Syracuse University will host the first seminar in a series focusing on social media and its impact on politics on Tuesday.

The Social Media and Democracy seminar series is co-sponsored by the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and the School of Information Studies, and consists of three panels throughout the fall semester. The first panel, “Activism in the Digital Age,” will be hosted in the Joyce Hergenhan Auditorium on Tuesday at 6 p.m.

The panel features three professors, including Biko Gray, a professor of religion in the College of Arts and Sciences. Gray studies how religion influences social justice movements. Dwight DeWerth-Pallmeyer, a communication studies professor at Widener University, and Tia Tyree, a professor of strategic, legal and management communications at Howard University, will also speak on the panel.

Regina Luttrell, a professor of public relations at Newhouse, will be moderating the discussion.

Pallmeyer is a documentary producer who explores news audiences and media critics. Last year, he collaborated with Luttrell on a chapter in her book “Trump Tweets, The World Reacts.” Pallmeyer said that he sees an increasing difficulty in making sense out of information when it’s disseminated through social media.

“I’ve been working on college campuses for many years,” Pallmeyer said. “But it’s only been in the last 10 years when personal communication has taken a hit because of devices like cell phones and laptops.”

Personal communication is important for a true democracy, Pallmeyer said. SU and Newhouse have a responsibility to continue conversations such as the one scheduled for Tuesday, he added.

“Newhouse is one of the top five journalism schools in the country,” Pallmeyer said. “Smaller institutions don’t have the resources or the reach, but schools like Newhouse can bring many ideas together in one conversation.”

Jon Glass, a professor of practice at Newhouse, said the series came out of talks between Newhouse Dean Lorraine Branham and iSchool Dean Liz Liddy. Glass said the timing was perfect, as the panels would fall around the time of the 2018 midterm elections — the first major U.S. elections since the 2016 presidential election.

“The deans brought us, a group of professors from both schools, to talk about it,” Glass said. “They wanted to know where that overlap is, where we could find places to collaborate. That was the initial spark that led to this series being developed.”

One of those professors was Lu Xiao of the iSchool, whose research focuses on collaborative and social computing and digital humanities. Xiao will moderate the second panel in this series, “Fake News, Language Analysis and Online Influence” on Oct. 16.

Jennifer Grygiel, a Newhouse professor who specializes in social media, will be moderating the last panel, “How Social Media Impacted the November Midterms,” on Nov. 14.

Published on September 23, 2018 at 9:05 pm