Fall 2021 Panel:
The Contemporary Social Media Environment

Hosted by the Social Media Narratives Class
Art and Technology Studies
School of the Art Institute of Chicago
Facebook and Twitter
November 19-22, 2021

Meredith D. Clark

Meredith D. Clark Ph.D.,
(@MeredithDClark;
she/her/hers)
is an Associate Professor in journalism and communication studies at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power. Her first book, We Tried to Tell Y’all: Black Twitter and Digital Counternarratives is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She has been a guest on Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, as well as NPR’s All Things Considered and Code Switch.

Hello all:

My book is currently under review, so rather than post from it, I'm using a selection from my article on "cancel culture."

"The problem with so-called 'cancel culture' does not rest with the formerly disempowered, seemingly faceless public that the letter critiques, but with the signatories and their peers, “ . . . the institutional leaders,” who, "in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms."

These self-appointed regents of open debate have failed to anticipate an age in which there is no longer a dominant public sphere, but a fractal sequence of counterspheres and oppositional publics. They have yet to reconcile how coalitions of the Othered are now equipped to execute a responsive strategy for immediately identifying harms and demanding consequences. The absence of deliberation in chastising bad actors, misconstrued as the outcome of cancel culture, is a fault of the elites’ inability to adequately conceive of the impact social media connectivity has for shifting the power dynamics of the public sphere in the digital age."

Panelists

Meredith D. Clark
Associate Professor in journalism and communication studies, Northeastern University

Shaohua Guo
Associate Professor, Carleton College;

Mark Marino
Professor of Writing, University Of Southern California; Director of the Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab

Jeff Nunokawa
Professor, Dept. of English, Princeton University

Élika Ortega
Assistant Professor in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, University of Colorado, Boulder

Abraham Richie
Social Media Manager, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; Chicago art critic

Katrin Tiidenberg
Professor of Participatory Culture at the Film, Media, Arts and Communication School, Tallinn University, Estonia.

SAIC ATS Class in Social Media Narrative
Nicole Abanador, Delilah Gabrielle Anaya, Meizhu Chen, Elizabeth Dawn Coleman, Ivette Cruz, Jerry Jie, Shixuan Ma, Lily-Ann Olesen, Jin Pang, Grace Marie Requejo, Goldie Schmiedeler, Xiaowen Wang, Jade Ortega White, Janet Xie, Bailey Elizabeth Zeller

Host: SAIC ATS Part-time Faculty: Judy Malloy