Zizi Papacharissi

University of Illinois at Chicago | UIC · Department of Communication

The internet and its surrounding technologies hold The promise of reviving the public sphere; however, several aspects of these new technologies simultaneously curtail and augment that potential. First, the data storage and retrieval capabilities of internet-based technologies infuse political discussion with information otherwise unavailable. At t...

In this essay, I further explicate the construct of affective publics by drawing elements from two case studies, the first focusing on uses of Twitter leading up to and following the events surrounding the resignation of Hosni Mubarak via #egypt, and the second one focusing on online iterations of the Occupy movement, and specifically #ows, one of...

This essay is written in response and extension to the thoughts offered by danah boyd and Kate Crawford on whether Big Data change how we define knowledge. I suggest that they do not, but they do reinforce and reproduce a form of communicating knowledge that I have been referring to as a digital orality. Online networked platforms, supportive of Bi...

Using prior seminal work that places emphasis on news framing and its relevance to sociocultural context, this study describes, maps, and explains evolving patterns of communication on Twitter through the events of the 2011 Egyptian uprisings, which led to the resignation of President Mubarak. Using a multimethodological approach, we conducted a ne...

This chapter examines the evolution of blog content, from the early stages of personal home pages, to the development of the blog format, to A-list blogs that influence other media and public opinion. Blogging content is examined, with a focus on blogging norms, patterns, and dominant trends the form of blogging takes on. As the blogosphere is vast...

This study traces the rhythms of news storytelling on Twitter via the #egypt hashtag. Using computational discourse analysis, we examine news values and the form of news exhibited in #egypt from January 25 to February 25, 2011, pre- and post-resignation of Hosni Mubarak. Results point to a hybridity of old and newer news values, with emphasis on th...

Online social platforms collapse or converge public and private boundaries, creating both opportunities and challenges for pursuing publicity, privacy, and sociality. Presentations of the self thus become networked performances that must convey polysemic content to audiences, actual and imagined, without compromising one’s own sense of self. This s...

In celebration of a burgeoning celebrity pop culture, Andy Warhol famously proclaimed that in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. Almost half a century later, being public online has become so easy that one wonders how, in the future, one may be truly private for 15 minutes. Both statements reflect the distance that separates the s...

This study traced the progression of the rhythms of news storytelling on Twitter via the #egypt hashtag, used most prominently during the Egyptian uprising that led to the resignation of Hosni Mubarak. A frequency analysis was combined with computerized content and an in-depth discourse analysis to study news values and the form that news reported...

This essay considers the civic ecology that is afforded via technologies of convergence. I propose that rather than examining the impact of technology, we consider technology as architecture. This permits us to situate civic tendencies and tensions in socio-cultural context. Thus, rather than measuring beneficial against adverse civic uses of onlin...

Blogs are a form of self-presentation on the Internet and variations like video blogs (vlogs) have expanded with the support of sites like YouTube. This study examines the culture of video blogging - its rhythm, language, and communication style. Utilizing Goffman's (1959) notions on the presentation of self as dramaturgical, multi-stage and multi-...

This study provided a comparative analysis of three social network sites, the open-to-all Facebook, the professionally oriented LinkedIn and the exclusive, members-only ASmallWorld.The analysis focused on the underlying structure or architecture of these sites, on the premise that it may set the tone for particular types of interaction.Through this...

In a period of more complex and numerous portrayals of homosexual characters in prime-time television, scholars have expressed concern about ostensibly enlightened portrayals that ultimately reinforce culturally dominant themes of heteronormativity. This study is a critical investigation of the reality show Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a site...

Scholars have been increasingly concerned with portrayals of terrorism in mainstream and alternative media outlets following the September 11 and subsequent terrorist attacks in the United Kingdom and Spain. Communication researchers have examined public response and reaction to terrorist attacks, definitions of terrorism, policy questions, media p...

This experiment investigates cognitive and emotional effects related to changing the label ascribed to still photographs from fictional to real, while keeping the content constant. Viewers tended to react emotionally more strongly to photographs labeled as real, but they thought more about photographs labeled as fiction. Further, the label assigned...

Several surveys attest to growing public concerns regarding privacy, aggravated by the diffusion of information technologies. A policy of self-regulation that allows individual companies to implement self-designed privacy statements is prevalent in the United States. These statements rarely provide specific privacy guarantees that personal informat...

A survey administered to reality TV viewers revealed that the most salient motives for watching reality TV were habitual pass time and reality entertainment. Additional analysis indicated that those who enjoyed reality TV the most for its entertainment and relaxing value also tended to perceive the meticulously edited and frequently preplanned cont...

This paper examines the policy issues surrounding residential broadband technology, discusses how broadband extends Internet capabilities and at what cost, and makes recommendations for future applications of broadband. It focuses on residential broadband access, and in examining the future of broadband, it identifies three areas of concern: regula...

The advent of information technologies has raised public concern re- garding privacy, as documented by the results of several surveys. Al- though extensive, online privacy statements seldom provide explicit re- assurance that consumer information will be kept confidential and will not be exploited. This research examines these privacy statements to...

This synthesis of literature examines conflicting and overlapping conclusions on the uses and consequences of new media and finds that approaches in interpreting these results are frequently guided by the belief that online and offline interactions somehow take place on separate social planes. Rather than viewing this as a real versus virtual quest...

The proponents of cyberspace promise that online discourse will increase political participation and pave the road for a democratic utopia. This article explores the potential for civil discourse in cyberspace by examining the level of civility in 287 discussion threads in political newsgroups. While scholars often use civility and politeness inter...

The purpose of this study was to explore the cross‐cultural differences in online presentation, by applying the concept of the independent and interdependent self‐construal to the online context. Therefore, this study analyzed 98 Korean and US individual home pages to examine how cultural differences are displayed online, especially as they relate...

The objective of this study was to understand the utility of personal home pages for their creators. Combining survey research and content analysis, the study investigated how demographic and medium use variables, home page motives, unwillingness to communicate, and contextual age were reflected through Web page design. Data analysis revealed that...

This study focused on how individuals used personal home pages to present themselves online. Content analysis was used to examine, record, and analyze the characteristics of personal home pages. Data interpretation revealed popular tools for self-presentation, a desire for virtual homesteaders to affiliate with online homestead communities, and sig...

The internet and its surrounding technologies hold the promise of reviving the public sphere; however, several aspects of these new technologies simultaneously curtail and augment that potential. First, the data storage and retrieval capabilities of internet-based technologies infuse political discussion with information otherwise unavailable. At t...

We examined audience uses of the Internet from a uses-and-gratifications perspective. We expected contextual age, unwillingness to communicate, social presence, and Internet motives to predict outcomes of Internet exposure, affinity, and satisfaction. The analyses identified five motives for using the Internet and multivariate links among the antec...