Students in the Ph.D. program study a wide range of topics related to media and communications. Some of the doctoral dissertations that have been successfully defended in recent years are described here.
Second-Order Network Development in India: Mobile Phone Users and the Indian Premier League
Colin Agur, 2014
This dissertation examines second order network formation on India's large and rapidly expanding mobile phone networks. It does so by examining a particular second order network - the Indian Premier League (IPL) mobile network. Using a case study approach and a mix of ethnographic methods and textual analysis, I explore the history that preceded the IPL mobile network, the intentions of its creators, the processes by which users participate on the network, and the outcomes of network expansion and evolution. I deploy the space of flows concept of Manuel Castells, to draw attention to continuity and change in Indian communication networks, and to highlight the new spatial dynamics at work in mass mobile telephony. This dissertation emphasizes the transformative nature of second order networks and identifies the ways that masses of users can disrupt and alter communication networks, especially in contexts of informal economics and power structures.
The City as Data Machine: Local Governance in the Age of Big Data
Burcu Baykurt, 2019
This dissertation is a study of the social dimensions and implications of the smart city, a new kind of urbanism that augments the city’s existing infrastructures with sensors, wireless communication, and software algorithms to generate unprecedented reams of real-time data. It investigates how smartness reshapes civic ties, and transforms the ways of seeing and governing urban centers long-plagued by racial and economic divides. How do the uneven adoption of smart technologies and data-driven practices affect the relationship between citizens and local government? What mediates the understanding and experience of urban inequalities in a data-driven city? In what ways does data-driven local governance address or exacerbate pervasive divides? The dissertation addresses these questions through three years of ethnographic fieldwork in Kansas City, where residents and public officials have partnered with Google and Cisco to test a gigabit internet service and a smart city program respectively.
I show that the foray of tech companies into cities not only changes how urban problems are identified, but also reproduces civic divides. Young, middle-class, white residents embrace the smart city with the goal of turning the city’s problems into an economic opportunity, while already-vulnerable residents are reluctant to adopt what they perceive as surveillance technologies. This divide widens when data-driven practices of the smart city compel public officials and entrepreneurial residents to feign deliberate ignorance against longstanding issues and familiar solutions, or explore spurious connections between different datasets due to their assumptions about how creative breakthroughs surface in the smart city. These enthusiasts hope to discover connections they did not know existed, but their practices perpetuate existing stereotypes and miss underlying patterns in urban inequalities.
By teasing out the intertwined relationships among tech giants, federal/local governments, local entrepreneurial groups, civic tech organizations, and nonprofits, this research demonstrates how the interests and cultural techniques of the contemporary tech industry seep into age-old practices of classification, record keeping, and commensuration in governance. I find that while these new modes of knowledge production in local government restructure the ways public officials and various publics see the city, seeing like a city also shapes the possibilities and limits of governing by data.
On the Incubation of Radical Ideas: A Communications History
Gal Beckerman, 2021
Published in 2022 by Crown as The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas
This dissertation examines the forms of media that are most productive for the formation of social and political movements at their earliest stages. The problem it confronts is a contemporary one: the dominant forms of social media on the internet do not allow for the slow and focused deliberation this is demanded for radical ideas that are attempting to undermine a status quo to begin to take root. Movements rise and fall very quickly, following the metabolism of sites like Facebook and Twitter, without having the long-term impact they seek.
By first looking historically at a series of pre-digital case studies – starting with letters before the scientific revolution and moving through petitions, small newspapers, samizdat and all the way to zines in the 1990s – aspects of more effective incubatory media will present themselves. Each chapter in this first half of the book zeroes in on the affordances of these particular forms of communication that made them so useful.
After having looked at pre-digital communication, the dissertation will then turn to contemporary case studies and the challenges posed by social media for activists of all stripes looking to incubate their ideas on these platforms. Starting with the Arab Spring in Egypt, which offers a cautionary tale of a movement overtaken by the social media metabolism and moving through the 2010s toward Black Lives Matter, there is a progression of awareness about what tools the internet can provide for communication and which prove most productive for offering sustainability to a movement. The conclusion is one gained from the juxtaposition of the historical and the contemporary, which builds to an awareness of what affordances are required for a radical idea to avoid burning out.
