God-level knowledge darts, according to Desus and Mero, are “advice you could base a religion on.” The book, part memoir, part comedic parable, serves as a life guide of lessons the duo learned on Bronx streets since they met in summer school in the 1990s.

Their conversation was indeed a lightning round of spinning darts. Their banter about the Bronx, graffiti, bodegas, and beyond was deftly facilitated by Monk-Payton, who asked them to dive deep into their personal stories and describe how the Bronx had shaped them.  

“Every day is a mix of hilariousness and overwhelming tragedy,” Desus said of his younger days in the borough. “You could be having the time of your life, and your good friend is dead. Or you’re chilling with your boys, and next thing you know, you get beat up by the cops. It happens that fast. I remember the last time I got arrested, I was literally just walking with my boys.

“The next thing I know, I’m in bookings. It happens in the blink of an eye, and you have to roll with the punches,” Desus told viewers of the virtual event, part of an ongoing partnership between Fordham University and the Bronx is Reading.

In their book, the two were not afraid to address sensitive issues like therapy and masculinity.

“Men should just cry it out sometimes or go to therapy if you can,” said Mero. He described how difficult it can be for men from Caribbean backgrounds to get the help and support they need. “If you go to a barbershop and you’re like, yo I’m going to go see my therapist, 10 mother-f-ers are like yo, you’re going to wha?!… There’s something wrong with you if you go to therapy.” 

In terms of combating the cultural stigma, Mero said, “Sometimes there are ebbs and flows in life. You want to speak to someone who is not going to judge you, someone you can speak frankly to, someone who will give you strategies to cope with whatever you are going through in life. My dad cried all the time. That’s why I never thought crying meant you were soft. If you keep that bottled up inside, you become a human black Air Force One.”

Beyond the difficulties of the Bronx— poverty, policing, and policies— that blighted their experiences, both Desus and Mero expressed overwhelming gratitude to the borough that made them. 

“Shout out to everyone in the Bronx. When people see [us], they thank us for representing the Bronx,” said Desus.

As one of the largest institutions in the Bronx, Fordham did not escape their discussion. Both Desus and Mero grew up within walking distance from the University.

 “As a kid, I always thought that [Fordham] was the Bronx zoo. I didn’t realize it was in the opposite direction. It had that big gate–and I was like, where are the animals at, what’s going on?” said Desus. 

Pugsley’s Pizza and Jubilee—Fordham’s annual alumni reunion event—also received a shout-out from Mero, whose wife is an alumna. 

“I used to live around the corner from Fordham, growing up and seeing this gate and wondering what’s that–it’s so mysterious… and then being a grown man and getting access to this for the first time because my wife is an alumna… And thinking, wow, this is a really nice campus…omg…Shout out to Pugsley’s I enjoyed some pizza over there… and jubilee…” He added emphatically, “Go, Rams!”

Bodegas: ‘Lifeblood of the City’

The bodega, central to NYC and the Bronx, plays a big role in Desus and Mero’s story. 

“The bodega is the lifeblood of the city,” said Desus.” It’s also where you establish a relationship with Papi, and Papi watches you grow up. He’ll let you get food for free because you left your wallet, and he knows you always come in here, and he’s like you got it next time. Or you can be like, ‘yo Papi, can you hold these house keys for me? I’m going to work, my sister will pick them up,’ and he’s like, ‘yo, no problem.’ If we don’t have bodegas, how would we survive? That’s why we are the Bodegas Boys. They hold us down, so we hold them down.” 

There were many questions about God-Level Knowledge Darts’ visual elements from readers in the event chatbox. The inside covers and chapter headings are filled with graffiti. All of the parts written by Mero are done in block letters, a nod to his love for graffiti. 

“I love graffiti so much because it’s just a dope way to express yourself. For kids in the hood, it’s like—I was here. I’m here, I matter, I exist. That’s what it was for me as a 13-, 14-year-old kid. Going up and down Tremont Avenue writing my name was like, I’m Mero, I was here. I matter in the giant world that we live in.” 

One of the biggest hopes for the book was for it to serve as classroom reading.

