I study the cultural creation, sociotechnical dynamics, and political power of the digital media technologies that shape journalism and public life.
[Google Scholar]
If you can't access any of the materials behind paywalls, please email me; I'm happy to share PDFs.
Networked Press Freedom [MIT Press]
In Networked Press Freedom, Mike Ananny offers a new way to think about freedom of the press in a time when media systems are in fundamental flux. Ananny challenges the idea that press freedom comes only from heroic, lone journalists who speak truth to power. Instead, drawing on journalism studies, institutional sociology, political theory, science and technology studies, and an analysis of ten years of journalism discourse about news and technology, he argues that press freedom emerges from social, technological, institutional, and normative forces that vie for power and fight for visions of democratic life. He shows how dominant, historical ideals of professionalized press freedom often mistook journalistic freedom from constraints for the public's freedom to encounter the rich mix of people and ideas that self-governance requires. Ananny's notion of press freedom ensures not only an individual right to speak, but also a public right to hear.
Bauhaus Futures [MIT Press]
[Co-edited with Laura Forlano & Molly Wright Steenson]
What would keep the Bauhaus up at night if it were practicing today? A century after its founding by Walter Gropius in Weimar, Germany, as an “experimental laboratory of the future,” who are the pioneering experimentalists who reinscribe or resist Bauhaus traditions? This book explores the varied legacies, influences, and futures of the Bauhaus.
Many of the animating issues of the Bauhaus—its integration of research, teaching, and practice; its experimentation with materials; its democratization of design; its open-minded, heterogeneous approach to ideas, theories, methods, and styles—remain relevant. The contributors to Bauhaus Futures address these but go further, considering issues that design has largely ignored for the last hundred years: gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, and disability. Their contributions take the form of essays, photo-essays, interviews, manifestos, diagrams, and even a play. They discuss, among other things, the Bauhaus curriculum and its contemporary offshoots; Bauhaus legacies at the MIT Media Lab, Black Mountain College, and elsewhere; the conflict between the Bauhaus ideal of humanist universalism and current approaches to design concerned with race and justice; designed objects, from the iconic to the precarious; textile and weaving work by women in the Bauhaus and the present day; and design and technology.
Oops? Interdisciplinary Stories of Sociotechnical Error [International Journal of Communication]
[Co-edited with Simogne Hudson]
A collection of essays in the International Journal of Communication, authored by participants in the USC research group I co-lead, MASTS (Media As SocioTechnical Systems). Tracing sociotechnical errors across varied disciplines, sites of inquiry, and normative stakes, it situates errors as complex and affectively charged relations between humans and nonhumans. Told as interdisciplinary stories, errors become ways to see how precarious systems are, who has the power to diagnose their breakdowns, and what alternative sociotechnical arrangements may be prompted by centering their breakdown, maintenance, and repair.
Sociotechnical Change: Tracing Flows, Languages, and Stakes Across Diverse Cases [International Journal of Communication]
[Co-edited with Simogne Hudson]
A collection of essays in the International Journal of Communication, authored by participants in the USC research group I co-lead, MASTS (Media As SocioTechnical Systems). A set of empirically grounded, conceptually provocative, and wonderfully playful essays illustrating how sociotechnical change emerges from messy but traceable collisions of people, practices, genealogies, representations, infrastructures, and values.
A Critical Field Guide for Working with Machine Learning Datasets -- Sarah Ciston (author) [A project by the Knowing Machines initiative]
[Co-edited with Kate Crawford]
A pragmatic and conceptually rich guide to help students, journalists, artists, researchers and developers conscientiously create, use, and critically analyze the datasets underpinning machine learning. Authored by Sarah Ciston (co-edited by me and Kate Crawford), it combines critical theories of AI and data science to offer, in clear and concise accessible language and a beautiful layout, "questions, suggestions, strategies, and resources for working with existing machine learning datasets at every phase of their lifecycle."
[Yale
University Press, under contract]
Absence Matters [under contract with Yale University Press]
A critical examination of the role that silences and absences play in the mediated public life. Through mini case studies and provocative examples, Ananny challenges the assumption that the solution to bad speech is more speech, tracing how journalists, social media, and infrastructures creatively create, interpret, and navigate absence.
Ananny, M. & S. Hudson (2025). Oops? Sociotechnical Errors as Interdisciplinary Stories of Complex Relations, Shared Consequences, and Resilient Hopes. International Journal of Communication.
Ananny, M. & J. Karr (2025). How media unions stabilize technological hype: Tracing organized journalism’s discursive constructions of Generative Artificial Intelligence. Digital Journalism.