Photography Distinguishes Itself: Law and the Emerging Profession of Photography in the 19th Century United States
The Cultural Contradictions of Cryptography: A History of Secret Codes in Modern America
Charles Berret, 2018
This dissertation examines the origins of political and scientific commitments that currently frame cryptography, the study of secret codes, arguing that these commitments took shape over the course of the twentieth century. Looking back to the nineteenth century, cryptography was rarely practiced systematically, let alone scientifically, nor was it the contentious political subject it has become in the digital age. Beginning with the rise of computational cryptography in the first half of the twentieth century, this history identifies a quarter-century gap beginning in the late 1940s, when cryptography research was classified and tightly controlled in the US. Observing the reemergence of open research in cryptography in the early 1970s, a course of events that was directly opposed by many members of the US intelligence community, a wave of political scandals unrelated to cryptography during the Nixon years also made the secrecy surrounding cryptography appear untenable, weakening the official capacity to enforce this classification. Today, the subject of cryptography remains highly political and adversarial, with many proponents gripped by the conviction that widespread access to strong cryptography is necessary for a free society in the digital age, while opponents contend that strong cryptography in fact presents a danger to society and the rule of law.’
I argue that cryptography would not have become invested with these deep political commitments if it had not been suppressed in research and the media during the postwar years. The greater the force exerted to dissuade writers and scientists from studying cryptography, the more the subject became wrapped in an aura of civil disobedience and public need. These positive political investments in cryptography have since become widely accepted among many civil libertarians, transparency activists, journalists, and computer scientists who treat cryptography as an essential instrument for maintaining a free and open society in the digital age. Likewise, even as opponents of widespread access to strong cryptography have conceded considerable ground in recent decades, their opposition is grounded in many of the same principles that defined their stance during cryptography’s public reemergence in the 1970s. Studying this critical historical moment reveals not only the origins of cryptography’s current politics, but also the political origins of modern cryptography.
Patterns in the Chaos: News and Nationalism in Afghanistan, America and Pakistan During Wartime, 2010-2012
Published in 2019 by Oxford University Press as Your Country, Our War: The Press and Diplomacy in Afghanistan
Katherine Ann Brown, 2013
This dissertation examines the United States's elite news media's hegemony in a global media landscape, and how it can come to stand for the entire American nation in the imagination of outsiders. In this transnational, instantaneous digital media arena, what is created for an American audience can fairly easily be accessed, interpreted and relayed to another. How, then, is U.S. international news, which is traditionally ethnocentric and security-focused, absorbed in Afghanistan and Pakistan, two countries where the United States has acute foreign policy interests?
This study draws from two bodies of scholarship that are analogous, yet rarely linked together. The first is on hegemony and the U.S. news media's relationship with American society and the government. This includes scholarship on indexing and cascading; agenda building and agenda setting; framing; and reporting during conflict. The second is on the American news media's relationship with the world, and nationalism as a fixed phenomenon in international news. This includes examining the different kinds of press systems that exist globally, and how they interact with each other. Afghanistan and Pakistan's media systems have expanded dramatically since being freed in 2002 and they struggle daily with making sense of the volatility that comes with the U.S.-led Afghanistan war. Through 64 qualitative, in-depth interviews with Afghan, American and Pakistani journalists, this study explores the sociology of news inside Afghanistan and Pakistan and how the American news narrative is received there.
There is a widespread, long-standing perception in Afghanistan and Pakistan that American journalists stain the reputation of their nations as failed states. Just as the U.S. exercises global hegemony in a material sense, the U.S. media is powerful in shaping how American and international publics see the world. Yet, while American foreign correspondents are U.S.-centric in their reportage on the Afghan, American and Pakistani entanglement, so too are Afghan journalists Afghan-centric and Pakistani journalists Pakistani-centric. Nationalism is how journalists organize chaos and complexity. While their news stories can represent an entire nation, they are more likely to harden national identities than to broker understanding between nations.
The Parrot and the Cannon: Journalism, Literature and Politics in the Formation of Latin American Identities
Published in 2019 by the University of Pittsburgh Press as Latin American Adventures in Literary Journalism
Pablo Calvi, 2011
The Parrot and the Cannon. Journalism, Literature and Politics in the Formation of Latin American Identities explores the emergence of literary journalism in Latin America as a central aspect in the formation of national identities. Focusing on five periods in Latin American history from the post-colonial times until the 1960s, it follows the evolution of this narrative genre in parallel with the consolidation of professional journalism, the modern Latin American mass media and the formation of nation states. In the process, this dissertation also studies literary journalism as a genre, as a professional practice, and most importantly as a political instrument. By exploring the connections between journalism, literature and politics, this dissertation also illustrates the difference between the notions of factuality, reality and journalistic truth as conceived in Latin America and the United States, while describing the origins of Latin American militant journalism as a social-historical formation.
