I’m honored to report that SIGDOC has chosen to give me a Career Advancement Research Grant! Their financial assistance is providing storage space for a tool to help meta-analyze social media research across disciplines. The goal is to help technical communication see where its social media research is participating in larger interdisciplinary conversations and see […]
On Journalism, Social Media, and COVID-19
A colleague of mine pointed me toward a Ben Thompson’s Stratechery piece entitled “An Interview with Zeynep Tufekci About Masks, Media, and Information Ecology.” The interview is long, fascinating, and behind a paywall. However, the part of it that struck my interest was a single quote that doesn’t even need to be in context to […]
On The Types of Blogging
One of bloggers’ favorite things to do is to discuss whether blogging is dead. Venkatesh Rao was the latest person to catch my attention with a variant of the “blogging is dead” idea, saying “If blogging is a cat with nine lives, this is probably the eighth death.” C’est la vie. These claims often include […]
Crowdsource TPC
At CPTSC 2019, I discussed ways forward for teachers of social media in technical communication. There are few resources for tech comm social media teachers, and I argued that a centralized place to share materials would be a boon to teachers. Enter Crowdsource TPC, an initiative built by Chris Lam at the University of North […]
Book Review: You Look Like a Thing and I Love You
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 […]