Annenberg Faculty Research
The Annenberg School stands at the forefront of basic and applied empirical research on the institutions, processes, nature, and consequences of communication. This research is based on theories, methods, and knowledge emerging from our own discipline as well those adapted from cognate disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Many Annenberg faculty members are jointly appointed or hold secondary faculty positions in other schools and departments at Penn. Annenberg faculty and students regularly collaborate with each other and with faculty, researchers, and students from Penn’s other distinguished schools and centers.
The result of this inter- and intra-disciplinary research network is a faculty and student body with the theoretical, methodological and substantive breadth, depth, and agility to produce cutting-edge research on the most pressing communication-centered issues of the twenty-first century.
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Publication The Advantage of the Right in Social Media News Sharing(Oxford University Press, 2022) González-Bailón, SandraWe analyze social media activity during one of the largest protest mobilizations in US history to examine ideological asymmetries in the posting of news content. Using an unprecedented combination of four datasets (tracking offline protests, social media activity, web browsing, and the reliability of news sources), we show that there is no evidence of unreliable sources having any prominent visibility during the protest period, but we do identify asymmetries in the ideological slant of the sources shared on social media, with a clear bias towards right-leaning domains. These results support the “amplification of the right” thesis, which points to the structural conditions (social and technological) that lead to higher visibility of content with a partisan bent towards the right. Our findings provide evidence that right-leaning sources gain more visibility on social media and reveal that ideological asymmetries manifest themselves even in the context of movements with progressive goals.Publication Normative and Informational Influences in Online Political Discussions(2006-02-01) Price, Vincent; Cappella, Joseph N.; Nir, LilachHow do the statements made by people in online political discussions affect other people's willingness to express their own opinions, or argue for them? And how does group interaction ultimately shape individual opinions? We examine carefully whether and how patterns of group discussion shape (a) individuals' expressive behavior within those discussions and (b) changes in personal opinions. This research proposes that the argumentative "climate" of group opinion indeed affects postdiscussion opinions, and that a primary mechanism responsible for this effect is an intermediate influence on individual participants' own expressions during the online discussions. We find support for these propositions in data from a series of 60 online group discussions, involving ordinary citizens, about the tax plans offered by rival U.S. presidential candidates George W. Bush and Al Gore in 2000.Publication Using Theory to Design Evaluations of Communication Campaigns: The Case of the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign(2003-05-01) Hornik, Robert C.; Yanovitzky, ItzhakWe present a general theory about how campaigns can have effects and suggest that the evaluation of communication campaigns must be driven by a theory of effects. The National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign illustrates both the theory of campaign effects and implications that theory has for the evaluation design. Often models of effect assume that individual exposure affects cognitions that continue to affect behavior over a short term. Contrarily, effects may operate through social or institutional paths as well as through individual learning, require substantial levels of exposure achieved through multiple channels over time, take time to accumulate detectable change, and affect some members of the audience but not others. Responsive evaluations will choose appropriate units of analysis and comparison groups, data collection schedules sensitive to lagged effects, samples able to detect subgroup effects, and analytic strategies consistent with the theory of effects that guides the campaign.Publication Ecological Narratives: Reclaiming the Voice of Theorized Others(2000-01-01) Krippendorff, KlausThe urge to theorize has been a driving force of Western intellectual tradition. It underlies academic discourse, giving the scientific enterprise its vitality. Without systematic theorizing, much of contemporary culture, particularly technology, would be virtually unthinkable.Publication Design in the Age of Information: A Report to the National Science Foundation (NSF)(1997-07-31) Boyarski, Daniel; Butter, Reinhart; Krippendorff, Klaus; Solomon, Richard; Tomlinson, James; Wiebe, WalterThe Information Age is upon us - it has become a global force in our everyday lives. But the promise of significant benefits from this revolution, which has been driven largely by technologists, will not be realized without more careful planning and design of information systems that can be integral to the simultaneously emerging user-cultures. In cultural terms, information systems must be effective, reliable, affordable, intuitively meaningful, and available anytime and everywhere. In this phase of the information revolution, design will be essential.Publication Writing: Monologue, Dialogue, and Ecological Narrative(2005-01-01) Krippendorff, KlausWriting mostly is a solitary activity. Right now, I sit in front of a computer screen. On my desk are piles of paper; notes for what I want to say; unfinished projects waiting to be attended to; books on shelves nearby to be consulted. I need to be alone when I write. Whether writing on a computer, on a typewriter or by hand, most writers I know prefer a secluded place without distractions from telephones and other people who demand attention. Writing requires a concentration that is absent in ordinary conversations. This affects how we communicate in writing. Writing flows differently from the way a conversation flows. It flows from word and from comments to comments on comments. Writing has a beginning, an end and headlines that introduce