Jennifer Stromer‐galley
Biographic Data
| ID | 4154670 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jennifer Stromer‐galley |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jennifer |
| FAMILY NAME | Stromer‐galley |
| SIGNATURE | GALLEY J S |
| AFFILIATIONS | Syracuse University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6079-8788 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 49 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 256 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 41 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 8 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Social Media in Elections: Evidence From the United States, Germany, and Australia
The year 2024 was marked by an unprecedented confluence of elections around the world, with more than 50% of the world’s population called upon to vote on the future of their governments; perhaps most important of these was the presidential election in the United States in November 2024, which saw Donald Trump returned to the Presidency – an outcome whose immense consequences are already being felt strongly around the world, mere months into the …
Reducing political polarization through conversations with artificial intelligence
Political polarization is threatening the welfare of individuals and societies. Connecting insights gained from interpersonal communication to human–machine communication, we hypothesized that positive interactions with artificial intelligence (AI) could reduce polarization between humans. To evaluate this proposition, two experiments were conducted, in which human participants (N = 1,035) communicated with AI chatbots in real time. The bots enga…
Controversies, Problematic Information, and Polarisation: Case Studies Across Six Countries
Political trends around the world have drawn further scholarly attention to the study of polarisation, especially also as it is expressed and potentially deepened by public communication on digital and social media platforms. The very concept of polarisation itself, however, remains ill-defined especially in communication research, where it is often used as a mere buzzword without sufficient definition – even in spite of a wide range of conceptua…
Discussions That Divide: The Interplay Between Experiencing Uncivil Conversations and Politically Motivated Avoidance on Whatsapp and Facebook
This study examines how experiences of incivility in political conversations influence selective avoidance on WhatsApp and Facebook in Brazil, using a national survey. Using national survey data, we find that being targeted by incivility in political discussions consistently predicts avoidance behavior on both platforms, despite their different affordance and networks. However, exposure to disagreement shows platform-specific effects, with WhatsA…
Immigration-related socio-cognitive dynamics driving digital hate: A four-country study on online incivility and intolerance perpetration
Amid crises, immigration-related digital hate is rising. When perpetrators attempt to rationalize their actions, various socio-cognitive dynamics activate. We theorize that immigration-related moral disengagement serves as the key mechanism between perceived immigration threats and digital hate perpetration (i.e., online incivility and intolerance). Also, we argue that constant victimization perceptions amplify this process. Using cross-sectional…
Social (media) psychology of the “news-finds-me” perception: Habits, mindsets, and beliefs
Unintended encounters with news on social media can foster a reliance on incidental news exposure and the perception that “news finds me.” Because the “news-finds-me” (NFM) perception has negative consequences for informed and engaged citizenship, explaining it has become a priority in recent years. This two-wave survey of adults in the USA incorporates scholarship on social media habits and social media mindsets for an expanded view of the antec…
The Efficacy of Large Language Models and Crowd Annotation for Accurate Content Analysis of Political Social Media Messages
Systematic content analysis of messaging has been a staple method in the study of communication. While computer-assisted content analysis has been used in the field for three decades, advances in machine learning and crowd-based annotation combined with the ease of collecting volumes of text-based communication via social media have made the opportunities for classification of messages easier and faster. The greatest advancement yet might be in t…
Unleash Britain’s Potential (To Go Negative): Campaign Negativity in the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections on Facebook
Negative campaigning has long concerned scholars because of the potential effects on the electorate and on democracy. Most scholarship has focused on single-election studies in the United States, whereas less is known about how campaigns go on the attack in the UK, and few compare two elections. Drawing from a dataset of Facebook posts by parties and leaders in Great Britain during the five weeks of campaigning in the 2017 and 2019 General Electi…
Introduction to the special issue of social media: The good, the bad, and the ugly
As social media scholarship pervades the communication discipline, it is time to reflect on the good, bad, and ugly of social media. The theme for this special issue is inspired in part by the 1966 film, “The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly.” Like its portrayal of the American Civil War, we again face deep divisions. The question is what role is social media helping us to heal those divides versus fragmenting us further? The seven articles in this is…
A Human-Centered Design Approach to Creating Tools to Help Journalists Monitor Digital Political Ads: Insights and Challenges
