Professor Profile: Jacob Groshek

Assistant Professor, Emerging Media

How did you become involved in the emerging media field?

Broadly speaking, I began working professionally with communication technology as a mechanic, where monitoring performance and diagnosing problems were becoming increasingly digitized. From there, I continued my training and earned a Bachelor’s degree in technology education while pursuing journalism as an editor at my collegiate newspaper. As I continued my professional career and my graduate studies, emerging media became increasingly embedded in my work. Eventually, I wrote a dissertation about ‘new’ media technologies and democratic change. Since then, I have continued to study and publish in the emerging media field, where I still use communication technology in both monitoring and diagnostic functions. Only now I’ve departed a bit from my mechanistic roots and the issues I now examine address social movements and democratic change.

What was your occupation prior to joining BU’s Department of Emerging Media Studies?

Immediately before I came to Boston University, I was a visiting scholar at the Institute for Advanced Study at the Toulouse School of Economics in Toulouse, France where I studied virality in social media with insights from evolutionary psychologists, economists and biologists. Concurrently, I was also a faculty member at the University of Melbourne (Australia) in their Media and Communication program. Prior to that appointment, I was an Assistant Professor at the Erasmus University in Rotterdam, the Netherlands where I carried out cross-national comparative research on political communication. I started my academic career at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa after I graduated from Indiana University where I specialized in time-series, panel data analyses and shooting pool in crowded and smoke-filled bars.

What classes do you teach at COM? Overall, what are the main topics and discussions addressed in these classes?

I teach a number of courses at COM, but generally speaking these classes converge around issues related to emerging media, data analysis, privacy, algorithms, and how those connect to everyday topics of information sharing, knowledge, and society.

What is your advice to students interested in joining the EMS program at COM?

Be innovative. Lead while you learn. Ask questions that advance understanding.

What was the most current research you’ve published? Why was this topic of interest to you?

I have a study set to be published on the Euro crisis and how it was communicated on social media. One of the most interesting features of this study is the combination of cross-national data from 27 EU member countries and Twitter data. I used to live in Europe and the Euro crisis was something that my family and I felt personally so when I had the opportunity to study it more thoroughly, it was a perfect alignment of my research interests and personal background.

When you have free time, what is your favorite activity to do in Boston?

In all honesty, I almost never have any free time but when I do, I take my family on excursions around the area. Along those lines, if I had to choose, I would pick hitting waves on Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester on a hot July or August day.

What is your favorite emerging media platform/device?

I am not a technophile and feel almost zero connection to any device I have ever owned. The only notable exceptions I can report here are, perhaps, a Sony Vaio from 2003 or an Atari 2600 from 1983. In my opinion, technology is fleeting and being overly devoted to a certain device, platform, operating system, or interface is a relationship intrinsically constructed to have to change, fade or disappear altogether (Blackberrys and Myspace, anyone?).