How Digital Television is Colonizing Indonesia
Diani Citra, 2019
Indonesian broadcasters are less than enthused about switching from an analog signal to digital terrestrial television (DTT). The nation's telecommunications industry appears mostly indifferent, consumers are reluctant to spend money on the necessary new equipment, and electronics producers are pessimistic about the new market. Despite the fact that few stakeholders are in support of this transition, the Indonesian government is moving forward on DTT. Why could this be?
Indonesia is the largest archipelago in the world, with more than 16,000 islands and a diverse geography that complicates the implementation of new broadcast and telecommunications infrastructure. By taking it as a case study, this project explains why, despite broad national ambivalence, high costs, and uncertain benefits, a developing country might still find itself accepting an externally imposed standard.
Primary research questions include: What incentivizes nations to accept new technological standards when domestic enthusiasm is sparse? How do foreign interests and a fear of isolation from an "inevitable" global technofuture reshape civic priorities? Which segments of society are legitimized in this process, and which are ignored?
The processes at play are nuanced. Building on the scholarship of Grewal (2008), this dissertation contends that Indonesia's decision to transition to DTT is understood as neither entirely voluntary nor entirely coerced. Rather, it is the result of a complex web of power plays and rhetorical frames. International bodies seek to impose a universal broadcast standard even in countries where it is counterproductive as certain domestic corporations attempt to influence the process in order to maintain and consolidate their dominance. At the same time, prevailing narratives of "necessity" and "inevitability" obscure policy choices better suited to the Indonesian situation, and hide the reality that DTT is not only a technological issue, but a social one as well.
Greenlining: Segregation and Environmental Policies in Miami from the New Deal to the Climate Crisis
Rosalind Donald, 2020
What do people talk about when they talk about climate change? This dissertation sets out to answer this question by focusing on local understandings of climate change and the policy priorities that result from them in Miami. Through a historical study that spans from the 1920s to today and 88 hourlong interviews, I demonstrate that climate change is a historically contingent, contested, and localized concept defined by power relationships. Through a historical investigation of the narratives that connect environmental policies with segregation and efforts to displace Miami’s Black residents over more than 80 years, I show how historic understandings of race and the environment inform debates about what climate change means and what to do about it today. This investigation shows how Miami’s current response to climate change has been shaped by its history as a colonial city built on the maximization of land value and exclusionary planning and policies.
I find that dominant understandings of climate change in Miami have been rooted in concern for the effects of sea level rise on property prices, directing policy money toward shoreline areas while continuing to encourage a building boom that is accelerating gentrification. This set of responses is not haphazard. As my research shows, it represents a continuation of local and international patterns of exploitation. In recent years, however, a coalition of activist groups mounted an unprecedented campaign to force the city to include social and environmental justice concerns in its policy agenda. This coalition mobilized Miami’s history of environmentally-justified urban removal as a key counternarrative to policies that have historically ignored the problems of low-income areas, especially in Miami’s historically Black neighborhoods, to demand a coordinated response to environmental and social vulnerability.
Playing with Virtual Reality: Early Adopters of Commercial Immersive Technology
Maxwell Foxman, 2018
This dissertation examines early adopters of mass-marketed Virtual Reality (VR), as well as other immersive technologies, and the playful processes by which they incorporate the devices into their lives within New York City. Starting in 2016, relatively inexpensive head-mounted displays (HMDs) began to be manufactured and distributed by leaders in the game and information technology industries. However, even before these releases, developers and content creators were testing the devices through “development kits.” These de facto early adopters, who are distinctly commercially-oriented, acted as a launching point for the dissertation to scrutinize how, why and in what ways digital technologies spread to the wider public.
Taking a multimethod approach that combines semi-structured interviews, two years of participant observation, media discourse analysis and autoethnography, the dissertation details a moment in the diffusion of an innovation and how publicity, social forces and industry influence adoption. This includes studying the media ecosystem which promotes and sustains VR, the role of New York City in framing opportunities and barriers for new users, and a description of meetups as important communities where devotees congregate.
With Game Studies as a backdrop for analysis, the dissertation posits that the blurry relationship between labor and play held by most enthusiasts sustains the process of VR adoption. Their “playbor” colors not only the rhetoric and the focus of meetups, but also the activities, designs, and, most importantly, the financial and personal expenditures they put forth. Ultimately, play shapes the system of production by which adopters of commercial VR are introduced to the technology and, eventually, weave it into their lives. Situating play at the center of this system highlights that the assimilation of digital media is in part an embodied and irrational experience. It also suggests new models by which future innovations will spread to the public.
