Speaker Series: Difference between revisions

====Wednesday, 16 January 2020: Social Media and Well-Being: Moving Beyond "Active" vs "Passive" Activities, Thursday, with Nicole Ellison====

* Location: Mozilla Mountain View + broadcast on [https://mzl.la/et-speaker-series-2020-01-16 Airmo], on [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xfmv3tzhmKs Youtube], and in [https://hubs.mozilla.com/22BFkVw Hubs in VR] and archived for later watching by NDAd Mozillians on Airmo.

In this talk, I’ll describe my current project: a co-authored book on social media and well-being broadly construed. Our goal is to shift public narratives about social media from one focusing on moral panics and negative outcomes to one that highlights what science can actually tell us about the implications of our use and highlights more positive and under-recognized aspects of use.  I’ll also share findings from a recent empirical project on the “non-click.” This work was inspired by scholarship on well-being outcomes that often characterizes browsing (but not clicking) activities as passive use, contrasting it with more desirable active use.  In this talk, I’ll report on a study investigating the non-click—instances where people intentionally and thoughtfully withhold from clicking on content they do pay close attention to—in order to interrogate assumptions that browsing is always passive and devoid of authentic attention. Employing a combination of eye tracking, survey, and interview methods (N=42), we found that there was no difference in attention (as measured by eye gaze duration) to clicked versus non-clicked Facebook content. Our interview data reveal that non-clicked content is often imported into other channels, where it serves as a stronger signal of relational investment than one-click “likes,” and highlight three audience-related concerns that contribute to active non-clicking.  

Nicole B. Ellison is the Karl E. Weick Collegiate Professor of Information in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. She received her PhD in Communication Theory and Research in 1999 from the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication.  Nicole's research has explored social and interpersonal aspects of online technologies and computer-mediated communication, including research on self-presentational strategies used by online dating participants; the role of social media in reshaping college access patterns for low-income and first-generation college students; and the ways in which users employ the communication affordances of Facebook to receive and give social and informational support to members of their network. This research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and the National Academies of Science. This year she is at Stanford University as a recipient of the Lenore Annenberg and Wallis Annenberg Fellowship in Communication at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, where she is currently writing a book on social media and well-being.