Category: Social Media

Studies in social data: how industry uses social media for communications and research.

A series of meetups have been arranged for those interested in the use and applications of social data. Farida Vis provides a brief overview of the latest event on business uses of social data. Speakers reflected on principles for handling data, the need to collaborate externally, and how to look more closely at the full lifecycle of social data. Sometimes social data […]

The importance of informed consent in social media research

Informed consent is important in large-scale social media research to protect the privacy, autonomy, and control of social media users. Ilka Gleibs argues for an approach to consent that fosters contextual integrity where adequate protection for privacy is tied to specific contexts. Rather than prescribing universal rules for what is public (a Facebook page, or Twitter feed) and what is private, contextual integrity […]

Identity in the Digital Age: Reading List for #LSELitFest

Join us this weekend for a free event on Digital Personhood and Identity as part of the LSE Literary Festival. Panellists Luke Dormehl (@lukedormehl), Andrew Murray (@AndrewDMurray), Aleks Krotoski (@aleksk), and Sonia Livingstone (@Livingstone_S) will be presenting a mixture of research and reflection, each exploring what affect our digital landscape and our digital lives have on the foundations of our identity. The event […]

Five Minutes with Cristóbal Cobo: Redefining Knowledge in the Digital Age.

How has and how will the overload of digital information impact the way that scholars look to absorb, disseminate, and assess new knowledge in journals and beyond? Scholastica‘s Danielle Padula interviews Cristóbal Cobo of the Oxford Internet Institute on how technology is shaping the research and publishing process for the modern scholar. How do you think the internet is changing the way […]

For many academics, the web is just a means to an end: Shifting gears to solve the digital divide.

The academic community faces a significant problem in staying up-to-date with new technologies. Often the easiest option for researchers is not to engage rather than trying a new way of working. Andy Tattersall looks at the lack of adoption of digital technologies and argues that in academia, the problem has often been a lack of translation: academics are advised how […]

“Brain Study Confirms Gender Stereotypes”: How science communication can fuel modern sexism.

The way much research on sexual differentiation is conducted and communicated has come under intense criticism from scholars in both the natural and social sciences. Cliodhna O’Connor describes how traditional gender stereotypes are projected onto scientific information and its subsequent reporting. But the dynamics of online spaces have also facilitated more nuanced debate about the social implications of research, and its […]

The Organized Mind: How to better structure our time in the age of social media and constant distraction.

The information age is drowning us in a deluge of data, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to separate facts from pseudo-facts, objective from biased sources, and at the same time, we’re all being asked to do more at home and at work. Daniel Levitin reviews the cognitive neuroscience of attention and memory, presents the differences between mind-wandering mode and […]