Furby Article

 

Retrospective Technological Mythmaking: Media

Discourses of Furby and Artificial Intelligence

https://tmgonline.nl/articles/849/files/659096281c9ea.pdf

Recent articles suggesting the late-1990s animatronic children’s toy, Furby, was promoted and perceived as true

Artificial Intelligence in 1998-99 are not wholly accurate. In examining 130 North American news stories, Furby

is often accurately described as only imitating machine learning. This paper analyses these articles from the

perspective of mythmaking in technological culture. In the article, I analyse the media discourses the time and

provide their historical context within North American technological culture, containing events such as the Y2K

bug, popular media representations, and the dotcom bubble. I also describe several potent emotional reactions to

Furby. However, recent media discourses suggests Furby had been perceived as a panic-inducing new technology,

similar to the War of the Worlds radio broadcast and silent cinema train effect, both of which historians have

largely discounted. I contribute evidence to the contrary, while acknowledging emotional reactions, which

are not necessarily indicators of utopian or dystopian cultural panics, but instead a technological banal. The

contemporary mythmaking about Furby is situated as comparable to Foucault’s analysis of myths of Victorian

prudishness and silence around sexuality. Retroactive mythmaking risks supporting uncritical perspectives in the

present, warranting interrogation of myths about AI as it develops and expands.

Queer Communication, Big Data

Communication studies research and big data: always already queer

D. Travers Scott

,

Joshua Casmir Catalano

 &

Christa A. Smith

“Big data” is neither unified nor stable, but instead offers opportunities for further exploration of queer methods. Communication studies scholars are particularly well suited to engage in this developing area. The potentials are illustrated in this article's description of an in-progress collaborative research project using artificial intelligence to examine public engagement with campus monuments and memorials at a large southeastern university. This discussion of an in-progress big-data research project, a collaboration between scholars of communication, public history/digital humanities, and geography, exemplifies the alignment of communication studies and emerging discussions in queer methods to a degree that we argue communication studies already is and has long been a queer project.

KEYWORDS: 

• queer methods
• digital humanities
• public history
• geography
• memorials

Article on food systems service learning

Entangled Production of Individuals and Organizations: A Food Systems Case Study in Service-Learning Transformations

D. Travers Scott, Sallie Hambright-Belue, Mike McGirr 

This article presents a longitudinal case study of a collaboration between a university and a nonprofit food justice organization. Using a collective autoethnographic process, we examine a three-semester service-learning course in which each author participated as instructor or client. We use the theoretical tools of intra-action and entanglement to address the challenges of complexity in such social justice collaborations. We also deploy these tools to avoid the instrumental/functional paradigm of evaluating collaboration in terms of negative or positive effects or un/successful outcomes, focusing instead on phenomena within a system in their transformative entanglements within ongoing (re)becoming. This approach was amenable to the content of our collaboration: a systems approach to thinking about food equity. Conceiving of ongoing interrelated phenomena within a system, as opposed to discrete separate objects impacting one another, helps accommodate the complexity involved in service-learning collaborations. Author/participants include an independent farmer who also teaches architecture, a communication instructor, and the director of a regional food justice nonprofit who collaborated via a land-grant university on an applied service-learning series of classes. We describe productive transformations in food-systems activism for individuals, our institution, local organizations, and the broader community. Therefore, this article contributes not an evaluative assessment of the success or failure of a single collaboration but a longitudinal examination of how individuals, institutions, organizations, and communities change through their entanglements and intra-actions.

Keywords:

food justicecollaborationintra-actionentanglementservice-learning

Social anxiety article published

 Originally posted first version of this here, now developed into this article on performative writing in response to pandemic for Cultural Studies Critical Methodologies

Articulating Apostasy: Crisis-Driven Medical Misbehavior Inspires Disciplinary Interrogation

In this essay I address insights gained during pandemic isolation in contrast to core assumptions of my professional discipline of communication. Drawing on perspectives from feminist studies of health and medicine, disability studies, and queer studies, I examine my increased health and productivity during social distancing. This is followed by a revised excerpt of an essay written to colleagues during our annual meeting, which had moved online. I conclude interrogating the ideology of beneficent connectedness.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/15327086221087657

New book review

Review of 20th century media and the American psyche: A strange love. by Charisse L'Pree Corsbie-Massay

Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, Vol 34(4), 2022, 249-251

From my review of the book, 20th Century Media and the American Psyche: A Strange Love byCharisse L'Pree Corsbie-Massay (see record 2020-80753-000). 

