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It Is an Honor for Me to Nominate Professor Eszter Hargittai for Election As an ICA Fellow

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It Is an Honor for Me to Nominate Professor Eszter Hargittai for Election As an ICA Fellow January 26, 2019 Dear ICA Fellows: It is an honor for me to nominate Professor Eszter Hargittai for election as an ICA Fellow. She is a rising international star who , in her supporting letter, aptly characterizes as ‘nothing short of exemplary’ for our field. I agree. In this letter of nomination, I will provide my reasoning behind her nomination, followed by letters from three major scholars in our field (Professor , Professor , and ). These letters are followed by Professor Hargittai’s up-to-date curriculum vitae which includes her present contact information. Based on my reading of her work, enhanced by my interaction with her over the years, I have absolutely no reservations in recommending Professor Hargittai for this award. She received her doctorate in sociology from Princeton, progressed her career to become the Delaney Family Professor in the Communication Studies Department at Northwestern University since 2003, and now Professor and Chair of Internet Use & Society at the Institute of Communication and Media Research at the University of Zurich, and member of the Swiss National Research Council, and Adjunct at her previous department at Northwestern. I have known Eszter for more than two decades through our common interests in studies of the Internet and society. I first met Eszter through a workshop that Professor had organized, and have since followed Eszter’s work, inviting her to on several occasions, when I was Director . It goes without saying that I invited her because I consider her the best positioned to address these issues, but I think it merits noting that she speaks and writes such invited chapters in support of our field, while also being exceptionally productive in peer-reviewed articles in major journals in her areas of specialization. There is no doubt in my mind that Professor Hargittai is one of the field’s stars in studies of the sociology of the Internet, particularly in the area of social stratification and its implications for Internet use and skills and their implications on inequalities in access to other resources. Eszter is well anchored in sociological theories of stratification, and has applied them in imaginative ways to the study of the Internet and related information and communication technologies. In the area of access and inequalities, she has championed a focus on skills as an under-researched factor shaping the use and impact of the Internet. For example, her recent work elaborates and empirically identifies the many (10) dimensions of skills that she calls out for study. Skills and inequalities are separate, but interrelated issues. Skills help explain the relationships found between age, education and other demographic factors related to the use of the Internet. Skill is also a factor that is subject to intervention, enabling policy and practice to better address inequalities. Her articles in the Social Science Computer Review and Sociological Inquiry are indicative of her contribution in this area. She is an exceptionally productive scholar, having published 68 peer-reviewed journal articles and 21 book chapters. Moreover, her productivity comes with truly high-quality work. Her article on “Digital Natives or Digital Naives?” was among the top-10 most cited (543) articles published in sociology journals in 2010-2014, as but one example. Her work has taken her focus on inequalities further by focusing on the implications of access to digital resources on life chances. This is a key question for public policy: Does access to the Internet make a difference in such outcomes as educational achievement and career opportunities? Of course, there is a strong correlation between digital access and socio-economic status, but unraveling the independent contribution of Internet access to one’s success in everyday life and work is a difficult research problem. This is a very useful, challenging, and evolving goal for her work. In addition to her programmatic focus on stratification and digital inequalities, she has a broader range of interests that are reflected in her published work. Her piece on the popularity of Twitter, and trust in the Web, illustrate this breadth. Her work on methodology with Christian Sandvig, another leading academic in Internet Studies, provides an added example of her breadth and intellectual range. In addition, Eszter brings a rigorous approach to social research methods to her work. In fact, the combination of her firm grounding in empirical research methods, and sociological theory applied to media and Internet studies, is what most impresses me about her contribution to the field. She is as adept in substantive areas on the new media or Internet, as she is in the rigorous application of research methods. When she was at , I met her students and saw the Web Use Lab that attracts graduate students for joint research. I was so impressed with her ability to work with students, and bring them into her research and publication plans. There