James Katz

James Katz
Boston University | BU · Emerging Media Studies Division; Center for Mobile Communication Studies

PhD, MA, MEd, DrHC

About

189
Publications
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9,946
Citations

Publications

Publications (189)
Article
Full-text available
Modern AI applications have caused broad societal implications across key public domains. While previous research primarily focuses on individual user perspectives regarding AI systems, this study expands our understanding to encompass general public perceptions. Through a survey (N = 1506), we examined public trust across various tasks within educ...
Article
Full-text available
The present study explores people’s attitudes towards an assortment of occupations on high and low-likelihood of automation probability. An omnibus survey (N = 1150) was conducted to measure attitudes about various emerging technologies, as well as demographic and individual traits. The results showed that respondents were not very comfortable with...
Chapter
The concluding chapter summarizes the major cross-cutting issues surrounding algorithmic nudging. It spotlights ethical, moral, and philosophical underpinnings of the practice of behavioral nudging and what these issues portend for the future as technology and consumer psychology advance. Comparative points of the individual contributors are discus...
Chapter
In this August 2022 interview, co-editors Juliet Floyd and James E. Katz converse with polymath Stephen Wolfram, whose expertise ranges from physics and business to computer science and mathematics. Dr. Wolfram applies his analysis to the interaction between artificial intelligence (AI) and humans with an eye towards what the two way interactions r...
Article
Introduction: COVID-19 has had a devastating impact on people's lives since its initial outbreak and global spread in 2020. While the U.S. government and public health officials have recommended best practices such as social distancing, wearing a mask, and avoiding large public gatherings, these orders have been met with varying levels of acceptan...
Article
As biometric technology relies on bodily, physical information, it is among the more intrusive technologies in the contemporary consumer market. Consumer products containing biometric technology are becoming more popular and normalized, yet little is known about public perceptions concerning its privacy implications, especially from the perspective...
Article
Full-text available
People around the world who seek to interact with large organisations increasingly find they must do so via mediated and automated communication. Organisations often deploy both mediated and automated platforms, such as instant messaging and interactive voice response systems (IVRs), for efficiency and cost-savings. Customer and client responses to...
Chapter
The second offline perspective, as introduced by Hidenori Tomita and explored in his edited volume, The post-mobile society: From the smart/mobile to second offline (2015), offers a valuable way of perceiving how the world works from a communication viewpoint as well as what problems may arise. In this chapter, I examine historical precedents, draw...
Article
Full-text available
People’s comfort with and acceptability of artificial intelligence (AI) instantiations is a topic that has received little systematic study. This is surprising given the topic’s relevance to the design, deployment and even regulation of AI systems. To help fill in our knowledge base, we conducted mixed-methods analysis based on a survey of a repres...
Article
Full-text available
Education technology (Edtech) is a booming industry based on its potential to transform education and learning outcomes. With concern over remote learning, there is renewed excitement about the visual component of Edtech, namely VR, along with artificial intelligence (AI), resulting in more significant investments and innovations. Despite industria...
Chapter
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The chapters presented in this volume have provided an opportunity to reflect not only on the technological advancements which have taken place since the close of the last century but also on their effect on communication. They have underscored the growing interaction between people via technology and between humans and machines. Many chapters also...
Chapter
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Consider which topics are covered by news outlets, where individuals invest their psychological energies, and what our contemporary societies take up as morally significant issues: in all of these, it is natural that the focus is on those issues which are recognized as threatening or troubling. Areas that are smoothly operating, adequately fulfilli...
Book
This book updates a long standing problem: how do people understand and prepare for the future using the technologies at hand and that they expect to have imminently? Drawing on experts from a variety of fields, the volume provides novel and penetrating insights that reflect innovative research on both headline-gripping and historical problems. Org...
Article
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In the last few years, smart security and physical identification technologies have grown exponentially; people are increasingly installing smart video devices to monitor their homes and buying DNA kits to collect and analyze their genetics. As the number of users and profits of these businesses increase, so too does the potential for privacy viola...
Article
Full-text available
Artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics applications have proliferated primarily in the industrial sphere, and social scientific studies emphasized robots’ functionality and appropriateness for certain roles, especially those related to work and most particularly to robots replacing humans’ jobs. Notably, robot studies are often premised on negat...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter analyzes structural changes arising from both economy‐wide and life course- long applications of mobile communication technology. These changes trickle through all sectors of society, including the domestic sphere, which arguably has been most pro­foundly affected by it. The chapter highlights some ways in which people have used the mo...
Chapter
Full-text available
Joachim Höflich has been a seminal contributor to the field of mobile communication and indeed, it was through this work that I had my first personal encounter with him. The occasion was a meeting hosted in Budapest by Kristóf Nyíri at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences in 2002. In my mind’s eye, I can still see him standing beneath bucolic murals o...