“We hope that in 30 years, students have a class based on this book, and students hate us for it,” Desus said, laughing.

For more jokes on cultural politics, favorite memories of the Bronx, and their illustrious career interviewing guests from Nas to the Obamas, listen to the conversation on crowdcast. 

William Baker, Ph.D., Fordham’s Claudio Acquaviva Chair and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy at the Graduate School of Education, wrote an Op-Ed in which he ponders the future of television news in the United States. In it, he says Germany has a successful model worthy of emulating.

Writing for Current, a nonprofit news service for and about public media in the United States, Baker says:

“Germany has a nightly public television program called Tagesschau (basically, ‘Daily Show’), arguably the highest-rated news program in the western world. Ten million people tune in each evening, in a country with a quarter of the U.S. population. The broadcast has a 34 percent share of the audience, nearly bettering the combined audience share of all the American networks, PBS and cable newscasts combined. The Germans have a heterogeneous audience that sits around the common campfire to listen to the day’s stories.”

Baker then explains how the show’s open and straightforward style, which does not include any tabloid or soft news, nets them success:

“To draw together an immense, heterogeneous, multigenerational audience requires trustworthy sources and reporters of the highest integrity. Tagesschau has both in abundance, but its formula does not depend on a Walter Cronkite figure; the program uses newsreaders who follow a script provided by a deep team of top editors and researchers. Their objective is to be the most reliable source of news, not just the fastest. Every story is checked two to three times by different editors before going live.”

Can the United States restore trust in the media? Read more of his thoughts in his Op-Ed via Current.

Bill Baker, Ph.D., the Claudio Acquaviva Chair in the Graduate School of Education and director of the Bernard L. Schwartz Center for Media, Public Policy, and Education, presented “The Digital Media Transition: Redefining the American Media Landscape,” in which he called for more digital citizenship.

A Fragmented Media Landscape

With hundreds of television channels to choose from, and thousands of on-demand options, Baker said the American populace has become fragmented in its choice of news sources. He contextualized today’s landscape by comparing it to a time, a few decades ago, when the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite provided Americans with their “water cooler conversations” the next day.

“All of our news came from that trusted source: Cronkite told you stuff you didn’t want to hear but needed to hear,” he said. “But not anymore, that’s one of the reasons why we’re so messed up.”

Today’s choice of news sources allows viewers to select news that fits one’s viewpoint, and “we end up reinforcing our own beliefs, and reinforce our own prejudices,” Baker said.

Moreover, during the last presidential election, Baker shared a disturbing statistic: Of the total Facebook engagement for the top 20 election stories, 8.7 million people got their information from fake news while 7.3 million got their news from mainstream established media.

“More [Americans] believed in the fake than real news,” he said. “We have to figure a way to get more trusted mainstream media.”

He said that, in Germany, a no-frills, 15-minute public news broadcast had a larger audience share than all the American news broadcasts combined. German public media is so trusted that the government pours $10 billion into it every year, as opposed to the $400 million contributed to America’s public broadcasting—which is also under threat by the Trump administration, he said.

Baker added that the administration’s opposition to net neutrality is a threat to smaller players, like pubic media, independents, and new startups.

“They will end up being second-class citizens,” he said.

Fighting Back With Facts, and Wikipedia

In the afternoon session, Samantha Weald, outreach manager of the Wiki Education Foundation, encouraged faculty to help shore up fact-based knowledge by incorporating Wikipedia projects into their coursework, particularly on the graduate level.

Once viewed as an unreliable source, Wikipedia’s credibility has grown over the years, she said. Yet, the platform has a “gap” problem.

Part of the reason, Weald said, is that 85 percent of Wikipedia’s contributors are young, white males from developed, Western nations—a fact that skews content, she said. For example, only 16.9 percent of Wikipedia’s biographies are about women.

“Information is only as good as how readily available it is,” she said.

College students can fill in those gaps with their original research, while also folding more good-sourced academic material into the free, public, accessible site, she said. According to a Knight Foundation study, Wikipedia is the most-used source of news, with eight billion page views a month.

