CATS members to present at AEJMC in Washington, D.C.

It's been a busy summer for CATS members. After a productive trip to London for the International Communication Association (ICA) conference, a couple of members are off to Washington, D.C., for the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) conference. CATS members are in boldface:

Vang, M. H., & Fox, J. Race in virtual environments: Competitive versus cooperative games with black or white avatars.

Waddell, F., Fox, J., Ivory, J ., & Ivory, A. Sex-role stereotyping is hard to kill: A field experiment measuring responses to user characteristics and behavior in an online multiplayer first-person shooter game.

OSU student & faculty @ Persuasive Tech conference

Several SoC students and faculty will be presenting at "Persuasive Technology and Design: Enhancing Sustainability and Health", a conference held this weekend (June 3-4) at the Ohio Union. Other presenters are coming from all over the world. This is a great opportunity to see some interesting talks without leaving your own neighborhood. For more information see the full schedule, available online at https://fisher.osu.edu/blogs/persuasive2011/program/

CATS at ICA

CATS will be well represented at this year’s ICA conference in Boston. It’s especially nice to see so many of our graduate students participating! Here's a brief list of the works being presented. (If I’ve missed yours, please send me a note so I can post an update.)

Brookes, S., & Ewoldsen, D. (2011). The World’s Not So Scary Now: Applying the Event Indexing Model to Cultivation. Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Boston, MA.

Brookes, S., Moyer-Gusé, E., & Mahood, C. (2011). Playing the Story: Transportation as a Mediator of Involvement in Narratively-Based Video Games. Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Boston, MA.

D'Angelo, J. D., Schumaker, E. M., & Van Der Heide, B. (2011). Cues in Context: Social Information and Impression Formation Through a Contextual Lens. Paper to be presented to the annual meeting of the International Communication Association in Boston, MA.

Garrett, R. K. (2011). Beyond attributes: Expanding the framework for studying technologies’ influence on political communication. Paper presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Boston, MA.

Ortiz, M., Harwood, J., & Schumaker, E. M. (2011). Imagined Extended Contact Through Facebook Profiles. Paper to be presented to the annual meeting of the International Communication Association in Boston, MA.

Van Der Heide, B., Schumaker, E. M., Johnson, B. K., Vang, M., & Peterson, A. (2011). The Effects of Product Photographs and Reputation Systems on eBay Consumer Behavior. Paper to be presented to the annual meeting of the International Communication Association in Boston, MA.

Velez, J. A., Mahood, C., Ewoldsen, D. R., & Moyer-Guse, E. (2011). Ingroup versus outgroup conflict in the context of violent video game play: The effect of cooperation on increased helping and decreased aggression. Paper to be presented at the annual meeting of the International Communication Association, Boston, MA.

Wang, Z., & Tchernev, J. (2011). The Myth of Media Multitasking: A Dynamic Panel Analysis of Media Multitasking, Personal Needs, and Gratifications. Paper presented to the International Communication Association, June 2011, Boston, MA.

Westerwick, A. (2011). Effects of Sponsorship, Web Site Design, and Google Ranking on the Credibility of Online Information. Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the International Communication Association, Boston, MA.

Westerwick, A. (2011). Wikipedia and Friends: Influences on Users’ Credibility Perceptions of Online Information on Wikipedia. Paper presented at the Annual Meetings of the International Communication Association, Boston, MA.

Video Games' punch can last for a day

The study conducted by Brad Bushman of The Ohio State University and Bryan Gibson of Central Michigan University, shows that at least for men, ruminating about the game can increase the potency of the game’s tendency to lead to aggression long after the game has been turned off.

Press Release

Washington Post

Rand to conduct NetLogo workshop May 26

The Complexity in Human, Natural and Engineered Systems Innovation Group is organizing a one-day workshop on agent-based modeling using NetLogo, from 8:30 a.m.-5 p.m. Wednesday (5/26). Bill Rand, University of Maryland will lead the workshop in the Mathematical Biosciences Institute, Jennings Hall, third floor. The workshop is open to all. Lunch and refreshments will be provided. Bring your own laptop. RSVP and address questions to: mailto:Virginia.Nivar@osumc.edu. Read more >

Profile: Jesse Fox's work

The Stanford News Service has posted an interesting profile of Asst. Professor Jesse Fox's research, titled "Can avatars change the way we think and act?" on its web site. If you're interested in the topic, or just want to know more about our new faculty member, please check it out.

http://news.stanford.edu/news/2010/february22/avatar-behavior-study-022510.html

TODAY: Talk addressing agent-based modeling

If you are interested in agent-based modeling, or just want to know what it is, you might want to attend a talk this afternoon sponsored by the Complexity in Human, Natural and Engineered Systems group. Here's the full announcement:

