an article by Jakob Jünger (University of Greifswald, Germany) and Birte Fähnrich (Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany) published in New Media and Society Volume 22 Issue 3 (March 2020)
Abstract
Recent publications question the public visibility of communication science as a discipline and its relevance for the broader society.
To address this issue, we analyse the public engagement of communication scientists by using the example of their Twitter activity. We theoretically distinguish eight types of engagement and explore their empirical prevalence.
The results show that a large share of communication is between peers, fulfilling social networking functions.
Nevertheless, more than a quarter of the tweets are on political and social topics.
In this way, communication scientists bring society into their scholarly community and thus act as bridge builders. They also reach diverse publics outside of science, such as followers from the field of economics.
Our study thus highlights the diversity of connections between science and society and can offer a starting point to further research other fields of public engagement and the impact of the discipline on the public discourse.
Full text (PDF 22pp)
Labels:
communication_science, communication_studies, microblogging, public_engagement, scholarly_communication, science_communication, scientist, sociology_of_science, Twitter,
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