Causal inference has long been a prevalent methodology in political science and economics, but its adoption within the field of communications has been slower, albeit increasing. This post aims to gather pioneering studies that utilize causal inference within the field of communications.

The agenda tonight is that we can start with a general discussion of modernity, then go to different “great thinkers”[BBC]. Then we will recognize the star of technical determinism, McLuhan. At last, we will return to the point that Mitchel and Hansen want to argue in their paper that changes of media are not “determining our situation” as what Kittler and McLuhan trying to preach [paper], instead, “media are our situation.”[paper]

Thomas S. Kuhn wrote that scientific progress involves both minor revisions during normal periods and major revolutions during abnormal periods. Recently, abnormal advances in artificial intelligence are approaching a potentially disruptive stage, as evidenced by the widespread recognition of GPT-4, the most advanced and astonishing language model. Nonetheless, the model elicits both satisfaction and contentious debate for its ramifications, wherein Chromesky’s assertions are both correct and wrong.

JCMC called for papers and this is the answer. This is an introduction to a special issue of JCMC. More details, questions, and critics will be added as hyperlinks of each point after reading.

This study examines the use of “algorithms in everyday labor” to explore the labor conditions of three Chinese food delivery platforms: Baidu Deliveries, Eleme, and Meituan.

A network is a representation of connections among a set of nodes and edges.

The concept of social capital describes the benefits individuals derive from their social relationships and interactions: resources such as emotional support, exposure to diverse ideas, and access to non-redundant information. Social capital is embedded in the structure of social networks and the location of individuals within these structures (Burt, 2005). Because social network sites (SNSs) have the potential to reshape social networks and lower the costs of communicating with (and thus contributing to and extracting benefits from) this social network, SNS use may have social capital implications. This study is among the first to explore the relationship between social capital and specific communication practices on the most popular SNS among US undergraduates, Facebook.

Process, LAVAAN, SEM, R, and Rstudio

Origin: Online/Digital Data + Computational Methods -> Computational Social Science -> Computational Communication ResearchDigital/Online Data

The rapid growth of Uber and analogous platform companies has led to considerable scholarly interest in the phenomenon of platform labor. Scholars have taken two main approaches to explaining outcomes for platform work—precarity, which focuses on employment classification and insecure labor, and technological control via algorithms. Both predict that workers will have relatively common experiences.

There are two complementary perspectives on the importance of friendship maintenance, particularly in the U.S. college-aged population. First, relationships help generate social capital (Lin,1999) and are important components of psychosocial development for emerging adults (Sullivan, 1953). For the college-age populations, sites like Facebook may play a vital role in maintaining relationships that would otherwise be lost as these individuals move from the geographically bounded networks of their hometown. Second, there is also growing evidence that Internet use in general, and social network sites like Facebook in particular, may be associated with a person's sense of self-worth and other measures of psychosocial development, although the positive or negative contributions of Internet use to psychological well-being are hotly debated (Kraut, Patterson, Lundmark, Kiesler, Mukhopadhyay, & Scherlis, 1998; Kraut, Kiesler, Boneva, Cummings, Helgeson, & Crawford, 2002; Shaw & Gant, 2002; Valkenburg et al., 2006).

Social capital broadly refers to the resources accumulated through the relationships among people (Coleman, 1988). Social capital is an elastic term with a variety of definitions in multiple fields (Adler & Kwon, 2002), conceived of as both a cause and an effect (Resnick, 2001; Williams, 2006). Bourdieu and Wacquant (1992) define social capital as ‘‘the sum of the resources, actual or virtual, that accrue to an individual or a group by virtue of possessing a durable network of more or less institutionalized relationships of mutual acquaintance and recognition’’ (p. 14). The resources from these relationships can differ in form and function based on the relationships themselves.