With the arrival of television, voters began to care not only about political candidates' stances on issues, but also about character, as demonstrated by Kennedy's and Nixon's 1960 debate. In the current qualitative study, we investigate how the technologically savvy Millennials form impressions of candidates when they obtain information through social or nonsocial media. We found that Millennials tend to stumble upon political information rather than seek it out, regardless of social media influence. We also found that social (versus nonsocial) media use did increase citizen expectations of candidates. Whereas both social and nonsocial groups appreciated candidate stance on issues and candidate character, those who were exposed to candidates via social media also sought candidate-to-community connection. Interestingly, the generation that has notoriously less physical community interaction, possibly due to social media, tends to emphasize community involvement when evaluating candidates through social media. This finding supports the view that with new media, public value is defined largely by interactions between senior politicians and the public.

People increasingly turn to social media to augment their broadcast viewing experience with a parallel stream of information and opinion. Known as "social watching," the practice of integrating broadcast media and social media has become routine for many citizens tracking live events and breaking news. In a controlled laboratory study, we examined how interactivity and exposure to social media opinions influence a sense of community, attitudes and discussion elaboration. The results suggest that receiving positive feedback to social media posts instills a psychological sense of community in the poster, and this feeling of connectedness is related to greater elaboration of the civic social media discussion. Secondly, the study found support for conformity effects. The third contribution of this work is a better understanding of how the valence of others' social media posts and the user's posting activity influences cognitive elaboration of social media discussions during social watching in civic contexts.

The study of how humans establish mutual understanding is intertwined with the design of artificial conversation systems [1,2,3,4,5]. The focus of this paper is perspectivetaking in and artificial imitation of communication. Regardless of whether an engineer takes psychological theory into consideration when building an agent, an underlying philosophy of perspective-taking is evident when observing the agent's performance. Furthermore, theories of perspectivetaking offer designers an advantage in two ways: 1) These agents could better imitate human behavior. 2) These agents could use common tendencies in human behavior as an advantage in communicating with humans.

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