Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
Social Media News
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 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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
An older study by Kumar et al. looking at Flickr and Yahoo 360 noticed not only the typical 80/20 distribution of connections, but also the social importance of the people in the top 20%. These individuals are the “linkers,” the ones that…
The great weakness of location aware mobile apps is precision and location relevance. Mobile apps that are supposed to push to you info about the place you are at rely on GPS signals to pull in information. Even when very precise, they…
Justin Jones: WordPress Security or Why Google Says You Shouldn’t Visit My Church | WordPress.tv.
Crowdsourcing and social media trust emerged to be the most Twitter-discussed topics related to the second Kredible Net workshop on Trust, Authority, and Credibility in social media, which I co-organized at Stanford University. A NodeXL analysis also suggests that the conversation was carried…
In the context of the Snowden and Prism scandal, Google released a transparency report, which discloses the number of judicial requests for disclosing information about Google service users by country over a period of three years. Data has been released in the…
According to Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency (NSA) leaker, the US government has recruited several major Internet corporations, especially Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo, to help it harvest emails, videos, and web traffic from unsuspecting US and foreign citizens through…
Not a billionaire, yet enjoying the limelight… Married for the third time, now to a Londoner, Jimmy Wales enjoys life among the glitterati of the world. A very entertaining and at times informative profile in the New York Times… High-minded or not,…
A method of monitoring copyright infringing P2P traffic meant to notify users in real time that the content they are viewing has been uploaded online illegally has been implemented by five of the most important ISPs in the United States: ATT, Verizon,…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Can social media increase the effect of undesirable social communication processes, such as the echo chamber or spiral of silence?…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Knowledge gap hypothesis proposes that more information does not always mean a better informed public, or at least that not all members of…
The relative popularity of the contenders in the 2012 US Presidential campaign can be measured not only by traditional polling methods, but also by the buzz the contestants create online and in social media. One efficient tool is Google Trends, which indicates…
See on Scoop.it – Mapping current events General Keith Alexander, head of the National Security Agency, gave an address at the Defcon hacking conference in Las Vegas Friday saying “Sometimes you guys get a bad rap. From my perspective, what you’re doing to…
See on Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies A TV/Web report on the digital revolution and how it’s changing our lives, with video stories, interviews, and user-generated video on relationships, information overload, education, the military, parenting, brain development, and more. See on…
See on Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies Want to know what Tom Daley’s bedroom looks like? Or how Matthew Mitcham amuses himself in the Olympic Park between training sessions? Or where 5,000 can sit down to dinner? See on socialmediatoday.com
See on Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies ROI eludes many folks in the social media space. Not because social marketeers aren’t able to, it’s just damn difficult to assign cause and effect to a very organic and often nebulous activity. See…
See on Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies A newspaper by Pekka Puhakka – updated daily with a curated selection of articles, blog posts, videos and photos. (The Location Aware Services Daily is out! See on paper.li
See on Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies In preparing for our morning show we were doing some research and came across an old story that showed that StumbleUpon was actually driving more traffic than FaceBook in January of 2011 and we wondered…
See on Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies This really is for anyone who is new to this exciting business! Using quotation marks is something that confuses many online. People usually ask “why (Keyword Research! See on www.warriorforum.com
See on Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies At launch, Path seemed like the ultimate social network for mobiles. It was as addictive to scroll as Instagram, but richer in actions like Facebook. See on www.fastcodesign.com
See on Scoop.it – Virtual community and societies BioSpace Spotlights the growing Midwest Life Science Community [February 7, July – 2:01 AM PST]: (RT @investorpoint: BioSpace Spotlights the growing Midwest Life Science Community http://t.co/Ax38fd8z...)… See on www.investorpoint.com