In the mid-1970s, before you could buy a computer at the store and no one yet called them “personal,” tech enthusiasts in the U.S. gathered around newsletters and magazines to imagine a more computerized future. For the past two years, my research assistant Rahul Zalkikar and I have been systematically exploring the first five years […]
In my new book Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear [MIT Press | Amazon] I critically examine what press freedom means today. I argue that, as news production, circulation, and interpretation are increasingly distributed across a new and unstable set of humans and nonhumans—from journalists and algorithms to platform designers […]
Yesterday was a surprising, difficult day for a lot of us. For many of us based in the U.S., amidst whatever political feelings we were having, it spurred us to think hard about our own work and research agendas, and how they should shift to face new political realities. So some of us spent the day […]
During the 2016 U.S. presidential election, a number of commentators in the media and scholars of political communication and journalism embraced the notion that the ascent of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee was, at least in significant part, the product of social media and technological change more broadly. Some pointed to the importance of […]
I wanted to share a new essay, “#Trendingistrending: When Algorithms Become Culture” that I’ve just completed for a forthcoming Routledge anthology called Algorithmic Cultures: Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies, edited by Robert Seyfert and Jonathan Roberge. My aim is to focus on the various “trending algorithms” that populate social media platforms, consider what they do as a set, and then […]