Publications - 2017

‘All the Wonderful Possibilities of Motion Pictures’: Hiram Percy Maxim and the Aesthetics of Amateur Filmmaking

Bureaucrats and Movie Czars: Canada’s Feature Film Policy since 2000

Critical approaches to communication technology – the past five years

Introduction: Sports Rights and Public Service Broadcasting

Neocolonial Intimacies

Representations of Holocaust in the audiovisual form of comics

Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality

Many users of the Internet are aware of bots: automated programs that work behind the scenes to come up with search suggestions, check the weather, filter emails, or clean up Wikipedia entries. More recently, a new software robot has been making its presence felt in social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter – the socialbot. However, unlike other bots, socialbots are built to appear human. While a weatherbot will tell you if it's sunny and a spambot will incessantly peddle Viagra, socialbots will ask you questions, have conversations, like your posts, retweet you, and become your friend. All the while, if they're well-programmed, you won't know that you're tweeting and friending with a robot. Who benefits from the use of software robots? Who loses? Does a bot deserve rights? Who pulls the strings of these bots? Who has the right to know what about them? What does it mean to be intelligent? What does it mean to be a friend? Socialbots and Their Friends: Digital Media and the Automation of Sociality is one of the first academic collections to critically consider the socialbot and tackle these pressing questions.

The personalization of engagement: the symbolic construction of social media and grassroots mobilization in Canadian newspapers

When Passion Isn’t Enough: Gender, Affect and Credibility in Digital Games Design.