Political actors have increasingly incorporated digital advertising into their persuasive efforts. Greater transparency of how political actors are using digital ads is necessary given concerns that they may be using digital ads to suppress voter turnout and spread disinformation and xenophobia. We apply a human-centered design framework to identify the design requirements necessary to create tools that satisfy journalists’ needs for covering dig…
Revisiting Key Concepts in Digital Media Research: Influence, Populism, Partisanship, Polarisation
Recent scholarship on the intersections between digital media and political debate has taken on a decidedly pessimistic, even dystopian tone, and not without reason: from the effective use of social media platforms by populists and demagogues like Donald Trump to the expression of deepening ideological divides in online public debate, and from the emergence of partisan online communities and platforms to the intensification and exploitation of su…
Seeding Doubts About Voting Broadly and Strategically: Trump and Biden Rhetoric Online in the 2020 U.S. Presidential Election
When rioters attacked the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021, they did so mistrusting the electoral process and believing that Donald Trump had been robbed of the presidency. Presidential rhetoric has the power to shape the attitudes of the public and steer the country (Mercieca, 2020). Indeed, presidential rhetoric has the power to shape what Taylor (2004) describes as the social imaginary – the rhetorical construction of a version of a shared real…
Categorizing political campaign messages on social media using supervised machine learning
Scholars have access to a rich source of political discourse via social media. Although computational approaches to understand this communication are being used, they tend to be unsupervised and off-the-shelf algorithms to describe a corpus of messages. This article details our approach at using human-supervised machine learning to study political campaign messages. Although some declare this technique too labor-intensive, it provides theoretical…
The story of social media: Evolving news coverage of social media in American politics, 2006–2021
This article examines how American news media have framed social media as political technologies over time. To do so, we analyzed 16 years of political news stories focusing on social media, published by American newspapers (N = 8,218) and broadcasters (N = 6,064) (2006–2021). Using automated content analysis, we found that coverage of social media in political news stories: (a) increasingly uses anxious, angry, and moral language, (b) is consist…
The effects of disagreement and unfriending on political polarization: A moderated-mediation model of cross-cutting discussion on affective polarization via unfriending contingent upon exposure to inc…
Cross-cutting discussion is the foundation of deliberative democracy. However, previous research has reported inconsistent results regarding the effects of exposure to dissimilar perspectives on political polarization. This study aims to extend the literature by exploring how cross-cutting discussion influences affective polarization through unfriending and how this indirect effect is contingent upon exposure to incivility. The study analyzes pan…
Facts are hard to come by: Discerning and sharing factual information on social media
How credulous are we when engaging information on social media? Addressing this question, this article aims to understand how individuals’ epistemic vigilance, a set of cognitive mechanisms that comprise our system of precaution in social interactions, may operate and fall short. Reporting findings from two survey experiments (Study 1, N = 413; Study 2, N = 392), we show that participants tended to be skeptical toward social media news, were reas…
The social movement was live streamed: A relational analysis of mobile live streaming during the 2019 Hong Kong protests
This study proposes a sociotechnical framework to study digital media and social movements and uses it to analyze the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Informed by actor-network theory, this framework examines media technology as infrastructure, practice, and text, and discusses its relation to other actors/actants in the network of social movements. Based on qualitative analysis of live streaming sessions and in-depth interviews with journalists and a…
When national identity meets conspiracies: The contagion of national identity language in public engagement and discourse about Covid-19 conspiracy theories
There are growing concerns about the role of identity narratives in spreading misinformation on social media, which threatens informed citizenship. Drawing on the social identity model of deindividualization effects (SIDE) and social identity theory, we investigate how the use of national identity language is associated with the diffusion and discourse of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on Weibo, a popular social media platform in China. Our results…
Staying in Their Lanes: Issue Ownership in the 2016 and 2020 U.S. Presidential Campaigns on Facebook and Twitter
Prior research has identified issue-ownership across partisan lines, with Republicans seen to focus on issues such as taxes and national defense, and Democrats more likely to focus on social issues and welfare. Given the complexities of the primary race, with candidates aiming to differentiate themselves within their own party, we ask whether the candidates in both parties engage in creating “lanes” by owning specific policy topics. Use supervise…
Flexible versus structured support for reasoning: Enhancing analytical reasoning through a flexible analytic technique
Structured analytic techniques (SATs) help the intelligence community reduce flaws in cognition that lead to faulty reasoning. To ascertain whether SATs provide benefits to reasoning we conducted an experiment within a web-based application, comparing three conditions: 1) unaided reasoning, 2) a prototypical order-based SAT and 3) a flexible, process-based SAT that we call TRACE. Our findings suggest that the more flexible SAT generated higher qu…
