Events
Join us for COMMColloquium Friday, March 8, at 1:00 pm in 102 Mann Library Building. Associate Professor Andrea Stevenson Won will present “Embodiment Now.” The colloquium is followed by a reception, located in The Hub of the Department of Communication.
Honor
Senior Lecturer Lauren Chambliss has been appointed to a third term of the Science Board at Cornell University Press.
Invited Lecture
Associate Professor Brooke Duffy delivered an invited talk, entitled “Visibility in the Creator Economy: Navigating the Promises and Precarities of Platform Labor,” at the Center for Information Technology at Princeton University. Drawing upon insight from more than 80 interviews with digital content creators, influencers, and streamers, she argued that participants in the creator economy often find themselves trapped in a “visibility bind.” In a labor market where algorithms are key arbiters of success—and failure—creators struggle to defy the imminent threat of invisibility. But they must also navigate the risks of hypervisibility, from burnout and cultural appropriation to trolling and targeted harassment. The consequences of this bind are amplified for marginalized creators, including women, people of color, and members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Publications
Professor Lee Humphreys, February 2024, “Connected in Isolation: How Zoom Enabled Ritual Communication for the Digitally Privileged During the Pandemic Lockdown,” International Journal of Communication. Lee was one of nine people asked to participate in a review forum of Esther Hargittai's book, Connected in Isolation. Drawing on James Carey's distinction between transmission and ritual communication, Lee explored why the author never mentioned Zoom in a book about social media use during the initial COVID-19 lockdown.
Postdoctoral Associate Kwanho Kim (with Soojong Kim and Haoning Xue), February 2024, “Fingerprints of Conspiracy Theories: Identifying Signature Information Sources of a Misleading Narrative and Their Roles in Shaping Message Content and Dissemination,” Journal of Online Trust and Safety. The study investigates the role of information sources in the propagation and reception of misleading narratives on social media, focusing on the case of the Chemtrail conspiracy theory—a false claim that the trails in the sky behind airplanes are chemicals deliberately spread for sinister reasons. The findings indicate that messages referencing signature sources, which are repeatedly used by online communities engaged in the discussion of a misleading narrative but are not widely used by other communities, contain more death-, illness-, risk-, and health-related words, convey more negativity, and elicit more negative reactions from users, compared with those without signature sources.
Associate Professor Neil Lewis, Jr. (with Amy Johnson, Christopher Levesque, and Asad Asad), February 2024, “Deportation Threat Predicts Latino US Citizens and Noncitizens’ Psychological Distress, 2011 to 2018,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The US federal government's approach to deportation fluctuated between 2011 and 2018. Drawing on eight years of public- and restricted-access data from the National Health Interview Survey, the authors examined how those fluctuations affected the psychological wellbeing of a variety of people—especially those vulnerable to the policy effects. They found that both dramatic societal events and gradual changes were associated with Latino US citizens and noncitizens' overall experiences of psychological distress. Their research was featured in the Cornell Chronicle.
