W Russell Neuman
Biographic Data
| ID | 280811 |
|---|---|
| NAME | W Russell Neuman |
| GIVEN NAMES | W Russell |
| FAMILY NAME | Neuman |
| SIGNATURE | NEUMAN W R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Michigan |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4629-9509 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 757 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1976 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| H-INDEX | 11 |
Beyond Framing
The Paradox of the Paradigm
Media effects research has focused so intently on effects that it has neglected the richly informative domain of persuasive messages that have no effects, have reverse boomerang effects, or have unintended and unanticipated consequences. This results in a paradoxical paradigmatic gap: a theoretical blind spot. I propose we broaden our research focus to include systematic patterns of miscommunication and non-communication in the interpretive dynam…
Doris Graber’s Insights on Taming the Information Tide
Doris Graber’s Insights on Taming the Information Tide." Political Communication, 35(3), pp. 504–505
Three guys walk into a bar
This study posits a scenario in which three famous information theorists meet each other in a bar and compare notes. The three include the celebrated information theorist Claude Shannon, the eighteenth century English statistician Thomas Bayes, and the Harvard statistical linguist George Zipf. Each promoted a foundational equation concerning human communication and the updating of beliefs based on new information. They discover that with some mod…
The Digital Difference
Although the shift from one-way to two-way mass communication - from broadcasting to social networking - represents a revolutionary restructuring, it does not necessarily mean the public is better informed, more culturally or politically polarized, or more engaged in public life. Practices, institutions, and norms are in mid-transition and potentially subject to our individual and collective choice. The book is designed to connect the best of rec…
Measuring Emotional Response
Scholarly interest in the role of emotion in accounting for how people react to political figures, events, and messages has escalated over the past two plus decades in political science and psychology. However, research on the validity of the measurement of subjective self-report of emotional responses is rather limited. We introduce here a new measurement approach, a “slider” format and compare it with the long used “radio button” item format. W…
Big Data, Digital Media, and Computational Social Science
The Dynamics of Issue Frame Competition in Traditional and Social Media
This study examines the dynamics of the framing of mass shooting incidences in the U.S. occurring in the traditional commercial online news media and Twitter. We demonstrate that there is a dynamic, reciprocal relationship between the attention paid to different aspects of mass shootings in online news and in Twitter: tweets tend to be responsive to traditional media reporting, but traditional media framing of these incidents also seems to resona…
The Dynamics of Public Attention
Researchers have used surveys and experiments to better understand communication dynamics, but confront consistent distortion from self-report data. But now both digital exposure and resulting expressive behaviors (such as tweets) are potentially accessible for direct analysis with important ramifications for the formulation of communication theory. We utilize “big data” to explore attention and framing in the traditional and social media for 29 …
Taming the Information Tide
This study reports on new media adopters’ perceptions of and reactions to the shift from push broadcasting and headlines to the pull dynamics of online search. From a series of focus groups with adults from around the United States we find three dominant themes: (1) Most feel empowered and enthusiastic, not overloaded; (2) evolving forms of social networking represent a new manifestation of the two-step flow of communication; and (3) although cri…
The Evolution of Media Effects Theory
The literature of media effects is frequently characterized as a three-stage progression initially embracing a theory of strong effects followed by a repudiation of earlier work and new model of minimal effects followed by yet another repudiation and a rediscovery of strong effects. We argue that although this dramatic and somewhat romantic simplification may be pedagogically useful in introductory courses, it may prove a significant impediment t…
Parsimony and Complexity
The theory of affective intelligence posits that an individual's emotions help govern a reliance on political habits or, alternatively, deliberation and attention to new political information. Some of the evidence adduced draws on the fact that voters who are anxious about their own party's candidate do not rely blindly on their partisanship but instead consider policy and personality when they vote. In a provocative paper, Ladd and Lenz (2008) a…
The Affect Effect
The Seven Deadly Sins of Communication Research
We analyzed anonymized copies of the complete reviewer comments for 120 recent submissions to the Journal of Communication and attempted to identify the scholarly “sins” and “virtues” most frequently mentioned by the reviewers and most closely associated with the decision to publish the submission. We assessed levels of interreviewer agreement and patterns of evaluation in different subfields of communication scholarship. An explicit connection t…
