Call for panel participants for the 103rd annual meeting of the Eastern Communication Association
Royal Sonesta Hotel, Cambridge, Massachusetts
April 26–29, 2012
In order to allow the organization of one or more panels related to the questions and issues described below, please send your abstracts, papers, or presentation proposals to robert_macdougall@curry.edu no later than 9:00 p.m., Wednesday, October 12 for full consideration.
Giving Voice to the Facts, Getting the Facts Straight, or Forgetting About the Facts: Understanding Some Real-World Uses of the Web 2.0 Information Environment
Rationale:
Recent socio-political events in North Africa and the Middle East, the earthquake and tsunami in Japan, the onslaught of Hurricane Katrina six years ago in and around New Orleans, the BP oil spill just last year, along with a host of other natural and human-induced phenomena of late prompt us to consider the means by which people get their news and information and learn of the «facts» related to their world. Both media producers and consumers are confronted with unprecedented amounts of information regarding what has occurred, how those occurrences can be explained, and how they might impact things and people elsewhere. Official «on-the-ground» reporting now includes textual, audio, and visual uploads of amateurs and citizen journalists alike. With Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Wikipedia, and the blogosphere now being incorporated into both online and offline news feeds, the competing news values of speed and accuracy seem to be reaching a boiling point. Contributors to this panel offer perspectives on mixed-methods approaches to understanding the way media users are «getting a handle on the facts» (and maybe pushing them on to others).
College teachers know more than most how cursory online searches sometimes conducted by our students do not always reveal the facts—or at least the facts worth weighing. Of course, college students are not the only cohort struggling to make sense of their world. For this reason, we might be well served to reframe our conceptualization of the fact in these new digital domains typified by minute-to-minute updates and the 24/7 global news feed.
Albert Einstein famously said, «Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.» Statistics, and other methods of massaging and cleaning data, can be applied for a variety of reasons. What is the relationship between, and respective values ascribed to, quantitative and qualitative data today? How are news collection, organization, and retrieval methods dealing with the data deluge? How is qualitative and quantitative information redirected, forwarded, added to, or truncated? How do news producers and consumers blur and bend «causal chains» and skew the underlying realities of any given event?
Twitter, Facebook and the blogosphere are replete with personal anecdotes that can sometimes be taken as part of a larger explanation of an issue or event. What role does the anecdote, or a cleaned data set, play in get us closer to—or farther from—some underlying historical or causal explanation? Beyond this, how do PR, self-promotion, and the «plant» (the person hired or personally driven to skew the unfolding of «facts,» opinion, and belief) in any given environment alter the way we come to know things?
Some questions and themes that would fit this call include but are not limited to the following:
News/Information morphology:
What is the difference between data, information, knowledge and wisdom? What is the difference between fact, factoid, opinion, and belief today? Are these differences that make a difference? What is the relationship between depth and breadth of content in these new contexts? What is the relationship between the quantity and quality of news and information? How have the nature, shape, and function of news and information changed in the Web 2.0 environment?
Efficacy:
In terms of channel/media selection, which media, or media mixes, seem to offer the best, most reliable, most substantive means of keeping abreast of the accelerating pace of information today? On the «update» and «checking in»—is it best to stay plugged into the system, or circumvent and delay the update? What roles do the logics (or values) of efficiency and attention and awareness play today? What is their relationship to memory and cognitive and emotional «flow»? Are those immersed in the Web 2.0 environments (Twitter, YouTube, Facebook, etc.) getting a better handle on the facts than anyone else? More important, perhaps, what are some of the unique ways different users encode and decode content and otherwise access and deal (or don’t deal) with the information at their disposal?
The Nature of Subjective Experience:
What is the «phenomenological feel» of the mobile, always accessible, always on, Web 2.0 denizen? What is it like to be connected to the ubiquitous computing apparatus? What is it like to get all the news «here and now,» or «there and later,» in terms of the way it makes us feel? What is it like to be disconnected (intentionally or not) for various lengths of time? What are our emerging relationships with time, space, place in the Web 2.0 world? Concerning the subjective experience of fear, or anxiety, or well-being and contentment, which media mixes seem to prompt some of these feelings rather than others?
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