My sweet, perfect Samson crossed the rainbow bridge yesterday. He was diagnosed with dementia in March, and it was fast and aggressive. We made the decision to end his suffering. He taught me unconditional love, and that I was worthy of love. Hug your fur babies tight tonight.

Scary stories about teens sell. The data tells a different story. After decades studying adolescent mental health, here's what I found: This isn't an anxious generation. It's a resilient one. Let's start treating them that way. go.ted.com/candiceodgers

It took six and a half years, but I finally got Covid. And a double ear infection and strep, but who’s counting?

REMINDER!! Creator & Influencer Studies is open for article submissionsI also have 20 article process charge (APC) waivers to use before the end of the year, so submit now!

Internet fame symposium time at the University of London!

I’m off to England tonight to give a talk at the University of London called “Researching Internet Fame and (Shitty) Digital Futures.” Basically, I ask how we as researchers can avoid some of the Internet’s most toxic practices of public shaming and clout chasing while we research those very things.

Ever wonder how parasocial relationships took over social media, pop culture, and fandom? I got you. My first general audience book on social media, PARASOCIAL: HOW STRANGERS STRUCTURE OUR ONLINE (AND OFFLINE) LIVES will be published by Sourcebooks in North America & Urano in Spain in Spring 2028

If anyone would like to feel ancient, I’m teaching a high school media camp this week. A student asked me why film is called film. They didn’t know it used to be shot on actual film.

You don’t always know I run my department’s Instagram account. But there will be signs.

So…anybody interested in a book on parasocial relationships and social media 👀👀

Slight tangent, but this reminds me of this symposium at Cal State Long Beach where Bruce Thompson from Microsoft was literally begging profs to get students AI-ready 🤮 + raving about how this Fall semester educators will be building our own agents to interact with students🤮

I’m extremely online for a living. My husband stays in his niche hyper fixation internet. Last week he told me about the Lego drama. Now that it’s gone viral he’s living for the fact he knew something about social media before me. I love this for him after a decade of, “have you seen -yes”

More evidence that dismissing media addiction as real thing is bad, actually. Great reporting from 404 as usual. www.404media.co/microsoft-wa...

My book advance hit my bank (yay!) but now I have to fill out all this paperwork for the university I work at for financial disclosures and outside compensation (boo). It is the most convoluted process and I am begging universities to be straightforward about something for once in their lives.

I'm incredibly proud of this one: I have a chapter out now in the Routledge Companion to Social Media Influencers called "Toward an Influencer Production Studies: Between-the-line labor in the Creator Economy." www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edi...

As an influencer researcher who just finished Yesteryear, there are a few things I want to commend the book on: 1. Showing how trad wife and girl boss influencers are two sides of the same coin 2. Showing that all brand identity is built on exclusion.

I swear to god if any of you accuse me of using AI because I like to use an em dash in my writing

I appreciate my editor so much because she uses the same amount of exclamation marks in emails as I do.

Margo’s Got Money Troubles is truly one of the best shows on TV right now. I research social media for a living, and I get fed up with how social media is represented in media. It almost always falls into two camps: Alarmist moral panic or frivolous, vain, cheap joke.

For the reviewer 2s of the world: if you want to be jerks, you do you. But ways people in a smalle, niche field can figure out it’s you: 1. You only recommend your own work as things to improve the quality of the submission. (Continued)

See you at Association of Internet Researchers this October in Mexico City! Very proud of my fabulous PhD advisee Sara Epps for leading this project on white feminine archetypes in RushTok

Some of the things I’m reading this summer to write my third book on social media (+other projects)

An attack on Black America is an attack on all of America. Remember: if they come for us, they’ll come for you next. www.nytimes.com/2026/05/16/u...

There's been a lot of conversation about clipping. I almost wrote my dissertation about this back in 2017. And as tenured prof in social media, I'm pretty ambivalent about this practice. www.npr.org/2026/05/12/n...

