Sorin Adam Matei
Analysis, research, maps, and essays from Sorin Adam Matei.
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…
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…
Today I launch a new teaching and research initiative which will empower Purdue students aspiring to embrace careers in big data, social media analytics, or communication. The initiative starts with a partnership with Google News Lab University. The partnership, which includes other…
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…
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…
A useful resource for those interested in mining data out of social media flows, the book introduces the novice researcher to basic techniques for: Scraping data from text Extracting and analyzing networks from social media flows Analyzing behaviors as evidenced by social…
Nothing seems more random to the naked eye than the babble of online exchanges. Are the posting patterns on Wikipedia user pages or the answers offered to Q&A sites ruled by any discernible configurations? Do users engage in predictable posting/answering behaviors? More…
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…
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…
On October 18, 2013 I co-organized a workshop in collaboration with MediaX (Martha Russell) and Social Media Research Foundation (Marc Smith) on Trust, Authority, and Credibility at IRISS, on the Stanford campus, in Palo Alto. My co-PIs on the NSF grant that…
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 Cultivation theory suggests that heavy television exposure generates a world of ideas and mental content that is homogeneous and biased toward “reality” as…
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…
It’s official: The National Science Foundation hereby awards a grant of $179,594 to Purdue University for support of the project “KredibleNet – Building a research community and proposing a research agenda for the study and modeling of reputation and authority across informal…
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…
In a an extremely detailed report to be delivered to the computer security conference, Imperva, an IT security consulting company describes how the hacker Anonymous group launched Operation Pharisee to bring down the Vatican web site. The report is to be presented…
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…
Description The course is a guide to the emerging field of educational and scholarly theories and practices that use networked computational resources and platforms to promote learning and research. It will investigate how technologies and the practices associated with them might generate…
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…
This is the title of the opening theoretical chapter of Francesca Comunello’s edited book “Networked Sociability and Individualism: Technology for Personal and Professional Relationships“. The chapter is the product of my collaboration with my former PhD student, Robert Bruno, now Assistant Professor…
Marc Smith, cyber sociologist, product developer, Connected Action Chief Scientist, and leader of the Social Media foundation will visit the West Lafayette Purdue campus between September 22-23 and will give a talk about one of his most important projects, NodeXL, on Thursday,…
ESRI has published a very nice map that shows Irene’s impact as captured in Flickr photos, Youtube clips, and tweets. If you get over the clutter at lower levels of resolution, it looks like a very nice idea. For some years ESRI…
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,…
To what degree can the human exchanges we observe online be called “sociability”? In other words, do these exchanges amount to any meaningful type of social organization? Are they more than the mere froth of collective emotion discharging its energy with a…
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.
The devastating series of tornadoes, of which the F-5 (maximum intensity) event that hit Joplin, Missouri left in its wake over 130 dead was the most terrifying, raise the question if tornadoes are becoming more destructive and if 2011 is a record-breaking…
After a great start, with great positive reactions on Twitter, President Obama’s Middle East speech has become only a few days later a more controversial proposition, both for social media audiences and for newsmakers. According to Social Mention, a social media monitoring…
NEW: Read latest update on social mention sentiment analysis of President Obama’s Middle East speech Textual analysis of the rhetoric and of the social media buzz created by President Obama’s speech on the future of the Middle East (see transcript of Middle…
Have you thought about digital estate planning? Suppose that just after you finish reading this article, you keel over, dead. Perhaps you’re ready for such an eventuality, in that you have prepared a will or made some sort of arrangement for the…
Image via Wikipedia Spot on. Leveraging the power of social media resides in our ability to check and funnel its output, not in hosing out content indiscriminately. In this respect Assange, who has decided to throttle the release of his stash of…
Image via CrunchBase Could this be a sign of the time? New York Time thinks social media so central to its effort that it insists that all of its editors and writers think “socially”… Earlier this week, New York Times Social Media…
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…
Nothing seems more random to the naked eye than the babble of online exchanges. Are the posting patterns on Wikipedia user pages or the answers offered to Q&A sites ruled by any discernible configurations? Do users engage in predictable posting/answering behaviors? More…
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 INTRODUCTION: Mass media has become a research issue during the 1930s and 1940s. This has imprinted it with an early concern with psychological…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Elihu Katz, Paul Lazarsfeld, and Gabriel Tarde have already said that media are profoundly social. Newspapers have been read at breakfast for almost…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University bySorin Adam Matei Of the couple dozen theories that aim to explain how mass media impact society, how many of them are still valid today, when…
Does the old fashioned newsroom still matter? Image via Wikipedia This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Agenda setting theory was proposed in the early 1970s by Maxwell McCombs and…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Media System Dependency Theory Core principles MSD proposes that media and its audiences co-exist in a state of ecological dependency. They establish relationships…
This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Social Capital Theory proposes that effective social action and the wellbeing of social groups, from the smallest voluntary organization to entire societies, is…
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?…
Wikipedia, had in July 2010 over 12 million users and 3.5 million articles ( see latest Wikipedia Stats) and was the 4th most visited website on the planet (see latest data from Google’s AdPlanner). It is at the same time a prototypical…
Social entropy theory and analysis applied to communication This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Social entropy theory is derived from Shannon’s Mathematical Theory of Communication and it proposes that…
Albert Bandura, right Image by psicologiautal via Flickr This is a learning module for the class Contemporary Social / Mass Media Theory taught at Purdue University by Sorin Adam Matei Social cognitive theory main tenets Albert Bandura’s (b. 1925) career spans more than 6 decades,…
How do we predict social behavior on social media? Shepperd and Taylor propose Expectancy Theory… The paper is also interesting for the connection it makes between group and personal expectations. I wonder, however, if the authors thought through the consequence of no…
This piece, which is available online, has become an instant classic… Billions of people participate in online social activities. Most users participate as readers of discussion boards, searchers of blog posts, or viewers of photos. A fraction of users become contributors of…
In a recent article by Mashable.com, writer Jamie O’Dell discusses ways in which social media has the ability to help others. O’Dell highlights 9 specific websites that contribute to good causes, some of which are free for users to participate in. Some examples of…