Ananda Mitra
Professor of Communication
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… Read More »
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.
Media Appearances
Could "narbs" help you tell your social media story?
Phys Org
August 18, 2014
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.
Teens slowly migrating to Twitter
USA Today
February 3, 2012
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.
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More Information
Areas of Expertise
- Communication and Public Culture
- Communication Technology and Evaluation
- Computer Use in Data Collection
- Computers in Education and Training
- Cultural Sustainability
- Employment in U.S. and India
- Indian Culture and Communication Practices
- Technology and Communication
- Technology and Society
Education
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign: Ph.D., Communication
Wake Forest University: M.A., Communication
Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur: B.Tech., Chemical Engineering
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