158회 언론정보학포럼

* 주제: Cause, nature, and consequences of informal political talks: 

A computational approach of studying the dynamic coevolution of political discussion networks and political attitudes

* 발제자: 송현진 박사 (Department of Communication, University of  Vienna)

* 장소/시간 : IBK 커뮤니케이션센터 남정헌 (64동 501호) /  9월 3일(화) 12:30 ~ 14:00

* Abstract: 

One of the fundamental regularities of human behavior is the interdependency of perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors among individuals. Basic to this approach is the understanding that social actors are embedded within a social network, where a social network is defined as a set of actors and ties among them representing some substantive relationship (or a lack of such relationship). Actors are surrounded by their personal network, and within the constraints and possibilities afforded by their network, they respond to one another’s opinions, attitudes, or behaviors while collectively shape their own environment, giving rise to the complex, emergent properties of social systems in which they reside in. Although such a notion that human behaviors are mutually interdependent is not entirely new, its implication has not been sufficiently understood until recently. Recent theoretical and empirical progress in this area, particularly from computational social science methodologies, has begun to shed new light on how such regularities are properly explicated and explained. Focusing on informal political discussion -- nonpurposive, informal, casual, and spontaneous political conversation voluntarily carried out by citizens -- I will review three basic questions surrounding the issue of properly understanding the interdependencies in citizens' political conversations: (1) its cause, nature, and co-evolutionary mechanisms (who talks politics with whom, and why?), (2) its content (what do citizens see and discuss?), and (3) its consequences on system- and individual-level. This talk also maps the major trends in recent advances in the network-centric, computational social science approach of studying political interactions among citizens, and its implications on our understanding of political perceptions and attitudes as “social” constructs. Finally, I will point out possible future directions for further research focusing on the issue of network perceptions and cognitive social structures (CSS), multi-attitudinal dynamics in opinion formation and coevolution process, and ways in which combining digital experiments in studies of informal political conversations.

* Bio: 

Hyunjin (Jin) Song (Ph.D., 2015, The Ohio State University) is an Assistant Professor ("Universitätsassistent, post-doctorate") at the Department of Communication at the University of Vienna, Austria, where he is currently affiliated with Vienna Computational Communication Science Lab. His research interests include the nature and antecedents of interpersonal political discussions and its influence, social and psychological mechanisms of mediated / unmediated message processing and its impact on perception, attitudes, and behaviors. His research also includes automated textual analysis, Agent-Based Models and simulations, statistical modeling and inferences of social network data, and regression-based linear conditional process models.  

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