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Scholarship: “Shutting down the Crossfire: lessons on digitality from the short history of Apple AirDrop”

Thrilled to announce the publication of a new article: “Shutting down the Crossfire: lessons on digitality from the short history of Apple AirDrop,” co-authored with Damien Pfister, now available in Critical Studies in Media Communication.

We explore the fascinating practice that was “AirDrop Crossfire.” People used Apple AirDrop’s local wireless connection to send diverse files, from friendly memes to protest messages, to unsuspecting users in public spaces. Damien and I first learned about it when, in my second semester teaching at the University of Maryland Department of Communication, students told me they were caught in the crossfire in one of the dining halls. Six or so years later and we have finally figured out what we had to say about the phenomenon!

We argue that AirDrop Crossfire is a proto-deliberative practice of refracted publics. Unlike hypersurveilled networked publics, refracted publics are transient, deeply contextual, and intensely communal, allowing users to circulate messages while largely avoiding detection. Across eight scenes that we “drop” into the paper, we examine how users of AirDrop Crossfire navigated three tensions of refracted publics: infrastructure and expressive agency, weaponization and care, and flow and interruption.

This is a cautionary tale: AirDrop was shut down in a global feature change by Apple in December 2022, conveniently timed after protestors used AirDrop Crossfire to evade Chinese censorship—to the dismay of China. We argue that the democratic promise of refracted publics is tempered by the confluence of state and corporate power: practices like AirDrop Crossfire are vulnerable to being “shut down by unethical corporations that choose the bottom line.”

We’d be thrilled if you read and shared with anyone who is interested! I’m always happy to email a PDF if you don’t have access. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15295036.2025.2523061

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Public Scholarship: How to Sell a Gendered Fantasy

I’m thrilled to share How to Sell a Gendered Fantasy, a collaboratively authored volume that emerged from my Spring 2025 graduate seminar, WRT 614: Intersectionality and Media. The volume, which would make a great textbook for an upper-level undergraduate or entry-level graduate course on media, criticism, or intersectionality, is freely available in the Stony Brook Academic Commons.

WRT614 was taught in my final semester at Stony Brook University’s Program in Writing and Rhetoric (I’ve since moved to the new Department of Communication). Rather than ask students to write standalone papers, I tasked students with working collectively to develop a shared theme, peer review submissions and revise extensively, and shape this book as a cohesive collection of critical media analysis. The result is a volume that interrogates how media sells gendered fantasies — not just products or platforms, but ideals, anxieties, and power structures — through an intersectional lens.

The 13 essays range in topic from digital trends like Tradwife influencers to entertainment media like Glee and The Bachelor; from K-pop music videos to video games like Resident Evil 2. I plan to use this volume in my COM346: Race, Class, and Gender in Media course this fall, and I hope many of you educators, researchers, and anyone interested in media and identity studies will find it insightful and helpful as well.

Scholarship: “Examining proposed generative AI integrations in public relations: Offering participatory (AI) public relations”

This featured image was generated using AI in the WordPress editor.

Drew Ashby-King and I published the first article from our ongoing research about Artificial Intelligence and Public Relations in Public Relations Inquiry at the beginning of 2025. We continue to recruit participants for the funded part of this research study, which will interview social change communicators about their use of AI. This project sets some of the conceptual stakes for our future work.

In this project, we reviewed 63 blog posts and news articles from thought leaders, bloggers, and scholars who proposed integrating GenAI into public relations practice following the public release of ChatGPT. What we found is that much of the focus was on efficiency and productivity, with less emphasis on the ethical implications of delegating relational work to machines.

Drew and I argue that “dominant guidance ultimately suggested that GenAI could solve the problem of having to engage with and understand the nuanced perspectives of varying publics and communicating with them toward co-created meaning.” In this technochauvinist model, “public relations becomes a product rather than a process, an outcome rather than an ongoing commitment to communication and dialogue.”

As a corrective, we suggest Participatory (AI) Public Relations—P(AI)PR, for short. (See what we did there?) P(AI)PR centers participation in relationship-building in PR practice—to “ensure that human connection and relationships are at the center of public relations practice.” This means prioritizing human-to-human relationships, using AI to supplement rather than replace human writers, and continuously evaluating ethical concerns as we adopt these new tools. 

You can read the entire article from Public Relations Inquiry, or email me if you need access to a PDF copy.

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Scholarship: “Capturing Cobalt: Communication and Change” — Review of “Eye to Eye” installation by Josie Williams

An image of the artwork Eye to Eye. Five shrouded, humanlike figures are placed in front of projected images.

I had the pleasure of participating in Dialogues on Digital Society‘s inaugural issue, in their book/culture review forum, with my Stony Brook University colleague Katherine Johnston. We were asked to review an artwork on display at SBU’s Zuccaire Gallery called “Eye to Eye” by Josie Williams, then an MFA student at SBU. Our review is available open access from Sage.