Grover, R., Widera, J. & M. Ananny. (2025). Data and its Disaffection: Toward a Relational and Affective Understanding of Datafication. New Media & Society.
Ananny, M. (2024). Making Generative Artificial Intelligence a Public Problem. Javnost - The Public, 31(1): 89-105.
Finn, M. & M. Ananny. (2024). Making events: How anticipatory infrastructures produce shared temporalities. New Media & Society.
Ananny, M., & Hudson, S. (2024). Creating a Language of and for Sociotechnical Change. International Journal of Communication, 18.
Ananny, M. (2023). What a ‘Platform View’ Has to Offer. Digital Journalism, 11(8): 1568-1575
Ananny, M. (2023). Making Mistakes: Constructing Algorithmic Errors to Understand Sociotechnical Power. Osiris, 38, 223-241.
Ananny, M. (2022). Seeing like an algorithmic error. Yale Journal of Law and Technology, 24: 342-364.
Ananny, M. (2022). Reflections on 'The Panoptic Sort'. International Journal of Communication, 16, 1626–1628
Ananny, M. & M. Finn (2020). Anticipatory news infrastructures: Seeing journalism’s expectations of future publics in its sociotechnical systems. New Media & Society, 22(9): 1600-1618.
Ananny, M. (2020). Making up political people: How social media create the ideals, definitions, and probabilities of political speech. Georgetown Law Technology Review 4(1): 351-366.
Ananny, M. & K. Crawford. (2018). Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability. New Media & Society, 20(3): 973-989.
Ananny, M. & L. Bighash. (2016). Why drop a paywall? Mapping industry accounts of online news decommodification. International Journal of Communication, 10: 3359-3380.
Ananny, M. (2016). Networked news time: Tracing the sources and forces governing online news rhythms. Digital Journalism, 4(4):414-431.
Ananny, M. (2016). Toward an ethics of algorithms: Convening, observation, probability, and timeliness. Science, Technology, & Human Values, 41(1): 93-117.
Ananny, M. (2015). From noxious to public? Tracing ethical dynamics of social media platform conversions. Social Media & Society, 1(1): 1-3.
Ananny, M. & K. Crawford. (2015). A liminal press: Situating news app designers within a field of networked news production. Digital Journalism, 3(2): 192-208.
Brubaker, J., Ananny, M. & K. Crawford. (2014). Departing glances: A sociotechnical account of leaving Grindr. New Media & Society, 18(3): 373-390.
Ananny, M. (2014). Networked press freedom and social media: Tracing historical and contemporary forces in press-public relations. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 19(4): 938-956.
Marwick, A., Gray, M.L., & Ananny, M. (2013). 'Dolphins are just gay sharks': Glee and the queer case of transmedia as text and object. Television & New Media, 15(7): 627-647.
Kreiss, D. & M. Ananny (2013). Responsibilities of the state: Rethinking the case and possibilities for public support of journalism. First Monday, 18(4).
Ananny, M. (2012). Press-public collaboration as infrastructure: Tracing news organizations and programming publics in application programming interfaces. American Behavioral Scientist, 57(5):623-642.
Lotan, G., Graeff, E. Ananny, M. Gaffney, D., Pearce, I. & d. boyd. (2011). The revolutions were tweeted: Information flows during the 2011 Tunisian and Egyptian Revolutions. International Journal of Communication, 5: 1375-1405.
Ananny, M., & Kreiss, D. (2011). A new contract for the press: Copyright, public domain journalism, and self-governance in a digital age. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 28(4): 314-333.
Ananny, M., Strohecker, C. & K. Biddick (2004). Shifting scales on common ground: Developing personal expressions and public opinions. International Journal of Continuing Engineering Education and Life-Long Learning, 14(6): 484-505.
Ananny, M. (2025). Recursive Press Freedom as the Capacity to Control and Learn From Mistakes. In Jones, RonNell Andersen & Sonja R. West (Eds). The Future of Press Freedom. Cambridge University Press.
[also at Knight First Amendment Institute Future of Press Freedom series]
Ananny, M. (2020). Presence of absence: Exploring the democratic significance of silence. In Reich, R., Landemore, H. & L. Bernholz (Eds). Digital Technology & Democratic Theory. University of Chicago Press.
Ananny, M. (2020). Advocating for what? The nonprofit press and models of the public. In Powell, WW. & P. Bromley (Eds.) The Nonprofit Sector. Stanford University Press.
Ananny, M. (2018). Anticipating news: What Trump teaches us about how the networked press can and should imagine. In Boczkowski, Pablo J. & Zizi Papacharissi (Eds.) Trump and The Media (pp. 101-110). MIT Press.
