- CI-M: Learn how communication in the field works
- That's why the class has been structured this way, reading books and other types of communication
Meta discussion on readings
- Are they leaving breadcrumbs?
- Bullet points, exec summary
- Pretty repetitive: "syllabus" aka short lesson plans (e.g. "Redpilling the normies")
- Lots of people in CMS produce curricula alongside research
- Syllabus generation as knowledge production and service
- Who's your imagined audience and is the work successfully landing for that audience?
- How are these reports indexed? Do audiences know the right search terms?
- Lots of additional labor, not just sending to a journal and getting published
Will Partin
- Academic trajectory.. very unique but also that creative mix that many emerging scholars are doing
Trajectory
- Fully enmeshed in serious humanities as an undergrad; art history, music composition
- Like school, like art history -> art history program at UNC, best scholarship
- Social media manager for esports team, as brands were getting their feet wet on Twitter
- "Is it okay to meme somebody else?" back then was a question, now an expectation
- Disillusioned with art history PhD, struggled to talk about technology in a way that felt relevant. Always felt like a background thing, conservative
- Addressed frustration by getting more involved in esports, putting on tournaments
- Did more public-facing writing, enjoyed other people engaging with the ideas and replying
- Helps you think through your ideas in a meaningful way
- Communications felt like the field most ready for games, infrastructures, tech<>culture<>power, etc and had taken a cool class
- From the beginning, thinking of dissertation as a follow-up to TL's book, know I wanted to write about esports
- Opportunity to talk about other industries where large tech companies are the basis, mediating exchanges (Uber, Airbnb) — let's think about that for esports
- Defended dissertation prospectus, writing it in theory; applied for Disinformation Action Lab
- Half applied, interventionist; other half is research questions, interviews
- Census justice, equitable data infra and data creation process
Disinformation
First critique:
-
Census possible harms
- People intimidated into not participating
- Loss of trust in data
- Found that disinfo is not the main threat
- E.g. journalistic articles "here's how the pandemic might screw over the census", bureau is now on the backfoot and has to defend
- E.g. Trump admin trying to add citizenship question
- What are the actual communication threats and how do we think about them more holistically?
- "Sociotechnical security" but don't want it to sound too militarized
Second critique:
- Makes normative judgments feel like natural ones, with the boxes dis/mis/malinformation
- Imposes worldviews
- It's not just about truth, it's about power too
Packaging
- Mis/disinfo has been picked up like crazy
- "Like the war on terror.. protracted, inconclusive, and always a war on symptoms"
- Not possible to make terms that avoid this; language is messy
Approahc to work
Co-authoring with Marwick
- Realized in Oakland airport that Q bakers are not trying to create doubt, but rather create certainty
- Allowed him to pull on his training and apply it to this new context
- Pulled them into 2 papers: Partin as first author on STS-y one (Q clock), Lewis as first author on media studies one
Something else
- "Fascist tailgate vibes rather than insurrection vibes"
- The frame of calling something fringe, Q, extremist delegitimizes, but a lot of what happened (at the insurrection?) was not that stuff, but rather standard right-wing beliefs
- Something more foundational we should reckon with
-
Accessing C-suite folks easier than accessing middle managers and below, because they (former) don't feel accountable, don't feel like they need to check with PR team, I'll do what I want
- Especially C-suite folks who had left, gone to different industry
- Sometimes they don't understand difference between researcher and journalist, especially when someone does both
Platform capitalism
- 90-page book
- Unfortunate because makes it seems like there was capitalism and now there's platform capitalism, as if they're fundamentally different
- Limited number of tech firms have created infrastructures through which people access their daily resources
- Take part, or risk exclusion
- Monopolistic because rely on network effects
- Built around collecting and using data, key to value accumulation
- *This is familiar to me thanks to my bit of research on platforms, yay!