David Atkin

Professor

IMJR Representative

Department of Communication

Education

Ph.D., Michigan State University, 1988

About

David Atkin has done grant-supported work on the adoption, use and regulation of digital media. He received the field’s Krieghbaum Under-40 award, granted annually to a junior scholar for distinction in research. Atkin also won University Distinguished Research as well as Teaching Awards prior to his arrival here. He’s ranked among the 80 most prolific scholars in the history of our discipline, the 25 most prolific since 1995, and the two most prolific scholars in telecom as well as communication policy. This corpus ranges from digital health “infodemics” to media policy, with a particular focus on audience uses and effects. His scholarly contributions include the need to re-interrogate legacy perspectives in light of media fragmentation–which blurs distinctions between mass and interpersonal (i.e., mass-personal) communication–to develop and validate the theoretical constructs involving the Functional Equivalence of various media use modalities for news, entertainment and health information. A key thrust of that work addresses online sharing behavior regarding news and political information, including forces that damage trust in journalism and democracy

Books include Communication Technology and Society, The Televiewing Audience (1st and 2nd editions), Communication Technology and Social Change, and Audience Genre Expectations in the Age of Digital Media. Author of over 180 scholarly articles, Atkin was recently identified among the top 1% most-cited scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences, according to Research.Com (2022-2024).

Courses Taught

• COMM 2310W: Media Literacy and Criticism
• COMM 4630: Communication Technology and Social Change
• COMM 6895: Topics in Applied Communication Research: Digital Political Communication (graduate level)

Research Affiliations

UConn Communication Technology, Emotion, and Culture Lab