The Digital Public Square: Understanding the Dynamics of Data, Platforms, and News
Thomas Glaisyer, 2019
This dissertation examines the nature of the American digital public square in the 2010’s, a place where people learn about and come together to discuss matters of public concern. The newly digital public square is a key component of any functional democracy in the twenty-first century. The dissertation seeks to shed light, not only on the capacities of today’s news media institutions to produce and efficaciously distribute news and information and support a capacity for discussion and deliberation that provides a “public intelligence” on matters of concern, but also on the newly enlarged role of the public in new rituals of digestion of such news.
The work draws upon multiple systems-focused analyses of the public square, interviews, and analyses of news production, the economics and dynamics facing those who both produce and distribute news, and the broader literature about and studies of the public square.
Despite the manifest uncertainty regarding how journalism will be supported and the success of a politics where rhetoric is often untethered to the truth, a temptation still exists to see the changes to the public square in a piecemeal fashion and to assume the institutions, business models, and practices of the future will be minor modifications on or variations of the past. Much scholarship concludes that the patterns of decay and growth in this area will eventually generate equilibria in terms of press freedom, news production, news distribution, and engagement that are familiar, no less efficacious than, and only marginally distinct from those of the latter half of the twentieth century.
In contrast, this dissertation argues that the combination of forces acting upon the digital public square and its emergent dynamics in the late 2010s means it is already functioning in a qualitatively different manner than the largely analogue public square of the past and, as structured, it is increasingly failing to serve individuals, groups, communities, the public writ large, and most importantly our democratic processes. This argument is built on insights from my nearly a decade of work in the media reform community—specifically, from three systems analyses I developed leading the Public Square Program at the Democracy Fund of the dynamics surrounding civic engagement and the production of local news, the dynamics of audience attention, and public trust and press freedom. After making the case for the difference that already exists, the dissertation argues that, without engagement of a wide range of actors (civic, political, and commercial) in support of much-needed changes to institutions, along with policies that will support a renewal of civic media and a focus on new practices more appropriate for the rituals of the digitally and data-infused world we live in, it is entirely possible the public square will fail to adequately support democratic ends. The dissertation concludes with recommendations to avoid this outcome.
Deciding What's True: Fact-Checking Journalism and the New Ecology of News
The Point of Destruction: Sabotage, Speech, and Progressive-Era Politics
Rebecca Hawthorne Lossin
Strike waves in the late nineteenth century United States caused widespread property destruction, but strike leaders did not suggest threats to employer property as a comprehensive strategy until the I.W.W. adopted a deliberate program of sabotage. Contrary to historical consensus, sabotage was an intellectually coherent and politically generative response to progressive, technocratic dreams of frictionless social cooperation that would have major consequences for the labor movement. This dissertation treats sabotage as a significant contribution to the intellectual debates that were generated by labor conflict and rapid industrialization and examines its role in shaping federal labor policy. It contends that the suppression of sabotage staked out the limits of acceptable speech and the American political imagination.
Under the Eye of Providence: Surveilling Religious Expression in the United States.
Published in 2018 by Routledge as Government Surveillance of Religious Expression: Mormons, Quakers, and Muslims in the United States
Kathryn A. Montalbano, 2016
This dissertation analyzes how government agencies contemplated the religious expression of Mormons of the Territory of Utah in the 1870s and 1880s, Quakers of the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC) from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, and Muslims of Brooklyn, New York, from 2002 to 2013. Nineteenth-century federal marshals and judges in the Territory of Utah, mid-twentieth century FBI agents throughout the United States, and New York Police Department officers in post-September 11 New York were prompted to monitor each religious community by their concerns about polygamy, communism, and terrorism, respectively, which shaped the distinctive environments in which the government agencies analyzed the religious communities. The government agencies did not just observe the communities, but they probed precisely what constituted religion itself.
