Hi there, I'm Andy.
I'm an Assistant Professor of Science and Technology Studies at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, where I direct the Mediatization Lab. My work asks how data-driven platforms and mobile devices reshape everyday political life—from the mediatization of terrorism and the far right to the everyday self-regulation of attention, habit, and digital literacy. Across these projects, I'm interested in how computational media become part of the ordinary practices through which people interpret the world, understand themselves, and make political judgments. If you're considering graduate study in science and technology studies, media theory and ethics, or critical and participatory digital methods, interested in collaborating, or simply want to chat, I'd love to hear from you.
About me
I received my Ph.D. in 2022 from the Department of Communication at Stanford University, where I was a graduate student affiliate with the Stanford Screenomics Lab. I was also a 2018–2019 fellow with the Center for Arabic Study Abroad in Amman, Jordan.
My first book, Mediatizing Terrorism: Social Media, Virtual Captivity, and the Reawakening of Fascism (under review at MIT Press), grew out of my dissertation research. The book examines how the data-driven political economy of platform media transformed public responses to Salafi-jihadist violence into a distributed, participatory condition I call virtual captivity, and traces how this transformation—resonating with settler-colonial narratives of "savage war"—helped fuel the resurgence of far-right authoritarian movements.
To develop this argument, I used screenomics—continuous mobile screen capture, collected here at five-second intervals—to observe U.S. mobile media users' responses to a wave of ISIS-linked terrorist attacks in Europe in the spring of 2017. This method captured audience responses unobtrusively as they unfolded, revealing in fine detail how people actually used their devices and platforms to encounter and process the attacks.
From this data, I identified four "mediatized rituals" through which platform users processed these events. One—concentrated in far-right media ecosystems—assimilated the attacks into a broader narrative about the threat liberal multiculturalism poses, creating conditions for offline mobilization and reinforcing cycles of violence. The other three comprised a more individualized, habituated suite of responses characteristic of data-driven media systems. Together, they complicate dominant accounts of platform media as simply de-ritualizing or driving polarization, showing instead how ritual action persists online—and how, in far-right media ecosystems specifically, it poses a distinct mobilizing threat.
I now direct the Mediatization Lab at RPI, where we use screenomics while developing new reflexive methodologies for critical user studies—currently including a study of minority conservatives' mobile media ecosystems, and a forthcoming study developing reflexive, participant-guided methods for studying technological self-regulation. Current and future work also explores extending these methods to study emerging AI technologies, including large language models and AI agents.
A commitment to radically democratic media and technology ethics runs through this work. This commitment informs recent work on the ethics of synthetic training data, ongoing research on the legitimating rhetoric of algorithmically driven military violence, and emerging work on AI-mediated practices of knowledge and self-regulation.
My research has been published in Journal of Communication, Surveillance & Society, Communication Theory, Human-Computer Interaction, and Media Theory, among other venues, and presented at conferences including the International Communication Association (ICA), the Society for the Social Studies of Science (4S), and the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR). Four of my papers have received student paper awards from the Philosophy, Theory & Critique division of ICA (PTC) in 2016, 2017, 2020, and 2021; my 2020 paper, "The Eclipse of Ideology: Nonconscious Cognition, Neurodiversity, and Datafied Media Systems as Tools for 'Self-Regulation,'" received the division's Top Student Paper award. I served as PTC's Student and Early Career Representative from 2019–2021.
In my spare time, I enjoy riding and working on my motorcycle and bicycle, exploring new places locally and internationally, and repairing furniture and electronics. Before Stanford, I lived in New York City and worked in PR at BerlinRosen Public Affairs, and in journalism as a freelancer and on the opinion desk at The Guardian US. My op-eds and popular essays have appeared in The Guardian, The Christian Science Monitor, and Al Jazeera America among other outlets. I received my BA in Politics from Bates College in Lewiston, ME in 2012. I was born and raised in the South Coast of Massachusetts, in the Town of Freetown, and I now live in the Upper Hudson River Valley region of NY with my wife Sandra, our daughter, and our two cats, Pirate and Squeaks.
Contact
Feel free to get in touch if you're interested in my work, or think I might be interested in yours!