“Imagine a world in which every human has equal access to knowledge—for free,” she said. “Teaching our students to become digital citizens [can]make that a reality.”

Two Fordham faculty members Harold Takooshian, Ph.D., professor of psychology, and Carla Romney, D.Sc., associate dean for STEM and director of pre-health education
said they’d already used Wikipedia projects in their courses. In his Social Psych course, Takooshian assigned students to come up with 30 biographies of people who were virtually unknown in their field.

“Instead of assigning a paper, I assign[ed]Wikipedia entries,” said Takooshian.

Weald said her foundation works with colleges around the United States and Canada to create Wikipedia-connected courses; to date, some 358 courses are ongoing.

In addition to Baker and Weald, Gardner Campbell, Ph.D., associate professor of English at Virginia Commonwealth University, gave a talk titled “Exercising the Franchise of Digital Citizenship,” while concurrent sessions examined online textbooks, online teaching techniques, digital copyrights, cybersecurity, multimedia, ergonomics, and social media etiquette.

Janet Sassi contributed to this article. 

Q. What inspired your interest in the public expression of emotion?

 I got interested in public emotions through those informal shrines on the streets of my city neighborhoods that began in the late 20th century. All over the city but across the country too, people would leave candles and flowers for someone who had died and I said to myself, “This is something different, something important.” The first time historically that the country did this for a public person was after JFK’s assassination, a highly mediatized event where Dealey Plaza became a place where people wanted to go to remember and to mourn. Many years later, was the death of Princess Diana. Kensington Palace was covered with flowers and people came from all over the world. And again, in the days after 9/11, the posting of photos of the “missing” all over Grand Central and Penn Station. That this grew and expanded as a cultural practice, both locally and on the media, interested me a great deal.

Q. Your book ties emotional change to contemporary performance theory. How so?

Today, many of us dramatize our connection to a death or a tragedy. There’s something different about how we express our emotions—we do this in a public way, take and post photos or videos. It’s new. I grew up in the fifties and there was a formality and restraint to things you did if someone died, right? Even if it was a tragic death.

In short, I think that contemporary life is making actors of all of us. But not in a false, phony sense; rather, in the sense that we want to act things out that we know with conviction and that we feel strongly. This doesn’t mean that we’re overly scripted in what we do. It means that we want to dramatize things and express what we feel with other people in public places in much the same way that actors do; it’s an argument I make in this book.

Q. Don’t some theorists question whether that is real emotion?

I don’t go there in this book, but I do engage my students in those kind of questions. Whether these are real emotions or not, I see an awful lot of people talking today about being “authentic” and pursuing authentic lives and I think this indicates something important about culture and emotion today. For example, I see an authenticity in my students when they talk about the primacy of emotions in their lives. And that impresses me. As a sociologist, I have to listen to them, to pay attention to what they and other people tell me about the meaning of emotions today.

 Q. What is the main argument of your book?

Well, my argument is about the identity of the modern self in history and how many things about being a person have changed today. Whether we think about the person in the 16th century, or the 18th, or the 21st, we meet different kinds of persons with different kinds of experiences and ideas about what a person is, what feelings mean, and so forth.

To sum up: we are cultural and collective beings whose emotions are shaped by the lives we live with others. So my book’s about the changing emotional cultures of the modern and postmodern age. Some of these changes have deep roots in our past, like individualism and Romanticism. Other changes have to do with the economies and digital technologies of today and how these, too, are changing us.

So how do these cities get that way? Can an art scene be “imported” via high-end art fairs, with their infusion of jet-setters who can afford to spend millions on a painting?

Andrew Hevia, GABELLI ’15, a documentary filmmaker, is spending a year in Hong Kong investigating that and other questions at the intersection of art, commerce, and identity, funded by a Fulbright that he won last year while earning his master’s in media entrepreneurship at the Gabelli School of Business.

His focus is Art Basel Hong Kong, the prestigious contemporary art fair that will bring more than 200 galleries to the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre at the end of March. Through interviews with a cross-section of local artists, he’ll produce a documentary about the city’s evolving character, viewed through the lens of the fair, which first came to Hong Kong three years ago.