Lenin Hiding Behind an Empty Signifier: The Making of a Left-Wing Populist Party in the Digital Age
Lluis de Nadal Alsina, 2021
This study takes a close look at the making of the Spanish left-wing populist party Podemos, paying special attention to the populist project devised by its original group of founders to capitalize on the political opportunities created by the 2008 economic crisis and the Indignados movement of 2011. Part I examines how Podemos’ founders used digital technology to connect with followers and exchange support and influence with them. It shows that online platforms constitute a precious tool in the hands of populist leaders who seek to mobilize plebiscitarian support for their authority and goals while creating a semblance of democratic participation. Part II delves deep into the biographical histories of the main founders of Podemos to investigate the beliefs and desires guiding their populist project. Based on a combination of qualitative research methods, including archival research, expert interviews, participant observation, and textual analysis, this study challenges the common notion that the founders of Podemos subscribe to the populist “ideology.” Instead, it demonstrates that they used populism strategically in order to take advantage of what Podemos’ leader Pablo Iglesias called a “Leninist moment” – an exceptional situation in which the seizure of power (through electoral means) becomes possible for a Communist party. It also shows that Ernesto Laclau’s theory of populism exerted a strong influence on some party founders. This was particularly the case for Íñigo Errejón, the main proponent of populism in Podemos, who used Laclau’s theory as a guide to thought and action and turned his book On Populist Reason into the first “sacred text” of the populist tradition.
Building Trust in the News: U.S. and German Journalists Respond to Political Polarization
Efrat Nechushtai, 2020
This dissertation explores how journalists in the United States and Germany have been addressing declining levels of trust and attacks on their credibility. I comparatively examine how journalists interpret the trust crisis, and consequently, the strategies they have developed for addressing it. This study is based on multi-site ethnography: I interviewed 87 journalists, conducted observations in 15 local and national newsrooms, and examined metajournalism from the United States and Germany. Findings show that U.S. and German journalists interpret declining trust and anti-media sentiments differently: U.S. journalists believe they stem from information gaps and lacking media literacy, while German journalists believe they reflect a sense of alienation. And so, in their efforts to gain credibility, U.S. journalists focus on increasing transparency and showcasing their professionalism, while German journalists focus on increasing reciprocity and showing that they listen to criticism from outside the profession. As this dissertation shows, both U.S. and German news media are thoroughly professionalized, but their different relationships to their audiences and communities shape different perceptions on — and strategies for — trust building.
Broadcasting Faith: Regulating Radio from the New Era to the American Century
David Noell, 2020
Between 1927 and 1987, American broadcast regulators undertook a project for radio. The project pursued multiple goals: to allocate wavelengths, to hold stations accountable to the public interest, to restrict prejudicial content, to protect domestic wavelengths from international signal interference, to sustain these policies over time with the advent of new media, and to evangelize the American way of life abroad. The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and the State Department, as the primary institutions responsible for developing this American system of radio, addressed several challenges. Domestically, the FCC resolved the free speech questions of the time by resisting government ownership of radio stations, but regulating the airwaves in the “public interest, convenience, and necessity.” Internationally, the State Department set up radio stations to broadcast around the world. Religion played a primary role in the aims of this project — domestically, that every listener would receive uplifting faith content and internationally, that the world would know of American religiosity.
Public utility law precedent was influential on the 1927 Federal Radio Act and its implementation. The Commission treated radio as if it were a public utility. In this way, it ruled that the listener took precedence over the broadcaster — specifically that all listeners had a right to a well-rounded programming lineup, including religious content. As a result, the Commission favored variety stations over single-interest outlets in a series of rulings that hurt religious stations. The Commission preferred that listeners receive religious content from outlets offering a variety of programming. The Commission also worked to protect listeners’ religious sensibilities from attack, most notably during the surge of anti-Semitic populism in the 1930s.
The FCC and the State Department worked together to protect American wavelength sovereignty in the 1930s and 1940s. The primary source of interference came from Mexican border stations. These signals created reception problems for American listeners of domestic stations; these particular stations were ones that the Commission had favored for laudable content, including religious programming. The border outlets also featured content the Commission deemed illicit, such as astrology and quack medicine.
In the early Cold War, American international broadcasters fought the Soviet Union in a war of ideas. These broadcasters included the State Department-run Voice of America and the semi-public Radio Free Europe. In this ideological battle against Communism, America used religion to defend a liberal conception of a just society. Freedom of worship and God-given human rights were key components. Domestically, the FCC continued to regulate licensees in the public interest in the early Cold War period. For example, the Commission implemented the 1949 Fairness Doctrine, which mandated that stations not only cover critical issues, but present these issues with balance.
By the late 1980s, the American system was collapsing. In 1987, as a sign of this breakdown, the Fairness Doctrine was repealed. This system had given broadcasting a liberal role in a century of totalitarian regimes — to defend free speech and uplift American society. Religion was a primary component of the system and served to encourage Americans to become more civil and ethically grounded citizens.
