Archive of posts filed under the New Media category.

Issue-Specific Activism on Climate Issues on Facebook

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Even as scholars discuss changes in the ways in which young adults approach politics – and particularly their focus on specific issues and social concerns rather than dutiful political participation – a lot of what we know about political engagement via social media focuses on politics proper: political candidates and campaigns. While this research is largely promising …

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Multi-modality debating: How social media (especially Twitter) are changing the presidential debates

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How we choose to watch political debates changes what we get out of them. That’s not really news: scholars have been discussing this effect since the first televised presidential debates in 1960. Popular wisdom suggested Nixon’s poor appearance (“death-like”) on TV hurt his standing compared to Kennedy’s vitality, later supported by finding that people who …

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Google+: Doing too much to succeed?

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As someone who was pretty enthusiastic about the potential of Google+, I’m sad to admit that I’ve been disenchanted lately. Although I have a lot of friends who relentlessly enumerate its benefits and try to convince everyone to join, I wonder if Google+ will be able to overcome its biggest challenge: the fact that Facebook simply …

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Is Twitter outgrowing itself? Disengagement on this “social” media

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I haven’t always been a fan of Twitter. For years, I was completely unconvinced of its utility – I couldn’t see the point in yet another social networking site with even more mundane status updates. But I changed my mind during the Wisconsin protests at the beginning of this year, in which social media – and …

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Google+ and politics: What the competition could mean for political engagement

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This must be my week to blog about Google+, so I’m rounding it out with a final post that at least somewhat fits my area of expertise. Whether Google+ defeats Facebook in the long run or whether it remains a network for early adopters with some cool features, it’s still garnering significant numbers. And this …

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