Given the transition from British to Chinese governance and the recent protests about democracy in Hong Kong, “it was a really ripe ground for an interesting project,” he said.

Hevia, an Emmy-winning filmmaker from South Florida, got the idea for the project last year after happening upon a Fulbright information session at Fordham.

He had produced a similar film, Rising Tide: A Story of Miami Artists, centered around Art Basel Miami Beach, the annual fair that began in Miami Beach almost 15 years ago, and wanted to further explore how  cities acquire their own version of the arts “branding” associated with cities like New York and London.

“In New York, everyone knows artists are doing things and what it means to be an artist, and everyone has that friend who has the gallery somewhere or that underground show in Brooklyn,” he said. “In a city like New York, there’s a broader understanding of cultural output, so how do you grow and develop that?”

In Miami, it seems to have rode in on the wave of money, artists, “pop-up” galleries, and economic development that attended Art Basel Miami Beach and the unrelated satellite art fairs that arrived soon after, Hevia said.

“What I noticed in Miami is that once the art fair arrived, there was this palpable change in how we perceived the city and our identity began to shift—just a little bit—into that of an arts city. I wanted to know if Hong Kong was experiencing that same shift,” Hevia said.

The fair brought plenty of spillover business for galleries selling less-pricey works, along with a social scene that sometimes delivered art appreciation via libations and nightlife.

While people may initially associate art galleries with free drinks, “at the same time, they’re in an art gallery,” he said. “It’s sort of a backwards way of teaching people about art, but they still learn about art.”

Hevia is based at Hong Kong Baptist University’s Academy of Visual Arts, where an economic art historian on the faculty—Emma Watts, PhD—has been helping him place his work into the context of the global art market. He’s been seeking out the artists he’ll follow during the fair, hoping to represent the many faces of the city’s arts community.

And he may mix in some of his own experience of the city and its lively and welcoming expatriate population.

“In some ways, the city is built for ‘orphans,’” he said, using a colloquialism for expatriates living in the city without family. “My second week in town, I met someone who invited me to an ‘Orphan’ Christmas,’ so I had Christmas dinner with a group of people from all over the world, most of whom I’d never met.”

He’s still amazed and gratified that he discovered the Fulbright option at Fordham and got so much support in pursuing it.

“Fordham absolutely expanded my world, gave me opportunities that I was completely unaware were options, and really helped me clarify and understand the things that I am best at,” he said. “Fordham was instrumental in getting this, and this is fantastic.”

Florio, a 2015 grad who majored in business administration with a dual concentration in entrepreneurship and marketing, was among handful of college seniors and recent grads from across the country to appear on a special episode of ABC program, which aired on Oct. 2.

The episode featured hit show, Shark Tank’s, “Mr. Wonderful,” Kevin O’Leary, putting college seniors through a sales boot camp on the art of the sell, prepping them for the show’s second annual sales challenge. After the field was narrowed down to three, the newly minted sales force headed to New York City’s Union Square Park to see which of the final contestants learned the most, in a competitive sales experiment captured on hidden camera.

The contestants had to sell cupcakes out of a truck from a company in which O’Leary had invested on Shark Tank, Wicked Good Cupcakes. O’Leary and ABC/ESPN anchor Hannah Storm provided live direction and commentary, and, in the end, Florio was the victor.

Christine Janssen-Selvadurai, the director of the entrepreneurship program at the Gabelli School, said she was “so proud of Tommy Florio’s representation of Fordham.” Watch the segment of 20/20 here.

“You would have people handing you fliers (on the street) about church services, all-night prayer vigils, and all kinds of things having to do with religion,” said Casteline, Ph.D., assistant professor of communication and media studies. “Half the day Saturday is filled up with televised sermons. A little stand selling food would have a name like ‘23rd Psalm Snacks.’”

“Religion is very much a part of the public sphere. It’s a part of the common discourse through mass media,” she said. “Literally, you see it everywhere.”

Such practices offer one example of how global Christianity is being reshaped by people from the developing world who are actively using mass communication tools to build their churches in their home countries and abroad, said Casteline.