If Time Permits: The Politics and Aesthetics of the Creative Writing Manual
Therese O’Neill, 2020
Creative writing manuals, often called craft books within the literary establishment, represent a genre with a significant place in print culture. These books not only offer advice on how to construct interesting, emotional, and experience-mimicking narrative prose but also suggest that creative writing is a practice available broadly to those who give themselves the permission to write. However, despite early creative writing manuals’ democratic promise to level the playing fields of the intellectual and artistic economy by facilitating individuality in the writerly voice, popular creative writing manuals have failed to substantively engage the politics implicit in craft and have discouraged individuality in the case of writers of progressive political orientation. This dissertation looks at the ideological underpinnings of these guidebooks and the development of the genre in the United States, which is situated in an extended tradition that has wed iconoclasm and a sometimes exacting paradigm of self-making.
In the Funhouse Mirror: How News Subjects Respond to Their Media Reflections
Published in 2018 by Columbia University Press as Becoming the News: How Ordinary People Respond to the Media Spotlight
Ruth Palmer, 2013
Based on in-depth interviews with eighty-three people who were named in newspapers in the New York City-area and a southwestern city, this dissertation explores the phenomenon of being featured, quoted, or mentioned in a news story, from the subject's point of view. Discussions of news subjects usually begin when the journalist comes on the scene and end with subjects' assessments of accuracy in the articles in which they appear. But I find that news subjects perceive the phenomenon of "making the news" as a broader saga that begins with their involvement in an event or issue, often only later deemed newsworthy by journalists, and extends to the repercussions of the coverage in their lives, including feedback they receive from others and effects on their digital reputations. Subjects interpret their news coverage, including its accuracy, in light of the trigger events that brought them to journalists' attention in the first place and the coverage's ensuing effects.
Individual chapters focus on subjects' reasons for wanting or not wanting to speak to reporters; their interactions with reporters; their reactions to the news content in which they were named; and repercussions of news appearances. I conclude that the assumption that news subjects are all victims of the press is both reductive and, often, from the subject's own point of view, inaccurate. While common wisdom suggests that people who seek news attention do so for petty or poorly considered reasons, I find that interviewees often did consider the pros and cons of speaking to the press before agreeing to do so. For most participants the attraction could be summarized as the opportunity to address or display themselves before a large audience, which they saw as rare and elusive, even in today's web 2.0 world.
At the same time, most subjects understood, at least in theory, the main risks involved: that they were giving up control over their stories to reporters, but would nonetheless bear the repercussions of having had their names in the news. But the majority concluded—even after seeing the, often imperfect, resulting articles—that the benefits outweighed the risks. Subjects were often pleased with their news appearances even despite inaccuracies in the content because they found that, unless they were portrayed extremely negatively, appearing in the news conferred status, which was often not just psychologically but materially beneficial.
Those subjects who were left dissatisfied with their experiences appearing in the news only rarely felt misled or outright betrayed by journalists. It was far more common that subjects felt journalists were unacceptably aggressive or exploitative. Other subjects traced their discontent not to their interactions with journalists but to the content of the resulting news stories, whether because inaccuracies derailed their objectives for appearing in the news in the first place, or because the content had stigmatizing effects. This is the ugly obverse of status conferral: subjects who were portrayed as behavioral deviants—criminals for instance—found that not only was their status not enhanced by their news appearances, their social standing and professional prospects were badly damaged. I conclude that both the status and stigma conferred by the news media are magnified by the digital publication, circulation, and searchability of news articles, which can now continue to have profound effects on subjects' lives far into the future.
Virtual Foreign Bureaus and the New Ecology of International News
Soomin Seo, 2016
This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of the digitally native production of foreign and international news in Anglo-American media. The focus is on the news startups I am calling
“virtual foreign bureaus” (VFBs), independent, professional and niche news outlets that carry out
much of the reporting remotely. These news startups have increased in numbers and importance with the shutdowns of foreign bureaus in traditional news organizations. Using newsroom visits,
interviews, and content analysis, I compare and contrast journalistic routines and norms of VFBs
with those of traditional foreign correspondence.
