You Look Like a Thing and I Love You: How Artificial Intelligence Works and Why It’s Making the World a Weirder Place by Janelle Shane, author of AI Weirdness blog. Talking to experts about tech (really, talking to experts about a lot of things) is an exercise in readjusting expectations about what the tech/thing/field can […]
On Twitter Bots and the Presence of Disinformation
On the latest episode of Winning Slowly, I made a statement that Chris took exception to but didn’t have time to mention in the podcast. So he wrote a blog post on it, which I excerpt here: Early on in the episode, I noted that people’s feeling of decline is itself a kind of actual decline, and Stephen disagreed: […]
Published at New Media and Society!
I’m thrilled to report that a collaboration between Anya Hommadova Lu and I is Online First at New Media and Society. “Work–game balance: Work interference, social capital, and tactical play in a mobile massively multiplayer online real-time strategy game” is based on data that Anya collected in a 19-month virtual ethnography of the game Lords […]
Conferences
I presented at two conferences this month! I attended CPTSC in West Chester, Pennsylvania and the ABC International conference in Detroit, Michigan. At CPTSC, I spoke on “Teaching students to communicate as technical communicators in the interdisciplinary space of social media: Ways forward in interdisciplinary education.” In this talk, I developed a thought experiment about […]
Interviewed!
I was honored when one of my former students asked me to participate in an interview about my involvement in civic life. I talked for much longer than the five minutes allowed (but of course). You can see the edited-down version here: I’d like to note that fantastic Christian rock band Bleach is a co-star […]
Revising and Resubmitting
I’ve spend most of this summer revising and resubmitting three different articles, so I don’t have a lot to report on the research front (yet). I also am about to send out a fourth article into the ether (of which I will probably also be doing revisions and resubmissions). In the spirit of a revise-and-resubmit […]
Collaborating on unfinished research through presentation questions
A few weeks ago, I returned from the Second Symposium on Applied Rhetoric. I had the honor of being on the planning committee for the Symposium, so I had the distinct pleasure of loving every minute of this thing I’d helped create and also slightly worrying every minute that something was going to go wrong. […]
The Positives of Social Platform Research for Social Platforms
I’ve signed a letter circulated by the Knight First Amendment Institute calling on Facebook to establish a Safe Harbor for research on the social media platform. (I am sure the signature will show up on the page soon.) As a researcher who has a published article about Facebook use on my CV, this is an […]
I’ve joined a board!
My friend and collaborator Chris Krycho is beginning work on a massive note-taking/referencing managing/word-processing/document formatting tool aimed at making things easier for writers of academic research, and he’s keeping people updated via email. (It’s temporarily called rewrite.) The goal is to replace the hodgepodge collection of research tools that each academic uses with a single piece of […]
About Town
I was honored to have three speaking requests in March. I opened the month speaking to the Surge Network on “The Blessings and Curses of Social Media”. I was honored to present to pastors with suggestions on how to approach unhealthy and healthy social media use in their work with parishioners. The talk was recorded; […]