Casteline’s trip to Ghana was part of her dissertation research into media use by Ghanaian Pentecostals in diaspora—in particular, those in Aurora, Colorado. One pastor, for instance, used cable access television to film his weekly service and send it to stations around the country, complete with subtitles and his web address scrolling at the bottom of the screen.

He also ran a radio show and a toll-free prayer line that fielded calls from as far away as Toronto. His congregation, meanwhile, numbered only about 50.

“You don’t see a church of 50 members doing anything like that” in America, Casteline said. “Most small churches have maybe a website that might get updated … every blue moon, once a year, but for the most part, American churches are not very media savvy.”

She’s seen Ghanaian Pentecostals using a variety of media in America. Pastors she has interviewed reach out to her regularly via text message and voice mail. Young Pentecostals in the Bronx started a Pinterest page that reflects the “Afropolitan” experience of Africans who have lived in diaspora for years, she said. Others are promoting their message through Facebook pages, tweets, and online videos.

These and other practices are an outgrowth of the “heavily mediated environment” in Ghana, she said.

“Ghanaian Pentecostals in diaspora are replicating practices found in the homeland, and … they are also going beyond what’s done in the homeland in order to take advantage of resources found in North America (and) Europe,” Casteline said. “As these populations increase in North America and in Europe, and as they gain access to more and more resources … we will see a change in North American Christianity as a whole. That change is already being felt in Europe, in that more African Christians are going to church and more are participating in the Christian life than are the European natives,” she said.

One reason African Pentecostals are at the leading edge of this proselytizing is the example set by televangelists, mainly Pentecostal, who came to West Africa in the 1970s, Casteline said. African pastors adopted this Western model, turning to television, printed brochures, and eventually other types of media.

Casteline plans to further study those Ghanaian Pentecostal communities abroad that not only use media well but also show a strong international bent.

“A lot of times they’ll start the church in their living room with friends and family, and friends of friends,” she said, “Then they [create]these ties with other churches around the world.” Sometimes the new networks will play host to each other’s pastors, she said.

“The churches have this way of worshiping and way of practicing Christianity that is just very different from traditional Western ways,” she said. “Even a storefront church will be called something like ‘World Tabernacle’ or ‘International House of Prayer.’ And literally, it’s 50 people. It’s a completely different mindset.”

Over the summer she visited churches in London and the Netherlands and interviewed pastors. Next year she’ll go to Padua, Italy, where Pentecostals are already making their mark in the public sphere via billboards and public advertisements.

“It’s very interesting, because it’s in the heart of Catholicism,” she said.

Ironically, by forming their own churches Africans are carrying out a kind of “reverse” missionary activity in Western countries, she said—in part because they see Western Christianity as lax.

“The pastors tell me, ‘We want to reach the world, and I know God has brought us here because the West has lost its way,’” Casteline said. “‘Yes, the West brought us Christianity, but now we’re bringing it back to them.’”

That question is at the heart of Dr. Fran Blumberg’s newly-published Advertising to Children: New Directions, New Media (Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014), which was co-edited by Drs. Barrie Gunter (University of Leicester, U.K.), Mark Blades, and Caroline Oates (both University of Sheffield, U.K.).

“Vulnerable audiences, such as kids, may not be aware that they are being subjected to advertising,” said Blumberg, an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education. “[It’s now] another aspect of the child’s environment that they are increasingly exposed to which probably requires their understanding of the goal of marketers — that is, that they want you to buy their product and may make false claims or present unrealistic imagery associated with their product to make it desirable.”

Because of this increased exposure, especially to new “stealth techniques” that target youth, there is an urgent need to study how advertising affects development, Blumberg said. And yet, despite this growing need, there is a dearth of information about the impact of new-age advertising on kids.

“The goal of the text is to understand the factors that contribute to children’s understanding of advertising, and elucidate at which point in [their growth]that [they develop an]understanding of advertising messages,” she said.

The book covers an array of topics surrounding children and advertising, including how children are affected by advertising for food and alcohol products, whether children are developmentally capable of identifying messages as persuasive, and what parents and educators can do to teach kids to become more critical of advertisements.