As organizations, VFBs are more networked
and less hierarchal than traditional foreign bureaus. I find a different use of sources, with open-
source Web databases, crowdsourced material, and social network sources taking precedence
over traditional “human” sources, because the former are more accessible to VFBs and also seen
as more verifiable than the latter. Despite these differences, I note an increasing convergence of
the norms of VFBs and traditional foreign correspondence, working toward the creation of a
hybrid professional identity. As organizations, VFBs are entrepreneurial, seeking to combine
multiple funding streams to achieve financial independence and sustainability. They rely heavily
on foundation grants and partnerships, but such relationships rarely constitute a sustainable
business model. I argue that any meaningful solution to the financial woes of foreign reporting
should include policy interventions and an infusion of public funds. This dissertation investigates the phenomenon of the digitally native production of foreign and international news in Anglo-American media. The focus is on the news startups I am calling “virtual foreign bureaus” (VFBs), independent, professional and niche news outlets that carry out much of the reporting remotely. These news startups have increased in numbers and importance with the shutdowns of foreign bureaus in traditional news organizations. Using newsroom visits, interviews, and content analysis, I compare and contrast journalistic routines and norms of VFBs with those of traditional foreign correspondence. As organizations, VFBs are more networked and less hierarchal than traditional foreign bureaus. I find a different use of sources, with open-source Web databases, crowdsourced material, and social network sources taking precedence over traditional “human” sources, because the former are more accessible to VFBs and also seen as more verifiable than the latter. Despite these differences, I note an increasing convergence of the norms of VFBs and traditional foreign correspondence, working toward the creation of a hybrid professional identity. As organizations, VFBs are entrepreneurial, seeking to combine multiple funding streams to achieve financial independence and sustainability. They rely heavily on foundation grants and partnerships, but such relationships rarely constitute a sustainable business model. I argue that any meaningful solution to the financial woes of foreign reporting should include policy interventions and an infusion of public funds.
Brain Waves, A Cultural History: Oscillations of Neuroscience, Technology, Telepathy and Transcendence
Caitlin Shure, 2018
This project proceeds from a narrow question: What, if anything, is a brain wave? Beguiling in its simplicity, this question prompts a cultural-historical investigation that spans over 150 years of science, technology, and society. Proposed in 1869, the original theory of brain waves cites etheric undulations to explain reports of apparent thought transference. Though most modern thinkers no longer believe in outright telepathy, I argue that dreams of thought transmission and other mental miracles subtly persist—not in obscure and occult circles, but at the forefront of technoscience.
A hybrid of science and fiction, brain waves represent an ideal subject through which to explore the ways in which technical language shrouds spiritual dreams. Today, the phrase “brain waves” often function as shorthand for electrical changes in the brain, particularly in the context of technologies that purport to “read” some aspect of mental function, or to transmit neural data to a digital device. While such technologies appear uniquely modern, the history of brain waves reveals that they are merely the millennial incarnation of a much older hope—a hope for transmission and transcendence via the brain’s emanations.
Invisible Ads
Ava Sirrah, 2022
In the American press, news publishers and advertisers have enjoyed a close relationship well before the birth of our nation. When Benjamin Franklin bought The Pennsylvania Gazette in 1729, he became the owner of a communications platform and printed both information and advertisements. Today, news publishers and tech companies like Facebook and Twitter do the same—they publish and distribute news and commercial messages. Organizations like The New York Times and Washington Post produce more than news stories. News outlets have departments dedicated to creating and placing marketing messages beneath our gaze as we turn the physical page of a paper or scroll, click, and tap our screens throughout the day. This dissertation examines how advertisers aim to invisibly inject their messages into and alongside news stories by investigating the relationship between the business and newsroom side of various news publications. The research methodology is qualitative and draws upon over 125 interviews with people who work at news organizations, ad agencies, media and tech companies. This dissertation has a simple premise: compare the words of CEOs, executive leadership, and mission statements with the actions of news organizations to identify where discrepancies exist between the core tenets of journalism and its practice.
Global Iconic Events: How News Stories Travel Through Time, Space and Media
Published by Oxford University Press in 2016 as Stories Without Borders: The Berlin Wall and the Making of a Global Iconic Event
Julia Sonnevend, 2013
This dissertation examines how a news event may become a global social myth. In order to track this voyage from the particular to the universal, I developed a theoretical concept of "global iconic events." I define global iconic events as news events that are covered extensively and remembered ritually by international media. I suggest five narrative aspects to consider in connection with them: (1) their narrative prerequisites; (2) their elevated and interpretative story; (3) their condensation into a simple phrase, a short narrative, and a recognizable visual scene; (4) their competing stories; and (5) their ability to travel across multiple media platforms and changing social and political contexts.
I perform textual analysis on media representations from four distinct national contexts (West German, East German, Hungarian, and American) to examine two case studies. With the help of the central case study, the "fall of the Berlin Wall," I exhibit the successful social construction of a global iconic event. The second case study, the 1956 Hungarian revolution, illuminates some factors, in particular local counter-narration, incoherent and contextual international representation, forgetting, and marginality of the event's location, as instrumental in the failure of an event to become a global iconic event.
