Alyssa Smith
PhD Candidate, Northeastern University
Talk recording
Complex systems can have particular properties, or exhibit certain behaviors, that are not characteristic of their constituent parts. This phenomenon, which we refer to as emergence, is a common occurrence in complex systems like the various sociotechnical systems we will visit in this dissertation. Understanding how power operates in information ecosystems requires us to move past the question of structure versus agency and instead think about emergent power: how do networks of individual actors cause events to happen, when those same actors working in isolation could not? This dissertation works to reconcile structure and agency, in the specific setting of information ecosystems on social media, by characterizing the emergent patterns of power that result from the collective agency of networked individuals. It does so by examining three manifestations of emergence in information ecosystems at varying scales, using methods that range from large-scale causal inference to constructivist grounded theory.
About the speaker
Alyssa (she/her) is a fifth-year PhD candidate working with Brooke Foucault Welles and David Lazer. Her current work focuses on the human impacts of (and the ways humans can impact) sociotechnical systems. She looks at three networked phenomena in her research – civic discourses, attention dynamics, and information spread – and analyzes how they influence power in networked sociotechnical systems. She uses mixed methods, ranging from terabyte-scale datasets to autoethnography, to make sense of the world. Before joining NetSI, she received a B.S. in Humanities and Engineering with Comparative Media Studies and Computer Science from MIT in 2017; after that, she worked in tech for 4 years.
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