SUNY Albany

Faculty Member, Communication

Associate Professor

College of Arts and Sciences

Thesis Title: New Voices in the Public Sphere: Talking Politics Online

About

In fifth grade my elementary school held a Career Day. Every kid was to come to school dressed up as their fantasized, future career. At that age, living on a ranch in Rapid City, South Dakota, I knew I liked animals. I was responsible for feeding, watering, and gathering the eggs of our 50 chickens. I also had to make sure the sheep had water, filling up the tank outside the barn. In the summer, I helped my parents make hay. I liked these chores, except when the hens pecked at my hands as I stole their eggs.

So, for career day, I found my mom's long, white button-down shirt, which I pretended was a lab coat. Other kids went as truck drivers, loggers, nurses, and I remember one clown. I went to school as a zoologist. I wasn't entirely sure what a zoologist was, but it had the word zoo in it, which meant it had something to do with animals. My teacher was suitably impressed by my declaration, and I felt important in my pretend lab coat.

As it turned out "zoologist" was meaningful as my fifth grade career choice. Although I didn't become a zoologist or a scientist, I see now the connections between it and what I did choose to spend my time on. A zoologist, I've learned in my adult years, is a person who creates typologies of animal species. Part of the word zoologist is "logist," which at its root is "logos," the Greek word for language or communication. So, I was partially right as a kid. I ended up studying communication, not for classifying animals, but for understanding human social reality. I became a scientist of sorts, a "social scientist," which means we don't wear lab coats, unfortunately.

Since 1996, I have studied presidential campaigns and their uses of internet-channeled technologies. I currently am writing a book titled Presidential Campaigning in the Internet Age. It's part history, part analysis of how campaign tactics have changed as they have adopted internet-channeled communication.

I also have branched into other dynamics of political communication, especially political talk online and off, in deliberative settings and informal political talk. Disagreements, especially, have captured my imagination. I am finishing up a three year National Science Foundation grant studying e-rulemaking and the utility of deliberations on proposed regulations to improving the quality of comments to government agencies.

I also have explored online social worlds and the norms that govern behavior there. This has led to two research grants focused on examining social behavior in chat rooms and in online games.

But, that's not all that comprises "me." My career is who I am, certainly. I am a Professor, and it is a foundational part of me. But, I'm also a wife, a mother to three amazing little girls, a sister, and a caregiver of dogs, cats, fish, birds, gnomes, and plants, and a friend to people very dear to me.

The people, creatures, and plants that I nurture allow me to return, just a little, to the South Dakota girl who cared for the chickens and the sheep, and who raked the hay, and looked at the clouds in wonder at the force that is life.

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