scholarly journals Empowering Parents and Protecting Children in an Evolving Media Landscape

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Palfrey ◽  
Urs Gasser ◽  
danah boyd
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Young People ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Public ◽  
New Information ◽  
Technology Changes ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities

When it comes to youth and technology, issues of concern about the future – rather than issues related to opportunities – often dominate the public discourse. This is understandable. First, parents and grandparents are often baffled by, and sometimes concerned about, the habits of their children and the generations that follow – and this shift in behavior by many youth is surely no exception to that rule. Second, we are in the midst of radical transformations in the information technology environment and in patterns of usage of technology, changes that are bringing with them much creativity but also challenges to existing hierarchies. And third, adults perceive that their children are more likely to use these new information technologies in ways that are at best perplexing and at worst dangerous to themselves and to society. The data collected by social scientists about young people, how they use technologies, and the challenges and opportunities they face often are at odds with this public perception. We appreciate the frame of the FCC’s NOI, which encourages respondents to focus on the empowerment of parents as well as the protection of our children with respect to online behaviors.

scholarly journals “Beauty” premium for social scientists but “unattractiveness” premium for natural scientists in the public speaking market

2020 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Weilong Bi ◽  
Ho Fai Chan ◽  
Benno Torgler
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public Speaking ◽  
Facial Attractiveness ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
Natural Scientist ◽  
The Public ◽  
Beauty Premium ◽  
The Face ◽  
Natural Scientists

Abstract In the face of scientists’ increasing engagement in public discourse, we examine whether facial attractiveness affects their market value (i.e., audience willingness to pay). For a sample of scientists who participate in public speaking, we find that facial attractiveness is uncorrelated with internal academic achievements (as measured by publications and citations) and is only weakly but positively linked to attention outside of academia. Notably, we find that the effect of facial attractiveness on external influence is only robust to measures where speakers’ physical appearance is likely to be most apparent to the public, such as invitations to give TED talks or Google web page counts while the effect on the number of book publications or book awards is not significant. Our results also suggest that these relationships do not differ across scientists’ fields of research. However, we find that in terms of speaking fees, social scientists benefit substantially from being more attractive, whereas unattractiveness is a comparative advantage for natural scientists. A similar divergence in the direction of the relationship between speaking fee and facial attractiveness is also evident for nonacademic speakers from different fields: whereas those from a natural science (job) background gain from unattractiveness, those with a social science history benefit from a beauty premium. This market premium for unattractiveness conforms not only to the common stereotype of the natural scientist but also to a belief that the more unattractive of these researchers engage in higher quality work. Overall, the findings indicate that facial appearance is important in the public perception of academics and, to some extent, their dissemination of knowledge.

scholarly journals Public Discourses on (Sectoral) Energy Policy in Switzerland

2021 ◽  
pp. 313-343
Author(s):  
Lena Maria Schaffer ◽  
Alessio Levis
Keyword(s):  
Energy Policy ◽  
News Media ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
National Policy ◽  
Energy Transition ◽  
The Public ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Future Policy ◽  
Transition Policy

AbstractEnergy transitions are based upon policy choices of sovereign nation states. Hence, politics plays a role in determining which policies governments implement and which sectors are targeted. Our chapter looks at the evolution of public discourse on energy policy as one important factor reflecting policy discussion and contestation within the political arena. Our descriptive and explorative analysis of the early public discourse in Swiss energy policy between 1997 and 2011 contributes to three main issues. First, it makes a case for the disaggregation of energy policy and its public perception to add to our understanding of energy transition pathways. We argue that looking at sectoral discourses as well as sectoral policy outputs allows for a more comprehensive understanding of the idiosyncrasies of Swiss energy policy regarding temporal as well as sectoral variation. Second, an increased politicization of energy policy may affect future policy choice, and thus any account on energy transition policy needs to scrutinize potential feedback effects from policies that manifest via policy discourse. Third, and on a more methodological stance, we argue that our approach to use news media as a representation of the public discourse via structural topic models can help to explore and explain the evolving national policy priorities regarding energy transition.

scholarly journals Panel on: The Creation and Distortion of Communication through Information Technology

