FSS Computational Social Sciences Workshop – Seminar on "To Affect, Or Be Affected, Is That the Question? Communication May Be Spirals Negotiated Between Releasers, Receivers, Relayers, and Reactors" by Prof. Xinshu ZHAO, Chair Professor of Communicatio


	FSS Computational Social Sciences Workshop – Seminar on "To Affect, Or Be Affected, Is That the Question? Communication May Be Spirals Negotiated Between Releasers, Receivers, Relayers, and Reactors" by Prof. Xinshu ZHAO, Chair Professor of Communication on 12 October 2022 (Wed), 12:30 – 14:00

Ref. No :	EMMM-CJX4FG	Posted by :	EdithM/UMAC
Department :	FSS	Posted Date :	08/10/2022
Category :
Category :	Workshop 工作坊

The Faculty of Social Sciences (FSS) is holding a series of Computational Social Sciences Workshop. We have the pleasure to invite Prof. Xinshu ZHAO to deliver the second seminar on "To Affect, Or Be Affected, Is That the Question? Communication May Be Spirals Negotiated Between Releasers, Receivers, Relayers, and Reactors ". Details of the Workshop are as follows:

Date: 12 October 2022 (Wed)
Time: 12:30 – 14:00
Venue: E21B-G016
Language: English

Please register by 11/10/2022 (Tuesday) 1pm.
https://forms.gle/oNT2w7neTvKJ8JLJ7

Speaker: Xinshu Zhao (B.A., Fudan Univ., M.A. Stanford, Ph.D., Wisconsin-Madison) is Chair Professor of Communication in Faculty of Social Sciences at University of Macau, Cheung Kong Chair Professor of Journalism at Fudan University, and Emeriti Professor of Media and Journalism at University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Prof. Zhao’s current work includes selective spiral effects of online and offline communication, and a range of methodological issues, including mediation, dissection analysis, effect size measures, intercoder reliability indices, and reconstructed experimental methods. He also studies voting, group decision making and electoral systems. He has over 100 publications: taking journal articles as an example, he published a large number of influential academic journal papers that were frequently cited by researchers in related fields. Prof. Zhao's high-quality papers won him many awards, including the first “Excellent Paper Award” in the Journal of Tsinghua University in 2011, the “Top Faculty Paper, Theory and Methodology” of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication of the United States in 2011, and the “Best Article Award” from the Journal of Consumer Research in 2013, etc. He also published a book in Chinese, titled Plight of Elections - A Critique of the World’s Election Systems and the Constitutional Reforms, expanded (3^rd) edition, Sichuan People’s Publishing House, 2008, ISBN 978-7-220-07537-7.

Abstract: Is public opinion shaped by the media, or vice versa? The problem is so fundamental that it may be the “Hamlet question” for the understanding of the media, communication, and society. Answers tend to fall into one of the two camps -- strong or limited effects of the media, active or passive audience, for example.

In this brown bag talk, we discuss preliminary findings from toutiao.com, one of the largest content aggregators and algorithm-push platforms in Chinese, that such binary questions may be outdated. Even the binary divisions of roles, such as the media vs the audience, the elite vs the public, administrators vs people, or senders vs receivers, may have oversimplified the roles that netizens play today. The inter-netted mobile communication may be continuously evolving spirals of information and misinformation negotiated between at least four groups of individuals: releasers, receivers, relayers, and reactors, with extensive and varying overlaps of memberships between the groups.

Receivers dominated without dictating the negotiations examined so far. Given that the receiver group practically constitutes all individuals in a society, these preliminary outcomes suggest that communication in this post-post-modern society might be a perpetual process of collective self-persuasion, self-affirmation, and self-amplification.