Academic Articles

Academic Articles / Publications

Learning to Search and Searching to Learn: Income, Education and Experience Online

Using data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project surveys, this article explores changing trends in reported sophistication and satisfaction with search skills and with search engines. We find that the proportion of Internet users searching online for answers to specific questions—as opposed to casual browsing—has grown significantly. Moreover, […]

Academic Articles / Publications

Testing the Leap Frog Hypothesis

This paper tests the ‘leap-frog’ hypothesis by modeling the impact of existing telecommunications infrastructure, controlling for economic, political and demographic factors, on changes in information communication technology (ICT) access for over 200 countries between 1995 and 2005. This study has significantly greater coverage than previous research, in terms of both time […]

Academic Articles / Publications

Digital Technology and the Market for Political Surveillance

Many new media technologies, such as the internet, serve both as a tool for organizing public commons and as a tool for surveilling private lives. This paper addresses the manner in which such technological innovations have enabled a dramatically expanded market for public policy opinion data, and explores the potential […]

Academic Articles / Presentations

Digitizing the Social Contract: Producing American Political Culture in the Age of New Media

Campaigns are complex exercises in the creation, transmission, and mutation of significant political symbols. However, there are important differences between political communication through new media and political communication through traditional media. I argue that the most interesting change in patterns of political communication is in the way political culture is produced, not in […]