the whole and its parts. These are units of thought, not of interaction. Writing is composed of small building blocks. Composition is deliberate, more or less controlled, moving through a topic without loosing track of the overall purpose, the whole. We may go back to assure that our composition is coherent, eliminating redundancy, improving the wording and inserting thoughts that showed up later. When we have to write under non-solitary conditions, for example, in a newsroom with pressing deadlines, interrupting telephone calls, other reporters conversing in the neighboring cubical, an editor calling us with new assignments, the product is different. It reads more like an assembly of observational reports, a collage of images, lacking an overall structure. Textbooks on writing rarely speak of the conditions of writing but celebrate the qualities of its preferred product: style, grace, grammar, logical structure and coherence.Publication A Trajectory of Artificiality and New Principles of Design for the Information Age(1997-07-31) Krippendorff, KlausFrom a likely trajectory of design problems, the paper identifies several design principles that can be expected to inform design in the next century. Underlying them is a shift in emphasis from technological to human considerations or from hardware to information. Along this trajectory design must increasingly afford a diversity of meanings (as opposed to realizing fixed functions), respond to many stakeholders (as opposed to catering to serviceable end users), address interactivity and virtuality (as opposed to materiality), support heterarchies, dialogues, or conversations (as opposed to standardizing social practices), rely on a second-order science for design (as opposed to a first-order theorizing, by engineers or ergonomists for example), generate knowledge that opens possibilities for design (as opposed to re-searching a past for previously existing constraints), develop graduate design education programs that continually rearticulate design discourses (as opposed to reproducing design traditions).Publication Sociology of Mass Communications(1979) Wright, Charles RThe study of mass communications is a broad, multidisciplinary field to which sociology has made major contributions. Some of these contributions have been reviewed in earlier works by Riley & Riley (1959), Larsen (1964), Janowitz (1968), McQuail (1969), Davison & Yu (1974), & Ball-Rokeach (1975), and Wright (1975a). Several chapters in Annual Review of Psychology, although not explicitly sociological in orientation, report on communication studies of sociological relevance. Schramm(1962) reviews the social psychology of mass communication from 1955 through 1961. Tannenbanm & Greenberg (1967) update that review through 1966, and W. Weiss (1971) brings it up to 1970. Lumsdaine & May (1965) focus on educational media, a topic beyond the scope of this review. (For an account of recent developments in media of instruction, see Schramm 1977.) And a recent review by Liebert & Schwartzberg (1977), which focuses the effects of the mass media, also presents data on patterns of media use, media content, and transmission of information and cultivation of beliefs-- all of which are topics of sociological concern. Current statistics on the distribution, structure, and uses of mass media are available in Frey (1973) and in a recent comprehensive review and guide American communication industry trends by Sterling & Haight (1978). In addition, the reader can find useful sociological materials on the mass media in the Handbook of Communication(Pool et al. 1973) and in Communication Research---A Half-Century Appraisal (Lerner & Nelson 1977). Here we review sociological developments in five areas of mass communications research, concentrating on the period from 1972 through mid- 1978 but also including some earlier research. First, we examine studies of mass communicators, media organizations, and the processes by which mass communications are produced. These studies relate to sociological interests in occupations and professions, complex organizations, and the phenomenon of work--placing the communicator in the context of the social system, a sociological development in communications research foreseen by Riley & Riley (1959) two decades ago. Second, we consider research on mass media audiences, especially research oriented toward interests in social differentiation and in the social psychology of media uses and gratifications. Third, we review studies that relate interpersonal communication and mass communication - opinion leadership, communication networks, and diffusion of news. Fourth, we consider studies of mass media content that touch upon changing social norms and upon the public presentation of social roles. Finally, we review recent research on mass communication effects, especially studies attempting to determine the media's effects on public beliefs, knowledge, and concepts of social reality, but also those considering the media's roles in socialization and social change.Publication One Journey Through, Across and Around Communication(2006-01-01) Zelizer, BarbieWhenever the topic of methodological and disciplinary divides is broached, one presumes a need to place or situate oneself on one side or another, regardless of which terrain is being sectioned. Placement involves selection, identifying with a presumed perspective and marking boundaries. It requires decision-making about identity that divides the rest of the world into insiders and outsiders and is accompanied by labels that appear natural and self-evident -- between quantitative and qualitative researchers, empirical and interpretive scholars, or behaviorist and cultural enclaves.Publication Semantics: Meanings and Contexts of Artifacts(2007-01-01) Krippendorff, Klaus; Butter, ReinhartEnglish dictionaries trace the origin of the word, 'experience' to knowledge of or skill in making experiments. Its etymology suggests an important conceptual truth: experiences are not merely personal and subjective but crucially related to interacting with something of interest, an artifact, an activity, or a situation involving other people. What we will explore here must therefore overcome the objective/subjective Cartesian dichotomy and be concerned instead with how humans experience the world by acting on it and creating it.