Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
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…
What qualifies as a mass communication theory? Typically, the phrase is connected with the idea of “media effects.” Mass communication theories are typically imagined as ways to explain how mass communication affects us. How does mass communication influence our political or shopping choices, how…
Purdue University Fall 2017 Meeting time: Tuesday – Thursday, 12 – 1:20 PM, BRNG 2275 Office hours: BRNG 2140, 2:15 – 4 PM T-Th and by appointment Instructor: Sorin Adam Matei, smatei at purdue edu According to the site Alexa.com, which tracks…
Most important highlights of the latest Pew Internet Study – 18-24 year olds compared to 30 year olds are almost twice as likely to have smartphones 20% less likely to read newspapers 100% more likely to use Twitter Younger Americans’ Reading Habits…
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 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…
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…
Systematic migration is defined in the study as “coordinated” migration in these terms: We formally define a coordinated migration as the movement of population from a hometown h to its most likely current city c(h) such that: At least 100 users have listed city h as their hometown.…
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…
For many moons Facebook has been denying its digital sharecroppers to access all at once the capital that they have brought to the site: their friend list. If you want to send an invitation about a page or event to your entire…
A simple tutorial on how to generate the code needed to embed a Facebook Fan Page Like Widget into your website. The example is customized for a WordPress based side, Kidnect.us. For other sites, simply dump…
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?…
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…
What is computational social science? It is an interdisciplinary approach to the study of vast, intact social networks and “big data” projects made possible by social media. Nature synthesizes the latest advances in this review article… Our own contributions in mining Wikipedia to decipher…
A wonderful list of Twitter Sentiment Analysis Tools collated by Twittersentiment.appspot.com… Twitter Analysis Tools look at the meaning of the tweets and divides them into negative and positive communication items. Since the original list missed some sites, feel free to add yours…
A list of principles for designing on-line communities created by Dr. Sorin A. Matei and his students registered in various versions of the Online Interaction Graduate Seminar at Purdue University Online / virtual community design principles Design guidelines are not guarantees. Many are necessary for…
Iceland surprised the world when it announced that it will include in the draft of its new constitution suggestions made by the citizenry via social media. A website and a special Facebook page were used as main means for collecting public input. The…
According to a recent European Union study, Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Cyprus lead social networking pack in Europe, with more than 2/3rds of Internet users accessing social networking sites frequently. On the other hand, the same countries are less concerned about privacy…
Google+ is the search giant’s response to Facebook’s recent raise as the most visited site in the world. The tools aim to make the web experience of Google account users a little bit more like that offered by Facebook. The problem is,…
Faceboo dethrones HI5, Orkut and other also ran networks in most countries of the world. Only significant exceptions, Russia and China. via Amazing maps that show how Facebook is taking over the world.
Connected, explores the visible and invisible connections linking major issues of our time—the environment, consumption, population growth, technology, human rights, the global economy—while searching for her place in the world during a transformative time in her life.
All your digital breadcrumbs in one place… A program aggregates all your location based information and plots it on a map. A new software tool created by Greek programmer Yiannis Kakavas goes much farther in the shock category. Called “Creepy,” Kakavas’ tool…
Facebook does not seem to have a very large advertising footprint. In fact, it relies in great measure on two major partners, Zynga, the producer of Farmville, and Groupon. Gaming and group buying partners are responsible for 2/3rds of Facebook’s revenue. While…
Image via Wikipedia Gene Weingarten wrote a tongue in cheek article for WP about Facebook’s uselessness and the way in which it can become a gigantic time suck, especially for those of us that have other, better things to do. He used…
Image via CrunchBase Sept 23, 4 PM, EST: Facebook appears to be down. I have tried to access it several times in the last hour and it is beyond reach. The current message is that not even the DNS request can be…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Web 2.0 and social media core assumptions The popular concepts of social media and Web 2.0 hinge on the assumption that the…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Identity theories and social media What cultural and intellectual forces account for the social and intellectual ethos that fuels the social media revolution?…
Image via Wikipedia The Structure of Information Pathways in a Social Communication Network Social networks are of interest to researchers in part because they are thought to mediate the flow of information in communities and organizations. Here we study the temporal dynamics…
A very interesting paper on calculating critical mass and predicting explosion of interaction on social media sites. Image via Wikipedia Disagreement surrounds a formal definition of ‘critical mass’ and of the economic willingness to pay for membership in a social network. Our…
Earlier this week at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Facebook announced a new version of its web site for mobile media users that will be available in coming weeks. Unlike its Internet counterparts, Facebook and Facebook Lite, the new “Facebook Zero”…
The FTC Logo, Image via Wikipedia Facebook is on the hook. Privacy advocates complained to the FTC that Facebook’s decision to make most of your actions public by default is a form of deceptive practices. The Electronic Privacy Information Center filed a…
After being overtaken by Google in the later part of 2008, Yahoo now is passed by Facebook. During the last year Facebook doubled its traffic, while Yahoo remained largely stationary. 133 million unique visitors in Jan 2010. From Mashable: Facebook is now…
Tired of having to stay logged into Facebook to utilize the chat function with your friends list on the site? Ever forgotten the need to be logged in to the site and signed out while you were chatting with someone? Well, Facebook…
Gang Signs on the Web creative commons image by JL! via Flickr Gang members use social media to organize payback missions or to snuff out snitches. A Washington Post article cited by Gawker and dugg 172 times reports that gangs regularly use…
Image by luc legay via Flickr The shortest, sweetest summary of the lates Facebook upgrade… The Twitter-like filter-free home page everyone hated a few months back was gone, and the default feed everyone missed so much was back — sort of —…
Cover via Amazon Are we too connected? Is social networking online changing our behavior? The the worse? USA TODAY believes so…. The changes can be vexing, but there is precedent. The arrival of new and improved media almost always foments behavioral changes.…