More than “Fake News: The media as a malicious gatekeeper and a bully in the discourse of candidates in the 2020 U.S. presidential election
While the debate around the prevalence and potential effects of fake news has received considerable scholarly attention, less research has focused on how political elites and pundits weaponized fake news to delegitimize the media. In this study, we examine the rhetoric in 2020 U.S. presidential primary candidates Facebook advertisements. Our analysis suggests that Republican and Democratic candidates alike attack and demean the news media on seve…
Political Messaging Over Time: A Comparison of US Presidential Candidate Facebook Posts and Tweets in 2016 and 2020
Political campaigns have a temporal nature, which means that the strategic environment shapes the nature of candidate communication, especially the stages of campaigning-from surfacing to the general election. As social media platforms have matured and political campaigns have normalized their use of those platforms in this decade, this study examines the 2016 and 2020 US presidential campaign communication on Facebook and Twitter using data from…
Does Anyone Talk About the Issues Anymore? The 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates' Messaging on Facebook and Twitter
As campaigns use social media to communicate with the public, this study investigates the dynamics of issue and image construction by the U.S. presidential candidates during the primary stage of the 2016 presidential campaign. Using computational techniques to classify candidate posts by message type and topic, we study all posts by the 17 Republican and 5 Democratic candidates from Sept. 1, 2015 through March 31, 2016. We ask whether candidates …
‘Coordinated Inauthentic Behaviour’ and Other Online Influence Operations in Social Media Spaces
Recently, major social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter have announced efforts to counter "coordinated inauthentic behaviour." However, scholarly research continues to provide evidence that coordinated human and automated accounts covertly seek to undermine and manipulate public debates on these platforms. Given the difficulties in obtaining data from these platforms to study these influence operations, and the significant challenge o…
Exploring the Relationship Between Campaign Discourse on Facebook and the Public’s Comments: A Case Study of Incivility During the 2016 US Presidential Election
Social media is now ubiquitously used by political campaigns, but less attention has been given to public discussions that take place on candidates’ free public accounts on social media. Also unclear is whether there is a relationship between campaign messaging and the tone of public comments. To address this gap, this article analyzes public comments on Facebook accounts of candidates Trump and Clinton during the US election presidential debates…
Digital Media, Power, and Democracy in Parties and Election Campaigns: Party Decline or Party Renewal
The role of digital media practices in reshaping political parties and election campaigns is driven by a tension between control and interactivity, but the overall outcome for the party organizational form is highly uncertain. Recent evidence contradicts scholarship on the so-called “death” of parties and suggests instead that parties may be going through a long-term process of adaptation to postmaterial political culture. We sketch out a concept…
Agreement and Disagreement in Group Deliberation: Effects on Deliberation Satisfaction, Future Engagement, and Decision Legitimacy
While research on democratic deliberation has burgeoned, little systematic work has been done on the effects of the communication content of deliberations. We examine how expressions of agreement and disagreement during online deliberation affect participants' evaluations of their experience, including satisfaction, reevaluation of opinions, and expected future participation. The effects of these evaluations on perceived legitimacy and opinion am…
Diversity of Political Conversation on the Internet: Users' Perspectives
This essay provides an account of the perspectives of users of online political discussion spaces. In-depth interviews with 69 people who participate in online political discussion groups were conducted. The interviews suggest that they perceive themselves to be interacting with persons who differ from them. They appreciate and enjoy the diversity of people and opinions they encounter online. Although some interview participants expressed dislike…
Citizen Perceptions of Online Interactivity and Implications for Political Campaign Communication
In this essay we test empirically whether U.S. citizens identify and distinguish between the media and human interaction components of the Internet as suggested by Stromer-Galley (2000). In addition, we explore how citizens understand the role of the Internet in political campaigns, and the role they themselves can play in the campaign process by utilizing the interactive features of Internet applications. To answer these questions, we conducted …
Exploring the Relationship Between Campaign Discourse on Facebook and the Public’s Comments: A Case Study of Incivility During the 2016 US Presidential Election
Social media is now ubiquitously used by political campaigns, but less attention has been given to public discussions that take place on candidates’ free public accounts on social media. Also unclear is whether there is a relationship between campaign messaging and the tone of public comments. To address this gap, this article analyzes public comments on Facebook accounts of candidates Trump and Clinton during the US election presidential debates…
