Donald McGannon Communication Research Center

23/04/2021

As the semester winds down, we want to alert you to one more special McGannon Center event. On May 7 at 2pm, we will host Phil Napoli of the Sanford School of Public Policy at Duke University. He will discuss his recent writing, including his excellent and prescient book Social Media and the Public Interest: Media Regulation in the Disinformation Age (Columbia 2019).

Professor Napoli is a highly regarded expert on media and communications policy in democracy. But, for us at the McGannon Center, he is especially notable because he was a transformational Director of the Center before he left for Rutgers in 2013 on his way to Duke. We are excited to see him again - even if it is over Zoom.

After Professor Napoli presents, Professors John Carey and Bozena Mierzejewska of the Gabelli School of Business at Fordham will join the conversation. Both have, in different ways, taken up the questions and problems that are at the heart of Professor Napoli's book. Current Center Director Olivier Sylvain will moderate the discussion. The DeWitt Wallace Center for Media & Democracy will cosponsor the event.

Please register in advance here: https://fordham.zoom.us/meeting/register/tZEqdu-rqTgsGdRvWFJMS_Esi-DCpxSWrIlU. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the meeting.

We look forward to seeing you in a couple weeks.

16/02/2021

Join us on March 2nd, 2021 to discuss : A Conversation with the winners of the 2020 McGannon Book Prize.

Click the link for more information and registration for this exciting Zoom event.

: A Conversation with the winners of the 2020 McGannon Book Prize

14/01/2021

We take great pleasure in announcing here that the McGannon Center awards its annual book prize this year to the authors of (MIT Press): Sarah J. Jackson, Moya Bailey, and Brooke Foucault Welles.

Click here to learn more about their compelling work on the lived social impacts of communications technologies in ways that this award means to recognize and celebrate.

Book Award for The McGannon Center

18/12/2020

What role did misinformation play in the 2020 Presidential election? Along with several other researchers, Director of the McGannon Center Olivier Sylvain shared his thoughts on the issue for a new Yale ISP series with Knight Foundation. The full set of essays are here:

A well-functioning democracy depends on healthy and trusted public and private institutions; strong public institutions; an economy that provides broad-based opportunity and prosperity; tolerance and respect for one another and our differences; and a vibrant civic life.

02/09/2020

How can we understand online speech and the rules that surround it? On Thursday, join Knight Foundation’s Sam Gill for a conversation with Oliver Sylvain, Fordham University law professor. Watch live on Knight’s page, or register to join the conversation via Zoom at kf.org/visionrsvp.

What do today’s college students think about free expression on campus, and how do they understand the rights guaranteed by the First Amendment? How has COVID-19 changed the way college students speak out? We're talking with Dr. Wayne Frederick, president of Howard University, and Suzanne Nossel, ...

29/06/2020

We are very excited to announce that the McGannon Center has been chosen as a Knight Foundation grant awardee to study the rules, norms, and governance of the internet and digital platforms.

To read more about this project with the Knight Foundation please click here:

JUNE 29, 2020 (MIAMI) — The John S. and James L. Knight Foundation today announced new investments to support research…

11/06/2020

Please join us for an exciting event on July 9, 2020 from 12:30 - 2:30 p.m EST via Zoom Webinar:

Seeing Tech Work: Conversations with the authors of Ghost Work, the winner of the 2019 McGannon Book Prize

Last January, the McGannon Center announced that Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri had won our book prize for a manuscript published in 2019. As we explained then, Ghost Work offers an important nuance to common perceptions about the ways in which the most celebrated AI-driven consumer applications and products today (think Uber, Amazon's Echo, or Facebook's News Feed) significantly depend on underserved on-demand workers from around the world. Gray and Suri draw on extensive interviews and data analytics to show that this large, invisible, and mostly unsupported workforce is essential to such things as geolocation, online payment systems, and content moderation. This human labor, they illustrate, is essential to fixing glitches and gaps, but remains obscured by claims from Silicon Valley and their boosters about full automation and the power of AI.

The July 9 event will have three parts. First, Gary and Suri will talk about the key findings of the book, as well as more contemporary questions concerning, for example, Facebook employees' recent pushback against CEO Mark Zuckerberg's statements about the company's laissez-faire approach to misinformation and work stoppage efforts at Amazon across the country in light of concerns about COVID-19. In the second part, Sarah Roberts (UCLA) and Lilly Irani (UC San Diego), leading scholars of tech work, will set out their reactions to Ghost Work's main findings. In the third part of the July 9 event, we will pull away from Ghost Work's specific focus on tech work and turn to Kimani Paul-Emile (Fordham) and Sam Roberts (Columbia) who will draw on their research to discuss healthcare workers, another underserved workforce, and the problems they endure. They will focus especially on the ways in which people of color are, on the one hand, disproportionately represented among this workforce and, on the other hand, the likeliest in the general population to suffer from COVID-19.

