Last week, I had the great pleasure of presenting my work at the International Conference on Social Media and Society (#SMSociety2017), hosted by the esteemed team at the Social Media Lab at Ryerson University. While in attendance, I listened to a fantastic keynote by Lee Rainie, the director of Internet and Policy Research at the Pew Research Center. His keynote, titled “The Reckoning for Social Media” focused on the research work conducted by the Pew Internet and Technology research center, about how social media have changed the relationship of people to each other and to public institutions. Some of his findings were disheartening such as, for example, recent research that shows that people polled in the US are experiencing declining trust in academic institutions, or that people are becoming more polarized in their political views. Other findings were more hopeful, such as the fact that there is substantial reciprocity across social media platforms.

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