Chapter
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The book concludes with a summary of the various perspectives presented throughout the chapters and the trends emerging from the practitioner lessons that each chapter provides for journalists in the age of social media. The chapter considers what is old and what is new with social media and journalism through the three lenses that have guided the...
Article
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The mechanisms by which users of platforms such as Facebook and Twitter spread misinformation are not well understood. In this study, we argue that the effects of informational uses of social media on political participation are inextricable from its effects on misinformation sharing. That is, political engagement is both a major consequence of usi...
Chapter
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Drawing on social-psychological and political research, we offer a theoretical model that explains how people become exposed to fake news, come to believe in them and then share them with their contacts. Using two waves of a nationally representative sample of Chileans with internet access, we pinpoint the relevant causal factors. Analysis of the p...
Article
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The far-seeing collection in this issue is arrayed across the terrain of journalism infused with social media. The authors take deep dives into the material and in the process contribute significantly to the research community’s corpus on social media and proprietary platforms in journalism. In their wake, they leave an ambitious albeit hazy roster...
Article
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In summer 2015, we conducted an exploratory study of how people in the U.S. use and respond to robot-like systems in order to achieve their needs through mediated customer service interfaces. To understand this process, we carried out three focus groups sessions along with 50 in-depth interviews. Strikingly we found that people perceive (correctly...
Article
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Recent research has identified that antimicrobial resistance (AMR) is giving rise to a global public health threat that involves all major microbial pathogens and antimicrobial drugs, and additional studies have found that despite its gravity, this threat is not reflected in public opinion of AMR. This study thus proceeds to examine which individua...
Article
This study advances a theoretical model centered on collective and internal efficacy to explain the separate pathways through which political sharing on Facebook and Twitter may influence individuals to engage in political activities. We test the model with data from a 2-wave panel survey conducted with an adult population in 2013 in Chile. We foun...
Article
Advancing a theoretical model to explain the negative effects of texting on romantic relationships, we suggest that constant texting leads partners to attend to their cell phones instead of communicating with their significant other (Pphubbing), reducing through two different processes the perceived quality of a romantic relationship. These process...
Article
With the growth of communication technologies in society, collective action has taken new forms that may not be well conceptualized by existing theories. Hence two meaningful theoretical and practical questions are: how is collective action performed by these new forms of human associations and with what effects? To address these questions, this st...
Article
Full-text available
We examine the widely popular social phenomenon of “selfies” (self-portraits uploaded and shared in social media) in terms of the observed positive relationship between this individualistic form of social media usage and narcissism. We conducted a cross-lagged analysis of a two-wave, representative panel survey to understand whether narcissists tak...
Article
Drawing on social-psychology and communication theories, we advance a theoretical model to explain the negative effects of selfies on romantic relationships. We suggest that this individualistic use of social media is related to selfie related conflicts between partners through two processes: (1) jealousy, stemming from excessive individual photo-s...
Article
A hierarchical regression analysis of U.S.-based Korean immigrants' mobile communication use (i.e., voice calling and texting) and their social network characteristics (i.e., network size, diversity, and centrality) revealed significant associations between texting with coethnic strong ties and network centrality within the ethnic community. Korean...
Chapter
This book presents a wide range of thinking about how the discipline of philosophy has engaged and might in the future engage with the profound questions raised by rapidly shifting methods of communication. Although social media and telecommunications have dramatically altered the daily lives of people, and no technology has enjoyed the same rapid...
Book
Full-text available
The types of communicating vessel systems that form public and private "spheres" constitute a multifaceted, complex system that is connected to an almost intractable range of issues. The fact is that the facets of mobile technology – ubiquity, multimediality, multidirectionality – form a new context in which trends to renegotiate, defend, adapt or...
Article
We draw on computer mediated communication (CMC) theories to argue that users’ earlier experiences with online social environments tend to attribute human-like characteristics to robots. Specifically, when users engage in socially-charged electronic environments to interact and communicate electronically with others, they find ways to overcome the...
Article
Full-text available
This study aims to assess the effectiveness of immersive environments that have been implemented by museums to attract new visitors. Based on the frameworks introduced by telepresence and media richness theories, and following a constructivist-based learning approach, we argue that the greater the similarity of an online museum experience is to its...
Book
Full-text available
The types of communicating vessel systems that form public and private "spheres" constitute a multifaceted, complex system that is connected to an almost intractable range of issues. The fact is that the facets of mobile technology – ubiquity, multimediality, multidirectionality – form a new context in which trends to renegotiate, defend, adapt or...
Article
Full-text available
