new essay on platform authoritarianism, disability, and class in creator economies out now in comm & critical/cultural studies! www.tandfonline.com/eprint/P8HRY...

Remembering Fobazi Ettarh‬ by reading her brilliant work. I read about vocational awe in my last year of library school & she provided the vocabulary I needed to describe some of my observations & experiences as a BIPOC worker. She will be missed. www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/2018/vocatio...

Journalism schools need to desperately hire more freelancers as lecturers to teach students how to make money, including gig comms work, while reporting on this side. I've had this thought for a while, but especially as a paper of record gets decimated.

some exciting news: announcing CREATOR & INFLUENCER STUDIES, the first open-access peer reviewed journal dedicated to creator and influencer culture research. I'm honoured to be named as one of the journal's inaugural associate editors. submissions open Feb 12.

heated rivalry x tegan and sara edits that aren't closer challenge!!!!!

For CBC Arts, I wrote about why I think Canada needs to revel in the beauty of its weirdest impulses www.cbc.ca/arts/canadia...

"But for people who were children in 2016, the year still holds a certain mystique. Google worked well. It was relatively easy to spot deepfakes. Teachers didn’t have to funnel all of their limited resources into determining if a student copy-pasted their homework from ChatGPT."

i feel like american academics don't need to write half-baked heated rivalry articles. let the canadians have this one, please

The reviews went out from our biggest conference in my field #ica26 Partial (AI) reviews are now a real problem. As a community we need to address this and work on standards. No one deserves AI slop as reviews.

In case you are unaware that digital images are also being manipulated to depict women and children as victims of physical violence. It's not just about bikinis.

AI companies are embracing the “power of cuteness,” and it’s not accidental. In a recent @washingtonpost.com article, FIMS professor @lukestark.bsky.social shares insight into why this design strategy works on humans — for better or worse. www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2...

new year, old me! for better or for worse, I'm trying my hand at professional content creation again on IG. (Especially after *finally* nuking my Twitter account.) Follow along for updates and halfbaked takes on digital culture. Same handle as here: @/JessRauchberg.

first week of semester looms? time to play my chem's cubicles on repeat...

super basic: Mad Men

PREDICTION: If 2026 is the year of logging off, it's also going to be the year more self-branding rhetorics move away from "self-care" (e.g., look how I'm bettering the self!) and toward "silent processes" (e.g., it's more authentic to make professional moves with less noise in between).

everything humans do is symbolic

✨dropping my brand new digital communication grad syllabus! ✨ the course is organised around digital keywords: authenticity, parasocial, viral, trend, etc. feel free to share widely! tinyurl.com/3cxx4a36

it's incredibly lovely to see that CLOSE READING FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY is on the year-end list for @publicbooks.bsky.social not once but TWICE!! thank you to @njdames.bsky.social and @leahprice.hcommons.social.ap.brid.gy!! and among such amazing books!!! www.publicbooks.org/public-picks...

I wrote a new piece for @pghcitypaper.com about loving analog media in a digital world. If you’re someone who’s into vinyl, film photography, print media, and invaluable local businesses, you should check it out! I also coin the phrase “techno-bummerism” lol

Neurodivergent people can be terrible people . And there’s a deep need for a convo ( intra community ) about how the discourse around how parts of our divergence are treated . And how privilege is handled . Because the fact that this on a table is about control

Palantir's new neurodivergent fellowship is in fact bad because neurodivergent people participating in technofascism will not save us. Latest for @motherjones.com www.motherjones.com/politics/202...

“Some of the language the job call uses about neurodivergent people as ‘able to see past performative ideologies’ reinforces really dangerous rhetoric that disabled people aren’t human." – @jessrauchberg.bsky.social

Very excited to announce that I am in the process of selling my first trade book to a major U.S. publisher. More information to come in the new year, and I can't wait to share the stories about what this journey entailed and tell you about the book.

authoritarianism loves to couch itself within a fiction of sameness and uniformity

See @ubiquity75.xyz’s Behind the Screen for more on the US tech industry’s outsourcing of content moderation

ISO of your favorite long-form writing on AI slop and authenticity! Thank you.

One of the biggest impacts I’ve seen from the unproven idea that people are wrongfully using disability accommodations is that people stop trusting people with disabilities and in fact further restrict, remove, and demonize accommodations for people with disabilities in general

academic shitposting on here doesn't hit like it did on The Other Place

which province is franklin the turtle from

NEW PUB ANNOUCEMENT! out today in @ejcs-journal.bsky.social, I wrote about lolcows, livestreaming, and how platform affordances and anti-fan practices catalyze digital freakery. journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1...

I wonder how the push for tenure-track faculty "AI" lines will converge with the death of the North American university and the burst of the AI bubble....

i think it's useful to look at areas where the *tech* has gotten much better while tech *interactions* have gotten way worse. streaming has gotten worse, google search has gotten worse, digital cameras are leaps better. apple's silicone is so good it's threatening their user upgrade cycle

half-baked thought but creators returning to long-form content speaks to the ways class and political power intrinsically shape creator labour. platforms know they profit when white, western, wealthier creators' work sits at the center.

I want to live in a world where an app is never a solution

a concept: being the bert mccracken of media studies

It's people who aren't disabled who are excited by these policies & the chance to get rid of disabled people, most disabled people would take a way to live over a way to die.

*evil mode activating*

scholarly/professional organizations offer a double-disciplining: 1. they professionalize members into a discipline (e.g., ways of knowing/understanding/producing intellectual output) 2. they discipline members into how to behave (e.g., this is the right way to be x academic)

Impossible how good reading is. You mean I just point my face at the paper for a bit and it does a whole update on my brain?

“Other examples…included Lily Allen's breakup album West End Girl, which leaned into a parasocial interest in her love life, and the emergence of parasocial relationships with AI bots, which saw people treat them as a confidant, friend or romantic partner.” www.bbc.com/news/article...

and I want to be known for my hits, not just my misses

leaving the [professional org] industrial complex

This is happening today at 1pm, presented by LUC's Beta Rho chapter of Lambda Pi Eta Honor Society! Use the QR Code to register for our Zoom!

absolutely gutted right now. alice wong, may your memory forever be a blessing: "We are the past. We are the present. We are the future. We are forever." disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2020/08/14/m...

Calling all humilitainment scholars: I'm putting together a panel for the Canadian Communication Association's 2026 conference on humilitainment, pleasure, & media industries with @krystenstein.bsky.social and @jessmaddox.bsky.social. We need 1 more panelist. Is this you? DM me by 11/24!

swapping "social" media for girlbossing these days

lower yourself into a cranberry bog it’s time

Apropos of .... nothing at all..... The postdoctoral laborers bill of rights is a project I collaborated on way back in 2019. It aims to clarify some of the purposes of postdoctoral positions and offers guidelines for designing successful positions. works.hcommons.org/records/9twr...

i think--i think i'm gonna have to write about the pope's tech discourse