The Communications PhD colloquium series invites you to the 2018 fall season's first event, where Nancy Baym from Microsoft Research New England and MIT will introduce her recent book-length study on communication of the gig economy in the age of social media.
The colloquium events are presentations by scholars of communication, as well as journalists, followed by an informal discussion with the audience.
As always, lunch will be provided. The Colloquium appreciates the continued support of the Sevellon-Brown Fund.
Topic of the talk: The architectures and norms of new media push people toward sharing everyday intimacies they might historically have kept to close friends and family. As more people are pushed toward gig work, the original gig workers - in this case, musicians - provide an exemplary lens for exploring the implications of this widespread blurring of interpersonal communication into everyday practices of professional viability.
Nancy Baym is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft in New England and Research Affiliate in Comparative Media Studies/Writing at MIT. She’s written on how people make sense of new communication technologies and weave them into their everyday lives in her books Personal Connections in the Digital Age (Polity), now in its second edition, Tune In, Log On: Soaps, Fandom, and Online Community (Sage), and, Internet Inquiry: Conversations about Method (co-edited with Annette Markham, Sage). Her new book is "Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection"(NYU). Baym has appeared in the New York Times, the BBC, NPR, WIRED, Mother Jones, and other news outlets. Learn more at nancybaym.com
