Published on December 1st, 2019Written by Meng Liang and Han Su Ten years ago, no one could imagine that the word “zhongcao” (Chinese as: 种草), literally meaning planting grass, could link so closely with “online shopping.” Zhongcao more recently became Chinese internet slang, referring to “the effect when someone sees something […]
GMTaC Blog
42 posts
Published on November 25th, 2019Written by Lisa Parks and Kelly Wagman Contemporary media studies emerged in the mid-20th century as a hybrid field growing out of communication, literary studies, sociology, art, critical theory, anthropology, psychology, philosophy, and cultural studies. Since the late 1980s, the field of media studies has expanded in […]
Published on November 15th, 2019 On October 21st hundreds of “glovers,” workers from Glovo – a Spanish delivery platform – who do deliveries by motorcycles and bikes, protested against the company in what could be considered the biggest organized protest of platform delivery workers in Peru to date. The primary motivation […]
Published on September 30th, 2019Written by Diego Cerna Aragon, CMS Graduate Student, Research Assistant, GMTaC Lab SISFOH interface. Photo by author. How do humans make sense of things? How does this process differ from the ways algorithms make sense of social reality? During 2016 and 2017 I was part of […]
Published on September 18th, 2019Written by Kelly Wagman, CMS Graduate Student, Research Assistant, GMTaC Lab Studio Various & Gould, 2015, Creative Commons Attribution ‘Human’ is too rich, too diverse, and too complex a category to bear a universal solution. – Shaowen Bardzell If you’ve worked at a tech company you […]
Published on July 22nd, 2019Written by Graduate Research Assistant Iago Bojczuk. My first year of graduate school at MIT came to an end with my participation at the 3rd edition of the “AI For Good Summit” in Europe. Organized by the International Telecommunication Union (ITU)––the United Nations specialized agency for […]
Published on May 3rd, 2019A blog post by Graduate Research Assistant Iago Bojczuk. Upon arriving in the Comparative Media Studies department at MIT, it did not take much time to realize how much students are encouraged to think about communication and media practices across historical periods, cultural settings, and methods […]
Published on May 1st, 2019A blog post by Visiting Graduate Student Gabriel Pereira and Research Assistant Iago Bojczuk. Last year, in our blog post “Zap Zap, Who’s There? WhatsApp and the Spread of Fake News During the 2018 Elections in Brazil,” we discussed how WhatsApp messaging was influencing the Brazilian […]
Published on April 2nd, 2019A blog post by Graduate Research Assistant Han Su. Imagine meeting someone from rural Tanzania — what could you have in common? One answer could be use of Facebook. But in a country where only 40% of people have access to grid electricity,1 how do users […]