10.28945/2733 ◽  
2003 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary Elizabeth Bezanson ◽  
Kenneth J. Levine ◽  
Susan B. Kretchmer
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Mass Communication ◽  
Digital Age ◽  
Content Filtering ◽  
Public And Private ◽  
Potential Harm ◽  
The Public ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
Information And Communication

Information and communication technology has opened up both challenges and opportunities for the process of communication. This is particularly true for communicating effectively and efficiently in the digital age, where unique problems of creation and distortion, especially misinformation and bias, can arise. In addition, the broad diffusion of a communication medium eventually prompts both the public and private sectors to establish mechanisms to regulate that medium under the rubric of the public interest. Sometimes this can happen through self-censorship on the part of the industry, while other times it requires the institution of governmental law and regulation. The emergence of the Internet as a mass communication system has raised questions about how this medium can function to benefit society, as well as concerns about its potential harm. Focusing on the nexus of the process of communication and the limitations and prospects of information technology, this panel explores some of the major concerns of the digital age from a legal and policy perspective. The topics to be covered through interactive discussion include: anonymous speech and cybersmearing; the nature of publication and misinformation; and Internet content filtering, freedom of speech, and intellectual property

Advising and Warning the People: Swedish Salafis on Violence, Renunciation and Life in the Suburbs

2020 ◽  
pp. 155-172
Author(s):  
Susanne Olsson
Keyword(s):  
Young People ◽  
Identity Construction ◽  
Role Models ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Local Community ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Positive Message ◽  
Foreign Fighters

The chapter analyses the public discourse of a Swedish Salafi group, concerned with concrete social ills in the local community. The group is against violence, carrying out missionary activities focused on piety, correct practice and behaviour. Three topics are analysed using material from their YouTube-channel: 1) Reaching Paradise through Renunciation, 2) Establishing a Non-Violent Strategy, and 3) Social development. Through missionary activities (daʿwa), they respond to the current situation with foreign fighters, terrorism and gang criminality. The message is straightforward and self-assured as it attempts to disrupt the positive images some young people may have of violent lifestyles and create new role models to emulate. They are thereby striving to present a positive message: if people join their project of moral reform and renunciation, they will contribute to strengthening suburbs and create a peaceful environment. At the same time, in-group identity construction is strong and exclusionist.

‘Everywhere and nowhere’: interventions and services under austerity

2020 ◽  
pp. 271-290
Author(s):  
Stephen Crossley
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Power Relations ◽  
The State ◽  
Service Users ◽  
The Public ◽  
It Systems ◽  
New Information ◽  
Access Services

This chapter explains how austerity has led to an increasingly fragmented and disparate economy and geography of welfare. These changes have affected people's ability to access services, leaving some of them isolated and excluded from activities that they previously enjoyed. The chapter then questions the use of new information technology (IT) systems and the related expansion of cybernetic relations to register, administer, manage, and target some of the most vulnerable members of society. It argues that these virtual systems emerge as a way of dealing with cases that need physical and in-depth contact in the context of austerity budgets rather than a tested way of pooling information to save lives. This argument suggests that they can also be a way to exclude service users from decision-making about their entitlement and ultimately their lives, reconfiguring the power relations between the public and the state.

A Conversation on Immigration in Prince George's County

2013 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 42-45
Author(s):  
Heidi Fishpaw
Keyword(s):  
Public Perception ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Collaborative Effort ◽  
Immigrant Community ◽  
Prince George's County ◽  
University Of Maryland ◽  
The Public ◽  
Maryland College ◽  
The University

This article describes and analyzes research that I carried out in the context of a collaborative effort to market and plan events around a mobile exhibit on the immigrant experience in Prince George's County, Maryland. The project aimed to shine light on and tease out the factors that play a role in public perception of immigrants and immigration as well as to understand, in the first place, what the range of public perceptions is. I participated in this project as an intern for the Anthropology of the Immigrant Life Course Research Program (2010) of the University of Maryland, College Park's Department of Anthropology. I focused on understanding how the public imagines the immigrant community in Prince George's County and the public discourse about immigration as an issue more broadly.

scholarly journals Social scientists as expert witnesses in The Hague Tribunal and elsewhere

