Allison Wan
Network Science PhD Candidate
Talk recording
Functioning democracies require individuals to navigate complex political information environments in order to make decisions that advance their interests. At the same time limits on cognitive bandwidth, policy complexity, and the proliferation of high choice media environments make this prohibitively challenging. Individuals must necessarily depend on external resources such as news media, interest groups, social networks. Increasingly, they also depend on digital platforms that aggregate, curate, and most recently generate content. In this dissertation, I present three projects studying how individuals leverage these external resources to remain informed, as well as how digital platforms shape the information people can access in the first place. In my first paper, I study how political pundits rely on each other to maintain ideological norms and stay up to date in a dynamic political environment. In my second paper, I examine the role Google search plays in the provision of information about elected officials. Third, I study the effect of Google AI Overviews on how individuals access government information and services.
About the speaker
Allison Wan is a Network Science PhD student advised by Dr. David Lazer. She is broadly interested in applying computational social science to study how emerging technologies influence political behavior and people's relationship to government. Allison graduated from Vassar College with a major in cognitive science and a minor in math.
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