Author: TheConversation

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...

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...

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,...

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...