Get To Know 23-24 BKC Fellow: Angela Xiao Wu
Dr. Angela Xiao Wu is a researcher who is concerned with the political economy and technological mediation of knowledge production. How this process intersects with politics provides rich fodder for her studies. Dr. Wu is currently an Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. As a 2023-2024 Fellow at the Berkman Klein Center, she plans to write about the history of Chinese media and algorithmic governance and looks forward to collaborating with peers in her cohort.
What do you most hope to accomplish during your time at BKC?
My primary goal is to complete the remaining chapters of my book, which is tentatively titled Mass Speech Administration: From the Socialist Press to Platform Atmospherics. It is a new history of Chinese media governance from the 1980s to the present with a focus on “systems thinking.” By that, I mean a governing style anchored by global vision and valuation, structural calibration, and large-scale coordination. What happens when public culture is governed this way?
This is a question underlying the global debates about digital platform governance on issues such as content moderation, disinformation, and monopoly power. This is also a question that I’d like to address with my book by tracing how China’s distinct political economy intersected with major technological transformations and its many ramifications in the formation of public culture. Conversations with the extraordinary BKC community would surely help me sort things out. My secondary goal is to think, breathe, hang out with folks, and have fun at Cambridge.
That certainly sounds like it’ll be time well spent. Are there any particular members of the BKC community or any professionals from any countries with a particular political economy with whom you are looking forward to speaking in order to help elucidate this question?
Sorry, there are so many, so this is really hard to answer in a succinct way! The themes of this cohort’s expertise and interests—“from intellectual property law and algorithmic infrastructure, to privacy, AI, and journalism”—can be directly used as the keywords for my book. I am so excited when I see it.
To dive deeper into a buzzy media technology, what role do you see generative AI playing in the field of media and communication, especially as it pertains to politics?
To be honest, after feeling out the presence of generative AI in my classrooms for a semester, I am delighted to retreat to BKC and observe the developments from the side for a bit. Pedagogical settings and media and communication–there are a lot of connections. With regard to politics and the internet, generative AI should be placed in the longer history of social bots and even astroturfing activities and the regulatory cultures and infrastructures that evolved in response. Therefore, I am quite interested in the fate of generative AI in different social and legal contexts. For example, what does it mean for it to survive and thrive in a society of meticulous information control (e.g., China)? Perhaps we can consider local regulatory ambitions one core generative mechanism of generative AI itself.
Do you have any specific hopes for the regulatory outcomes of the social and legal response to generative AI?
Now, generative AI operates in diverse domains of life and is quickly migrating into more—PR and marketing, disinformation campaigns, art and creative work, classrooms, therapy, paperwork, and so forth. To think about it, for each of these domains, to consider what constitutes just and effective legal responses requires us to consider a distinct set of factors. My specific hope is that the deliberation about responses takes seriously social science and humanities research on the particular scenarios and social worlds at stake, and it must include voices of the communities who are directly affected by the applications. Many failures in the history of tech policymaking can be attributed to the lack in these aspects.
Why is it important to combine humanities and social science methods to study media and communication? How have you found the best methods to uncover what you need to learn?
Thanks to diverse trainings, I adopt methods out of research needs and oftentimes to complement existing methodological approaches. In the beginning, it was quite a jarring experience, mobilizing different parts of your mind and body (yes, both) for concurrent projects. But with time, I worked with diverse forms of data and techniques, and dialogued with a range of knowing communities, each holding distinct epistemologies, resources, and relationships to institutional power. I have gained a better understanding about knowledge production as a social and material process.
This angle is extremely useful to contextualize extant knowledge claims about anything, media and communication included. If it is indeed particularly important here, I guess it’s because in the digital age, this field of media and communication is often the first one to be overwhelmed by new data, new methods, and new money. Hence, it is particularly important to have methodological reflexivity.
To bring us to a close, what, to you, is the greatest area of concern facing technology and the internet today?
Any scholar on technology and the internet today is probably boggled by concerns. I’ll just name one of mine—I think we need more serious engagement with histories, circumstances, and experiences outside of Euro-America. This is not about filling gaps of knowledge on these vast regions to make a “fuller” global account of tech, but to realize that insights from these contexts may help the US and the West grapple with its own crises (let alone global crises).
Decolonial thinking has been a powerful lens to parse out our current Anglophone centric approaches to tech and the internet. De-Cold War thinking, by which I mostly mean to recognize latent anxieties and fears as being rooted in Cold War-era military alignments and to reflect on the tendency to simplify and deduce the social world according to political and moral binaries, is also much needed for us to move forward, especially in today’s intensifying geopolitics.
This idea of decolonizing our approach to tech and the internet is incredibly important. How do you think you might be able to enlist your fellow BKC community in focusing on this imperative?
This year’s emphases at BKC include AI ethics, a growing interdisciplinary field that really benefited from decolonial thinking. Multiple Fellows working in other fields have also produced great critical scholarships informed by this approach. So, I am sure there is a lot to learn from the community in this regard.
What is your ultimate vision for improving social media and the way information is produced and communicated within the political economy? What needs to change for that vision to become a reality?
I will designate my time at BKC to think through this one, of course with the help of my cohort. Perhaps I’ll have an answer if you ask me in the summer of 2024!
Thank you, that’s an excellent thought to end with!
Interviewer
Krista Cezair graduated from Harvard University in 2023 with dual Juris Doctor and Master of Public Health degrees. During the 2022-2023 academic year, she worked as a research assistant with the Berkman Klein Center’s communications team.