To register for this event, please click here:

Welcome! You are invited to join a webinar: Seeing Tech Work: Conversations with the authors of Ghost Work, the winner of the 2019 McGannon Book Prize. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email about joining the webinar.

07/01/2020

Friends,

It gives us great pleasure to announce that Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley from Building a New Global Underclass (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) by Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri is the winner of the McGannon Center book prize for a manuscript published in 2019.

It is common wisdom that artificial intelligence (AI) powers popular networked applications like ridesharing, home assistants, and social media. Gray and Suri's account in Ghost Work offers an important nuance to this perception by describing the people and global industrial processes that bring these high tech services to market. They show that most of the celebrated AI-driven consumer products today (think Uber, Amazon's Echo, or Facebook's News Feed) significantly depend on underserved on-demand workers from around the world to function as expected. Drawing on extensive interviews and data analytics, Ghost Work demonstrates that technologies like geolocation, online payment systems, and content moderation do not work but for the labor of this large, invisible, and mostly unsupported workforce. Human labor, Gray and Suri illustrate, is essential to fixing glitches and gaps in every new networked application. This work, however, remains obscured by claims from Silicon Valley and their boosters about full automation and the power of AI.

The McGannon Center has awarded the book prize to wonderful manuscripts in the past, including Yochai Benkler's Wealth of Networks, Daniel Solove's The Future of Reputation, James Boyle's The Public Domain, Tim Wu's The Master Switch, Siva Vaidhyanathan's The Googlization of Everything, Christina Dunbar-Hester's Low Power to the People, and Simone Browne's Dark Matters.

Last year, we awarded the book prize to Virginia Eubanks for writing Automating Inequality, an elegant and incisive account of the toll that automated decisionmaking systems have on the most vulnerable recipients of government services. This year, with this award to Ghost Work, we turn our attention to the unsung human laborers that make the newest technologies work as marketed. Ghost Work is the latest in a recent line of research, including Anatomy of an AI System by Kate Crawford & Vladan Joler and Behind the Screen by Sarah Roberts, that chronicles the political economy underlying today's most popular networked services. The McGannon Center promotes research that uncovers the lived social impacts of communications technologies. We are honored to associate ourselves with Ghost Work through this year's award. And we are grateful to Gray and Suri for writing it.

We will convene an event later this year, in the fall, to celebrate Gray and Suri. In the meantime, I hope you find the time to check out the excellent Ghost Work. https://ghostwork.info/

20/12/2019

On November 20th, the McGannon Center welcomed Julie Cohen, Professor of Law and Technology at Georgetown University, to discuss her latest book Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism. Click the link below to read the Fordham Law News coverage of the event.

https://news.law.fordham.edu/blog/2019/12/19/law-in-the-age-of-the-information-economy/ @ Fordham Law

14/11/2019

Fordham University's McGannon Center is thrilled to host Georgetown Law's Julie Cohen on November 20 at 4:00pm. We present this session in conjunction with the Leitner Center and Catherine Powell's Law School seminar on Civil Rights and Civil Liberties in a Digital Age. Cohen will present the findings and arguments of her recently published book, Between Truth and Power: The Legal Constructions of Informational Capitalism. In it, Cohen relies on an array of perspectives from law, political economy, communications studies, and science & technology studies to explore the ways in which "law and information technology are remaking each other." After her presentation, acclaimed scholars Kate Crawford (AI Now) and Solon Barocas (Cornell) will join Cohen and Center Director Olivier Sylvain in a panel discussion of the book.

For registration information please visit: law.fordham.edu/betweentruthandpower @ Fordham University School of Law Corporate Law Center

09/10/2019

Please join us on October 18th as we welcome Johan Farkas, a PhD Fellow in Media and Communication Studies at Malmö University in Sweden, as a part of our Brown Bag Lunch series. The event will take place at the Fordham Law School room 7-119 from 12:30-1:45pm.
Moderated by Mathias Klang, Farkas will present a talk entitled “Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: A Critical Examination,” based on Farkas’ new book, Post-Truth, Fake News and Democracy: Mapping the Politics of Falsehood. Please visit our website, linked in our bio, for more information about this event and more.