Interactivity and Democracy: Online Media Effects in the Age of AI

The Center for Media Engagement welcomes Dr. S. Shyam Sundar to discuss the psychology of human-AI interaction in the contexts of online political expression, fake news, and content moderation. This talk will be guided by the speaker’s theory of interactive media effects (TIME) and will provide implications for socially responsible AI media for the future of democracy.

Speaker Bio:

Shyam Sundar is Evan Pugh University Professor and director of Penn State’s Center for Socially Responsible Artificial Intelligence. He is also the Jimirro Professor of Media Effects and co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory in the Bellisario College of Communications at Penn State. Prof. Sundar is a theorist as well as an experimentalist who studies the role played by technological affordances in shaping user experience of mediated communications, in a variety of interfaces from websites and social media to mobile media and smart speakers. He edited the first-ever Handbook on the Psychology of Communication Technology (2015) and served as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 2013-2017.