Interactivity-as-Product and Interactivity-as-Process
This article attempts to clarify the murky conceptual water of “interactivity,” arguing that the term refers to two distinct phenomena: interactivity between people and interactivity between people and computers or networks. The former orients research on the process of interactivity. The latter orients research on the product of interactivity. That two distinct phenomena have been labeled with the same term causes problems when one wants to move…
Tweeting to the Target: Candidates’ Use of Strategic Messages and @Mentions on Twitter
This paper reports on a mixed-methods (i.e., content analysis, machine learning, and quantitative analysis) study of Twitter use among 74 U.S. gubernatorial candidates during the 2014 election. In extending the theory of controlled interactivity, this article focuses on politicians’ use of the @mention where we detail differing messaging strategies when candidates mention themselves versus their opponents, and between incumbents and challengers. …
Democratizing democracy: Strong democracy, US political campaigns and the Internet
2000). Democratizing democracy: Strong democracy, US political campaigns and the Internet. Democratization: Vol. 7, The Internet, Democracy and Democratization, pp. 36-58
More than “Fake News: The media as a malicious gatekeeper and a bully in the discourse of candidates in the 2020 U.S. presidential election
While the debate around the prevalence and potential effects of fake news has received considerable scholarly attention, less research has focused on how political elites and pundits weaponized fake news to delegitimize the media. In this study, we examine the rhetoric in 2020 U.S. presidential primary candidates Facebook advertisements. Our analysis suggests that Republican and Democratic candidates alike attack and demean the news media on seve…
Unleash Britain’s Potential (To Go Negative): Campaign Negativity in the 2017 and 2019 UK General Elections on Facebook
Negative campaigning has long concerned scholars because of the potential effects on the electorate and on democracy. Most scholarship has focused on single-election studies in the United States, whereas less is known about how campaigns go on the attack in the UK, and few compare two elections. Drawing from a dataset of Facebook posts by parties and leaders in Great Britain during the five weeks of campaigning in the 2017 and 2019 General Electi…
The Democratic Divide in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
By analyzing Pew Internet and American Life Project's postelection survey, this article examines whether there continues to exist a democratic digital divide in the 2008 U.S. presidential election season. The research focuses on the divide patterns of four different types of political Internet use: information-seeking, communication, mobilization, and use of social networking sites. The research results suggest a higher likelihood for the socioec…
Visual spaces, norm governed places: The influence of spatial context online
Current theories of social interaction and normative influence in Computer-Mediated Communication were developed in the era of the internet predominated by text-based interaction. With the growth of visual-spatial worlds like Second Life, these theories need to be re-examined. The evolution of thinking about social norms online has moved from a mechanistic view to a systems view of humans and communication technology intertwined in a complex rela…
Public policy and obstacles to the virtual agora: Insights from the deliberative e-rulemaking project
Cyber-optimists anticipate that electronic media will serve as an extensive public space, a virtual agora, that will re-engage the public with politics and the policies that affect everyday life. For three years we were involved in a U.S. National Science Foundation funded project desig ned to enhance the participation of citizens in government agency rulemaking processes using online public deliberation and Natural Language Processing technologi…
The Argumentative Burdens of Audience Conjectures: Audience Research in Popular Culture Criticism
We define “audience conjectures” as claims about specific effects on audiences or claims describing the determinate meaning of a text for audiences. We note that audience conjectures are being advanced by rhetorical critics of popular culture texts without adequate evidence. Our thesis is that if critics make claims concerning the determinate meanings of the text or the effects those texts have on audiences, then the critic should support such cl…
When national identity meets conspiracies: The contagion of national identity language in public engagement and discourse about Covid-19 conspiracy theories
There are growing concerns about the role of identity narratives in spreading misinformation on social media, which threatens informed citizenship. Drawing on the social identity model of deindividualization effects (SIDE) and social identity theory, we investigate how the use of national identity language is associated with the diffusion and discourse of COVID-19 conspiracy theories on Weibo, a popular social media platform in China. Our results…
Social Media, Opinion Polls, and the Use of Persuasive Messages During the 2016 US Election Primaries
Political campaigns' use of digital technologies has been a topic of scholarly concern for over two decades, but most studies have been focused on analyzing the use of digital platforms without considering contextual factors of the race, like public opinion polls. Opinion polls are an important information source for citizens and candidates and provide the latter with information that might drive strategic communication. In this article, we explo…
Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project: Challenges to Enacting Real World Deliberation
