NickGeidner.com

Current research I am working on:

Content analysis of political discussion on Twitter
Myself, Adam Maksl and person to be named later
Design process

Content analysis of political videos on YouTube leading up to the 2008 presidential election
Ivan Dylko, Kristen Landerville, Myself and Micheal Beam
Data collection

Issue publics/Lifestyle politics: The effects of blackness on political participation
Troy Elias and myself
Design process

The Facebook Effect: Social media and the 2008 election
Erik Nisbet and myself
Data analysis

Perceived Network Connection: A second measurement paper
Myself
Design process

Debate Viewing, News Frames, and Opinion Expression
Ray Pingree, Myself and Megan Hill
Data Analysis

Uncategorized research

So I just wanted to throw down some more thoughts about my Twitter experiment again. As a reminder a few weeks ago, at the beginning of winter quarter, I decided to start Twittering. I just wanted to see what the fuss is about and I think I might do some research using Twitter, so I want to at least have tried it.

Let’s start with some stats:

People I am following: 43
People following me: 33
Times I have updated: 131

Yesterday was the first time I used Twitter during a breaking news situation (both the inaugural and then the breaking Kennedy news) and it was actually impressive. I was able to get a lot of information from a number of different sources. I was also able to directly communicate with a number of people very quickly. For example, most of my communication with Glenn, who was at the inauguration, was through Twitter. I also had no problems with overload or anything. I really expected Twitter to be slow and crashing from like 11:45 until a little after the speech.

The only problem I have been noticing is a problem I have mentioned before. There are a number of people that I talk to regularly who are not on Twitter. This includes: my friend Kevin, my brother, and pretty much everyone from school. Now that I am using Twitter there are times when I either (1) don’t tell these people something that I would have under normal circumstances, because I already mentioned it on Twitter and don’t care to discuss again or (2) feel a slight disconnect because they are missing the conversations on the Twitterverse. In short, there is an in-group and out-group being created around this new form of communication. I am, in my head, separating my network into at least two partitions (users and non-users). This goes along with my whole conception of perceived network connection.

So for the next few days I am going to try to keep track of everyone I talk to and how I talk to them (e.g. f2f, IM, Twitter, phone, e-mail). I just want to see how Twitter is changing my media usage.

Uncategorized Twitter

“With malice toward none, with charity for all…let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds…” – Abraham Lincoln’s 2nd Inaugural Address

To explain the incredible journey, which has been the last four years of my life, would be impossible. It was the fall of 2004 when I first heard of a young state senator from Illinois named Barack Obama. At the time, I was working at a TV station in Youngstown and for the first time I was really paying attention to the presidential campaign.

In 2000, I had paid a little attention, but I never really connected the fact that this really affected me. In 2004, I knew it. I knew that we were choosing a president whose decisions and views would affect the future of our country. On the nights of the DNC, my friend Glenn and I got together and watched the speeches. When we saw soon-to-be Senator Barack Obama speak we were both blown away. As matter of fact, we were both, along with I assume most of the country, more impressed by him than the nominee, Sen. John Kerry.

Then election night came along and I was heartbroken. For the first time in my life, I found out that more than half the country did not see the world the same as me. More than half my countrymen didn’t see ending the war as important, didn’t see the assault on civil liberties as wrong, and didn’t seen all the other things the Bush regime did as important to fight against. This blew my mind. It took me a while to recover from that election.

I don’t think I really bounced back until the talk about freshman Senator Barack Obama’s possible presidential run stated surfacing. I was at grad school by this time at Ball State University. I was working on my master’s studying digital media with a focus on political communication. I knew from before the start that the Obama campaign was going to be an amazing case study of new media usage in political communication. So I started tracking him.