2007 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 103-116
Author(s):  
Vladimir Petrovic
Keyword(s):  
Scientific Knowledge ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Expert Witnesses ◽  
Specific Character ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Public ◽  
Specific Solution ◽  
The Hague ◽  
Legal Contexts

The article analyses the role of social scientists as expert witnesses in the ICTY, whose contribution is assessed in the light of the long development of this practice. Wider discussion on the courtroom usage of scientific knowledge is evoked in order to emphasize the problems in regulation of expert witnessing. Differing mechanisms set to ensure the scientific reliability and legal relevance of the contribution of experts is analyzed in different legal contexts and in different scholarly disciplines. Regulation of expert witnessing in The Hague tribunal is perceived as specific solution whose consequences are tracked through the role of experts in the trials and through the public perception of this role. The goal of such approach is to nuance the dominant interpretations on the role of scholars in the Hague tribunal and to create the preconditions for understanding of the specific character of their role.

scholarly journals Talking About Youth: The Depoliticization of Young People in the Public Domain

2019 ◽  
Vol 64 (5) ◽  
pp. 591-607
Author(s):  
Marco Giugni ◽  
Maria Grasso
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Young People ◽  
Public Discourse ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
Public Domain ◽  
Claims Analysis ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Actors ◽  
Political Agents ◽  
Cross National

In this article, we employ data from comparative claims analysis of five major newspapers in nine European countries between 2010 and 2016 to examine discourse around youth. We look at the ways in which collective actors frame youth in the public domain and how this may provide discursive opportunities understood in terms of the extent to which public discourse portrays young people as agents of social change. More specifically, we argue that young people are depoliticized in the public domain. We find that public statements and more generally public discourse about youth tend to depict them as actors who do not have political aims or to focus on other, nonpolitical characteristics. Our exploratory analysis shows that, while youth are fairly present as actors in the public domain, they are only rarely addressed or discussed in political terms. Moreover, where they are addressed politically, it is in negative terms, with few political claims. At the same time, we observe important cross-national variations, whereby the depoliticization process looks to be further matured in some countries relative to others. This process of depoliticization of youth in the public domain, in turn, has important implications on their potential for acting as political agents and for their political activism.

Green Information Technology and Virtualization in Corporate Environmental Management Information Systems

2010 ◽  
pp. 23-36
Author(s):  
Edward T. Chen
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Management ◽  
Information Technology ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Green It ◽  
Ecological Awareness ◽  
The Public ◽  
Effective Strategies ◽  
Corporate Environmental Management ◽  
Day To Day Operations ◽  
Green Information Technology

Businesses today must not only be concerned with their day-to-day operations and the making of profit, but also with a set of challenges related to the public perception, the environment, and the costs of energy consumption. The image of the company from the perspective of customers and the public in general must be carefully monitored as it relates to the environment and the use of natural resources and energy. The demonstration of effective strategies that allow for “greener” and more ecological awareness, will gain the respect of customers, businesses, stockholders, and other concerned groups. The protection of our environment is also a major agenda of firms today. This paper discusses how “Green IT” along with the concepts of “Virtualization” can provide for better organizational, operational, and environmental outcomes.

Information Technology and Organizational Change in the Public Sector

2013 ◽  
pp. 41-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonal J. Seneviratne
Keyword(s):  
Information Technology ◽  
Organizational Change ◽  
Public Sector ◽  
Information And Communication Technology ◽  
Communication Technology ◽  
Information Technologies ◽  
Organizational Transformation ◽  
The Public ◽  
Information And Communication ◽  
Public Sector Managers

The adoption of Information and Communication Technology (ICT) to organize, integrate, coordinate and manage various activities has become the catalyst for organizational change. The impact of these changes in the public sector have been to change the type of work being performed, demand new levels of productivity and efficiency from those performing the work, and call for a fundamental restructuring of the public sector to reflect the value systems of an information age. The literature on the organizational impacts of Information and Communication Technology have pointed to mixed findings about the success of information technology enabled organizational change, suggesting that the success of such change efforts depends on the combination of technical and social influences. Despite any potential for organizational change in the private sector, information technologies have not been associated with organizational transformation in the public sector. It is suggested that for the public sector to begin reaping the benefits of Information and Communication Technology, public sector managers are going to need to become change agents and manage the change process by managing the technology. <BR>

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