Mike Ananny, PHD

Mike Ananny is Associate Professor of Communication and Journalism, and Cinematic Arts (Media Arts + Practice, by courtesy), and Affiliated Faculty of Science, Technology, and Society, all at the University of Southern California.  In 2024 he was an expert advisor to the Canadian Minister of Heritage on the future of CBC/Radio-Canada.

He studies how people build the communication infrastructures, algorithmic systems, and artificial intelligences that create public life.  He traces their institutional dynamics and normative aims, trying to show how alternatives might better serve public interests.

He co-directs the interdisciplinary USC collective MASTS (Media As SocioTechnical Systems), the USC Center on Generative AI and Society's AIMS Initiative (AI for Media and Storytelling), and is on the Steering Committee of USC’s Center on Science, Technology and Public Life.  Most recently he was a co-PI on the Sloan Foundation project Knowing Machines (with Kate Crawford and Jason Schultz).

He was a 2022 Visiting Professor at the University of Helsinki Institute for Social Sciences and Humanities, a 2018-19 Berggruen Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, and has held fellowships and scholarships with USC’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, 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.

He is the author of Networked Press Freedom (MIT Press, 2018), co-editor (with Laura Forlano and Molly Wright Steenson) of Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019), co-editor (with Simogne Hudson) of special issues of the International Journal of Communication, and is currently preparing a manuscript on the public power of silence (tentatively titled "Absence Matters", under contract with Yale University Press). He publishes in various interdisciplinary academic venues including Journalism & Media Studies, Science & Technology Studies, and Critical Internet Studies, and regularly gives expert commentary to national and international media on contemporary events and controversies.

He holds a PhD from Stanford University (Communication), a Masters from the MIT Media Laboratory, a Bachelors (Computer Science & Human Biology) from the University of Toronto, and writes for popular press publications including The Atlantic, WIRED, Harvard's Nieman Lab, and the Columbia Journalism Review.