I immersed myself in Obama stuff. I read his books. I followed his website. I read news about him and I woke up early on a Saturday morning in February to watch a speech on the steps of the Illinois statehouse that would forever change the trajectory of our country. Over the next four months, I followed his new media campaign and in May wrote my thesis on the effects of new media in the early stages of the 2008 presidential election. In my thesis I basically said Obama’s web presence was going to change how people related to him and of all the campaigns Obama’s overall rhetorical strategy was most easily adaptable to the web.

I then moved to Columbus to work on my Ph.D. and over the summer volunteered for the campaign doing things like phone banking and canvassing. Election night came and I was relieved and amazed when Obama won, but it hadn’t fully sunk in. Honestly, it still hasn’t. For the first time, since I really connected presidential politics to my life, I am going to have a president I agree with, a president who I helped elect, a president who I feel represents and will fight for me and my views.

So now an hour away from the inauguration, I am flooded with emotions. I am excited for this change. I am excited for my country to get better. I love this country with all my heart and I want it to be good, not just for me, but for all Americans. I hope most that our country can move forward. That we can realize that above self and party comes county. I am restored in the hope that our country can work together “to bind up the nation’s wound.”

God bless the United States of America.

Uncategorized Obama, presidential, thoughts

So Troy Elias and I are meeting tomorrow to discuss our reserach on how blackness can act as a moderating force in understanding levels of political participation in black church goers. Basically what we are saying is for some people blackness is the most important issue in their life. For these people all political decisions go through the filter of blackness. For other people race is an important issue, but other issues trump it. A great example of this idea are the Log Cabin Rebuplicans. The Log Cabin Republican are a group of gay republicans. For them (and this is greatly over simplified for demonstative purposes) homosexuality is not the issue they found to be most important when deciding what party to join. We are trying to create a measure to understand which people use blackness as their key issue and which view blackness as an issue of importance, but not their defining issue.

Here are some questions I have come up with:

- HBCU’s should recieve increased funding from the U.S. government or all university’s should get equal funding.
- I would prefer donating to the United Negro College Fund than a general scholarship fund.
- Affirmative action
- Unconstitutionality of mandatory minimums
- No child left behind

I think these are going to be set-up as comparisons (e.g. do this or do this) on a scale.

Or they could be something like this:

Mandatory minimums…

a) should be overturned, because they are racist and proportionally affect more blacks.
b) should be overturned, because they constrain judicial power.
c) should be overturned, because they stress punishment over rehabilitation.
d) should be kept as they are.

Hmmm…well I think this has been a productive round of writing out my thoughts and hopefully I am ready for tomorrow’s meeting.

Uncategorized blackness, Elias, research

So I was sitting around the house tonight waiting for my girlfriend to get off work and I was bored so I figured I would Google myself real quick. I hadn’t done it in a while and just wanted to make sure my Google profile was ok. Well I made it though the first few pages and found nothing interesting, links to articles I have written, old blogs, comments on other blogs, etc. It wasn’t until about page 6 that it got interesting to the point of down right creeping me out.

I am 28. I don’t have a great memory, but I remember a lot. I also tend to remember things from my own life, but on page 7 I found something that I have no recollection of.

You may be asking yourself, what is this? Well this seems to be a letter I wrote to the editors of Baseball Digest on the grave occasion of them not mentioning Ricky Henderson in the “This Month in Baseball History” section of the May 1994 issue.

I have no recollection this happening. I don’t remember writing the letter. I don’t remember it getting published. I only barely remember getting Baseball Digest. But 15 years later Google remembers and the scary thought is that 15 years from now Google will still be remembering everything. The stuff we want to remember and the stuff we want to forget.

Uncategorized

Another project I am working on as a co-author looks at how lifestyle politics affect political participation. More specifically, we are looking at how people can use a single issue to shape all their political thought. The issue we are going to be looking at is race issues in the black community. For some people, race issues will define the individual’s whole being, while in others race issues are important but are not the basis of all their political thought. To quantify this, we are going to present the individual’s with a number of scenarios and then ask them how much they would agree with or support the proposition. These propositions need to speak to black culture and should be politically based. Lance suggested something about supporting the funding of HBCU. So far I have thought of another couple:

- Affirmative action scenario
- Unconstitutionality of mandatory minimums

We are also trying to come up with a couple questions that do not speak to black culture at all.

