ERMeCC Lunch Seminar

Citizens Producing Media Content: Lessons for Journalism
prof. Melissa Wall

This talk will draw from Professor Melissa Wall’s recently published book, Citizen Journalism: Practices, Propaganda Pedagogy (Routledge, 2019), focusing on the ways citizen media content is produced outside the boundaries of mainstream news institutions and what lessons those institutions might learn from these variants.  These outsiders include Engaged Citizen Journalists, Enraged Citizen Journalists and from the non-journalistic realm Citizen Scientists.   From the under-represented and marginalized groups narrating their own struggles to the rise of right-wing media producers generating propaganda as performance to the more structured development of citizen stewards of science and the environment, a multitude of approaches to citizen content complexify the future of journalism and more broadly the production and sharing of information in the public realm.

Melissa Wall is a professor of Journalism at California State University. She studies citizen/participatory journalism and is the editor of the book, Citizen Journalism: Valuable, Useless or Dangerous. Within this line of inquiry, she created the Pop-Up Newsroom, a temporary, virtual newsroom for citizen and student journalists.  Pop-Up Newsroom has collaborated with universities around the world to produce collective coverage with journalism programs in the Armenia, Brazil, Bulgaria, India, Netherlands, Taiwan and UK.  Some of the studies about the project can be found at the MIT Civic Media Project, the MILD Yearbook, and Journalism Practice.

The Domestication of Alexa and Voice-controlled Technology by Amazon
Steve Neville

This presentation explores the surveillance and privacy contours of new media and sound reproduction technology by drawing from a case study of the Amazon Echo voice-controlled smart speaker. The domestication of the device and its digital assistant, Alexa, renews historical debates about the eavesdropping capacity of sound reproduction technology, such as the phonograph and telephone. Meanwhile, the integration of Alexa within home environments articulates gendered patterns of domestic servitude that problematically contribute to the normalization of always-on, always-listening technology. This presentation outlines preliminary findings based on two sites of inquiry concerning the social process of domestication: Amazon’s End User Agreements governing the use of the technology, and YouTube unboxing videos and audience comments of the Amazon Echo. The empirical study is complemented by a theoretical project that challenges standard conceptions of surveillance as a practice of “watching over” by calling attention to the unique privacy relations of eavesdropping and the forms of power yielded from aural knowledge. The concept of eavesmining is introduced to characterize a novel set of corporate listening techniques being deployed in the domestic sphere. This is developed to critique the social implications of hosting Amazon and other sets of corporate ‘ears’ at home.

Steve Neville is a visiting scholar at Erasmus University and the recipient of a Mitacs Globalink Research Award funded by the Government of Canada. He is currently completing thesis research for his master’s degree in the joint program of Communication and Culture at York University and Ryerson University, Toronto.