Video: Natalia Martín talks to Marc Smith and John Kelly about Social Media Analysis

I spoke about social media with Natalia Martín Cantero, RTVE blogger and professor in digital new reporting at IE School of CommunicationIE University in Segovia, Spain along with my colleague John Kelly, from the Berkman Center for Internet & SocietyHarvard University and Founder of Morningside Analytics. The video was recorded at the symposium on Transnational connections: Challenges and opportunities for communication.


In this video interview, John and I summarize the themes discussed at the symposium including the political implications of inequality of technology access and the literacy to use it.  John describes his efforts to map the global blogosphere and I describe the ways social media creates social networks that can be extracted and mapped.  What does it take to be a communicator in a digital media environment?  We discuss the privacy rights of public data and the use of data in ethical ways.  Not everyone with a fiber-optic cable and server room operates under ethical guidelines.  Given that digital communication is inherently traceable communication, could it be that not everyone should take the risks of communicating?    Digital communication makes messages more findable and available which is a virtue when you want your message heard widely.  It is getting harder to limit distribution of content to select audiences.  I like to argue that the destiny of all information is to be made public if only because information never becomes less public.

IE University has a YouTube channel with lots of interesting  video (in English and Spanish) related to communication, innovation, and social media.

2009 Sociological Association Meetings – Internet Sociologists Meet (CITASA @ ASA09)

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The 2009 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting was held in San Francisco, California, August 8-11.

The ASA attracts thousands of sociologists, a subsection of whom have  a passion for the study of the Internet and its many forms of social impacts and uses.  The Communications and Information Technology Section of the American Sociological Association (CITASA) is the group that gathers many forms of social science research on the creation and uses of information technology.  This year’s meeting included two CITASA panels, round tables, a business meeting with awards, and a (windy!) boat ride through San Francisco Bay and beneath the Golden Gate Bridge.

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The CITASA sponsored papers at the conference are listed below.  The range of work illustrates the continued interest in social science studies of the impacts of information technology.

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