The strength of a university’s Facebook community may play a role in building brand loyalty among students.
The vast streams of digital data being produced are proving to be a goldmine for marketers and companies of all kinds, but they also are a promising source of information for journalists.
The announcement in May 2015 that nine news organizations, including the New York Times, NBC News, the BBC and BuzzFeed, would begin serving up some of their content natively to Facebook’s platform has been the subject of intense scrutiny in the media and publishing world.
Questions about how social media platforms may drive users into “filter bubbles” — increasingly like-minded communities whose views are reinforced and become more extreme — have been swirling for several years now. As the debate has developed in popular discourse, scholars and data scientists have continued to make insights on what is often referred to in the academic literature as online “homophily,” or colloquially as the “birds of a feather flock together” phenomenon.
Recent weeks have brought a deluge of new findings about the digital media space, crowned by the Pew Research Journalism Project’s 2014 State of the News Media report.
Social media have transformed corporate communication practices: Tools such as Twitter and Facebook allow organizations to speak directly to and solicit responses from the public quickly and affordably. But the original intention of these media were to connect friends, not customers or employees; for businesses, accustomed to managing all aspects of communications (and muting dissent), social media can be an awkward fit.
As the Internet plays a larger role in governance, campaigns and activism, the debate continues about how social and digital media are changing politics. Ongoing research is addressing topics such as whether or not the Internet is leading to increased political polarization — the tendency of like-minded individuals to cluster even closer together in their habits and viewpoints.
From The Conversation, written by Vincent F. Hendricks, University of Copenhagen
In the age of information, we no longer need to leave the house to shape democracy. We’re heading towards a world in which the traditional sites of protest are sitting alongside online forums, which are becoming an extremely powerful democratic tool.
