Lecture on May 15th, 2019
Fake Facts and False Friends: Coping with the New Information Environments
Professor Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw, Universität Hamburg
About the lecture
In recent years, lay people have experienced great changes to their information environments due to their increasing use of social networks. Here, they encounter – next to personal updates from friends and family - the familiar traditional news sources in a new look, but also a wide range of unfamiliar alternative news offers, and even at times computers pretending to be human. Drawing on cognitive psychology and communication research, the lecture discusses the heuristics lay people have developed to identify trustworthy information online, and whether these heuristics are still useful for identifying trustworthy information on social networks. Presenting evidence from a recent experiment on the impact of media reputation and news recommendations on incidental news exposure for German Facebook users, the talk will then discuss the implications of the new information environments for the political public sphere from the perspective of lay citizens.
About the speaker
Katharina Kleinen-von Königslöw is Professor of Journalism/Communication Studies, esp. Digital Communication and Sustainability at the University of Hamburg. Her research focuses on transformations of political communication due to digitalization: She has worked on fragmentation, transnationalization, and entertainization in legacy media, online media, and social networks, as well as on public debates of climate change and climate politics. During her previous appointments at Vienna and Zurich, she has directed projects in a major national election study, on transnational debates of climate politics and on information repertoires. She has contributed to high-ranking journals with publications on e.g. social networks as information intermediaries, news selection on social networks, the legitimacy of climate politics in transnational debates, the impact of media visuals on climate attitudes, as well as on integrative research designs.
Her most recent publication in Communication Research on “Incidental News Exposure on Facebook as a Social Experience” is available here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0093650218803529
photo credit: @katifoerster
Mittwoch, 15. Mai 2019, 18:15-19:45
Flügelbau West, 2. OG, Raum ESA W 221
Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1
20146 Hamburg
poster lecture Prof. Katharina Kleinen-von Köngislöw [pdf]
programme "Taming the Machines" [pdf]
site plans:
lecture halls at Edmund-Siemers Allee 1: ESA1 [pdf]
University of Hamburg (Edmund-Siemers-Allee 1 is number 12 in C3 of the map): UHH [pdf]