Recent Publications

In Media and Communication: Consumer reviews on platforms like Amazon are summarized into star ratings, used to weight search results, and consulted by consumers to guide purchase decisions. They are emblematic of the interactive digital environment that has purportedly transferred power from marketers to ‘regular people,’ and yet they represent the infiltration of promotional concerns into online information, as has occurred in search and social media content. Consumers’ ratings and reviews do promotional work for brands—not just for products but the platforms that host reviews—that money can’t always buy. Gains in power by consumers are quickly met with new strategies of control by companies who depend on reviews for reputational capital. Focusing on ecommerce giant Amazon, this article examines the complexities of online reviews, where individual efforts to provide product feedback and help others make choices become transformed into an information commodity and promotional vehicle. It acknowledges the ambiguous nature of reviews due to the rise of industries and business practices that influence or fake reviews as a promotional strategy. In response are yet other business practices and platform policies aiming to provide better information to consumers, protect the image of platforms that host reviews, and punish ‘bad actors’ in competitive markets. The complexity in the production, regulation, and manipulation of product ratings and reviews illustrates how the high stakes of attention in digital spaces create fertile ground for disinformation, which only emphasizes to users that they inhabit a ‘post-truth’ reality online.

In Surveillance & Society: This essay argues that Amazon, the leading e-commerce platform in many parts of the world, uses surveillance not just as a key tool in the platform logic of its growing constellation of businesses but also increasingly as a service to its consumers. In contrast to prevailing assumptions that platforms will obscure the surveillant aspects of their businesses and that users will resist the intrusive nature of corporate surveillance, Amazon’s business practices point to the rapid normalization, and even embrace, of surveillant logics by consumers. Given the importance of consumer data to its operations, Amazon increasingly designs services whose purpose is, at least in part, to collect more data about consumers. The zenith of Amazon’s surveillance capabilities of its customers is no doubt its family of Echo devices enabled by the artificial intelligence interactive-voice service Alexa, which connects to the cloud run by Amazon, itself, through Amazon Web Services. Alexa is similar to competing digital voice assistants like Apple’s Siri and Google’s Assistant, but with more cultural visibility, worldwide market penetration, and greater integration with a host of Internet-of-Things devices produced by a variety of manufacturers. Amazon seeks to make Alexa an indispensable service to consumers, one that sweetens the granular forms of surveillance in more private spaces and situations that it now has the capability to gather, relative to the company’s more established forms of surveillance. While a typical association with surveillance might be the alienation and disempowerment of social control, I suggest that Amazon’s practices of consumer surveillance cultivate a sense of intimacy, borne of being seen between consumer and brand. In other words, I advocate for recognizing the subjectification of contemporary practices of platform surveillance, in addition to its structural elements.

In Media and Communication, with Joshua A. Braun and John D. Coakley:

This study examines the international activist movement known as Sleeping Giants, a social-media “campaign to make bigotry and sexism less profitable” (Sleeping Giants, n.d.). The campaign originated in the US with an anonymous Twitter account that enlisted followers in encouraging brands to pull their online advertising from Breitbart News. The campaign achieved dramatic success and rapidly spread to regions outside the US, with other anonymously run and loosely allied chapters emerging in 15 different nations (as well as a regional chapter for the EU). Many of these were initially created to take on Breitbart advertisers in their home countries, but in a number of cases they subsequently turned their attention to disrupting financial support for other far-right news media in—or impacting—their home countries. Based on interviews with leaders of eight Sleeping Giants chapters, as well as the related UK-based Stop Funding Hate campaign, this study examines the Sleeping Giants campaign with respect to its continuity with media activism of previous eras, while also seeking to understand its potential as one of the first high-profile activist campaigns to grapple with the impacts of programmatic advertising on the news ecosystem. In particular, we consider how the campaign’s interventions speak to the larger debate around the normative relationship between advertising and the performance of the news ecosystem.

In International Journal of Communication: This article considers recent media texts from four Western countries that invite audiences to watch someone die. When dying people resist the default of social invisibility by participating in documentary media, they challenge hegemonic attitudes about dying and physical fallibility, even as they introduce this aspect of life into the logics of media visibility and self-disclosure. I focus on their invitation to witness and the faith in the possibilities of media visibility they express by agreeing to die on camera, bearing in mind the power relations among dying people, media professionals, and audiences within which this invitation occurs. The participants in these texts articulate a desire to deprivatize the deathbed in order to help other dying people and their caregivers. Their motivation speaks to the idea that seeing death may puncture the neoliberal fiction of the autonomous, invulnerable self.