Neilson Professor Lecture Eszter Hargittai

Eszster Hargittai ’96, Neilson Professor Lecture, "The Role of Social Media in Learning about Science and Religion"

Social media have become an important information source for people on a myriad of topics including the sometimes-contentious domains of science and religion. Which social media platforms are popular for seeing and discussing these topics? Do people tend to have negative or positive experiences with them? Why might people avoid related conversations? This talk draws on interviews with 45 American adults and a survey administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,505 US adults to explore what contexts encourage learning about science and religion versus turn people away from it.

Eszter Hargittai ’96 is a Professor and holds the Chair in Internet Use & Society in the Department of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich. She is Fellow of the International Communication Association and an External Member of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. She is past Fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford, Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and Princeton's Center for Information Technology Policy. Before moving to Zurich, she was the Delaney Family Professor at Northwestern University.

Hargittai's research focuses on the social and policy implications of digital media with a particular interest in how differences in people's Internet skills influence what they do online, and how these may translate into changes in life chances. Hargittai is author of Connected in Isolation: Digital Privilege in Unsettled Times (The MIT Press, 2022), Wired Wisdom: How to Age Better Online co-authored with John Palfrey (forthcoming with the University of Chicago Press in 2025) and three books on the behind-the-scenes realities of doing empirical social science research.

Her work has been featured in many popular media outlets in the United States and internationally. Her research has been supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Microsoft Research, Nokia, Google, Facebook, and Merck, among others.

NEILSON PROFESSORSHIP

The Neilson Professorship was established in honor of the college's third president to enable the college to have a distinguished scholar visit the community and share their current research with faculty and students.