I’m an Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, City University of New York. I write and teach about the transformation of media and advertising systems in the digital age with an emphasis on economics, politics, and internet technologies. My major project at the moment is a book manuscript about the rise of surveillance advertising on the web. Read more about research here. I teach courses covering subjects such as digital media and culture, political economy, public policy, media industries, intellectual property, and communications technologies.
I’m happy to talk with journalists about digital advertising and other issues related to internet business and politics.
This site is a likely a bit out of date. Some (fairly) recent activities:
- Op-ed on CNN about Congress, the FCC, and internet privacy
- Article in New Media & Society about transparency, data brokers, and commodification of personal information.
- Co-authored essay in N+1 about social media, advertising, and political manipulation
- Quoted in NPR Music about private equity’s role in iHeartMedia’s bankruptcy
- Interviewed by Morning Consult on Facebook content moderation challenges
- Presentation at Data & Society in NYC about the history and future of internet advertising.
- Interviewed by NPR’s Marketplace about Google’s acquisition of the music streaming service Songza.
- Short essay for Culture Digitally about the politics of data brokerage
We’ve recently launched a master’s program at Queens that focuses on media and social change. If you’re interested in working with me or my stellar colleagues, please drop a line.
Previously I taught in the New Media Studies program at DePaul University and before that I was a Graduate College Fellow and a researcher with the Center for People and Infrastructures at the University of Illinois. In 2011-2012, I was a fellow at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities and in 2009, a participant in the Annenberg-Oxford Summer Institute on Global Media Policy. I did my PhD at the Institute for Communications Research at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
Just a note about any ads you might see: WordPress, the host of this site, now runs ads on hosted sites unless users upgrade.
Another developing interest of mine is information visualization. Info viz can be great a teaching and research tool, blending aesthetics with the presentation and interpretation of data. Here is a word cloud visualization of my manuscript’s first chapter, weighted by frequency. It provides a quick impression of my points of emphasis. Scroll down for a few more infographics.
This is a pseudo-cartogram illustrating the “realms of social media.” (Image by David Parkins for The Economist.)
And an infographic about income distribution. (Image by Mother Jones. Data from Emmanuel Saez.)
And then there is this, from the National Telecommunications and Information Administration. Some infographics are more useful than others. (I still like this one though.)
