News

• Helen Nissenbaum Publishes Book on Privacy and the Sharing of Information
• In her new book, Privacy in Context: Technology, Policy, and the Integrity of Social Life (Stanford UP), Helen Nissenbaum, Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, argues that what people really care about is not that information about them is shared - this is crucial for social life - but that it is shared inappropriately. Her book develops a theory of appropriate sharing and explains some of the ways digital technologies have threatened this.
  
  Read more about Privacy in Context by Helen Nissenbaum, whose research focuses on the social, ethical, and political dimensions of information technology and new media.
• McIlwain Awarded NSF Grant for Race Appeal Research
• Charlton McIlwain, Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication, was awarded a grant of approximately $21,000 from Time-Sharing Experiments for the Social Sciences (TESS), funded by National Science Foundation (NSF). The award for his project - "The Effects of Racial and Racist Appeals on White Voters (with Stephen Maynard Caliendo)" - includes Jeremy Freese and Penny Visser, principal investigators.

  The study tries to ascertain how Anti-Black racial appeals and Black candidate appeals to racial authenticity affect Black and White potential voters' perception of both Black and White candidates. Results from the study are part of McIlwain's forthcoming book "Race Appeal" (with Stephen Maynard Caliendo; Temple, 2010).

• Coleman says Open-source thriving
• Gabriella Coleman, assistant professor in the NYU Steinhardt Department of Media, Culture, and Communication, was the opening keynote speaker at Linux.Conf.Au. Coleman said the open-source software movement is thriving despite the economic downturn.
  
  One explanation is that hackers are employed by IT firms with a financial stake in the success of open-source projects.

  For more on this topic, read Open-source alive and thriving, by Tom Pullar-Strecker of The Dominion Post.

• More...