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I am a Professor and Chair of the Department of Communication at Cornell University. I study the ways people adopt and integrate communication technology into their everyday lives. Often using qualitative field methods, my research has explored mobile and social media, privacy and surveillance, and identity and social interaction. My book, The Qualified Self: Social media and the accounting of everyday life (MIT Press, 2018) historicizes contemporary social media to help us reveal what’s really new about social media. I argue that social media users are not as narcissistic as some would suggest, but instead are engaging in longstanding practices using media to document their lives and share it with others. Instead, it is the commodification of people’s everyday media accounting that raises new and significant challenges to a long-standing media practice.
I also collaborated with the late Paul Messaris on the second edition of our book, Digital Media: Transformations in human communication. It’s a great collection by authors who help us to understand how digital media are changing the ways we process and experience information, persuasion, community, gender and sexuality, communication across cultures, as well as privacy and surveillance.
Currently, I am working on topics related to mobile media, rural communication technologies, as well as, IOT. I continue to be interested in how people adopt communication technologies and incorporate them into their everyday lives, as well as privacy & surveillance issues that arise with such technology.
In Spring 2024, I am teaching Comm 6830: Qualitative Research (one of my favorite classes to teach). You can find the course descriptions of classes I teach on my Teaching page. I was the inaugural director of the Cornell Center for Social Science’s Qualitative and Interpretive Research Institute (QuIRI- pronounced like query) and continue to be involved. We support and strengthen qualitative social research at Cornell and beyond through seminars, small grants, and working groups.
Lastly, it is huge honor to be leading the department where I did my undergraduate studies in the 1990s. If you want to learn more about the Department of Communication at Cornell, please reach out to me. I am always happy to talk about our department!
Contact info:
468 Mann Library Building
Dept. of Communication
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY 14853
lmh13 [at] cornell.edu