For hard-pressed profs and agitated grads: videos and podcasts from the Social Media Collective, suitable for online classes

Many of our colleagues in academia have had to very quickly migrate their teaching online, in response to changes made by their universities in addressing the coronavirus. This can be so much work – our hats off to everyone who has done so gracefully and ingeniously. An online course can be a lot of hours to fill, a lot of Zoom meetings, so many unmuted mics. There’s nothing better than a video to provide that welcome relief of a guest lecture. But finding them can eat up a lot of prep time too: scrounging through so much available material online, skimming through long videos to see if they’re right for your course.

And, many graduate students in our field are finding their research disrupted – unable to gather data, or unable to write with kids at home, or just thrown by the world. Sometimes it’s easier to just power through a book you meant to read – but that takes hours. Isn’t a good book talk almost as good, and so much faster?

We thought we’d do a little of the scrounging and skimming for you. Below are some of the lectures, interviews, and podcasts from the researchers and the postdocs (past and present) from the Social Media Collective, that we thought could be most easily dropped into a new media syllabus. If one works, may it speed your prep time and more quickly get you to your bed or your binge watching. If one lines up with your work, we hope it provides an easily digestible task in these days of stress and distraction.

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Nancy Baym, “New Media, New Work, and the New Call to Intimacy” (2018, Rutgers University, 78 min – Q&A starts at 60) — overview of Playing to the Crowd

Nancy Baym, “Personal Connections in the Digital Age” (2016, Microsoft Research, 56 min – Q&A starts at 50) — overview of Personal Connections in the Digital Age

Nancy Baym, “Connecting with Audiences: Musicians and Social Media” (2012, Summer Social Webshop, 53 min – Q&A starts at 50) — on research coding methods

Mary Gray, “Ghost Work – Discussion with the Author” (2019, TechEquity Collaborative, 74 min – Q&A starts at 53) — overview of Ghost Work

Mary Gray, “‘There are no gay people here’: Expanding the boundaries of queer youth visibility in the rural United States” (2012, UNC, 60 min) — overview of Out in the Country

Mary Gray, Communicators (2014, C-SPAN, 29 min) — on data ethics

Tarleton Gillespie, “Custodians of the Internet” (2018, MIT, 16 min) — overview of Custodians of the Internet

Tarleton Gillespie, “Custodians of the Internet” (2018, UVA, 69 min – Q&A starts at 53) — overview of Custodians of the Internet

Tarleton Gillespie, “Content Moderation and the Politics of Social Media Platforms” (2020, Social Media and Politics Podcast, 57 min) — interview

Elena Maris, “Tumblr’s Fandometrics and the metricization of online communities” (2019, Data Power, 14 min)

Elena Maris, “Are porn site visits being tracked by Google and Facebook? (You already know the answer.)” (2019, NPR Marketplace, 7 min)

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Mike Ananny, “Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures For a Public Right to Hear” (2018, New Books Network, 42 min)

Alice Marwick, “The ‘alt-right’ approach to disrupting the media” (2017, Guardian podcast, 16 min)

Alice Marwick, “Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online” (2017, University of Oslo, 27 min)

Andres Monroy-Hernandez, “Collaborative News: From ‘Narcotweets’ to Journalism-as-a-Service” (2015, Personal Democracy Forum, 13 min)

Andres Monroy-Hernandez, “Collaborative News: From ‘Narcotweets’ to Journalism-as-a-Service” (2014, Stanford, 49 min – Q&A starts at 38)

Jessa Lingel, “At 25 Years, Understanding The Longevity Of Craigslist” (2020, NPR All Things Considered, 4 min)

Jessa Lingel, “An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of Craigslist” (2020, Princeton University Press, 3 min)

Megan Finn, “We Are All Well: A Social History of Public Information Infrastructures After Disasters” (2019, University of Washington, 77 min – Q&A starts at 49)

Megan Finn, “Documenting Aftermath: Information Infrastructures in the Wake of Disasters” (2019, New Books in Science, Technology, and Society, 54 min)

Sarah Brayne, “Policing Digital Traces” (2017, AI Now 6 min)

Sarah Brayne, “Police Surveillance in the Age of Big Data” (2018, Vera Institute, 7 min)

Kevin Driscoll, “Re-Calling The Modem World: The Dial-Up History Of Social Media” (2015, MIT, 83 min)

Kevin Driscoll, “Minitel: The Web before the Web” (2018, Computer History Museum, 86 min)

Lana Swartz, “(How) is Venmo Social Media?” (2018, ICA, 14 min)

Lana Swartz, “Talking Blockchain” (2019, Filene Fill-in, 27 min)

Lana Swartz, “Paid: Tales of Dongles, Checks, and Other Money Stuff” (2017, MIT, 19 min)

Lana Swartz, “Cashless Society: Can We Get Rid of Cash? (2019, University of Virginia, 1 min)

Dan Greene, “Not Bugs, But Features: Hopeful Institutions and Technologies of Inequality” (2017, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, 70 min – Q&A starts at 35)

Dan Greene, “Organizing the Library and Its Contradictions” (2018, Metropolitan New York Library Council, 42 min – Q&A starts at 36)

Dylan Mulvin, “Embedded Dangers: Revisiting the Y2K Problem and the Politics of Technological Repair” (2017, Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, 56 min – Q&A starts at 28)