Today the worlds of technology and finance collide yet again in the first day of public trading of Facebook stock. Facebook is not the first online social networking site (Remember Myspace? Or for that matter TheSquare?). Nor is it the first overhyped IPO. What Facebook does teach us, though, is that even in a weakened […]
Zizi Papacharissi just published a new article in the Journal of Communication. Her article, authored with Maria de Fatima Oliveira, is titled Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt. (Click on title for a link to the paper.) The article examined Twitter use during the Arab Spring uprisings between Jan. 2011 and Feb. […]
Several weeks ago, the popular message board Reddit announced that it was making a policy change to ban all “suggestive or sexual content featuring minors.” Owned by Advanced Publications, Reddit has made a name for itself in part by its hands-off, pro-free-speech, let-the-users-decide, and self-police approach. In fact, before the policy change, the only rules of […]
Last week, Gawker received a curious document. Turned over by an aggrieved worker from the online freelance employment site oDesk, the document iterated, over the course of several pages and in unsettling detail, exactly what kinds of content should be deleted from the social networking site that had outsourced its content moderation to oDesk’s team. […]
Media can reinforce and support agencies of socialization and agents of control – such as parents, educators, the state. At the same time, media can be viewed as potentially disrupting, undermining or otherwise threatening the established way of doing things in society. This fundamental premise – outlined most clearly in Denis McQuail’s unparalleled work on […]