Researchers from the Laboratory for Social Machines have partnered with The Washington Post to examine how people are discussing the current presidential election on Twitter. The researchers use a program that detects and categorizes tweets “to see which issues or candidates have had the biggest share of the conversation.”
Prof. Sherry Turkle speaks with ABC News about the impact of constant connectivity on how people relate to one another in the digital age. “Before we had our phones, conversation was the way we satisfied our need for stimulation,” explains Turkle. Face-to-face conversation “lays the groundwork for empathy.”
Stephanie McFeeters writes for The Boston Globe about the social media campaign #ILookLikeAnEngineer, highlighting the MIT students, faculty and alumni who participated in the trend by posting their photos. The campaign stemmed from the negative response one female engineer received after appearing in an ad campaign for her IT company.
Professor Catherine Tucker writes for Fortune about the factors that prevented Google Plus from being a widely adopted social media platform. “The assumptions about social media that we started with a few years ago don’t necessarily hold true today,” Tucker explains.
Researchers from the MIT Media Lab are studying Twitter use in the small Spanish town of Jun, Fox News Latino reports. “It’s believed to be the first town to adopt the social network as the dominant method of communication.”
BetaBoston reporter Curt Woodward writes about a new study by researchers from the MIT Laboratory for Social Machines examining how the government of Jun, a small town in southeastern Spain, is using Twitter to interact with residents. The researchers found that “residents’ tweets are incorporated into livestreamed city council meetings.”
MIT graduate student Maia Majumder speaks with Nidhi Subbaraman of BetaBoston about her digital habits. Subbaraman writes that Majumder, “uses Twitter as a professional tool to discuss her research and to interact with colleagues around the world.”
Peter Shadbolt of CNN reports that MIT researchers have incorporated social networking into clothing, creating a T-shirt that displays the wearer's interests and associations. "We wanted to examine more tangible ways of representing ourselves in social media," explains graduate student Viirj Kan.
Robert Lane Greene writes for The Economist about a new paper by MIT researchers, which examines the importance of specific languages by studying how languages are connected to one another. The researchers found that for many languages “their connectivity has little to do with their home country’s modern power.”
A study by Prof. Thomas Malone found that social perceptiveness can be gained through electronic communications, writes Financial Times reporter Jonathan Moules. “People develop social intelligence skills even when they cannot see into each others’ eyes,” says Malone.
MIT researchers have traced how information flows to see which languages are the most influential, reports Michael Erard for Science. The research shows that “if I want our ideas to spread, we should pick a second language that’s very well connected,” explains MIT alumnus Shahar Ronen.
Kristi Hedges writes for Forbes about Professor Sherry Turkle’s research that indicates that technology may be having an adverse effect on our connections to one another. Hedges writes that Turkle’s research suggests that “we’re creating a culture where we prefer an artificial presentation of ourselves through social media and texting."
Colleen Shalby reports for the PBS NewsHour that MIT is launching a new laboratory to examine how people use social media, in particular Twitter. Twitter is granting MIT researchers access to every tweet sent in the social network’s history as part of this new project.
WBUR reporter Zeninjor Enwemeka writes about the new MIT laboratory launched this week to analyze social media. “The new lab will focus on understanding how people behave across various types of media, and develop tools to make sense of social patterns,” writes Enwemeka.
Andrea Chang of The Los Angeles Times writes about a new partnership between Twitter and MIT to study social media patterns. Twitter is providing the MIT Media Lab with $10 million to study and make sense of content across social and mass-media platforms.