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Interpersonal networks and traditional mass media are more intertwined than ever as evidenced by the proliferation of social media. However, it remains unclear how the interplay between the two shapes the way individuals monitor opinion climates, which play a critical role in public opinion dynamics. Using an agent-based modeling (ABM) approach, this study aims to explore the conditions under which social networks and mass media interact to facilitate or hinder the emergence of large-scale spirals of silence. The simulation results show that the spiral of silence in a networked environment may be locally observable, but not likely on a global scale—unless the opinion representation of mass media becomes extremely homogeneous, individuals are hyperconnected, or both, the majority-minority opinion gap found locally seldom escalates to the global silence of the minority.

Understanding the experience people have in a direct or mediated interaction is essential to defining interactivity and theorizing its role in communication, but the question of what constitutes a person's perceptual experience of interaction, namely perceived interactivity, has not been systematically inquired. The objective of this article is to define the general structure of perceived interactivity, which provides an integrative framework to compare and evaluate interaction forms or situations involving human actors as well as both old and new media. A major premise of this framework is that an interaction experience, whether direct or mediated, consists of three underlying dimensions – sensory, semantic, and behavioral.

To examine how communication scholars have incorporated the concept of social capital originating from other disciplines, we first analyzed citation patterns among social capital–related journal articles, book chapters, and books extracted from Communication Abstracts. Moreover, we investigated whether and how communication scholars have cited three pioneering scholars in this area, that is, Robert Putnam, Pierre Bourdieu, and James Coleman, to identify aspects of social capital that have either been emphasized or overlooked. Based on the analyses of 171 journal articles, books, and book chapters, we found that the translation of the concept of social capital into communication research has been driven and dominated by a small group of political communication scholars. The results of our content analysis demonstrate that the prominent players in social capital research in the communication field distinctly favored the work of Putnam over those of Bourdieu and Coleman. The implications of these findings for communication research are discussed.

An implicit assumption underlying previous interactivity studies is that every time people use a communication medium (e.g., website) or device (e.g., smartphone), they perceive its interactivity through analyzing it from scratch trait-by-trait. As psychologists have long shown, however, we quite often skip such an intensive analysis, and rely on our expectations or schematic knowledge to perceive/evaluate an object. This study is designed to develop a measure of individuals' expectation of interactivity toward a medium, called expected interactivity (EI). After specifying three conceptual dimensions underlying EI – sensory, semantic, and behavioral dimensions – scales for capturing them are developed, refined, and validated through multiple studies. Implications for future interactivity research are discussed.