Mike Ananny

Mike Ananny is Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism at USC’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism. He studies how technologies and cultures of media production have the power to shape public life. His research focuses on the public ethics of communication systems, specifically intersections of journalism practice and technology design, the sociotechnical dynamics of networked news infrastructures, and the power of algorithmic systems. Professor Ananny is also on the Steering Committee of USC’s Science, Technology and Society research cluster, and co-leads the interdisciplinary research group “MASTS” (Media as SocioTechnical Systems).

Professor Ananny was a 2019-2021 faculty fellow with USC’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, a 2018-19 Berggruen fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and has held fellowships and scholarships with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Harvard’s Berkman-Klein Center on Internet and Society, Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, LEGO, and Interval Research. He was a founding member of Media Lab Europe, a postdoc with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective, and has consulted for LEGO, Mattel, and Nortel Networks.

Professor Ananny has published in a variety of academic venues, including Science, Technology, and Human Values; Social Media+Society; Critical Studies in Media Communication; International Journal of Communication; Journal of Computer Mediated Communication; New Media & Society; First Monday; American Behavioral Scientist; Television & New Media; Digital Journalism; and the proceedings of the ACM’s conferences on Computer-Human Interaction and Computer Supported Collaborative Learning. His first book, Networked Press Freedom: Creating Infrastructures for a Public Right to Hear (MIT Press, 2018), proposed a new model of press freedom in an age of platform publishers. His second book (under contract with Yale University Press) critically examines the power of absence and silence in the networked press. He is also co-editor (with Laura Forlano and Molly Wright Steenson) of Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019).

Professor Ananny has led several public-private learning and design partnerships with the BBC, University of Tampere, Amsterdam Computer Clubhouse, Loyalist College Canada, The Ark Children’s Cultural Centre. He was principal investigator on European Union grant proposals and has licensed his custom software to Trinity College Dublin for classroom use. He has a background in new media and technology design, creating both technological toys for children’s language acquisition as well as large-scale, interactive public art installations in Dublin, Northern Ireland and Amsterdam for people to communicate publicly through SMS text messaging.