Keynotes

2024 Keynotes

Stay tuned for the thrilling announcement!

2022 Keynotes

Moya Bailey

Associate Professor of Communication Studies, Northwestern University

Moya Bailey is an Associate Professor in the School of Communication at Northwestern University. Her work focuses on marginalized groups’ use of digital media to promote social justice and she is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is the digital alchemist for the Octavia E. Butler Legacy Network and the Board President of Allied Media Projects, a Detroit-based movement media organization that supports an ever growing network of activists and organizers. She is a co-author of #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (MIT Press, 2020) and is the author of Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York University Press, 2021).

An Ethical Social Media Platform?

Abstract

Can social media be transformed to lessen the harm it exacts on those who support its infrastructure and contribute to its proliferation? Can these exploitatively built, capitalistically driven, entities be reconfigured in ways that don’t exploit human or natural resources? Moya Bailey will talk about how her research and teaching are working through these questions in multiple ways.

Ethan Zuckerman

Associate Professor of Public Policy, Information & Communication, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure

Ethan Zuckerman is an Associate Professor of public policy, information and communication at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and director of the Initiative for Digital Public Infrastructure. His research focuses on the use of media as a tool for social change, the use of new media technologies by activists and alternative business and governance models for the internet. Previously he directed the Center for Civic Media at the MIT Media Lab from 2011-2020. He is the author of Mistrust: How Losing Trust in Institutions Provides Tools to Transform Them (2020) and Rewire: Digital Cosmopolitans in the Age of Connection (2013). With Rebecca MacKinnon, Zuckerman co-founded the international blogging community Global Voices. With colleagues at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, Zuckerman co-founded media analysis tool, Media Cloud. In 2000, Zuckerman founded Geekcorps, a technology volunteer organization that sends IT specialists to work on projects in developing nations, with a focus on West Africa. He and his family live in Berkshire County in western Massachusetts.

The Good Web

Abstract

Between the US Capitol Insurrection – broadcast and organized online – and Frances Haugen’s revelations about the inner workings of Facebook, 2021 was a rough year for social media. Many social media observers  concluded that tools like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube were harming individuals and society and needed regulation. Legislators are now at work proposing increased transparency, algorithmic accountability and other possible remedies for social media harms.
The danger with this approach is that a better Facebook is still surveillant, centrally-controlled and a poor venue for many important public conversations. Fortunately, a new conversation is emerging around alternatives to existing corporate social media, exploring new forms of ownership, governance and interaction online.This talk examines four different models for the future of social media, including blockchain-based web3 models and decentralized open source models, and the ideologies animating each vision of the future.

Past #SMSociety Keynotes

  • Valerie Steeves
    2019 Keynote Speaker
    Full Professor in the Department of Criminology at the University of Ottawa.
  • Tarleton Gillespie
    2019 Keynote Speaker
    Principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and an affiliated associate professor in the Department of Communication and Department of Information Science at Cornell University.
  • Karine Nahon
    2018 Keynote Speaker
    Associate Professor, the Interdisciplinary Center at Herzliya (IDC), Israel, and an Affiliated Associate Professor at University of Washington
  • Lee Rainie
    2017 Keynote Speaker
    Director of the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project,
  • Ron Deibert
    2017 Keynote Speaker
    Professor of Political Science, and Director of the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs, University of Toronto.
  • Helen Kennedy
    2016 Keynote Speaker
    Professor of Digital Society, University of Sheffield, UK
  • Susan Halford
    2016 Keynote Speaker
    Director, Web Science Institute, University of Southampton, UK
  • William H. Dutton
    2015 Keynote Speaker
    Professor of Media and Information, Director Quello Center, Michigan State University
  • John Weigelt
    2014 Keynote Speaker
    Chief Technology Officer (CTO) Microsoft Canada
  • Keith N. Hampton
    2014 Keynote Speaker
    Associate Professor, School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University.
  • Sharad Goel
    2013 Keynote
    Senior Researcher, Microsoft Research
  • Gilad Lotan
    2012 Keynote
    Chief Data Scientist, Betaworks
  • Caroline Haythornthwaite
    2011 Keynote
    Director & Professor, The iSchool, University of British Columbia.
  • Barry Wellman
    2010 Keynote
    The S.D. Clark Professor of Sociology, Director Netlab, University of Toronto