Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Topical news on social media, web culture, digital humanities
I am not a squeamish man. I do not like seeing blood, but it does not scare me. My grandmother, born in 1900, kept chickens, pigs, sheep, a goat or two, cattle, dogs, and assorted cats. I saw my share of slaughtered…
FORCES Virtual D-Day, also known as Virtual Omaha, launched on June 6 in Washington, DC, bringing Omaha Beach to life as an immersive history education tool.
Online human networks are highly centralized, with a few nodes raking in most connections. The conventional wisdom is that this is the product of so-called “preferential attachment.” In Barabasi and Albert’s [1] formulation, new nodes (connectors) added to any network will prefer…
In the digital era, “discourse power” is real power. Disinformation has become a preferred method of confounding the adversary and winning supporters. How does this work at the level of great power competition and conflict? Why is this question relevant today? Here…
An experiment by Tromholt Morten from the University of Copenhagen published in Cyberpsychology, Behavior, and Social Networking suggests that people who gave up Facebook for a week ended (for that time) happier, less lonely, and less depressed than those who did not.…
On Friday May 24, 2019 I organize in collaboration with the French Laboratory of Excellence in Creative Industries, the ICA preconference “Riding or Lashing the Waves: Regulating Media for Diversity in a Time of Uncertainty,” to discuss whether regulatory and policy changes are…
In collaboration with the Online Masters’ Program in Strategic Communication, I launched the Social Media Analytics Class, which will be available worldwide. Introduction to social media analytics Overview of digital analytics Twitter as a data source for analysis Introduction to social media…
This article is a companion material to the Course COM 25100 Information, Technology, Society which I teach at Purdue University as a University core class. The course teaches trade-off thinking as a fundamental method for understanding technological choice and innovation. Where does electricity come…
This is an introduction to a set of core concepts related to Internet communication for the Course COM 251 Information, Technology, Society which I teach at Purdue University. One of Aesop’s fables gives a clever answer to the question: “what is the…
This is a tutorial on a set of core concepts related to Internet communication for the courses I teach at Purdue University. In a previous post about the basic architecture of the Internet, I discussed the Internet’s intrinsic decentralization and its layered…
This is a tutorial on a set of core concepts related to Internet communication for my courses at Purdue University. For technical details, take a look at the PowerPoint presentation The Internet is not one net. It is more versatile than that. The…
The results of the French elections are in and the two front runners in the polls did indeed come up as predicted by traditional methods. Marine Le Pen and Emanuelle Macron will be the two contenders of the second round of elections.…
What does the social media crystal ball say about the biggest global event of the day, the French presidential campaign? On social media, Marine Le Pen and Jean-Luc Mélenchon seemed to be the favorites, running neck in neck on Twitter the day before…
Donald Trump’s social media campaign is known for its virulence, but relatively less was said about its virality. Trump had a larger base of followers on Twitter. By the end of the campaign, he had 15 million followers to Hillary Clinton’s 11.1.…
Hillary Clinton did a very good job during the debates, as she was expected to, while Donald Trump had a hard time trying to decide if his open glove style is appropriate or not in the given circumstances (it was not and…
The rhetorical struggle between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump is not only about issues, actions and change, but also about who will ultimately be responsible for everything said. Donald Trump affirms that the agent of change is himself and this is reflected…
Google Trends analysis shows that Donald Trump has been dominating and dominates Google Searches by a large margin. This is a good predictor for public interest and can lead to future changes in intentions to vote. In the last 90 days, the volume of searches…
On the quiet Saturday morning of July 23rd, just after the Republic National Convention, Donald Trump was getting about 7500 Tweets per hour. Hillary somewhere around 5500. The interesting part was that while Hillary got quite a bit of traction from the usual…
Donald Trump rip-roars his way through social media, keeping Hillary Clinton’s Campaign in a tight spot. An average official Trump Facebook page [1] post published after August 1st 2015, when the primary campaigning began, attracts on average a staggering 72,058 likes. An…
I dipped the R cup in the Twitter font of wisdom and here is what I found… For the period April 15-July 16 Trump’s campaign leads Hillary Clintons’ on Twitter by a factor of about 2. Trump’s campaign put out a couple…
Donald Trump has an obsession: Donald Trump. But so does Hillary Clinton. This might give the Donald an extra umpf in the final presidential race. This is one of the conclusions of my analysis of the 2176 tweets put out by the…
The issue if and how much is Trump’s celebrity influenced by a so-called “media obsession” with his persona and ideas has been much discussed during the 2016 nomination campaign. Here are some opinions… The Media’s Not Being Honest About Its Trump Obsession…
We live in a world of things. Those who make the things define the way we live our lives. Their decisions impact not only our trivial needs, such as spending a night on Facebook checking the status of our friends. Technologies that…
Technologies such as the power grid, plumbing, or mass media rely on standards that are accepted as simply being there. Electric power is provided at 120V AC, pipe gauges are measured in fractional increments, typically expressed in inches, sitcoms are 30 min…
In Spring 2015, together with my colleagues, Michael Smith, Abrar Hammoud, and Davin Huston I developed a multidisciplinary learning experience whose main goal is to help students acquire competencies related to problem formulation, design thinking, ethical and critical thinking, advanced persuasive speaking,…
You probably knew that the Internet is inherently unsecure. And you probably knew that 80% of email is spam. But did you know that any appliance that is connected to the net and is running some sort of OS, can be taken…
