Author: TheConversation

Sports and Politics: The challenge of rebranding community ownership of a business as Packerism

By Alan J. Kellner, PhD Candidate in Political Science and Instructor in Chicago Field Studies, Northwestern University I few years ago I was walking with my parents through the newly constructed Titletown District in Green Bay, Wisconsin, a community development project across the street from Lambeau Field, where the Green Bay Packers play their home games. It features a local brewpub, a boutique hotel, free outdoor games like foosball and shuffleboard, and a large practice field, where kids can play football. At one point, I heard my dad say, “I know who this is.” He had picked out the...

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What if Tom Brady took a knee? And why Colin Kaepernick is still out of a job after five years

By Jonathan Finn, Professor of Communication Studies, Wilfrid Laurier University The 2021-22 NFL season is underway and Colin Kaepernick is still out of a job. It has been more than five years since he took a knee during the national anthem and in so doing further exposed issues of systemic racism in the NFL. I have been researching and writing about sport and media for several years and I frequently use Kaepernick’s case in my classes. To illuminate the gendered and racialized nature of that case and of the NFL, I ask a hypothetical question: what if Tom Brady...

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COVID in Dog Years: How emotional responses to the pandemic has altered our perception of time

By Philip Gable, Associate Professor of Psychology, University of Delaware; and Chris Wendel, PhD Student in Psychology, University of Alabama The COVID-19 pandemic, now in its 19th month, has meant different things to different people. For some, it has meant stress over new school and work regimes, or anxiety over the prospect of catching COVID-19 and dealing with the aftereffects of an infection. But for others, it has created space and freedom to pursue new passions or make decisions that had been put off. Our upended lives – for better or for worse – also likely influenced our perception...

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A misinformation problem: Why Facebook’s algorithms are a threat to public health

By Ethan Zuckerman, Associate Professor of Public Policy, Communication, and Information, University of Massachusetts Amherst Leaked internal documents suggest Facebook – which recently renamed itself Meta – is doing far worse than it claims at minimizing COVID-19 vaccine misinformation on the Facebook social media platform. Online misinformation about the virus and vaccines is a major concern. In one study, survey respondents who got some or all of their news from Facebook were significantly more likely to resist the COVID-19 vaccine than those who got their news from mainstream media sources. As a researcher who studies social and civic media,...

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From Neuromancer to Snow Crash: Facebook’s clumsy vision unlikely to fulfill 40-year dream of a Metaverse

By Rabindra Ratan, Associate Professor of Media and Information, Michigan State University; Yiming Lei, Doctoral student in Media and Information, Michigan State University The metaverse is a network of always-on virtual environments in which many people can interact with one another and digital objects while operating virtual representations, or avatars. of themselves. Think of a combination of immersive virtual reality, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game and the web. The metaverse is a concept from science fiction that many people in the technology industry envision as the successor to today’s internet. It’s only a vision at this point, but...

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Archaic and often racist Supreme Court cases dating back to 1901 still rule over millions of Americans

By Eric Bellone, Associate Professor of Political Science and Legal Studies, Suffolk University The 4 million inhabitants of five United States territories, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Northern Marianas Islands, Guam and the U.S. Virgin Islands, do not have the full protection of the Constitution, because of a series of Supreme Court cases dating back to 1901 that are based on archaic, often racist language and reasoning. No U.S. citizen living in any of those places can vote for president. They do not have a voting representative in Congress, either. But this inferiority is inconsistent. Puerto Ricans are American citizens...

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