Graduate Research

Along with my focus in video journalism, I am keenly interested in how media and tech shape our interactions with each other and how we interpret the world.

Tasked with investigating Twitch as a platform for community building, I and a group of fellow grad students worked to understand, then demonstrate, how chat bots help streamers cultivate their communities through what is known as a sociotechnical system. In essence, it is how a certain technology helps solve a particular problem, social issue or area of concern.

This involved “deblackboxing” chat bots, or in other words, learning enough about the technology to understand its architecture (the pieces and parts) and its algorithm (how inputs turn into outputs). The bots section of our capstone website was my personal charge, and in it I provide a video guide for how chat bots work.

“As bots continue to evolve and acquire more functions on Twitch and in other streaming-based communities, it will be important to follow their development and their effects on community building, for better or worse.”

In the fall of 2021, talk of the Metaverse was booming. Mark Zuckerberg announced the new direction Facebook, now Meta, was taking and many in the tech and media industry seemed eager to follow suit. However, was the hype for the Metaverse sustainable? In this paper I argue the hype for the Metaverse is nothing new, rather it is the latest wave of excitement for a technology decades in the making. I also offer my point of view on a topic I believe was glaringly absent from the general conversation: the importance of trust.

“Whatever the way forward, metaverse developers must grasp one fundamental thing: innovative and boundary-breaking ideas only go so far without the understanding of human need and desire to support them.”

Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1968) details his concept of aura—the quality of visual art that accentuates its value within a certain time and space. Critical theory scholars have long referenced and refuted Benjamin’s notions here for decades and I decided to throw my hat into the proverbial ring. I argue that regardless of the merit of his argument, his failure to acknowledge aural, that is musical and sonic, art in relation to aura hurts this concept. Several cases, including the relationship between spaghetti western composer Ennio Morricone and director Sergio Leone, 11th century church artifacts and Aerith’s death in the video game Final Fantasy VII, are discussed as examples of how aura can manifest when both aural and visual art are combined. The key is that they are not mutually exclusive, and thus music has the same ability as visual art to invoke the special quality of aura.

“music has always had and continues to have a stake in the art and media we interact with and admire in our lives.”