Uncategorized blackness, Elias, research, single issue

I am co-authoring a paper with a professor here at OSU and for now I am just writing some notes on the general role of new media in the 2008 presidential election and how these new roles could affect communication research.

1) YouTube and other online video sharing – Unlike three television channel media system of the 1950’s, YouTube allows the user to have a seemingly endless amount of choice in their media experience. The rise of this type of media creates a number of important areas of future communication research.

a) Will online video add to theories of media fragmentation put forth by scholars, such as Sunstein (2002)? Communication researchers must begin to understand how individuals use these new media to gain information. Are they using it just to reinforce there own views or are they using it to gain new information about different/opposing views?

b) What is the environment of the online video? It is widely speculated that YouTube is driving by bitterly partisan videos, which deal with topics of a superficial nature. Like the USENET before it, content analyzes should be performed to extend this past simple speculation.

2) Datamining, content specialization, and targeting – Unexamined in most research on Internet and politics is a formal discussion of message targeting. More easily than with any media before it, the Internet allows the message creator to gather, store and access vast amounts of information about the reader/user. This information can be used to target messages for the specific user. The most famous example of this being the suggestion engine on Amazon.com. There is no reason this type of targeting couldn’t be apply to the political realm.

In the 2008 election, nearly all the candidate’s websites encouraged the user to give up personal information (e.g., e-mail and zip code). Some of the campaign’s use of this information might be benign or even helpful for the user (e.g., sending an e-mail when there is a local campaign event), but it could be much more. The candidates could use the information to reshape their whole website to highlight the issues important to the user and hide the issues unimportant to the user. This presents a number of ethical questions, which need to be examined, and presents a number of communication research issues and oppurtunities.

a) The ability to create many different specialized, database driven sites creates a huge problem for any type of systematic content analysis.

b) The effects of targeting on political outcomes in the online realm need to be understood better.

3) Social media – With the rise of Web 2.0, there has also been an increase in the ability to socialize on the Internet. This online socialization creates an interesting problem for communication research. Basically, we don’t know where to place these new communication technologies on the scale from intrapersonal to mass communication. For example, YouTube as mention above presents a number of problems for comm research, but then by adding the social element it gets even more muddy. For example, YouTube allows people to post response videos. If the user watches a video and then a response video are they watching two instances of mass communication or are they witnessing deliberation between two individuals. Social media (e.g., Facebook, YouTube, etc) were used extensively throughout the 2008 election.

One way to understand their effects on political outcomes is to understand what kind of communication is occurring. Another way is to isolate an important variable which could mediate the effects of the media usage on political outcomes. One such variable could be connection or emotional attachment to the issue group, candidate, or online environment being examined. By isolating connection and examining how it varies in relation to media usage we can indirectly understand the effects of those media without having to limit our analysis to only the mass comm or interpersonal comm aspects of the media.

So that is what I am thinking for now. These are only idea starters and should not be assumed to be anything more than that. If anyone has any other thoughts or ideas it would be greatly appreciated.

Uncategorized 2008 election, election, holbert, presidential, research

Well this is one of Zimbabwe’s many problems. This is equivalent to 2 dollars American.

Uncategorized Zimbabwe

I have been Twittering for a few days now and I am starting to have some informed opinions about this communication system. First, some stats:

People I am following: 38
People following me: 21
Times I have updated: 40 (about 10/day)

One major problem I have noticed is Twitter seems to be down a lot. I have gotten one of their cutesy error screens at least 10 or 12 times in the last couple days. This is annoying. I have also had a lot of problems with Twitterific, my iPhone Twitter client. At first, I thought that it was a problem with the app, but the more I think about it the more I think it is probably having issues on the Twitter side of the connection. Regardless, I understand that over the last six months they have been experiencing amazing growth, but if they are having this many problems now I wonder what would happen if a national emergency (e.g. 9/11) happened. We might get a little test of this at about noon on the twentieth. My guess: they will crash, because of millions of simultaneous “Yes, we did” tweets.

