Special Lecture (19) : Second level gatekeeping and Content Concentration in Twitter: An Analysis of the 2009 Gaza Conflict By Prof. H. Raghav Rao SUNY Distinguished Service Professor Management Science and Systems Department, University at Buffalo,State University of New York, USA

International School of information Management (ISiM) has organised a Special Lecture (19) on “Second level gatekeeping and Content Concentration in Twitter: An Analysis of the 2009 Gaza Conflict” by Prof. H. Raghav Rao, SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Management Science and Systems Department, University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA, on 16th January, 2012 at 11:00 am @ International School of information Management (ISiM), Manasagangotri, Mysore.

Talk Abstract:

Twitter is a social news site in which various types of information are re-circulated and reinterpreted by individual users. The talk will provide an overview of a research study conducted by Hazel Kwon, Onook Oh, Manish Agrawal and H. R. Rao. The research study explores the pattern of Twitter users’ selection of news contents, defining their practice as the ‘second-level’ gatekeeping. By analyzing user-selected contents in Twitter about the 2009 Israel-Gaza conflict, the study finds: first, while a variety of contents were selected and redistributed by Twitter users, the aggregation of these selections over-represents a small number of prominent content providers; second, Twitter users’ selection is not constituted randomly, affected by hyperlinks structure and content types; third, temporal analyses revealed that social media sites and traditional media are prominently selected in a later stage of news lifespan.

Speaker Bio:

Dr. H. Raghav Rao is SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, Management Science and Systems Department, at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York, USA. Prof. Rao got his PhD from Purdue University, MBA from Faculty of Management Sciences, Delhi University, and B Tech from the Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur.

Professor Rao’s interests are in the areas of management information systems, decision support systems, e-business, emergency response management systems and information assurance. He has chaired sessions at international conferences and presented numerous papers. He also has co-edited four books of which one is on Information Assurance in Financial Services. He has authored or co-authored more than 175 technical papers, of which more than 100 are published in archival journals. His work has received best paper and best paper runner up awards at AMCIS and ICIS. Dr. Rao has received funding for his research from the National Science Foundation, the Department of Defense and the Canadian Embassy and he has received the University’s prestigious Teaching Fellowship. He has also received the Fulbright fellowship in 2004. He is a co-editor of a special issue of The Annals of Operations Research, the Communications of ACM, associate editor of Decision Support Systems, Information Systems Research and IEEE Transactions in Systems, Man and Cybernetics, and coEditor-in-Chief of Information Systems Frontiers. Dr. Rao also has a courtesy appointment with Computer Science and Engineering as adjunct Professor. Prof Rao is also the recipient of the 2007 State University of New York Chancellor’s award for excellence in scholarship and creative activities. In 2010, Professor Rao was appointed a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor and is the only School of Management Professor to be honored as a SUNY Distinguished Service Professor, which represents a promotion in rank above full professor.

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