Category: Media and Society

Knowledge and Well-Being in the Digital Society

[New preprint posted to SocArXiv] Has the internet made all the world’s knowledge universally accessible to everyone, anytime and anywhere? No. But access to knowledge has changed a lot since the 1990s. Ubiquitous digital media means people have developed new default ways of searching for information in everyday life, and there is a lack of … Continue reading Knowledge and Well-Being in the Digital Society

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Citizenship, Bees, and Zucchini (ggplot2)

Opendata.swiss currently provides about 8000 open government data sets from agriculture to health to culture. Here, I'll be looking at a data set from the Federal Statistical Office containing the 500 most successful Swiss films by theater admissions. This post is mostly about preparing data for ggplot and customizing figures in R. You can download … Continue reading Citizenship, Bees, and Zucchini (ggplot2)

Media Technology Adoption in Europe

This post is inspired by the #tidytuesday CHAT data set and focuses on the diffusion and adoption rates of media technologies since 1992. Most interesting is probably the current data about internet users, whereas the statistics on radios, television sets, and newspaper circulation are only available up to about the year 2000. On the technical … Continue reading Media Technology Adoption in Europe

Analyzing Between-Person and Within-Person Associations

Explanations and implied causal mechanisms for digital media use often operate at the individual level. For example, the hypothesis photo sharing with friends increases social connectedness implies that when people share more photos they will feel more connected. A typical test of such a hypothesis might rely on a linear regression with a count measure … Continue reading Analyzing Between-Person and Within-Person Associations

Digital Well-Being: An Industry Perspective by Paul Marsden

I had the pleasure of having consultant consumer psychologist Dr. Paul Marsden of digitalwellbeing.org and WPP as a guest lecturer in my course on digital well-being. Paul has a PhD in social psychology and helps brands understand the effects of consumer technology; how consumers think, feel, and behave. He offered an excellent and nuanced overview … Continue reading Digital Well-Being: An Industry Perspective by Paul Marsden

Digital Inequality in the Social Media Use–Well-Being Relationship

This is a summary post of a short article in which we argue for the need to consider digital inequality in research on social media use and well-being. The open access article is published in Social Media + Society. Our literature review didn’t turn up any papers that could empirically show the “full cycle” of … Continue reading Digital Inequality in the Social Media Use–Well-Being Relationship

Digital Well-Being Theory and Research

The article Digital Well-Being Theory and Research has been published in New Media & Society. A blog post and Twitter summary thread are available below. The full paper is open access here: https://doi.org/10.1177/14614448211056851 Created with https://app.wombo.art/ Abstract Digital well-being concerns individuals’ subjective well-being in a social environment where digital media are omnipresent. A general framework … Continue reading Digital Well-Being Theory and Research

Research Reports from the World Internet Project – Switzerland 2021: Covid-19 and Digitization Push

95 percent of the Swiss population use the internet in 2021. Among those under 70, it is almost 100 percent. 86 percent of the total population also use mobile internet in 2021, which is more than four times as many as ten years ago. Internet usage time doubled between 2011 and 2019 to 3.5 hours … Continue reading Research Reports from the World Internet Project – Switzerland 2021: Covid-19 and Digitization Push

Making Sense of Algorithmic Profiling

This is a summary post of an article published open access in Information, Communication & Society. What reactions and rationales do Facebook users have when confronted with their algorithmically generated profiles? We surveyed 292 US-based users and led them to their "Your Interests" and "Your Categories" sections on their Facebook profiles followed by open-text questions … Continue reading Making Sense of Algorithmic Profiling