Again my goal of this project is to understand the benefits and weaknesses of this communication system and to understand why and how people use it. So one of the things I have done over the last couple days has been to search out people to follow. I also talked to my friend Glenn, who is an avid Twitterer, about his Twitter experience.

First, who have I started following. When I started looking I wanted to find two types of people. These are people geographically near me and people who are idealistically close to me. I looked for people geographically close to me, because I thought they more give me good information about the community around me. I had some luck. I found Chris Bradley the weatherman from 10-TV in Columbus. He posts weather updates about 4 or 5 times a day. Very convenient. I also found that the Dispatch has a Twitter account, but all they do is send out links to all their main stories. Not very convenient. Unfortunately, I had problems finding regular people from Columbus to follow, but I don’t blame Twitter that much for this. Don’t get me wrong, I think they could make it easier to find people geographically close to you, but I would also have more people if more of my local social network was on Twitter. So half my fault, half Twitter’s.

As for people idealistically close to me, I had more luck. First, I looked for some widely known tech people that I respect and most of them were on Twitter. These included: Danah Boyd, a researcher for Microsoft, Prof. Lawrance Lessig, a law professor at Harvard, and Steve Safran, VP at Audience Research and Development. Then I just started searching and had some good luck. I searched for “communication research” and found a few university-based comm groups that had Twitter accounts. So now I have all these people and I am hoping that through them I can find other new and interesting links.

I also talked to a friend of mine, Glenn Luther, online and mobile media producer for MHz Networks, about his Twittering experience. Basically trying to find out why he does it. First, he has two accounts, which is interesting. Each represents a unique identity. One is his work account, which has fairly serious posts. Most posts in this account link to some kind of tech or journalism related outside story. Then he also has his personal account, which usually has light, funny posts. These clearly represent two distinct personalities, which correspondent to the different identities he uses through out the day. In a follow-up discussion it would be interesting to find out if while at work he goes to and post on his personal account as a type of temporary escapism.

Beyond this, his overall use of the technology seems to be much less as a two-way communication system and much more a way to broadcast his thoughts. As he said about his personal account, “Some people do stand-up as a hobby, I twitter.” He uses his work profile to push out his thoughts about technology, journalism and media and he uses his personal profile to basically say funny things. In talking to him, I felt he used the people he followed more as an entertainment than informational source.

His use of Twitter is opposite of me. I want two-way communication and information. He seems to use Twitter for one-way communication and entertainment. It would be interesting to do some in-depth interviews or a larger survey to try to understand how others use Twitter. I am sure some kind of topology could be derived.

Well I just realized I have droned on for much too long.

Uncategorized Twitter

The Dispatch reported yesterday that someone close to Sen. Voinovich said that the Senator might not run for re-election in 2010. The Voinovich camp denied it, but now today the Dispatch has a quote from Voinovich’s press secretary giving him some wiggle room.

It seems like the Voinovich camp is trying to back out of their strong reaction to the first story. So hopefully there will be in open seat in 2010. According to the Dispatch, the Democrats will have a very competitive primary.

Democrats who might run include Ohio Attorney General Richard Cordray, Ohio Secretary of State Jennifer Brunner, Lt.Gov. Lee Fisher, and Reps. Tim Ryan of Niles and Marcy Kaptur of Toledo.”

Of this group, I don’t know who I would support. Congressman Ryan, my congressman when I lived up in the 17th, seems like a natural choice for me, but I want to be really sure before I give 100% support. I also want to critically look at all the candidates and decide who I think would be the best possible U.S. Senator for my state and my country.

Regardless, in 2010 I think we’ll have a real good chance to finish turning Ohio blue.

Uncategorized 2010, Ohio, Politics, Senate