Ananny, M. (2017). The whitespace press: Designing absences into networked news. In Boczkowski, P. & C.W. Anderson (Eds.) Remaking the news (pp. 129-146). MIT Press.
Ananny, M. & T. Gillespie (2016). Public platforms: Beyond the cycle of shocks and exceptions. The Platform Society, Oxford UK, Sept 22-23.
Ananny, M. (2015). Creating proper distance through networked infrastructure: Examining Google Glass for evidence of moral, journalistic witnessing. In M. Carlson & S. C. Lewis (Eds.), Boundaries of journalism: Professionalism, practices, and participation (pp. 83-99). Routledge.
Ananny, M. (2014). Critical news making and the paradox of "do-it-yourself news". In M. Ratto & M. Boler (Eds.), DIY citizenship: Critical making and social media (pp. 359-372). MIT Press.
Ananny, M. & C. Strohecker. (2009). TexTales: Creating interactive forums with urban publics. In Foth, M. (Ed.) Handbook of Research on Urban Informatics: The Practice and Promise of the Real-Time City (pp. 68-86). Information Science Reference, IGI Global.
Ananny, M. & M. Pearce (Eds) (2025). How We're Using AI. Columbia Journalism Review.
Ananny, M. & J. Karr (2025). News unions are grappling with generative AI. Our new study shows what they’re most concerned about. Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. (2024). To Reckon with Generative AI, Make It a Public Problem. Issues in Science & Technology.
Ananny, M. & J. Karr (2023). Press freedom means controlling the language of AI. Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. (2023). Datasets as Institutions. Knowing Machines.
Ananny, M. (2023). An infrastructural approach to digital authoritarianism. Global Affairs Canada & The Berggruen Institute.
Ananny, M. (2021). “Public”: A Pandemic Diary of a Future Idea. Social Science Research Council.
Ananny, M. (2021). Journalists are grappling with their relationships to big tech companies. It’s time for academics to do the same. Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. & D. Kreiss (2020). Put Trump's Tweets on a Time Delay. WIRED.
Ananny, M. (2020). Toward better tech journalism. Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. (2020). Public interest and media infrastructures: Regulating the technology companies that make ‘pictures in our heads’. Canadian Commission on Democratic Expression, Public Policy Forum.
Ananny, M. (2019). Tech platforms are where public life is increasingly constructed, and their motivations are far from neutral. Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. (2019). Probably speech, maybe free: Toward a probabilistic understanding of online expression and platform governance. Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University.
Ananny, M. (2018). Freedom from what?: It’s time to broaden the definition of a ‘free press.’ Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. (2018). The partnership press: Lessons for platform-publisher collaborations as Facebook and news outlets team to fight misinformation. Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Ananny, M. (2018). Checking in with the Facebook fact-checking partnership. Columbia Journalism Review.
Ananny, M. & T. Owen (2017). Ethics and governance is getting lost in the AI frenzy. Globe & Mail.
Ananny, M. (2016). Teaching on day one of Trump. Culture Digitally.
Ananny, M. (2016). It’s time to reimagine the role of a public editor, starting at The New York Times. Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. & K. Crawford (2014). Designer or journalist: Who shapes the news you read in your favorite apps? Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. (2013). Invisible hand or thoughtful design? Ownership and influence in the sale of The Washington Post. Harvard Nieman Lab .
Ananny, M. (2013). Breaking news pragmatically: Some reflections on silence and timing in networked journalism. Harvard Nieman Lab.
Ananny, M. (2011). The curious connection between gay applications and sex offenders. The Atlantic.
Ananny, M. (2025). The Human Journey through Media and Technology. From Research to Imapct | The Walrus & Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation. HOST: Ann Elisabeth Samson.
van Den Bulck, H. & M. Ananny. (2024). Epistemic Challenges and Democratic Accountability in European Media. The Democratic Epistemic Capacities in the Age of Algorithms. HOST: Yann Ilunga
Ananny, M. (2023). Synthetic Media: AI & Journalism. Knowing Machines. HOST: Tamar Avishai
Ananny, M. & K. Crawford (2023). What Lives Inside Our Datasets? An Introduction to Knowing Machines. Knowing Machines. HOST: Tamar Avishai
Ananny, M. (2023). What's Really Happening when an Algorithm Makes a Mistake. Untangled. HOST: Charley Johnson
Hansen, M. & M. Ananny. (2019). Making the Census Count. Stats & Stories. HOSTS: John Bailer & Rosemary Pennington
Ananny, M. (2019). Digital Media, Platforms, & Governance. Human Centered, Stanford Center for Advanced Studies in the Behavioral Sciences. HOST: John Markoff
Ananny, M. (2018). Networked Press Freedom. New Books Network. HOST: Monica Wilkie
