Danielson Award Lecture- Eszter Hargittai

This year, the Moody College of Communication is proud to announce Professor Eszter Hargittai of the University of Zurich as the 2020 Danielson Award winner.  Professor Hargittai will present “Connectivity, Covid, and Coping: Digital Inequality in Unsettled Times.”

As lockdown measures swept across the globe in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, people turned to digital media to stay connected both for interpersonal communication and to access information about the situation. Social media, in particular, offered important ways to be in touch during times of physical distancing. How were people using such platforms to be in touch about the pandemic and, importantly, who was most likely to use such resources in the first place? This talk reports on finding from national survey data collected in April 2020 about people’s social media experiences during the unsettled times of the pandemic.