Speaking in Lisbon, Portugal, at CEIS-IUL and OberCom
I am back from a stimulating visit to Lisbon to speak at two events. The first was a talk before lunch on 9 April 2018 with a group composed of individuals from the media and regulatory agencies concerned with disinformation and data protection in the social media world. This was at the beautiful Palace Foz, where OberCom (Observatório da Comunicação) https://obercom.pt/is located, and where communication was centered during Portugal’s period as a constitutional monarchy. My talk focused on conveying the findings of our Quello Search Project. The slides are posted here.
The second talk, on the evening of the 9th, was at CEIS-IUL. I was invited by doctoral students to kick off a panel that was primarily focused on online dating research. My talk aimed at more broadly speaking about the role of social media, and how the realities generally differ from the implications portrayed in the news. I entitled the talk ‘Social Media and Society: News and Reality’.
I was able to bring some of our early research on online dating into the talk. The slides are posted here. I was joined by Cristina Miguel from Leeds Beckett University, Cláudia Casimiro from EIEG/ISCSP-ULisboa, and Jorge Vieira from ISCTE-IUL. My host, Gustavo Cardoso, introduced and moderated the session. Everyone remarked on the imagery of the poster for the forum, entitled ‘Dating Through a Screen’, and the talks on dating underscored how the field has shifted from studies of online dating per se to critical and empirical studies of particular platforms, like Tinder, Match.com, and eHarmony. 
Great to catch up with Gustavo Cardoso, who has a new book out, jointly edited with Manuel Castells, Olivier Bouin, João Caraça, John Thompson, and Michel Wieviorka, entitled Europe’s Crises(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018). See: http://www.worldcat.org/title/europes-crises/oclc/993624071 The editors put together a group to discuss the crises in Europe, which yielded this impressive collection that will add more analytical scholarship to the growing body of work seeking to make sense of developments across Europe, from the financial crisis to Brexit. Eighteen chapters are grouped into three sections dealing with economic, social and political crises – take your pick – plus an introduction and conclusion. This could be a beautiful text for a course.
