Jess Maddox

It’s Bad: What Now? - Nancy K. Baym, 2026 This essay reflects on a decade of worsening social media harms—inequality, algorithmic power, precarious labor, and data extraction—arguing for renewed interdi...

An absolute banger of an article by @nancybaym.bsky.social out today in Social Media + Society. She astutely captures so much of what I've felt and observed about social media these days.

journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/...

From dismissal to DOI: disciplining creator and influencer studies - Creator and Influencer Studies Creator and Influencer Studies -

My opening editorial as Editor-in-Chief of Creator and Influencer Studies is now live. In this piece, I reflect on how creator and influencer studies has been a discipline for a while, and how journals risk siloing as much as they do creating an umbrella.
link.springer.com/article/10.1...

I am teaching a digital culture research seminar this term and I shared @jessmaddox.bsky.social newsletter with the students—they absolutely loved it.

Students are now asking me if I know of any other similar newsletters. Any recommendations? I am trying to compile a public list.

Thanks for sharing!! I personally love Rachel Karten’s Link in Bio and Aidan Walker’s How to do things with memes

Have more questions about Creator and Influencer Studies? I still have answers.

Got a question about the new journal Creator and Influencer Studies? We have answers.

As a friendly reminder, please do not DM me with submissions questions but email them to jessmaddox [at] uga [dot] edu

Thanks, Alice!!

Exciting news for everyone on #TeamRhetoric studying "content creators, influencers, content production, and creator/influencer cultures examining the critical-cultural, ethical, industrial, and socio-political dimensions of the creator and influencer economies."

Thank you!!

Some personal news, as they say.

Get your submissions ready for when our portal opens February 12. As the founding editor-in-chief of the new Springer Nature academic journal Creator and Influencer Studies, I’m thrilled to welcome them.

link.springer.com/journal/44538

Thanks for boosting, friend!!

Creator and Influencer Studies Creator and Influencer Studies publishes studies of content creators, influencers, content production, and creator/influencer cultures examining the ...

My dear friend @jessmaddox.bsky.social has launched a new academic journal for folks who study content creators and influencers!

If that's your thing do consider submitting your work:

link.springer.com/journal/4453...

The transition to U.S. TikTok has been messy. This has led to a lot of conspiracies. I'm the first to say we should be skeptical of this new venture, but this weekend's problems speak to glitches, incompetence, and the physicality of social media infrastructure more than they do censorship.

Okay but Karl Marx is actually funny as hell.

If it was just political content and accounts being throttled, I’d say it was deliberate. But I was trying to do book citations yesterday and I could not pull up saved videos to save my life. Nor could I search things.

But apps glitch all of the time, even when the gov isn’t involved. More features are down than just views - searches, collections, etc. This is more likely than not technical problems with new ownership.

I’d say it’s too early to freak out. Yet. I’m the first person to say (and have said) we should be concerned about the gov’s closeness to this app.

Is TikTok shadowbanning anyone talking politics?

Maybe, but probably not. TikTok is glitching in several ways right now, and not just in views.

A more accurate way to think about this is how the government-appointed board has access to this information now, given what this government’s attacks on these groups have been.

Important update here - the biggest thing I want to highlight is that while social media collecting demographic information from your profile and content is not remotely new.

More info here:

www.instagram.com/reel/DT3Bz3s...

Thank you for boosting!

This is a great primer for PhD students or ECRs who are interested in doing public facing work

Thanks for sharing!!

This is probably long overdue, but here's the guide I give my students on how to do public scholarship and engage with media.

drive.google.com/file/d/1mHMu...

Happy Friday.

Petition to get rid of email subject lines because emailing IT with a subject line, “virus?” is a rather demoralizing way to start spring semester

This spring, I'm teaching my favorite course: My "social media storytelling," or a "how to be a professional content creator" class. Syllabus below.

drive.google.com/file/d/1rcbp...

lol indeed. If I did all of them, I’d still be making memes 😂

I guess these are the “precedented” times we asked for