Alice E. Marwick

Alice E. Marwick is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. Her current book project examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender, race, and socio-economic status. Marwick is also an Advisor and Research Affiliate on the Media Manipulation project at the Data & Society Research Institute, which studies far-right online subcultures and their use of social media to spread misinformation.  Her first book, Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), draws from ethnographic fieldwork in the San Francisco tech scene to examine how people seek social status through attention and visibility online. Marwick was formerly Director of the McGannon Communication Research Center and Assistant Professor of Communication and Media Studies at Fordham University, and a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. She writes for popular publications such as The New York Times, The New York Review of Books and The Guardian in addition to academic journals including New Media and Society, Public Culture, Social Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication and Television & New Media, among others. Her most recent article on the ethics of the celebrity nude photo leaks appears in Ethics and Information Technology. Alice has a PhD from the Department of Media, Culture and Communication at New York University.