Ananda Mitra
Professor of Communication | Wake Forest University
Winston-Salem, NC, UNITED STATES
Mitra’s expertise makes him the go-to person for the latest trends in social media.
Biography
Nielsen reports that social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube account for nearly a quarter of the time Americans spend online. Ananda Mitra’s expertise makes him the go-to person for the latest trends in social media and how “narbs”—the personal details such as residence, age, sex and interests that users reveal on social media sites—are used.
He is the author of a series of books on digital media addressing such topics as digital video, digital crime and digital commerce. He is on the editorial board of the journal Critical Studies in Mass Communication and is a member of the international advisory board of the journal New Media and Society. Mitra also studies cultural sustainability—particularly as it relates to political, economic, and lifestyle sharing between India and the U.S.
Areas of Expertise (9)
Technology and Communication
Technology and Society
Computers in Education and Training
Computer Use in Data Collection
Employment in U.S. and India
Cultural Sustainability
Communication Technology and Evaluation
Communication and Public Culture
Indian Culture and Communication Practices
Media
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Videos:
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Education (3)
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Ph.D., Communication 1990
Wake Forest University: M.A., Communication 1986
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur: B.Tech., Chemical Engineering 1984
Affiliations (2)
- Critical Studies in Mass Communication (Journal) : Editorial Board
- New Media and Society (Journal) : International Advisory Board
Media Appearances (4)
Could "narbs" help you tell your social media story?
Phys Org
2014-08-18
Ananda Mitra of the Department of Communication, at Wake Forest University, Winston-Salem, North Carolina and colleague Sanjay Mamani point out that there are increasing amounts of unstructured data permeating the internet and in big databases. They refer to the narrative bits of unstructured data, the social media updates and the like as "narbs". They have now developed a theoretical approach that could bring order from the chaos and have demonstrated its advantages in making sense of the data that emerged from Egypt during the so-called Arab Spring. The same approach might be applied to other large-scale events such as political campaigns, terrorist attacks, protests, marketing and advertising campaigns and even at the personal level for biography or autobiography...
WFU and Arts Council announce 2014 Lifelong Learning summer course schedule
Camel City Dispatch
2014-05-23
Dr. Ananda Mitra, Professor of Communications at Wake, will kick off the program on Tuesday, May 27 with “Our Digital World,” an introduction to the Internet in general, web-based applications, interpersonal applications, and interpersonal communication tools such as blogs, podcasts, and chat rooms...
Social media ‘Narbs’ may have predicted violence in Libya
NewsWise
2012-09-14
As experts debate whether an anti-Muslim video posted on YouTube caused the violence in Libya or whether conditions already existed and the clip was the catalyst, Wake Forest University communication professor and social media expert Ananda Mitra says there is information on the Web that can give insight into how people might react to or behave under certain circumstances, and it is shared voluntarily online...
Teens slowly migrating to Twitter
USA Today: Tech
2012-02-03
Still, teens and parents shouldn't assume that even locked accounts are completely private, says Ananda Mitra, a professor of communication at Wake Forest University in North Carolina. Online privacy, he says, is "mythical privacy." Certainly, parents are always concerned about online predators — and experts say they should use the same common sense online as they do in the outside world when it comes to dealing with strangers and providing too much personal information. But there are other privacy issues to consider, Mitra says.
Articles (5)
Theorizing cyberspace: the idea of voice applied to the internet discourse
New Media & Society
This article offers the idea of voice as a way to think of cyberspace and the internet. It is argued that web pages represent the presence of individuals and institutions representing what they have to say. Consequently, we would argue that a robust construct ...
Marginal voices in cyberspace
New Media & Society
This article examines the process of expressing oneself in cyberspace through the metaphor of 'voice', by drawing a similarity between the process of speaking and the presentation of the self in cyberspace. The metaphor of voice allows the examination of ...
Changes in student attitudes and student computer use in a computer-enriched environment
Journal of Research on Computing in Education
The pedagogic usefulness of the computer is examined by focusing on student attitudes and use of computers in a “computer-enriched” environment. Our analysis uses data from three years of a five-year longitudinal study at Wake Forest University. The ...
Analyzing the web
Doing Internet Research, Critical Issues and Methods for Examining the Net
The late 20th century has witnessed the development and growth of the Internet much like the post-World War II era saw the growth of television. Use of the Internet, and applications such as the World Wide Web (WWW), is no longer a novelty but is becoming ...
Virtual Commonality: Looking
Virtual Culture: Identity and Communication in Cybersociety
The notion of community has become a central construct in thinking about the way humans organize their lives. In the electronic age, particularly in the age of the Internet, this organization of human activities has become more complex with the availability of fast ...
Social