Bio
Lee Humphreys is a Professor in Communication at Cornell University. She studies the social uses and perceived effects of communication technology and media. Her research has explored mobile phone use in public spaces, emerging norms on mobile social networks, and the privacy and surveillance implications of mobile location-based services. Often using qualitative field methods, she focuses on how people integrate communication technology into their everyday lives in order to facilitate identity management and social interaction.
Lee’s scholarship historicizes social media into a broader context of communication practices. By comparing new media to old media we can begin to see what is really new about new media. Lee’s work reveals many similarities between the ways people use social media today and the ways people used diaries and scrapbooks in the early 19th and 20th centuries, suggesting that social media users are not as narcissistic as some would claim.
Her research has appeared in such journals as Journal of Communication, New Media & Society, and the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication. She co-edited two books on digital media entitled, Digital Media: Transformations in Human Communication (Peter Lang, 2006 and 2017) with Paul Messaris. Her book, The Qualified Self: Social Media and the Accounting of Everyday Life, was published with MIT Press in 2018. She is an Associate Editor of Journal of Computer Mediated Communication and on the editorial boards of Mobile Media & Communication, Communication Methods and Measures, Information Communication and Society, and Journal of Ethnographic & Qualitative Research. She was the Chair of the Communication and Technology Division of the International Communication Association (ICA) from 2016-2018. She was named an ICA Fellow in 2022. She received her Ph.D. from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania in 2007.
Lee loves exercising and consuming media of all kinds. She is married to Professor Jeff Niederdeppe and they have two children, Ruth (12) and Charlie (9).
Lee Humphreys, Professor of Communication (COMM).