Tuesday, February 22, 12:30 pm
Berkman Center, 23 Everett Street, second floor
How are online and offline political activities linked? Using data collected soon after the 2008 presidential elections on a diverse group of young adults from Obama's home city of Chicago, this presentation will look at the relationship of online and offline political engagement. Thanks to detailed information about political participation, political capital and Internet uses in addition to people's demographic and socioeconomic background, we are able to consider the relative importance of numerous factors in who was more or less likely to vote and engage in other types of political action.
About Eszter
Eszter Hargittai is Associate Professor of Communication Studies and Faculty Associate of the Institute for Policy Research at Northwestern University where she heads the Web Use Project. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Princeton University where she was a Wilson Scholar. In 2006/07 she was a Fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford and in 2008/09 was in residence at Berkman. Her work looks at the implications of differentiated Internet uses for social inequality. She is editor of Research Confidential: Solutions to Problems Most Social Scientists Pretend They Never Have.
About Aaron
Aaron is a Ph.D. candidate in the Sociology Department at UC Berkeley. His current research examines the effects of institutional variation in large-scale collaborative production communities online. In particular, he focuses on relations of power within online communities that create and share informational resources. Aaron has also conducted ethnographic research on political movements to promote access to knowledge in Brazil, a project which he plans to continue as part of a broader analysis of the global governance of informational capitalism.