behavioral Outcomes in the Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model: Socio-Cognitive Factors Predicting Information Seeking, Sharing, and Discussion,” Science Communication. This research expands the risk information seeking and processing (RISP) model to test whether socio-cognitive factors can predict social-level behaviors (e.g., information sharing and discussion) aside from individual-level behaviors (e.g., information seeking and processing). Findings showed that one's values, risk perception, and information insufficiency similarly predicted individual- and social-level behavioral outcomes. On the other hand, knowledge and informational descriptive and injunctive norms only predicted social-level behaviors. Importantly, while participants expressed intentions to share information, they were less likely to do so when provided with an actual video, which offers insights about the utility value of the RISP model for practitioners.
Danielle Eiseman & Assistant Professor Andrea Stevenson Won, April 2023, “Community Attitudes toward Local Foods and Producers: The Role of Warmth versus Competence Across Demographics for Social Media Engagement,” Journal of Applied Communication. In this study, the researchers ran a nationally representative survey (n = 966) with an experimental component to determine if videos of local farmers were an effective method of connecting with consumers, and if so, how this varies across demographics. They further investigated whether aspects of warmth of competence influence consumer willingness to purchase locally produced foods. Dr. Eiseman is a former Visiting Lecturer in the Department of Communication.