If New York City never lacked for something, those are the immensely talented, greatly gifted writers, whose words flow from the keyboards like milk and honey and whose voices whisper in your ear things no one wants to pay attention to. There…
The first major publication of the KredibleNet project is out. The volume Roles, Trust, and Reputation in Social Media Knowledge Markets: Theory and Methods discusses the emerging trends in defining, measuring, and operationalizing reputation as a new and essential component of the…
Google Maps just got the right to publish its “street view” of the roads surrounding the Great Pyramids of Giza, in Egypt. This means that you can walk around seeing the sights in near 3d format… View Giza PYRAMIDS IN STREET VIEW…
Agree or disagree? The Value of Admitting What We Don’t Know – Commentary – The Chronicle of Higher Educationhttp://chronicle.com/article/The-Value-of-Admitting-What-We/147983/All dialects are equal linguistically, in that they are regular, rule-governed, and just as effective at communicating as is standard English. They are not,…
Articles published in the same journals, resubmitted for review. Almost 1 in 10 articles rejected by 9 out of 10 reviewers. Only 8% o the editors recognized the re-submission… Cambridge Journals Online – Behavioral and Brain Sciences – Abstract – Peer-review practices…
There is much talk nowadays about the “wise crowds” that automagically emerge on social media to democratically decide what is news or what is knowledge. Some believe that the Internet creates a liberating “crowd edited” source of information. Some take the idea with…
I tried to watch the Apple launch with my Purdue Polytech students to show them how to introduce a product with a livcast… What we got out of the experience was how not to sell a product with an online livecast. First off,…
The next revolution in the digital world will not be on a desktop or in your pocket. It will be in your car… Maybe… The rise of the “connected” car. This is the coming together of communications technologies, information systems and safety…
An awesome collection of “technology demystified” videos from the digital living magazine, Wired… Emphasis on special effects…
Do you only have the ASIN of your product. Enter the ID (ASIN) of the product and hit GO… A Short URL will be generated immediately…
An update from the Nieman Journalism Lab While high-level speculation continues on the future of news and information, research studies are providing a more under-the-hood look at the practices of journalists, outlets, and the digital networks in which they operate. Here’s a recent…
The preference of some Chinese sites to use numbers over letters in their domain names has something to do, as you might imagine, with the complexity of translating Chinese characters into latin characters. There is, however, a little bit more to it than…
In the enthusiasm for digital publishing and e-ink devices, such as the Kindle, the relative advantages of using old fashioned paper books has been lost. While there is nothing magical about paper, the tangible, physical object that is a book creates a…
Zuckerberg’s silly slogan “stay focused and keep shipping” was never more childishly immitative of the digital “big boys” (whoever those might be) swagger and style… Facebook […] has introduced and eliminated different designs and focal points of activity so many times over…
If the latest trendy phrase in cybersphere, Social Physics, should refer to anything, that should be an emergent social scientific approach to characterizing social systems as if they were particle aggregates, each component unit moving according to laws dictated by their intrinsic…
Failure is a gift from the gods, who want us to earn the privilege of success. Yet, those that fail too many times the first time they try something should change their approach. They should consider the following suggestions: You have no…
The origin of dark color in human skin is strongly connected to our African roots. However, it is puzzling how different we are from the great apes… SHAVE a chimpanzee and you will find that beneath its hairy coat its skin is…
A balanced view on net neutrality… To make sure consumers benefit, we need to solve the network capacity problem. Yes, we need to ensure broadband providers can’t do something nefarious to kill off new services. But we also need to ensure content…
New York Times reports that a successful YouTube broadcaster with 1,000,000 subscribers to multiple channels, who posts at least 20 new video segments a week may expect a little bit more than 100,000 dollars a year in revenue. This is about $10…
A new concept, practice capital, which extends the concept of social capital to collaborative projects is proposed in my chapter to the upcoming volume on the research significance of the C-Span Video Archive. I should mention that the archive is hosted in…
Who am I, when I am online? Why to I do the things I do? Who suffers? Who is right and who is wrong? This classic essay preceding the Internet is absolutely fascinating and oh, so well written…. They say…
Why I will not buy another Android phone anytime soon… The opinion of this programmer is worth his weight in gold.
Do you buy into this explanation? Xbox effect: Dinner bells that summoned children from the great outdoors have long gone silent, and youths and young adults are spending more time on indoor pursuits involving high-definition TVs, gaming consoles and computers. That,…
This is the modest, “it just works” Samsung TV the your mom always wanted in her bedroom. Crisp image, great controls, no fuss… Bestseller on Amazon.com I would get it today for my mom if she wasn’t so far away.
State of the art research and development on online collaborative technologies. An excellent recent summary: We review a representative selection of systems that support the management of collaborative learning interaction, and characterize them within a simple classification framework. The framework distinguishes between…
What is known (and unknown) about computer supported collaborative learning? This chapter summarizes two decades of research on computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL). We first review the key idea that has emerged, namely the fact that collaboration among peers can be “designed”,…
An article about group design and selection collaborative learning. This study investigates whether instructor-formed heterogeneous groups produce a more effective CL environment than student self-selected groups by measuring individual academic performance and perceptions. Results indicate the presence of…