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

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

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.

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.

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.

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”

• Related: check out the in progress Digital Archive for Instagram Slideshows I am building.

#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.

Continue reading “Scholarship: NCA 2022, “Installectual participation”” →