The book is structured in three media-relational sections, each with three medium-centered chapters covering related technologies, historical developments, and theories from social psychology, interpersonal communication, and other areas. The first section focuses on intimate media, with chapters on theatrical film, recorded music, and consumer-market still cameras as examples of mediated public intimacy. Section Two examines regular media, or those that synchronize common, shared experiences, broadcasting them into users’ everyday lives. The chapters on radio, network television, and cable television each contain useful summaries of relevant scholarship as well as key moments, such as the War of the Worlds broadcast. The final section, reciprocal media, continues the structure of evoking contemporary digital media relations as the framework for discussing earlier media. Magnetic tape, video gaming, and dial-up Internet Service Providers (ISPs) are presented to examine media that respond to users, allowing users to, in turn, affect their media experiences. Concluding with a summary reflection on users’ emotional relationships with media technologies, Corsbie-Massay posits that Americans want honesty, connection, devotion, and flexibility from their media, and calls for further variations on media psychographies. In so doing, she presents a welcome alternative to teleological media history texts that are litanies of names and events, as well as to media theory texts that often drain the joy and humor from media consumption. It is a welcome additional to the media scholar’s instructional toolkit. 

https://psycnet.apa.org/buy/2022-84180-001

New book review

​"Much to Scott’s credit as a researcher and writer ... he has threaded seemingly disparate (and queer) methods and analyses together to reveal key themes and to expose the multiple connections/disconnections between gay men and feminist women." Thanks Kimberly B. Dugan for the great review of my "rich and unique book" in Gender & Society! https://t.co/rTph4MTN0p

COVID, Mental Health, Communication

​New article out! "Articulating Apostasy: Crisis-Driven Medical Misbehavior Inspires Disciplinary Interrogation" in Cultural Studies <—> Critical Methodologies. Subscription link.

Not quite Patty Duke

​identical brothers!

Unboxing Gag Reel

What's a Perfect Autumn Moment? parts 1 and 2

Unboxing New Edition of my 2nd Novel

new edition of second novel out now

My 2005 novel, One of These Things is Not Like the Other, is back in print from Rebel Satori Press in an updated edition with a new introduction.

New website

Haven't put up a personal site in ages but thought it was time to consolidate my scholarly and creative activities at https://www.dtraversscott.online/ 

NCA GLBTQ Book of the Year!

 Delighted to learn my book, Gay Men and Feminist Women in the Fight for Equality: “What did you do During the Second Wave, Daddy?” has been selected Book of the Year for the GLBTQ Communication Studies Division for 2021 by the National Communication Association.

Gay Men and Feminist Women in the Fight for Equality: What Did You Do during the Second Wave, Daddy?

 My new book is out! 

"What did gay men do in women's liberation--and vice-versa? This book offers the first systematic investigation of the question. Conventional wisdom has offered varied and contradictory stories: Gay men were misogynistic enemies of feminism; feminist women were homophobic or androphobic; feminist women and gay men collaborated only during the 1960s-1970s liberation moment; lesbians rushed in to work with gay men during the AIDS crisis. Examined for the first time in this book, their stories are much more complex, yesterday and today. Feminist women and gay men have had dynamic relations in popular thinking and historic practice, including commonality, opposition, and intellectual contributions. Written by a feminist-identified gay man, this book forges an examination of these two groups' alliances and obstacles over the past 50 years, as well as their communications of, between, and about each other. What have been the received views of how these groups have or have not worked together politically? What historical evidence supports, contradicts, or complicates these views? New findings help illuminate understandings of the past and present of US women's and LGBTQ movements, as well as broader relations between social movements in general. With a special focus on neglected areas of research, such as the US South, it also argues for how these social movements shaped ideas about what it means to be gay and/or feminist."