Profs & Pints Northern Virginia: Social Media to Social Reckoning

[Profs and Pints Northern Virginia](https://www.profsandpints.com/washingtondc) presents: **“Social Media to Social Reckoning,”** a talk about how Big Tech social media platforms operate and affect our world, with Caddie Alford, leading digital rhetoric scholar, associate professor of rhetoric, and co-lead of the AI Futures Hub at Virginia Commonwealth University. [Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at [https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nv-social-media-social-reckoning](https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nv-social-media-social-reckoning).] Learn what social media platforms attempt to get us to think and feel, and assess the impact that their algorithms are having on our social lives and democracy, with Caddie Alford, a scholar of persuasion vis-à-vis Big Tech’s power. Applying the ancient art of rhetoric to social media platforms and what’s billed as “artificial intelligence,” she’ll offer insights on the beliefs held by AI company CEOs and on the changes that Elon Musk made to Twitter. She’ll discuss concepts like cyberlibertarianism, technofascism, and “data trauma,” and she’ll call attention to the relationship between how we talk about social media and how we use it. If you started out “surfing the web” but now find yourself “doomscrolling,” her talk will help you understand why. Dr. Alford will shed light on the discrepancies between how Big Tech social media companies portray themselves and how they actually operate. No matter how much they characterize social media platforms as “ecosystems,” the platforms’ true purpose is harvesting our data for shareholder value. We’ll look at how the story of AI is deeply intertwined with the story of the internet, and how the political agendas of Big Tech social media companies are actualized by the material realities of computing infrastructure, contingent labor, and other considerations. We’ll close by discussing how social media users are pushing back at Big Tech and its justifications for its policies and agendas. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.) Image from Pixabay.