This dissertation explores how dominant U.S. constructions of race, class, and gender are embedded into and inscribed onto artificially intelligent virtual assistants and the labors they perform. I examine virtual assistants like Amazon’s Alexa, Apple’s Siri, and Microsoft’s Cortana, interrogating their complex relationship to humanness, the tasks they are programmed...
We all—users, businesses, governments, and the general public—expect internet platform companies, like Meta, Alphabet, and Amazon to govern their users. Without platform governance, we all experience disasters like foreign election interference, vaccine misinformation, counterfeiting, and even genocide.
Unfortunately, the platform companies have failed. To this day, despite the lessons from...
The experiences and environments of working-class children vary dramatically from their more affluent peers. I update Bronfenbrenner’s (1986) ecological systems theory to account for the technology children interact with and child social class, using Lareau’s (2003) frameworks that establish class differences in parenting practices. I position child technology devices at...
Television's history has at numerous points been punctuated by pronouncements that technological innovations will improve its programming, empower its audiences, and heal the injuries it has inflicted on American society. This enduring faith in the inevitability and imminence of television's technological salvation is the subject of this dissertation. "TV Repair"...