This fall, the Friday Center is pleased to announce two special free evening events, featuring compelling panel discussions of important contemporary issues.
The New Fake News —the first in a two-part lecture series on fake news and big data — will be held Tuesday, Sept. 26, from 7-8:30 p.m.
News reporting and journalism have always been shot through with ideological influences, often swayed by the partisan politics of its subjects if not practitioners. And while objectivity has long been critiqued as an impossible fantasy, our contemporary news landscape presents citizens with novel conundrums and mounting confusions, not to mention a president who tosses the term around with impunity. This panel will address the cultural, political, technological, economic, and ethical issues vexing news producers and consumers alike.
Panelists Include:
Deen Freelon is an associate professor in the School of Media and Journalism. His research covers two major areas of scholarship: 1) political expression through digital media and 2) data science and computational methods for analyzing large digital datasets. He has authored or co-authored over 30 journal articles, book chapters, and public reports, in addition to co-editing one scholarly book. He has been awarded grants from the Knight Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, and the US Institute of Peace, and written research-grade software for content analysis, network analysis, and social media data collection. He formerly taught at American University in Washington, DC.
Daniel Kreiss is Associate Professor in the School of Media and Journalism and Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Kreiss’s research explores the impact of technological change on the public sphere and political practice. In Taking Our Country Back: The Crafting of Networked Politics from Howard Dean to Barack Obama (Oxford University Press, 2012), Kreiss presents the history of new media and Democratic Party political campaigning over the last decade. Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy (Oxford University Press, 2016) charts the emergence of a data-driven, personalized, and socially-embedded form of campaigning and explains differences in technological adoption between the two U.S. political parties.
Alice E. Marwick (PhD, New York University) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. Her current book project examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, and socio-economic status. Marwick advises the Media Manipulation project at the Data & Society Research Institute, which studies far-right online subcultures and their use of social media to spread misinformation. Her first book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the San Francisco tech scene to examine how people seek social status through attention and visibility online. Her most recent article on the ethics of the celebrity nude photo leaks appears in Ethics and Information Technology.
Stephanie Willen Brown connects people with the information they need when they need it. She offers research assistance to undergraduate and graduate students in her role as director of the Park Library at UNC’s School of Media & Journalism. Stephanie guest lectures in classes in public relations and media management, and she teaches as an adjunct at UNC’s School of Information and Library Science. She serves as a research consultant for students working on campaigns, projects, and research papers. Stephanie coordinates the popular therapy pet program during exams, in which trained cats and dogs visit the library to provide stress relief. She also actively participates in celebrating the School’s First Amendment Day.
Moderated by Michael Palm, Associate Professor, Department of Communication, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
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For more information on both events, please visit The Friday Center website. RSVP REQUIRED for both events: Call (919) 962-2643 or email conradj@email.unc.edu