With another holiday season upon us, lots of eager fingers will be unwrapping the latest mass-market technological marvel: a smart speaker system. The number of homes in the United States with an Amazon Echo, Google Home or other such device reached 50 million this year, according to an August report by the research group CIRP. As people interact more and more with these digital assistants, what effect will that have on how we interact with each other?

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Why should we care about how journalists have been portrayed in media? What makes such an area worth studying? Those are the questions that Joe Saltzman, professor of journalism and communication, answers in this short video. For the past 20 years, he has studied film, television and books and has created a worldwide resource on this subject. He explains why this subject is important and what the image of the journalist tells us about the health of U.S. democracy.

A journalism class, led by Mary Murphy and Sandy Tolan, takes on the homelessness issue in Los Angeles County. Students spend the semester learning about the various issues and then do field reporting, creating stories, digital projects and videos. Their work was also featured in the Huffington Post. For more information on the project, click here.

Manuel Castells, University Professor and the Wallis Annenberg Chair in Communication Technology and Society, talks about how his research charts the new global world emerging from the communication and information technology revolution, and how globalization both connects some and disconnects others.

Courtney Cox, a PhD candidate at USC Annenberg researches the lived experiences of athletes and how global frameworks offer us new ways to think about the ways in which the exchange of culture, economy and politics can operate within this sphere.

Robert Kozinets, professor of journalism, is netnography’s inventor. In the 1990s, Kozinets, the Hufschmid Chair of Strategic Public Relations and Business Communications coined the term — fusing Internet with ethnography — and developed the research method from the ground up. A subset of digital anthropology, netnography is a systematic, ethical approach to following the millions of bread crumbs scattered in plain view across social media platforms. This video explores how he came up with the term and what it means to us.