The Affect Effect
Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in our understanding of political behavior, Affect Effect fills the void by providing a comprehensive overview of current research on emotion in politics and where it is likely to lead. In sixteen seamlessly integrated essays, thi…
Social Implications of the Internet
The Internet is a critically important research site for sociologists testing theories of technology diffusion and media effects, particularly because it is a medium uniquely capable of integrating modes of communication and forms of content. Current research tends to focus on the Internet's implications in five domains: 1) inequality (the 'digital divide'); 2) community and social capital; 3) political participation; 4) organizations and other e…
The Gordian Knot
Political Communications Infrastructure
Major American corporate and political forces are currently battling for control of a new digital communications network that marks the convergence of what were until recently separate industries of publishing, broadcasting, telecommunications, and computers. So far the debate over the National Information Infrastructure has been dominated by questions of who gains and who loses economically. This article attempts to redirect attention to the iss…
Interpreting Visual Versus Audio Messages in Television News
A three-way experimental design examined the relative power of visual, audio, and audiovisual television messages on people's learning of and feelings about political issues. Evidence from these experiments showed that audio alone is just as effective as a combined audio and visual presentation for conveying information, including the critical interpretation of a news story. Comparing results across stories demonstrated that encoding information …
Constructing Political Reality
The politics of a paradigm shift
As a result of the convergence of telecommunications and mass communications technologies, American policymakers face a series of critical decisions about infrastructural investment, technical architecture, and regulation that will determine the character of the U.S. electronic industrial base. This article develops the argument that the current policy trajectory will likely lead to some awkward choices. Powerful vested interests have distorted t…
The Republic of Mass Culture
Common Knowledge
The Threshold of Public Attention
Journal Article THE THRESHOLD OF PUBLIC ATTENTION Get access W. RUSSELL NEUMAN W. RUSSELL NEUMAN w. RUSSELL NEUMAN directs the Communications Research Group of the Media Laboratory and teaches communications and public opinion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 2, SUMMER 1990, Pages 159–176, https://doi.org/10.1086/269194…
Presidential Communications
Social Implications of the Internet
The Internet is a critically important research site for sociologists testing theories of technology diffusion and media effects, particularly because it is a medium uniquely capable of integrating modes of communication and forms of content. Current research tends to focus on the Internet's implications in five domains: 1) inequality (the 'digital divide'); 2) community and social capital; 3) political participation; 4) organizations and other e…
The Threshold of Public Attention
Journal Article THE THRESHOLD OF PUBLIC ATTENTION Get access W. RUSSELL NEUMAN W. RUSSELL NEUMAN w. RUSSELL NEUMAN directs the Communications Research Group of the Media Laboratory and teaches communications and public opinion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 2, SUMMER 1990, Pages 159–176, https://doi.org/10.1086/269194…
Parsimony and Complexity
The theory of affective intelligence posits that an individual's emotions help govern a reliance on political habits or, alternatively, deliberation and attention to new political information. Some of the evidence adduced draws on the fact that voters who are anxious about their own party's candidate do not rely blindly on their partisanship but instead consider policy and personality when they vote. In a provocative paper, Ladd and Lenz (2008) a…
Measuring Emotional Response
Scholarly interest in the role of emotion in accounting for how people react to political figures, events, and messages has escalated over the past two plus decades in political science and psychology. However, research on the validity of the measurement of subjective self-report of emotional responses is rather limited. We introduce here a new measurement approach, a “slider” format and compare it with the long used “radio button” item format. W…
The Evolution of Media Effects Theory
The literature of media effects is frequently characterized as a three-stage progression initially embracing a theory of strong effects followed by a repudiation of earlier work and new model of minimal effects followed by yet another repudiation and a rediscovery of strong effects. We argue that although this dramatic and somewhat romantic simplification may be pedagogically useful in introductory courses, it may prove a significant impediment t…
The Dynamics of Issue Frame Competition in Traditional and Social Media