A group of young adults were observed and interviewed as they spent a weekend without access to the mobile phone and Internet. Thirty-seven students participated in a program, entitled “unplugged weekend.” How they experienced the social interactions and flow of time without the usual interruption by mobile communication was the main point of exami...
Article
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An opinion survey of 878 college students examined attitudes about the suitability of robots for various occupations in society and how these attitudes varied by the robots’ appearance. Factor analyses revealed three primary attitudes: Robot-Liking, Robotphobia and Cyber-Dystopianism, and three occupational niches: social-companionship, surveillanc...
Chapter
Full-text available
As mobile and social computing technology have grown in power and melded in cross-platform capabilities, the resulting media instantiations have infused all aspects of daily life, creating in the process new social routines and meanings. In particular, mobile media has enabled through location-based services new forms of social interaction. This ch...
Book
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The proliferation of social media has altered the way that people interact with each other - leveling the channels of communication to allow an individual to be "friends" with a sitting president. In a world where a citizen can message Barack Obama directly, this book addresses the new channels of communication in politics, and what they offer.
Article
Full-text available
The emerging era of mobile communication transcends the traditional privileging of text and voice to draw upon sensations of augmented reality, especially in terms of the visual domain. Thus one will be able to have new views of the local environment (mobile visual services). In terms of the former, the sense of sight is increasingly being brought...
Article
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This study examines the extent to which national governments are using Web-2.0 applications to increase transparency and engage citizens in decision-making processes. Based on a typology of governmental websites that distinguishes among executive office sites, government web portals and personal websites of heads of government, 160 websites from 82...
Chapter
The next several chapters delve more deeply into the Obama Administration’s practices for digital engagement, considering in finer detail how these practices use social media to gather, broadcast, and collaboratively engage political information. We cover several mini-case studies, “counterfactual” examples of social media input, and a sampling of...
Chapter
This chapter briefly sketches the rise of digital media in recent American presidential elections and offers snapshots of the victors’ digital engagement approaches. Our retrospective analysis of presidential elections from 1992 through 2012 reveals emergent patterns concerning social media’s role in presidential politics. The period shows dramatic...
Chapter
Billed as “the first of its kind” online, the White House Online Town Hall, held March 26, 2009, allowed questions submitted by ordinary Americans via the web to be paired with those from a live White House audience. President Obama would answer each question in detail over the course of the 75-minute event.
Chapter
Despite the justifiable skepticism about its crowdsourcing attempts, in April 2010, the Obama Administration advertised what appeared to be a desire for meaningful citizen participation on the website of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Across an image of the White House ran the words: “Join the conversation on the fu...
Chapter
To give a broader superstructural view of what is entailed in a social media presidency during the Obama Administration, we next discuss several larger examples and trends regarding the use of social media in federal policy. Though our focus in this book is mainly on the White House, in this chapter we give greater emphasis to how the social media...
Chapter
Barack Obama‘s presidential campaign and election in 2008 appeared to bring social media enthusiasts’ dream of citizen participation in governmental policymaking closer to reality. But even with a second term of office in which to work, fulfillment of this vision remains a distant remnant of early term ambitions. A closer look yields a number of in...
Chapter
In this chapter, we consider possible reasons why social media involvement in setting governmental policy unfolded as it did under the Obama Administration from 2008 to 2013. While the Obama campaign and Administration stressed its intentions to use social media for guiding governmental policy, such initiatives have ultimately not materialized in a...
Chapter
In this chapter we look at the counterfactual: How social media could have been used, but were not. We also look at how social media were used by the White House to counter opposition to Administration programs, and some of the difficulties the attempts encountered. The two cases we consider are the Supreme Court nominations and the healthcare deba...
Chapter
In this chapter, we consider additional examples of Obama Administration initiatives that illustrate the tripartite modalities concerning social media and governmental decision-making. This revisits the modalities in the second chapter, when we laid out three predominant ways social media can be used for digital engagement (the acquisition of infor...
Chapter
On July 8, 2013, President Barack Obama entered the White House State Dining Room to address a packed chamber of reporters and dignitaries and lay out his new management agenda. He spoke forcefully on behalf of his vision: harnessing communication technology, so effectively deployed in his campaign, for empowering citizen participation in governmen...
Chapter
Alexander Hamilton, the first US Secretary of the Treasury, did not mince his words when he bluntly assessed the much-debated notion of using the wisdom of the crowd to inform governmental policy decisions. The masses, Hamilton complained, “are turbulent and changing. They seldom judge or determine right.”1 Hamilton believed that experts knew best...
Article
Full-text available
We draw on the social information processing (SIP) model to argue that users' earlier experiences with online social environments tend to attribute human-like characteristics to robots. Specifically, when users engage in socially-charged electronic environments to interact and communicate electronically with others, they find ways to overcome the r...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