This article describes the challenges facing a federal government–funded initiative to promote online deliberation to improve the public comment process by federal and state government agencies in the United States. The three year project met several difficulties. Some have been technical, but our primary obstacle has been in securing partnerships with government agencies. Due to institutional, legal, and organizational challenges, many governmen…
The Digital Dollhouse: Context and Social Norms in The Sims Online
This article investigates the relationships between norms and the rich visual environment of the multiplayer game The Sims Online (TSO). Literature suggests that people exhibit normative behavior in online environments. The complex actions and interactions possible with the game's avatars and a minimal game structure make TSO an evocative online space in which to examine social interaction. Through participation and observation, we examined conve…
The effects of disagreement and unfriending on political polarization: A moderated-mediation model of cross-cutting discussion on affective polarization via unfriending contingent upon exposure to inc…
Cross-cutting discussion is the foundation of deliberative democracy. However, previous research has reported inconsistent results regarding the effects of exposure to dissimilar perspectives on political polarization. This study aims to extend the literature by exploring how cross-cutting discussion influences affective polarization through unfriending and how this indirect effect is contingent upon exposure to incivility. The study analyzes pan…
The story of social media: Evolving news coverage of social media in American politics, 2006–2021
This article examines how American news media have framed social media as political technologies over time. To do so, we analyzed 16 years of political news stories focusing on social media, published by American newspapers (N = 8,218) and broadcasters (N = 6,064) (2006–2021). Using automated content analysis, we found that coverage of social media in political news stories: (a) increasingly uses anxious, angry, and moral language, (b) is consist…
The social movement was live streamed: A relational analysis of mobile live streaming during the 2019 Hong Kong protests
This study proposes a sociotechnical framework to study digital media and social movements and uses it to analyze the 2019 protests in Hong Kong. Informed by actor-network theory, this framework examines media technology as infrastructure, practice, and text, and discusses its relation to other actors/actants in the network of social movements. Based on qualitative analysis of live streaming sessions and in-depth interviews with journalists and a…
Social (media) psychology of the “news-finds-me” perception: Habits, mindsets, and beliefs
Unintended encounters with news on social media can foster a reliance on incidental news exposure and the perception that “news finds me.” Because the “news-finds-me” (NFM) perception has negative consequences for informed and engaged citizenship, explaining it has become a priority in recent years. This two-wave survey of adults in the USA incorporates scholarship on social media habits and social media mindsets for an expanded view of the antec…
Categorizing political campaign messages on social media using supervised machine learning
Scholars have access to a rich source of political discourse via social media. Although computational approaches to understand this communication are being used, they tend to be unsupervised and off-the-shelf algorithms to describe a corpus of messages. This article details our approach at using human-supervised machine learning to study political campaign messages. Although some declare this technique too labor-intensive, it provides theoretical…
Facts are hard to come by: Discerning and sharing factual information on social media
How credulous are we when engaging information on social media? Addressing this question, this article aims to understand how individuals’ epistemic vigilance, a set of cognitive mechanisms that comprise our system of precaution in social interactions, may operate and fall short. Reporting findings from two survey experiments (Study 1, N = 413; Study 2, N = 392), we show that participants tended to be skeptical toward social media news, were reas…
The Argumentative Burdens of Audience Conjectures: Audience Research in Popular Culture Criticism
We define “audience conjectures” as claims about specific effects on audiences or claims describing the determinate meaning of a text for audiences. We note that audience conjectures are being advanced by rhetorical critics of popular culture texts without adequate evidence. Our thesis is that if critics make claims concerning the determinate meanings of the text or the effects those texts have on audiences, then the critic should support such cl…
On-Line Interaction and Why Candidates Avoid It
Journal Article On-Line Interaction and Why Candidates Avoid It Get access Jennifer Stromer-Galley Jennifer Stromer-Galley 1Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, PA, USA Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Journal of Communication, Volume 50, Issue 4, December 2000, Pages 111–132, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1460-2466.2000.tb02865.x Published: 10 January 2006
Democratizing democracy: Strong democracy, US political campaigns and the Internet
2000). Democratizing democracy: Strong democracy, US political campaigns and the Internet. Democratization: Vol. 7, The Internet, Democracy and Democratization, pp. 36-58
Voting and the Public Sphere: Conversations on Internet Voting
An abstract is not available for this content so a preview has been provided. Please use the Get access link above for information on how to access this content
Interactivity-as-Product and Interactivity-as-Process
