Internet

Russia is a dangerous country in which to be a journalist. A number of reporters have been attacked or killed on the job in the last several years, and the government closely monitors print and broadcast organizations. However, Russia has a robust digital sphere where criticism of the government has been much more free.

What makes content go viral on the Internet? Theories abound, and the answers given often relate to the inherent quality or catchiness of the “meme,” or information unit. But research suggests that factors intrinsic to social networks may make the process more random — and less explicable — than is often assumed.

From the Scholars Strategy Network, written by Andrea Hetling, Rutgers University.

Banner ads — those ubiquitous rectangular advertisements that typically span the headings of Web pages — were once the bread and butter of online promotions. But as users learned how to ignore banner ads, they’ve been replaced by text-based advertisements such as Google Ads or flashy multimedia promotions.

Concerns about the decline in personal privacy have long troubled citizens, scholars and politicians. The issue was most famously raised in “The Right to Privacy,” published in the Harvard Law Review in 1890 by jurists Samuel D. Warren and Louis Brandeis, the future Supreme Court justice.

Despite early hopes that the Internet would foster communities based on common interests regardless of race, age or gender, studies have found that many offline sociological patterns are typically replicated in online spaces. However, few studies have tracked these behaviors at the level of the individual user.

With the coverage of cellular networks expanding rapidly across the developing world, researchers are investigating how the access to information that mobile phones make possible can be leveraged to help alleviate poverty.