Julie Field, Mark Moritz, and Rick Yerkes (Department of Anthropology) will discuss how anthropologists and archaeologists have integrated complexity, complex systems, complex adaptive systems and agent-based modeling in their research. The seminar will be held from 1-2:30 p.m. today (2/15) in 525 Scott Laboratory. Contact: Mark Moritz at mailto:moritz.42@osu.edu. Read more: https://complex-systems.wikidot.com/

Twitter's long tail

A new study coming out of the Harvard Business School concludes that very few Twitter users send messages using the service, suggesting that it is used more like a broadcast medium than a peer-to-peer communication network. Specifically, the authors found that although about 4 in 5 (80%) Twitter users are followed by at least one other person, "the top 10% of prolific Twitter users accounted for over 90% of tweets." These conclusions are drawn based on analysis of the activities of a sample of 300,000 Tweeter users in May 2009.

See: http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/cs/2009/06/new_twitter_research_men_follo.html

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8089508.stm

Delphi Survey from EU on Creative Content Industry

Since Dr. Dimmick participated in the June 2007 Delphi survey on the future of the creative content industry that the European Techno-Economic Policy Support Network conducted on behalf of the European Commission, we can see the results of the study.

The Delphi report as well as additional analytical reports from the project website.
are available to be downloaded from here:

http://epis.jrc.es/documents/Deliverables/EPIS%202-3-1%20Delphi%20Report.pdf

http://epis.jrc.es/Pages/deliverables.html

Here is what the survey is about from their own Executive Report:

In a nutshell the Delphi survey revealed a number of topics where experts have no consensus
about the likely development. They will serve as an input to the subsequent scenario development. Among these issues are
• Intellectual property rights (IPR), the relevance of current IPR concept under changing
conditions, new ways to protect IPR and the issue of technical protection means like DRM
systems.
• The structure of the Creative Content Sector is currently undergoing a fundamental transformation process. Of particular importance is the question how new, innovative enterprises that experts regard as the drivers of technological and business changes can be
supported in an environment that is currently dominated by a few globally active corporations.
• An open issue is the likely development and importance of virtual worlds (like second life)
and multiplayer online-games (like World of Warcraft).

The central result is the identification of five theses with a high relevance in all considered
dimensions (economic, techno-scientific, society, quality of life). These theses include:
• Most users are able to transmit and receive large amounts of media data (e.g. streaming
of high definition TV) from the Internet even at peak times of the day without recognizable
delay. The fact that this thesis is also considered to become reality quite soon (in 2014)
underlines the outstanding importance of widespread availability of a true broadband
infrastructure with seamless and universal access for all.
• Content creation for educational purposes (e-learning) reaches a 20% share of the entire
creative content market in Europe.
• Most media (including instructional software) used in education can be copied and redistributed without payment. Though judged as very relevant, there is a controversy if educational applications can profit from the ongoing transformation in the desired way because of the dominance of economic factors in the CC sector. In this respect this could be one of the priorities for future policy measures.
• A seamless exchange of audio-visual contents between mobile devices and personal
computers (regardless of the manufacturer) is routine. Interoperability and seamless
gateways are central requirements for universal and ubiquitous access, which is an often
unuttered assumption for the future success of media.
• Most media suppliers earn money by distributing content over the Internet even without
using Digital Rights Management. This thesis’ assessment is another evidence for the
central role of IPR and its protection (see above).

Niches of the News Media

For those interested in niche theory as it is applied to the media industry, or studies of news consumption examining new (e.g. internet, web-enabled phone, iPod) and traditional media (e.g. TV, radio, newspaper), Dr. Dimmick, John Feaster, and Greg Hoplamazian are currently involved in research in this area. Below is an abstract from their paper submitted to ICA in November. If you have any questions about the study, or niche theory more generally, please let us know!


The use of mobile and traditional media for information: News in time and space

Dr. John Dimmick, John Feaster, and Greg Hoplamazian

The study was supported by a grant from the Knight Foundation and the Shorenstein Center for the Press and Public Policy at Harvard University

News content, once restricted to purely paper formats, is now accessible through 24-hour news channels, constantly updated websites, text messages sent automatically to cell phones, and newspaper sources available in several formats (print, online, e-mail). This growth from one channel to many seems to suggest great competition between these available news media, each diminishing the consumer need for the other. However, research on media use displacement and offers conflicting results regarding the impact of novel media (for review see Cai, 2005). This study employs the theory of the niche (Dimmick, 2003) to examine competition and coexistence between traditional and mobile news media. A time-space diary method was used to capture paticipants' news consumption during an assigned 24-hour peroid. Results suggest that new media are occupying niche spaces where traditional media are either unavailable or inconvenient. These findings offer insight into how various news media are able to coexist by occupying distinct niches in the news domain. Media were differentiated by demonstrating superiority over competitors based on time of day, location, or content offered.