This article attempts to clarify the murky conceptual water of “interactivity,” arguing that the term refers to two distinct phenomena: interactivity between people and interactivity between people and computers or networks. The former orients research on the process of interactivity. The latter orients research on the product of interactivity. That two distinct phenomena have been labeled with the same term causes problems when one wants to move…
Diversity of Political Conversation on the Internet: Users' Perspectives
This essay provides an account of the perspectives of users of online political discussion spaces. In-depth interviews with 69 people who participate in online political discussion groups were conducted. The interviews suggest that they perceive themselves to be interacting with persons who differ from them. They appreciate and enjoy the diversity of people and opinions they encounter online. Although some interview participants expressed dislike…
Citizen Perceptions of Online Interactivity and Implications for Political Campaign Communication
In this essay we test empirically whether U.S. citizens identify and distinguish between the media and human interaction components of the Internet as suggested by Stromer-Galley (2000). In addition, we explore how citizens understand the role of the Internet in political campaigns, and the role they themselves can play in the campaign process by utilizing the interactive features of Internet applications. To answer these questions, we conducted …
Measuring Deliberation’s Content: A Coding Scheme
This paper details a content analysis scheme to measure the quality of political deliberation in face-to-face and online groups. Much of deliberation research studies the outcomes of deliberation, but there has been a lack of analysis of what groups actually do when tasked with deliberating. The coding scheme was developed out of the theoretical literature on deliberation and further enhanced by the empirical literature on small groups, deliberat…
The Digital Dollhouse: Context and Social Norms in The Sims Online
This article investigates the relationships between norms and the rich visual environment of the multiplayer game The Sims Online (TSO). Literature suggests that people exhibit normative behavior in online environments. The complex actions and interactions possible with the game's avatars and a minimal game structure make TSO an evocative online space in which to examine social interaction. Through participation and observation, we examined conve…
Visual spaces, norm governed places: The influence of spatial context online
Current theories of social interaction and normative influence in Computer-Mediated Communication were developed in the era of the internet predominated by text-based interaction. With the growth of visual-spatial worlds like Second Life, these theories need to be re-examined. The evolution of thinking about social norms online has moved from a mechanistic view to a systems view of humans and communication technology intertwined in a complex rela…
Agreement and Disagreement in Group Deliberation: Effects on Deliberation Satisfaction, Future Engagement, and Decision Legitimacy
While research on democratic deliberation has burgeoned, little systematic work has been done on the effects of the communication content of deliberations. We examine how expressions of agreement and disagreement during online deliberation affect participants' evaluations of their experience, including satisfaction, reevaluation of opinions, and expected future participation. The effects of these evaluations on perceived legitimacy and opinion am…
The Democratic Divide in the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
By analyzing Pew Internet and American Life Project's postelection survey, this article examines whether there continues to exist a democratic digital divide in the 2008 U.S. presidential election season. The research focuses on the divide patterns of four different types of political Internet use: information-seeking, communication, mobilization, and use of social networking sites. The research results suggest a higher likelihood for the socioec…
Public policy and obstacles to the virtual agora: Insights from the deliberative e-rulemaking project
Cyber-optimists anticipate that electronic media will serve as an extensive public space, a virtual agora, that will re-engage the public with politics and the policies that affect everyday life. For three years we were involved in a U.S. National Science Foundation funded project desig ned to enhance the participation of citizens in government agency rulemaking processes using online public deliberation and Natural Language Processing technologi…
Deliberative E-Rulemaking Project: Challenges to Enacting Real World Deliberation
This article describes the challenges facing a federal government–funded initiative to promote online deliberation to improve the public comment process by federal and state government agencies in the United States. The three year project met several difficulties. Some have been technical, but our primary obstacle has been in securing partnerships with government agencies. Due to institutional, legal, and organizational challenges, many governmen…
Communicating age in Second Life: The contributions of textual and visual factors
Although considerable research has identified patterns in online communication and interaction related to a range of individual characteristics, analyses of age have been limited, especially those that compare age groups. Research that does examine online communication by age largely focuses on linguistic elements. However, social identity approaches to group communication emphasize the importance of non-linguistic factors such as appearance and …
Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age
Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age challenges popular claims about the democratizing effect of Digital Communication Technologies (DCTs).