The book also discusses the ramifications of “stealth advertising,” such as embedded commercial messages in television shows and new forms of media that influence children without their conscious awareness. An example of the latter is the practice of “advergaming,” or the use video games to promote products or services — for instance, a cereal company that makes a game involving collecting pieces of the cereal for points.

“The message [in the book]is that children and adolescents… may be best served through media literacy, which includes understanding the persuasive intent of advertising and advertisers,” Blumberg said.

Rachel A. Annunziato, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of clinical psychology, A&S,

“7 Ways to Nurture Your Geeky Kid,” The Stir, June 5

Tom Beaudoin, Ph.D.,
associate professor of practical theology, GRE,

“Anatomy of a ‘Deconversion’,” Eureka Street, June 10

Fran Blumberg, Ph.D.,
associate professor of counseling psychology, GSE,

“7 Ways to Nurture Your Geeky Kid,” The Stir, June 5

Leonard Cassuto, Ph.D.,
professor of English, A&S,

“Spotting a Bad Adviser—and How to Pick a Good One,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, July 21

James Cohen,
associate professor of law, LAW,

“Dewey Execs Likely Bound for Trial Despite Ace Legal Teams,” Law 360, July 14

Mark Conrad,
professor of legal and ethical studies, BUS,

“Student-Athletes to Get Paid? It Looks That Way,” NBC News, August 12

George Demacopoulos, Ph.D.,
professor of theology, A&S,

“Iraqi Christians Flee Homes Amid Militant Push,” ABC 13 via Associated Press, June 16

Deborah W. Denno, Ph.D.,
Arthur A. McGivney Professor of Law, LAW,

“Lethal Injection: A Pharmacist Balances Profit and Karma,” TheStar.com via Global Post, August 11

Karen J. Greenberg, Ph.D.,
director of the Center on National Security, LAW,

“Who Gets to See the CIA Torture Report,” WNYC, August 7

Christina Greer, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of political science, A&S,

“‘Are You, Like, African-AMERICAN or AFRICAN-American?’,” NPR, August 9

Constantine Katsoris,
Wilkinson Professor of Law, LAW,

“Critics Charge Termination Forms Ripe for Abuse,” Bank Investment Consultant, August 11

Beth Knobel, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of communication and media studies, A&S,

“Russian Perspective on Airline Shootdown,” CBS, July 23

Sergios-Orestis Kolokotronis, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of biology, A&S,

“Elephants Can Outsniff Rats and Dogs,” Live Science, July 22

Paul Levinson, Ph.D.,
professor of communication and media studies, A&S,

“Live Chat: The Life and Legacy of Robin Williams,” ABC News, August 12

Mark Naison, Ph.D.,
professor of African and African American Studies and history, and principal investigator of the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), A&S,

“Panel Discussion on the Black Arts Movement,” CSPAN, July 12

Aristotle Papanikolaou, Ph.D.,
Archbishop Demetrios Chair of Theology and Culture, professor of theology, and co-founding director of the Orthodox Christian Studies Center, A&S,

“Russian Orthodoxy,” Sightings, July 21

Christiana Peppard, Ph.D.,
assistant professor of theology and science, A&S,

“The Pope and the Sin of Environmental Degradation,” NPR, July 18

Candace Rondeaux,
fellow at the Center on National Security, LAW,

“Taliban Deftly Offer Message in Video of Freed U.S. Soldier,” The New York Times, June 4

Susan Scafidi,
academic director of the Fashion Law Institute, LAW,

“Hello Katey? A Push Into Cat Fashion From Kate Spade,” Bloomberg Businessweek, August 12

Olivier Sylvain, Ph.D.,
associate professor of law, LAW,

“Great Privacy Essay: Fourth Amendment Doctrine in the Era of Total Surveillance,” Network World, July 30

Terrence W. Tilley, Ph.D.,
Avery Cardinal Dulles, S.J., Professor of Catholic Theology and chair of the department, A&S,

“Theologians Critique Cardinal Dolan’s Defense of Capitalism,” National Catholic Reporter, June 6

Alexander Van Tulleken, M.D.,
Helen Hamlyn Senior Fellow, IIHA,

“Fordham’s Alexander Van Tulleken on CNN’s New Day: Chikungunya Virus,” CNN, July 29

Ian Weinstein,
Associate dean for the Clinical and Experiential Programs and professor of law, LAW,

“How Far Have We Come a Year After Stop and Frisk Ruling?” WNYC, August 12

Most professors didn’t choose academia to become media stars. But personality-driven new media is here to stay, and many academics are nervously sailing into uncharted waters.