This study examines the dynamics of the framing of mass shooting incidences in the U.S. occurring in the traditional commercial online news media and Twitter. We demonstrate that there is a dynamic, reciprocal relationship between the attention paid to different aspects of mass shootings in online news and in Twitter: tweets tend to be responsive to traditional media reporting, but traditional media framing of these incidents also seems to resona…
Beyond Framing
Differentiation and Integration
Conceptual differentiation refers to the number of discrete elements of political information individuals utilize in their evaluation of political issues. In contrast with the more commonly used textbookish political knowledge indices, this measure corresponds more closely to knowledge-in-use. Conceptual integration is defined as the spontaneous and explicit organization of ideas and information in terms of abstract or ideological constructs and …
The Digital Difference
Although the shift from one-way to two-way mass communication - from broadcasting to social networking - represents a revolutionary restructuring, it does not necessarily mean the public is better informed, more culturally or politically polarized, or more engaged in public life. Practices, institutions, and norms are in mid-transition and potentially subject to our individual and collective choice. The book is designed to connect the best of rec…
Big Data, Digital Media, and Computational Social Science
Television and American Culture
Journal Article Television and American Culture: The Mass Medium and the Pluralist Audience Get access W. RUSSELL NEUMAN W. RUSSELL NEUMAN W. Russell Neuman is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Communications Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, 1980. Sea…
Political Communications Infrastructure
Major American corporate and political forces are currently battling for control of a new digital communications network that marks the convergence of what were until recently separate industries of publishing, broadcasting, telecommunications, and computers. So far the debate over the National Information Infrastructure has been dominated by questions of who gains and who loses economically. This article attempts to redirect attention to the iss…
Taming the Information Tide
This study reports on new media adopters’ perceptions of and reactions to the shift from push broadcasting and headlines to the pull dynamics of online search. From a series of focus groups with adults from around the United States we find three dominant themes: (1) Most feel empowered and enthusiastic, not overloaded; (2) evolving forms of social networking represent a new manifestation of the two-step flow of communication; and (3) although cri…
Constructing Political Reality
Patterns of Recall Among Television News Viewers
Television
Differentiation and Integration
Conceptual differentiation refers to the number of discrete elements of political information individuals utilize in their evaluation of political issues. In contrast with the more commonly used textbookish political knowledge indices, this measure corresponds more closely to knowledge-in-use. Conceptual integration is defined as the spontaneous and explicit organization of ideas and information in terms of abstract or ideological constructs and …
Television and American Culture
Journal Article Television and American Culture: The Mass Medium and the Pluralist Audience Get access W. RUSSELL NEUMAN W. RUSSELL NEUMAN W. Russell Neuman is Assistant Professor of Political Science and Co-Director of the Research Program on Communications Policy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This article is a revised version of a paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, New York, 1980. Sea…
Presidential Communications
The Threshold of Public Attention
Journal Article THE THRESHOLD OF PUBLIC ATTENTION Get access W. RUSSELL NEUMAN W. RUSSELL NEUMAN w. RUSSELL NEUMAN directs the Communications Research Group of the Media Laboratory and teaches communications and public opinion at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Public Opinion Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 2, SUMMER 1990, Pages 159–176, https://doi.org/10.1086/269194…
Common Knowledge
The politics of a paradigm shift
As a result of the convergence of telecommunications and mass communications technologies, American policymakers face a series of critical decisions about infrastructural investment, technical architecture, and regulation that will determine the character of the U.S. electronic industrial base. This article develops the argument that the current policy trajectory will likely lead to some awkward choices. Powerful vested interests have distorted t…
The Republic of Mass Culture
Interpreting Visual Versus Audio Messages in Television News
A three-way experimental design examined the relative power of visual, audio, and audiovisual television messages on people's learning of and feelings about political issues. Evidence from these experiments showed that audio alone is just as effective as a combined audio and visual presentation for conveying information, including the critical interpretation of a news story. Comparing results across stories demonstrated that encoding information …
Constructing Political Reality
Political Communications Infrastructure
Major American corporate and political forces are currently battling for control of a new digital communications network that marks the convergence of what were until recently separate industries of publishing, broadcasting, telecommunications, and computers. So far the debate over the National Information Infrastructure has been dominated by questions of who gains and who loses economically. This article attempts to redirect attention to the iss…
