SNU ICR hosts 13th Renowned International Scholar Special Lecture. This session will be held via Zoom. When participating to the lecture, please turn on your cameras. Date: Feburary 17th (Fri) 9:30-11:00 A.M. (KST) Zoom Link: https://snu-ac-kr.zoom.us/j/96592047773 Lecutrer: Tai-Quan Peng (Michigan State University) Title: Public agenda dynamics: From zero-sum competition theory to an ecological framework Content: Agenda-setting has been extensively investigated over the past 50 years as a formal theory of media effects. Of the various research questions about agenda setting, the competitive nature of the interissue relationship on public agenda is particularly intriguing but has not been settled. In the past decade, we have conducted a series of empirical studies (Xu et al., 2013; Sun et al., 2014; Peng et al., 2017; Peng & Zhu, 2022) to understand public agenda dynamics in both online and offline settings. I will first present two studies based on large-scale social media data: one re-tested the issues competition theory and the other proposed and tested an issues coopetition model. Then I will share our latest effort that proposed an ecological perspective to explicate interissue relationships on public agenda. With the Gallup Most Important Problem (MIP) polls in the United States from 1958 to 2020, we empirically show that the issue ecosystem of the American public is essentially competitive and that the balance of competition and cooperation has remained unchanged over time. About the Lecturer: Dr. Tai-Quan Peng (PhD in Communication, City University of Hong Kong) is currently an associate professor in the Department of Communication, Michigan State University. He previously worked at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore (2013-2016), Macau University of Science and Technology in Macau (2009-2013), and City University of Hong Kong (2008-2009). His research interests include computational social science, health communication, political communication, and mobile analytics. He has published more than 50 peer-reviewed articles, many of which appeared in top journals in the fields of communication, computer science, information science, and public health. Dr. Peng is currently the associate editor of the Journal of Communication and serves on the editorial board of several other scholarly journals, including Communication Methods and Measures, Computational Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, and Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media.