This research explores how federal agencies interact with their audiences via Facebook, their most popular social media channel, by analyzing the comments posted by agencies and how users respond to the initial threads. This study seeks to determine whether the additional communication channels that Facebook offers within formal accounts facilitate...
Conference Paper
Full-text available
A survey of 873 undergraduate students was conducted to understand which individual factors affect subjects' attitudes toward robots. A third of participants (N =284) were exposed to a humanoid robot, another third (N= 293) to a doggy robot, and the remaining third (N=296) to an android. Results showed that in the humanoid condition individuals rec...
Article
By providing ultimate explanations for human behaviors, an evolutionary perspective lends itself to understanding why and how mobile communication occupies an ever increasingly critical role in modern life. From the perspective of evolution, human behaviors - in interaction with the environment - are driven by, and can be made understandable throug...
Article
This article examines a central question raised by the growth in Internet use: is Internet use associated with increased or decreased social interaction? First, it reviews relevant prior literature and research on the digital divide in general and the relationships of Internet use with social interaction. This overview grounds four research questio...
Article
Full-text available
В статье рассмотрены коммуникационные перспективы с учетом вызова, предъявляемого традиционной прессе социальными сетями и гражданской журналистикой, с акцентом на ситуации в Соединенных Штатах. Данная тема очень важна, если принять во внимание роль, которую играют журналистские расследования и печатная пресса в укреплении практики демократии. Пров...
Article
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Communication perspectives are presented on the challenges posed to traditional newspapers by social media and citizen journalism, with special reference to the United States. This is an important topic given the critical role investigative reporting, long the domain of newspapers, plays in fostering democratic practices. New Media and social netwo...
Article
Full-text available
Families and social relationships are of course highly important, so it is worthwhile to ask how they are being affected by omnipresent mobile communication. In this paper, I will examine how increasingly portable communication technology affects daily activities and social relationships, especially in terms of the relationship between children and...
Article
In 1999, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration report Falling through the Net noted that "NTIA has found that there is still a significant "digital divide" separating American information "haves" and "have nots." Indeed, in many instances, the digital divide has widened in the last year." From the Internet's earliest days,...
Article
To assess some of the ways that blogs appear to be affecting news reporting and consumption as well as some giving a sense as to their implications for social stability, this paper presents a preliminary analysis of views and comments by bloggers in Asian countries. Data on this topic was gathered by e-mail interviews of Asian bloggers as well as b...
Article
The current study seeks to understand if there is a pattern between college students’ mobile phone usage and their family members at home, and to what degree it affects their college life. Three focus group interviews were conducted on February 1, February 2, and February 15, 2006. A total of 40 undergraduate students who were majoring in communica...
Article
In 1999, the National Telecommunications and Information Administration report Falling through the Net noted that "NTIA has found that there is still a significant "digital divide" separating American information "haves" and "have nots." Indeed, in many instances, the digital divide has widened in the last year." From the Internet's earliest days,...
Article
The cell phone is a social medium developing into a multimedia digital platform that provides, obtains, and shares personal and social information. Thus, digital divide, social support, and privacy issues familiar to students of the Internet are here applied to understanding why people may be more or less interested in new text and video cell phone...
Article
A 2007 national public opinion survey of 1404 Americans revealed variations in sentiments concerning the desirability of several mobile healthcare technologies based on RFID. The survey appears to be the first reasonably national public opinion survey of US adults concerning their attitudes towards mobile healthcare technology. The survey revealed...
Chapter
This book focuses on the increasing use of mobile communication in people’s daily lives. This chapter presents people’s willingness to use, and the accessibility of, technology, both of which have made the spread of mobile communication easier, although there are still individuals and groups that have rejected the technology. The book highlights th...
Chapter
Full-text available
This chapter focuses on mobile music players and their advantages. It shows how mobile music players such as MP3 players and iPod devices create an image of a person that he or she projects. These technologies are helpful in protecting individuals from not only unpleasant sounds but people as well, although they are helpful in connecting people to...
Chapter
Experts analyze how mobile communication is changing daily life and local culture around the world, in both industrialized and developing countries. Mobile communication has become mainstream and even omnipresent. It is arguably the most successful and certainly the most rapidly adopted new technology in the world: more than one of every three peop...
Chapter
Our research, which began fielding surveys in 1995, and thereafter with variation in 1996,1997, and 2000, was apparently the first to use national random telephone surveymethods to track social and community aspects of Internet use, and to compare usersand non-users. Our program has explored the Internet in terms of trends in access, politicaland c...
Article
This study examines how libraries within college and university settings in the United States have dealt with the influx of patron mobile telephone use. We contacted 150 colleges and universities throughout the United States and received 87 responses. These institutions were ranked by US News and World Report in their 2006 Edition of “America’s Bes...

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