Announcing the lineup of presenters for the Trans-Asian Transcultural Fandom Symposium 🫶 Our event is free and open to all 🆓 Sign up today ▶️ tinyurl.com/tatf2026 or scan the QR code 📲 💌 Follow us for updates! #Fandom #FanStudies #TransculturalFandom #KPop #kpopfandom #fandoms #asianfandom

The kids are alright. Quite on top of everything else, what kind of bozo makes a graduation speech that isn't actually about the graduates?

What should we make of Hollywood’s turn toward microdramas, as well as TikTok’s heavy investment in them? How is any of this different than Quibi? @krystenstein.bsky.social and I answer those questions in our latest op-ed for The Conversation. theconversation.com/tiktoks-popu...

I may be plant based most of the time, but I still love grilling a steak.

Listen. I play this dumb little train game to relax at night instead of scrolling. The “objectives” of the game are to build your train empire and you often do so through helping facilitate the building of major historical projects. But tell me why this new objective is building Chernobyl.

I haven’t done a recent adventures in cooking roundup in a while 1. Pretzels and Creature Comforts beer cheese. 2. Homemade Taco Bell vegan fiesta cheesy potatoes 3. Sweet potato black bean bowls 4. Homemade spicy tofu pho

On this International Creator Day, I'm excited to share I've been appointed a founding member of the American Influencer Council's Academic Advisory Circle to bridge creator economy research and industry practice.

Apparently someone took a hairdryer to Charles de Gaulle airport to manipulate a temperature sensor to win a bet on #Polymarket. Weird--but not new! My recent @aeon.co essay on weather gambling mentions early 20th-c. data manipulation & bribery for exactly the same purpose. aeon.co/essays/what-...

New publication! Anne Herfurth, a University of Alabama Management Information Systems PhD student, and I conducted a textual analysis of news coverage of the 2023-2024 mass layoffs in the Tech industry. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

Thank you, News Creator Corps, for highlighting our journal, Creator and Influencer Studies! We had a great conversation about avoiding monolithic, white-focused/American-centric research, research privacy concerns, the slow speed of academic research, and more newscreatorcorps.org/2026/04/jess...

Starting on the academic equivalent of 3rd and making it to home plate is not, in fact, as impressive as the people who start in a rec league and somehome still make it into the majors.

I kind of can’t believe Gangnam Style hasn’t had its TikTok moment yet.

I finally made it to Chicago after circling for two hours because of weather + a surprise diversion to Milwaukee to refuel. I’ll be presenting research at be annual Society of Cinema and Media Studies conference on people who livestream their jobs.

Spoke to Wired for this piece. In a world where AI can only mimic its prompt, it’s not surprise this reflects the inherent violence of reality TV dating shows. Also everyone should watch the old show UnReal

I made it through security in ATL in 25 minutes. Thankfully I have pre-check. Shoutout to the ATL airport for being so organized and on top of it, and to the TSA agents caught in the middle. Many of them were working multiple stations.

In the year of 2026 I just had to listen to an old man tell me (again) that social media and content creation are just fads.

The only way I knew how to celebrate AJ’s new book was to get him a political Cameo.

It finally happened. A reviewer told me to cite Maddox's work on BookTok. I am Maddox.

I'm back on my Substack bullshit tomorrow. open.substack.com/pub/bytheway...

A real email I sent to my boss today.

Rethinking television via TikTok. That sounds like a pretty cool paper d-(^_^)z

New article out today with Andreas Schellewald, @krystenstein.bsky.social, Ignacio Siles, and Ellenrose Firth, in which we examine how TikTok functions like television via audiences, genres, political economy, aesthetics, and intertextual elements. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

An absolute banger of an article by @nancybaym.bsky.social out today in Social Media + Society. She astutely captures so much of what I've felt and observed about social media these days. journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

My opening editorial as Editor-in-Chief of Creator and Influencer Studies is now live. In this piece, I reflect on how creator and influencer studies has been a discipline for a while, and how journals risk siloing as much as they do creating an umbrella. link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I am teaching a digital culture research seminar this term and I shared @jessmaddox.bsky.social newsletter with the students—they absolutely loved it. Students are now asking me if I know of any other similar newsletters. Any recommendations? I am trying to compile a public list.

Have more questions about Creator and Influencer Studies? I still have answers.