“By using LLMs to voice each perspective, Williams captures how the consolidation of power structures and stonewalls any discussions of meaningful change–especially under the false pretenses of everyone having an equal voice, supposedly convened and empowered by technology. Without agency or power, the machinic “think tank” stagnates in an endless loop of concerns and competing interests, and with each additional utterance–and the computing power and energy it demands–the urgency of the violence in the Congo mounts. Thus, generative AI emerges as a beneficiary of the very problem Williams has prompted it to discuss: the more text it generates (however important), the more battery power is needed.”

—Salzano and Johnston

Dialogues on Digital Society uses “open peer review,” which means the artist got to read all of our reviews and then write a response. You can read Josie Williams’s response to her reviewers here.

Public Scholarship: AI and Advocacy: Maximizing Potential, Minimizing Risk

Last week I, along with students in my “AI and Advocacy” course at Stony Brook University, released a new report entitled “AI and Advocacy: Maximizing Potential, Minimizing Risk.” The report addresses any advocate who is considering using AI in their work. We argue that AI can be useful for advocates, but they must be careful to center human judgment and avoid risks that could distract from their important work or even contribute to societal harms. You can download and read the whole report on the Stony Brook Academic Commons.

The report identifies three major opportunities and accompanying risks, plus one strong recommendation:

  1. Advocates can use AI tools to increase outreach—at the risk of compromising trust
  2. Advocates can use AI to address complex issues—at the risk of partially hindering progress
  3. Advocates can use training data to advocate for their causes—at the risk of misinformation and bias
  4. Advocates must be proactive to assess privacy impacts before deploying AI tools

Below, I’ll expand on a few of these insights, plus talk a bit about the pedagogy of collaborative report-writing. I previously shared these on my LinkedIn page. Please share and help us reach folks interested in the intersection of AI and Advocacy!

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Scholarship: “Weizenbaum’s Performance and Theory Modes: Lessons for Critical Engagement with Large Language Model Chatbots”

Misti Yang and I wrote this article for Association of Internet Researchers’ 2023 conference, and it was submitted a few weeks before her passing. It draws on her excellent work on Joseph Weizenbaum, applied to the context of ChatGPT and other LLMs. It’s an honor to carry on her legacy in thinking about ethical use (and non-use) of AI that promotes human faculties of decision-making.

In 1976, Joseph Weizenbaum argued that, because “[t]he achievements of the artificial intelligentsia [were] mainly triumphs of technique,” AI had not “contributed” to theory or “practical problem solving.” Weizenbaum highlighted the celebration of performance without deeper understanding, and in response, he articulated a theory mode for AI that could cultivate human responsibility and judgment. We suggest that, given access to Large Language Model (LLM) chatbots, Weizenbaum’s performance and theory modes offer urgently-needed vocabulary for public discourse about AI. Working from the perspective of digital rhetoric, we explain Weizenbaum’s theorization of each mode and perform a close textual analysis of two case studies of Open AI’s ChatGPT shared on Twitter to illustrate the contemporary relevance of his modes. We conclude by forecasting how theory mode may inform public accountability of AI.

You can read the paper at AoIR’s Selected Papers of Internet Research here, where a free PDF is available. I also encourage you to read and cite Misti’s work, which is so relevant today, and even donate to the Misti Yang Impact Award at our alma mater if you are so lead.

Scholarship: “Beyond Participation, Toward Disparticipation”

The first case study of my dissertation was published today in the Quarterly Journal of Speech: “Beyond Participation, Toward Disparticipation.”

Social movements require participatory dissent. Facing tensions between ideological purity and mass popularity, movements that desire to be politically effective and act in the interest of their participants need dissent that leads to revision instead of conflict that devolves to dissolution. Using three examples from the 2017 and 2019 Women’s Marches, this essay theorizes “disparticipation.” Building from José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, I define disparticipation as participatory, disidentifying dissent. While disparticipants may be seen as not participating, or even counter-protesting, I reframe their participation as a “diss” of a protest for a lack of nuanced politics. Disparticipants dissent from binary oppositions of popular/pure and reformist/radical and disidentify to promote coalition-building. Women’s March disparticipants dissed white feminist racism, cissexism, and antisemitism. Disparticipation generates discourse that can expand the topoi of protest rhetoric by revealing and responding to broader structural injustices.

You can read the entire article from the Quarterly Journal of Speech (and there are 50 free e-copies here, while supplies last!) or email me (mattsalzano AT gmail DOT com) to get a PDF.

Public Scholarship: Preparing Communication Studies for Artificial Intelligence

I wrote “Bring on the Bots? Public Scholarship: Preparing Communication Studies for Artificial Intelligence” as the lead feature for the May-June 2023 issue of Spectra, the National Communication Association’s online magazine.

In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, then a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), published a paper that introduced his chatbot ELIZA, a computer program that made “certain kinds of natural language conversation between man [sic] and computer possible.” In the paper, he writes about a chatbot, a program that allows a human user to have a seemingly natural conversation with a computer program. Weizenbaum’s ELIZA chatbot imitates a Rogerian psychotherapist who puts the burden of the conversation primarily on the client by prompting them to share more and expand on their experience, as shown above. ELIZA is considered one of the first chatbots ever made, and its convincing dialogue sparked the term “ELIZA Effect” to describe how users anthropomorphize conversational machines.  

