Every time I start writing something about The Situation, it seems pointless. Both the media environment and the world itself seem to be spinning out of control. The bubble of Boomer Realism has been popped. The weirdness which has been bubbling since 2008 has flooded the territory; old maps seem worse than useless. I’ve got nothing better than aphorisms to offer to understand the present.
Thankfully, my job interacting with students and colleagues forces me to be a bit more concrete. I’m very excited about the re-launch of the APSA Experiments Section Newsletter, which I’m editing along with Krissy Lunz Trujillo — check it out here.
But mostly today I want to talk about the graduate seminar I just finished teaching, about Media, Social Media and Politics. The syllabus is here. To summarize what we spent the most time talking about in class, I’ll quote a sentence from Green et al (2025): “The online information ecosystem in the early twenty-first century is characterized by unbundling and abundance.”