As a professor of communication and media management in the Schools of Business, John Carey, Ph.D., FCRH ’68, isn’t concerned for the profession, as he has studied similar changes for decades.

Whether it’s politicians dealing with their televised images in the 1960s, or television networks dealing with a multitude of platform choices in the 2010s, Carey’s fascination with media theory has adapted with the times, with a particular focus on behavior as it relates to new technology. Much material is analyzed in When Media Are New: Understanding the Dynamics of New Media Adoption and Use (University of Michigan, 2010), which he coauthored with Martin C.J. Elton.

After studying at Fordham with renowned media theorist Marshall McLuhan, Carey went to the University of Pennsylvania’s Annenberg School for Communication, where he wrote his dissertation on political candidates’ behavior on and off camera.

He interviewed the media staff from both the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns about the nation’s first televised presidential debate in 1960. He learned that neither Kennedy nor Nixon wanted to be seen by the press walking into the makeup room before the debate. They feared an emasculating headline like: “Kennedy/Nixon wears makeup.”

But Kennedy’s media camp understood the effects of harsh TV lights. They purchased makeup at a local drugstore and applied it to their candidate in private.

“Kennedy was no better than Nixon in understanding television,” said Carey, who suggested Kennedy owed his successful appearance to his handlers. “Politicians, then as now, are not as savvy with media as people think.”

Carey went on to study the convergence of broadcast television and telecommunications via an interactive television system that linked five senior citizen centers by two-way cable. What was initially funded as a way for the seniors to share information on social security and nutrition, via a local cable channel, became a space for seniors to meet and have fun.

One particularly popular segment featured Mary, a former recluse at the center who presented weekly bargains found at local supermarkets. Her cable segment was simple: she clipped sales news from the newspaper and then read it to the cable audience. In her own low-tech way, Mary had “gone viral” and become a local celebrity, said Carey.

“The low production quality of the show actually was very human, and that’s what made it so popular,” he said. “This was social media before it was called social media.”

Most recently, Carey completed a study for NBC that focused on the use of second and third screens by television viewers during the 2012 London Olympics. He found that, counter to what some network executives had feared, smartphones and tablets did not detract from TV viewership; rather, they whetted viewers’ appetites to watch the events later on television.

Whether they be politicians, doctors, senior citizens, or consumers, people altered their behavior alongside of evolving technology, Carey’s research has shown. Clearly, changes are coming to academia too.

“There is no question that online classes will become more prevalent,” said Carey. Whether the future of academia will focus on personality-driven lectures for Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) or simply enhanced interaction on Blackboard, is fodder for debate.

Carey doubts professors will need to develop on-screen personalities, but their presentations will matter more, as will their ability to interact online. While he does not recommend an all-out plunge into the Twittersphere, he does believe that faculty should embrace the changes at least incrementally.

He suggested media newcomers begin by holding more group discussions on Blackboard. He also urged incorporating Skype and YouTube into lectures.

“That guest lecturer who you’d like to invite up to the Bronx but are reluctant because you might be imposing on their schedule, they can now can do it from their office via Skype and it’ll take no more than 20-30 minutes of their time,” he said. “You’re the expert, but now you can bring in other experts.”

Academics who believe the academy’s on-campus enrollment will drop with online delivery platforms may also be mistaken, Carey said, just as NBC executives were mistaken about TV viewership and new platforms.

“There are definite advantages to face-to-face. I don’t think universities or classrooms are going to go away,” he said. “But the mix is going to change. I don’t want to assign a number—whether it will be 10, 20, or 40 percent—but there will be a higher percentage of courses offered online.”