Like Weizenbaum, I have created a bot. Mine, @RhetoricTweeter, is a Twitter bot that produces a hypothetical thesis for rhetorical criticism once per day, e.g., “In my next paper, I will use decolonial theory to uncover that Gay Instagram Memes cultivated the critic. #TeamRhetoric.” Created in my first year of graduate school, I was experimenting with a more productive use of automation than popular examples of election-meddling and anti-vaccine bots. @RhetoricTweeter joined a legion of “good bots”—like Protest Bots and Art Bots—on Twitter that have since been largely killed off under Elon Musk’s ownership.  

After creating @RhetoricTweeter, I hosted a “Deliberative Bots” workshop in 2019 during a department colloquium at the University of Maryland, College Park. My colleagues and I created and published our own Twitter bot, and I attempted to demonstrate why experimenting with bots and automation—when there were plenty of humans to engage with!—might be worth their time. In the last nine months or so, those of us who are studying artificial intelligence (AI) and communication have rarely needed to explain the relevance of our research. That’s because one chatbot has fundamentally reshaped our cultural conversations: ChatGPT.  

You can read more on NCA’s Spectra.

Dissertation: Living a Participatory Life

Photo courtesy of Jeannette Iannacone

I defended my dissertation, Living a Participatory Life: Reformatting Rhetoric for Demanding, Digital Times on April 12, 2023. My committee and I are pictured above, complete with participation ribbons. From left to right: Kristy Maddux, Catherine Knight Steele, Matthew Salzano, Damien S. Pfister (chair), Carly S. Woods, Jason Farman (Dean’s Representative, American Studies).

Abstract: Living a Participatory Life explores how people navigate demanding, digital times where social movements and digital media meet, in the context of what media scholars refer to as the participatory condition. The participatory condition describes how participation is an inherent, inescapable condition of digitality with its always-on and always-prompting media; it is distinctly different from the participatory cultures theorized of the blogosphere and Web 2.0. In the participatory condition, the digital is demanding, and our demands are digitized. What does it mean to live a participatory life in the participatory condition? How should we practice rhetoric (as a productive and critical art) during demanding, digital times? To aid in answering these questions, this dissertation offers a format theory of participation. I theorize four key concepts—parameters, imperatives, trans-situations, and sensibilities—to define participation as a formatted rhetorical practice that modulates affect and sensibilities within a formatted ecology. In the following three chapters, I locate three participatory sensibilities from advocates for social change across intersectional issues: Disparticipants, offering participatory dissent at the Women’s March; Fictocritics, generating criticism of the YouTube manosphere; and Installectuals, transforming Instagram during the Summer 2020 resurgence of Black Lives Matter activism. Each illustrates the ramifications of the participatory condition and how advocates for social change navigate it. The dissertation concludes with a provocation to learn from these sensibilities and begin reformatting our own participatory lives. 

If you’re interested in learning more about the dissertation, feel free to contact me via email (mattsalzano AT gmail DOT com). You can also look at some earlier versions of the case studies on this website:

Read a truncated version of Chapter 1, Disparticipants, in the volume Local Theories of Argument

Read the conference presentation for Chapter 2, Fictocritics, NCA 2020, “Digitizing Fictocriticism”

Read the conference presentation for Chapter 3, Installectuals, NCA 2022, “Installectual participation”

Scholarship: NCA 2022, “Installectual participation”

#BlackLivesMatter, Instagram Slideshows, and participatory sensibilities in Summer 2020

This paper was presented at the 2022 National Communication Association for the Critical and Cultural Studies division in a panel entitled “Algorithms and Public Culture.”

This is a Slideshow about Slideshows

Hello! Thanks for having me. My name is Matthew Salzano, and I’m a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Maryland. My paper today is entitled “Installectual participation: BlackLivesMatter, Instagram Slideshows, and participatory sensibilities in Summer 2020.”

This is a slideshow about slideshows. If you were on Instagram during Summer 2020, you probably encountered graphics like these. Using Instagram’s carousel feature, users uploaded up to ten swipeable images per post to circulate social justice information on the platform.

My paper reckons with how the slideshow “formats” participation, as one particularly notable phenomenon to understand the infrastructure of digital civic life. I ask: What sensibilities of digital participation are being generated in this moment, and how do they enable and constrain coalitional movements for intersectional justice?

In today’s presentation, I identify a sensibility of participation generated by these slideshows that I call an “Installectual participatory sensibility.”

  1. To understand how the slideshow specifically formats participation, I begin by sharing a rhetorical history of the slideshow.
  2. Second, I reveal how users of Instagram slideshows build on these features and format a sensibility of participation.
  3. Finally, I argue that this installectual sensibility, while helpfully attuned to access and information, remains tethered to modes of judgment that tie participation in social justice projects to the metrics that benefit digital platforms, metrics that must be questioned in projects seeking intersectional justice.
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