The strategic female: Gender-switching and player behavior in online games
As players craft and enact identities in digital games, the relationship between player and avatar gender remains unclear. This study examines how 11 in-game chat, movement, and appearance behaviors differed by gender and by men who did and did not use a female avatar – or ‘gender-switchers’. Drawing on social role and feminist theories of gender, we argue that gender differences in behavior align with the social roles and norms that establish ap…
Context and Medium Matter: Expressing Disagreements Online and Face-to-Face in Political Deliberations
Processes of disagreement are important to public deliberation, but research has not examined the dynamics of disagreement in deliberation of political topics with respect to effects of the channel of interaction. This study analyzes the discussions generated via an experiment in which discussants were randomly assigned either to deliberate online via synchronous chat or face-to-face. The study compares the initiation of disagreement, its qualiti…
Digital Media, Power, and Democracy in Parties and Election Campaigns: Party Decline or Party Renewal
The role of digital media practices in reshaping political parties and election campaigns is driven by a tension between control and interactivity, but the overall outcome for the party organizational form is highly uncertain. Recent evidence contradicts scholarship on the so-called “death” of parties and suggests instead that parties may be going through a long-term process of adaptation to postmaterial political culture. We sketch out a concept…
Balancing Play and Formal Training in the Design of Serious Games
This article discusses the design and development of two serious games intended to train people to reduce their reliance on cognitive biases in their decision-making in less than an hour each. In our development process, we found a tension between rich and flexible experimentation and exploration experiences and robust learning experiences that ensured the lesson content was easily understood and recalled. In line with game-based learning researc…
The relationship between race competitiveness, standing in the polls, and social media communication strategies during the 2014 U.S. gubernatorial campaigns
Political campaigns have been systematically using social media for strategic advantage. However, little is known about how competitiveness affects the ways candidates communicate online. Our study analyzes how race competitiveness as measured by polling performance influences candidates’ strategies on Twitter and Facebook. We analyze all social media messages of Republican and Democratic candidates in states that held gubernatorial elections in …
Tweeting to the Target: Candidates’ Use of Strategic Messages and @Mentions on Twitter
This paper reports on a mixed-methods (i.e., content analysis, machine learning, and quantitative analysis) study of Twitter use among 74 U.S. gubernatorial candidates during the 2014 election. In extending the theory of controlled interactivity, this article focuses on politicians’ use of the @mention where we detail differing messaging strategies when candidates mention themselves versus their opponents, and between incumbents and challengers. …
Social Media, Opinion Polls, and the Use of Persuasive Messages During the 2016 US Election Primaries
Political campaigns' use of digital technologies has been a topic of scholarly concern for over two decades, but most studies have been focused on analyzing the use of digital platforms without considering contextual factors of the race, like public opinion polls. Opinion polls are an important information source for citizens and candidates and provide the latter with information that might drive strategic communication. In this article, we explo…
A circulação da (des)informação política no WhatsApp e no Facebook
As eleições de 2018 no Brasil colocaram em destaque a circulação de informação política e os impactos da desinformação na formação da opinião pública. O declínio da confiança nas notícias veiculadas pela grande mídia foi terreno fértil para o aumento das fake news, que atuaram fortemente na produção de conteúdos sobre as campanhas. Nesse contexto, também chamou a atenção a utilização dos sites de redes sociais (SRSs) e o serviço móvel de mensagen…
Does Anyone Talk About the Issues Anymore? The 2016 U.S. Presidential Candidates' Messaging on Facebook and Twitter
As campaigns use social media to communicate with the public, this study investigates the dynamics of issue and image construction by the U.S. presidential candidates during the primary stage of the 2016 presidential campaign. Using computational techniques to classify candidate posts by message type and topic, we study all posts by the 17 Republican and 5 Democratic candidates from Sept. 1, 2015 through March 31, 2016. We ask whether candidates …
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