I’m happy to hear all this. Trump really does overshadow a lot of the conversation about social media/Twitter, doesn’t he? That seems like an effect of his political communication, which works in his favor, obliterating other contexts of Twitter out of conversation. But as scholars and thinkers we have to read social media with more nuance,…[Read more]

I’m glad to hear that 🙂 Twitter fiction (or social media fiction more broadly) is pretty nice, but I’m glad you enjoyed discovering it. If creative uses of social media appeal to you, then I would think that that is a promising start for thinking through how these forms can be used for the betterment of public conversation in these domains.

Thanks for this, Leigh. We did also talk about a lot of the caveats; in some way, social media is as good at suppressing marginalized voices as it is at allowing sidelined folks new platforms…

Hi Sophia, Happy to hear that you found the content of the class helpful and at times surprising 🙂 Social media definitely is not an equalizer, as you point out, and this makes it all the more interesting that it bills itself as such.
I also wanted to note that “algorithmic censorship” is not a term that has existed out there, at least, not to…[Read more]

Twitter fiction inhabits a curious place–at once perhaps harmless, and yet, if we think about the importance novels still have, perhaps not so insignificant after all? This question certainly merits further analysis.

I’m intrigued by the idea of cultural lags, and I wonder whether this concept could not usefully be applied to other social…[Read more]

I’d actually never heard of Parler! But such “alternative” sites abound, so the responsibility is far from being merely that of Twitter, Facebook, and co. But the existence of the alternatives suggests the need for comprehensive internet reform.

One of the tricky things about these types of misinformation is that though they may be simple…[Read more]

It wasn’t that long ago actually that Google seemed like the nifty little challenger to Apple! That’s kind of mindblowing to think about.

Well, what does the article say about whether conservatives/liberals might be more inclined to support conspiracy theories? I find it quite interesting, given that security tends to be a more conservatively…[Read more]

Or, how can we think about misinformation as a security threat without falling into this one-sided depiction advanced by Gerstell?

Hi Essex, that’s an astute observation! So, Gerstell is actually a security adviser and as such, it’s his profession to be alarmed about the US specifically. Thus, no surprise that he presents a picture in which America is the one to be vulnerable to interventions that are depicted as primarily foreign. Yet you are very right in pointing out that,…[Read more]

That’s a great point, and one could accept the pandemic as real and yet still think that @nymag was trying to emotionally manipulate people into a grieving mood. In other words: presentation always matters. There is no content without form, the form is always part and parcel of what is being said.

Thanks for this. How do you identify particular media content as being “across the aisle”? Sometimes, this type of information can be quite tricky to come by…

And you raise a good point on immediacy–the ability of social media to communicate instantaneously. Is that a blessing or a curse for journalism, do you think?

But to take a less anthropological view: what the myths are that a society tells about itself, or what the stories are whose structures recur frequently in a particular society tell us A LOT about the inner psychological life of that society, as well as its ideologies, norms, values, and expectations. It is interesting to ask, for example, what…[Read more]

I’ll be happy to discuss them. I personally don’t really think that we can easily assert any particular story as universal, but there is some merit to analyzing certain patterns as repeating across cultures. And there are some that have been shown to recur through time and space. Some of these are very basic, for example the figure of the…[Read more]

So when you search for a hashtag or name, what are the results that come up typically? The player’s handle? News coverage about the player? Or fans geeking out about him? These are very different “genres” of texts, so it does matter how we try to differentiate between them.

The question of what a “raw” photo might be is really tricky: like you point out, what would the analogy in text be? What is “raw” writing?

Every choice of word has particular consequences in terms of how a particular event in the world is depicted. Same with images: there is no “objective”, “pure”, or “original” image, since even to the naked…[Read more]

Yes, it’s really interesting that social media seems to sort of automatically lead to a kind of “business-ification” of social life: everything is immediately a product/brand/image to be sold.

You’re also spot on to note that social media CREATES place: Amsterdam (and other tourist spots) become actively different places than they are in the…[Read more]

It is then impossible to talk about privacy even in this supposedly private medium.: social media, then, are fundamentally constitutive of certain publics.