is no doubt she will create an equally collaborative institute at Zurich. Her research has been covered widely in US and international print and online media, including The Washington Post, The New York Times, Chicago Tribune, L.A. Times, USA Today, and she has published numerous OpEds on her research and other topics including work in The Huffington Post, Slate, and The Chicago Tribune. She has written her own academic advice column for Inside Higher Ed called Ph.Do. She has also appeared repeatedly on live TV (such as CNNfn, WTTW Chicago Tonight) and several radio stations (in the US, Canada and Europe). In short, she can communicate her work to a broad public quite effectively. Already, her work has received awards from several professional associations including the International Communication Association's Outstanding Young Scholar Award, the American Sociological Association’s Public Sociology Award, and the Galbut Outstanding Faculty Award at Northwestern. And she has been invited to give well over a dozen (17) keynotes across the US and internationally, and many more invited talks, over 150. And she serves on a dozen journal editorial boards. Finally, but importantly, she is seriously connected with communication research on the Internet, and able to stay on the leading edge of developments. Given her sheer intelligence, taken together with her studies at Smith and Princeton University, and her very successful career at Northwestern, and now at Zurich, it is difficult to imagine a stronger candidate for election as an ICA Fellow. As noted above, she is seen as an exemplar for the Internet research community, communication, uses new media, and is clearly one of the top scholars in the area of Internet studies. I am delighted to nominate Professor Hargittai for election as an ICA Fellow. It would be very well received worldwide within and beyond the communication field. Sincerely, 9 January 2019 Dear ICA Fellows Selection Committee Re: Professor Eszter Hargittai It is a pleasure to write in support of the nomination of Professor Eszter Hargittai to be a Fellow of ICA. Eszter is an internationally renowned scholar whose documented record of scholarly achievement – the primary requirement for election to ICA fellow – is beyond question. She is a prolific researcher and publisher, building a hugely influential and widely cited reputation for leading the new and important field of study on digital skills and digital inclusion and exclusion. In this work, Eszter’s contributions include intellectual originality, especially in her proposal of the second level digital divide (namely of skills and competences, over and above the previous focus on access and use), and in her conceptual and empirical demonstration of how the skills divide has severe implications for the participation divide. Eszter’s contribution is also substantively methodological. Her commitment to rigour in measurement, research design and analysis has been vital to the success of research on skills-based digital inequalities and their socio-economic implications. For through a series of creative tests based on her development of diverse methods and tools, she has contributed significantly to overcoming previous doubts that skills could not be reliably measured in relation to the fast-changing digital environment. Her approach has been innovative not only in the measurement of skills, and the assessment of the reliability and validity of the results, but also in her detailed attention to the affordances of different digital interfaces, drawing on and contributing to research specifically at the cutting edge of digital communication and culture studies, as well as to sociological research on skills and inequalities. As her curriculum vitae documents, Eszter publishes systematically in the top journals of our field and related fields, with 12 peer reviewed articles just in 2018! Her recognition is documented across several intersecting domains – communication, information science, health, sociology, security studies, public policy, computer science, and more. She is also committed to bringing high quality research ideas and evidence into the public domain, through short publications and presentations, including an interesting side-line in reflexive critique of the academy itself, as also demonstrated in her inspirational book series “Research Confidential.” With an impressive list of awards and honours, external grant funding won and keynotes and invited talks, Eszter’s achievements to date (and yet to come) surely merit the support of the fellows in this nomination, in recognition of her important contribution to the field of communication, and her international leadership especially in the study of digital skills and digital inclusion and including specifically in her multiple active service roles in ICA. Yours sincerely, December 28, 2018 To the ICA Fellows: I am happy to join in the nomination of Eszter Hargittai as an ICA Fellow. Eszter Hargittai is unquestionably one of the leading scholars of her generation – something ICA recognized in giving her the Outstanding Young Scholar Award in 2010 – and one of the key figures in shaping the field of internet studies.
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