While the East German border opening on November 9, 1989 was unintentional, confusing, and messy, its global message is not about "luck" or "accident" in history. Incarnated as a global iconic event, the fall of the Berlin Wall has come to communicate the momentary power that the otherwise hopelessly vulnerable individual can have. The event's elevated and interpretative story, condensed into a simple phrase, a short narrative and a recognizable visual scene, provides global civil society with a contemporary social myth. Through recycling, reenactment, possession, memorialization and other embodiments, the event's simple and universal story continues to travel successfully through time, space, and media, inspiring people in various parts of the world.
In conclusion, I emphasize that when we examine the social construction of global iconic events, the stakes are high. I hope that this piece of academic writing will help us understand how powerful stories of events might shape the lives of those generations who come after us all over the world. Because in the end, after common currencies, military alliances, and international courts have failed, stories may well be all we have left to bring hope and unity.
Grounding Drone Warfare: Imperial Entanglements, Technopolitics, and Ghostly States in the Tribal Areas, Pakistan
Madiha Tahir, 2020
How does a view from the ground reshape the analytics of US drone warfare? Through an ethnographic exploration of drone warfare from one of its sites of destruction — Pakistan and its borderlands known as the Tribal Areas—this dissertation troubles the notion of war-at-a-distance. Far from being at a remove, the war for many Pakistanis is in their neighborhoods, their fields, and their homes. Especially for ethnic Pashtuns who live amidst the drone war in the borderlands, attack drones are one element among a violent network — from Pakistani military helicopters to ground operations to armed guerrilla movements — that create radical disruptions. It is this dialectic between U.S. attacks and Pakistani state machinations that both produces ‘drone warfare’ and informs the analytics of Pashtuns and Pakistanis more generally vis-à-vis drone bombardment. By interrogating the relationship between drone attacks and the pluriverse of differentially distributed violence in the border zone, this dissertation traces the multi-scalar entanglements of the US imperial formation and the Pakistani state through which drone warfare and the ‘war on terror’ take shape in the Tribal Areas. Through an ethnographically situated account of the material, embodied geographies and conditions of the war zone, I show how these entanglements shape the geopolitics of the Pakistani state and position ethnic Pashtuns as multiply inflected: tribal-ized marginals, ethnic-ized citizens, and racialized transnational-ized targets of the ‘war on terror.’ In so doing, Grounding Drone Warfare shows that the remoteness of drone warfare is less an empirical reality than an authorizing self-narration of an imperial formation that prefers to frame itself as temporary and limited.
The Polysemia of Recognition: Facial Recognition in Algorithmic Management
Elizabeth Watkins, 2021
Algorithmic management systems organize many different kinds of work across domains, and have increasingly come under academic scrutiny. Under labels including gig work, piecemeal work, and platform labor, these systems have been richly theorized under disciplines including human-computer interaction, sociology, communications, economics, and labor law. When it comes to the relationships between such systems and their workers, current theory frames these interactions on a continuum between organizational control and worker autonomy. This has laid the groundwork for other ways of examining micro-level practices of workers under algorithmic management. As an alternative to the binary of control and autonomy, this dissertation takes its cue from feminist scholars in Science, Technology, and Society (STS) studies. Drawing on frameworks from articulation, repair, and mutual shaping, I examine workers’ interpretations and interactions, to ask how new subjectivities around identity and community emerge from these entanglements. To shed empirical light on these processes, this dissertation employs a mixed-methods research design examining the introduction of facial recognition into the sociotechnical systems of algorithmic management. Data include 22 in-person interviews with workers in New York City and Toronto, a survey of 100 workers in the United States who have been subjected to facial recognition, and analysis of over 2800 comments gathered from an online workers’ forum posted over the course of four years. Facial recognition, like algorithmic management, suffers from a lack of empirical, on-the-ground insights into how workers communicate, negotiate, and strategize around and through them. Interviews with workers reveals that facial recognition evokes polysemia, i.e. a number of distinct, yet interrelated interpretations. I find that for some workers, facial recognition means safety and security. To others it means violation of privacy and accusations of fraud. Some are impressed by the “science-fiction”-like capabilities of the system: “it’s like living in the future.” Others are wary, and science fiction becomes a vehicle to encapsulate their fears: “I’m in the [movie] The Minority Report.” For some the technology is hyper-powerful: “It feels like I’m always being watched,” yet others decry, “it’s an obvious façade.”