Girma Parris, Ph.D. – Visiting Assistant Professor, Department of Political Science

Dear Colleagues:

Many thanks to all who have participated in the “Friday Lunch,” as invited speakers or other participants, during this Fall Semester of 2022. December 9 is our final program of the year. We will meet in the alternate room kindly provided by the Kelvin Smith Library, Lower Level 6A/B/C, as new equipment is being installed in the Dampeer Room that day. If all goes well we will be better equipped for our “dual delivery,” in person and by Zoom, when we return on January 20, 2023.

I thank all those who have been patient with our technical struggles this semester. Perhaps it’s appropriate that our topic this Friday is another manifestation of modern communications technology (and to some of us perhaps another plague): social media.

Girma Parris, who this semester is teaching his course on the News Media and Politics, will join us to share his observations about social media as part of that larger topic. There is a lot to consider.

President Trump’s use of the “Twitterverse” made the political uses of social media hard to ignore. But the political uses and consequences of social media go far beyond his use or abuse of it. As Zeynep Tufekci describes in her excellent book, Twitter and Tear Gas, social media has greatly eased organization of political and social movements around the world, as in the “Arab Spring.” As more Americans get their news online, most still use search engines or traditional outlets’ websites, but a growing share get their news directly from social media platforms such as YouTube, Facebook/Meta, and Twitter. Social media is now the most common news source for people under age 30. Whatever their age, people who rely more on social media for information seem to be especially prone to receive misinformation. In the case of COVID-19, the public health risks from misinformation are so severe that some but not all platforms have tried to police content, leading in turn to controversies about “censorship.”

The business model of the “mainstream media” of my youth was to provide content and advertising that would each appeal to as many people as possible, pushing political coverage to the center and advertising content to be uncontroversial. Neither news nor ads could be targeted to different parts of an audience. Now the business model is to target each user with what they seem to want, and the algorithms used by major social media corporations are widely believed to exacerbate the growing political polarization in the U.S. Social media was certainly a factor in the radicalization and mobilization of “election deniers” in 2020, and in the priming of distrust and then organization for challenging the election results in 2022. The ability to use social media to target individuals has also made social media a growing medium for campaign advertising, estimated by one Guardian article just before the election as reaching about 15% of the nearly $10 billion spent.

As the political use of social media has burgeoned, it can be possible to lose track of the fact that a lot of people still get their news elsewhere. But that also means that social media world can be a misleading alternative reality. For example the Democratic party one can see on social media is much more “left” than Democrats within the nation as a whole. Similarly, President Trump’s tweets were amplified because mainstream reporters picked them up as stories – which meant, for example, that I noticed them even though I was not on Twitter. In ironic ways reporters in the mainstream media may be especially influenced by the world of social media – because reporters and their employers tend to use it quite heavily (including by trying to become influencers and to steer people to their own websites).

There are too many themes and facts to consider, so Professor Parris will focus on what may be the most basic issue: how social media have changed discussion about politics – “democratic discourse” – over time. We should remember that the role and workings of the “mainstream” media have been changing for decades. We’ve seen massive consolidation and disappearance of newspapers, shrinking of newsrooms, the rise of cable news with some of it clearly partisan, and the rise of right-wing “infotainment” talk radio. So what does social media add to what many people already thought was a narrative of decline? In particular have social media changed the main sources of information? At one point scholars argued that the mainstream media provided most of the content for social media news. Is that still true? Or has the rise of social media exacerbated a decline in the information gathering and information validation (or gatekeeping) functions that the mainstream media once performed?

In-Person and Virtual Attendance

In order to make it easy for people to protect themselves and still participate, the meetings are accessible on Zoom. Participants can register for each meeting in the same way they did for the past two years. The link is posted below.

This “dual delivery” remains a work in progress. Please be patient with any glitches. The ways we can set up video and audio to work for both people in the room and on Zoom are not perfect.

The discussion begins at 12:30 p.m., but the room should be open no later than Noon. We try to have beverages and refreshments set up soon after that. Participants should be able to sign on to Zoom also by Noon. But please remember not much will be happening online until the talk begins at 12:30 pm. Please also remember to show identification when entering Kelvin Smith Library.

Zoom participants should speak up when asked for questions or comments, or submit thoughts through Zoom’s chat function. Please keep yourself muted until you are choosing to speak.

Each week we will send out this newsletter with information about the topic. It will also include a link to register (for free) for the discussion. When you register, you will automatically receive from the Zoom system the link to join the meeting. If you do not get the newsletter, you should also be able to get the information each Monday by checking http://fridaylunch.case.edu/. Then if you choose you can use the contact form on that website to request the registration link.

This week’s Zoom link for registration is:

https://cwru.zoom.us/meeting/register/tJwod-yprjMoGNXVTmy5h_RKm6XGfzM6PKhO

After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

Please e-mail padg@case.edu if you have questions about how the Zoom version of the Friday Lunch will work or any other suggestions. Or call at 216 368-2426 and we’ll try to get back to you. We are very pleased to be partnering this semester with the Siegal Lifelong Learning Program to share information about the discussions.

Best wishes for safety and security for you and yours,

Joe White
Luxenberg Family Professor of Public Policy and Director, Center for Policy Studies

About Our Guest

Girma Parris is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at Case Western Reserve University. His research focuses on race, ethnic relations, issues of race and immigration in education, and comparative immigrant integration.

Dr. Parris completed his dissertation, “Why the Turks Have it Better: A Comparative, Historical Analysis of U.S. Bilingual Education and Islamic Religious Instruction in Germany, 1965-2010,” in the Department of Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. Dr. Parris’ dissertation looks at two issues in political incorporation through a focus on explaining their respective policy trajectories since the 1960s. The study treats Islamic religious instruction in Germany and US bilingual education as comparable issues of political incorporation and as issue areas central to the respective national debates over national cultural identity. The dissertation investigates how the history, politics, and institutional structures of the U.S. and Germany affect the respective prospects for immigrant integration of the main immigrant target groups of these policies—immigrants of Mexican origin in the U.S. and those of Turkish descent in Germany.