The Gordian Knot
Social Implications of the Internet
The Internet is a critically important research site for sociologists testing theories of technology diffusion and media effects, particularly because it is a medium uniquely capable of integrating modes of communication and forms of content. Current research tends to focus on the Internet's implications in five domains: 1) inequality (the 'digital divide'); 2) community and social capital; 3) political participation; 4) organizations and other e…
The Affect Effect
Passion and emotion run deep in politics, but researchers have only recently begun to study how they influence our political thinking. Contending that the long-standing neglect of such feelings has left unfortunate gaps in our understanding of political behavior, Affect Effect fills the void by providing a comprehensive overview of current research on emotion in politics and where it is likely to lead. In sixteen seamlessly integrated essays, thi…
The Affect Effect
The Seven Deadly Sins of Communication Research
We analyzed anonymized copies of the complete reviewer comments for 120 recent submissions to the Journal of Communication and attempted to identify the scholarly “sins” and “virtues” most frequently mentioned by the reviewers and most closely associated with the decision to publish the submission. We assessed levels of interreviewer agreement and patterns of evaluation in different subfields of communication scholarship. An explicit connection t…
The Evolution of Media Effects Theory
The literature of media effects is frequently characterized as a three-stage progression initially embracing a theory of strong effects followed by a repudiation of earlier work and new model of minimal effects followed by yet another repudiation and a rediscovery of strong effects. We argue that although this dramatic and somewhat romantic simplification may be pedagogically useful in introductory courses, it may prove a significant impediment t…
Parsimony and Complexity
The theory of affective intelligence posits that an individual's emotions help govern a reliance on political habits or, alternatively, deliberation and attention to new political information. Some of the evidence adduced draws on the fact that voters who are anxious about their own party's candidate do not rely blindly on their partisanship but instead consider policy and personality when they vote. In a provocative paper, Ladd and Lenz (2008) a…
Taming the Information Tide
This study reports on new media adopters’ perceptions of and reactions to the shift from push broadcasting and headlines to the pull dynamics of online search. From a series of focus groups with adults from around the United States we find three dominant themes: (1) Most feel empowered and enthusiastic, not overloaded; (2) evolving forms of social networking represent a new manifestation of the two-step flow of communication; and (3) although cri…
The Dynamics of Public Attention
Researchers have used surveys and experiments to better understand communication dynamics, but confront consistent distortion from self-report data. But now both digital exposure and resulting expressive behaviors (such as tweets) are potentially accessible for direct analysis with important ramifications for the formulation of communication theory. We utilize “big data” to explore attention and framing in the traditional and social media for 29 …
Measuring Emotional Response
Scholarly interest in the role of emotion in accounting for how people react to political figures, events, and messages has escalated over the past two plus decades in political science and psychology. However, research on the validity of the measurement of subjective self-report of emotional responses is rather limited. We introduce here a new measurement approach, a “slider” format and compare it with the long used “radio button” item format. W…
Big Data, Digital Media, and Computational Social Science
The Dynamics of Issue Frame Competition in Traditional and Social Media
This study examines the dynamics of the framing of mass shooting incidences in the U.S. occurring in the traditional commercial online news media and Twitter. We demonstrate that there is a dynamic, reciprocal relationship between the attention paid to different aspects of mass shootings in online news and in Twitter: tweets tend to be responsive to traditional media reporting, but traditional media framing of these incidents also seems to resona…
The Digital Difference
Although the shift from one-way to two-way mass communication - from broadcasting to social networking - represents a revolutionary restructuring, it does not necessarily mean the public is better informed, more culturally or politically polarized, or more engaged in public life. Practices, institutions, and norms are in mid-transition and potentially subject to our individual and collective choice. The book is designed to connect the best of rec…
Computer Science (18 works) · Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Politics (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Social Media and Politics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Law (11 works) · Media Studies and Communication (11 works) · Media studies (6 works)