Dr. Jess Maddox
@drjessmaddox
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Social media expert. Asst. prof, @ua_jcm . Author, The Internet is for Cats, @rutgersupress . Words @niemanlab | @wired | @slate | @conversationUS . Thoughts mine
Tuscaloosa, AL
Joined August 2012
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Hello new followers! I’m Jess, tenure-track prof at the University of Alabama. You can expect tweets on:
- social media platforms and cultures
- academic life
- critiquing social science as a dominant paradigm, particularly in qualitative research
- dogs, memes, and puns
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There’s a therapy dog at this airport to help people with travel anxiety, and she’s a very good girl who keeps eating things off the floor and rolling over for belly rubs. Is currently blocking boarding. Perfection and no notes.
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If you were the type of kid that got excited to buy school supplies at the end of each summer I regret to inform you that you have a PhD now.
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Shout out to Interlibrary Loan, the unsung heroes of higher education.
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My only contribution to the nepo baby in academia discourse is this: I’m the first and only person in my family to have a PhD. I was legitimately surprised when I started this job and learned how rare that was.
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My take, and I know everyone has different circumstances that my opinions can’t account for, is that as a chair, unless it’s completely unavoidable, you don’t put that student in a room unless you know they’re passing a defense.
Fellow academics: if you've ever failed someone in a PhD defence, how did you break the news to them so as not to be cruel?
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I’m overwhelmed right now and don’t even know what to say - but I was just notified I was awarded tenure and promotion at the University of Alabama.
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Non-academic people, I can’t reiterate how insane and impressive it is that Dr. Jill Biden taught a 5/5 load while Second Lady and will continue to do so as First Lady.
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I graduated from my MA/PHD programs with 48k in student loan debt. I was “fully funded,” which is the biggest lie we tell prospective graduate students.
I made every payment on time before covid and now I owe 54k.
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Let me tell y’all about this dog.
Finished the last semester of a BA with me.
A year in Atlanta
An MA
A PhD
And earned tenure yesterday. 13/10 one educated good boy.
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Hi, BookTok researcher here - TikTok reading cultures have helped usher in some of the best publishing sales years in recent memory. I know it doesn’t fit with social media moral panic narratives to attribute an increase in youth reading to social media, but here we are.
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Taylor Swift eras as qualitative methods with no explanations, a thread.
Debut: Participant observation
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A coauthor & I got an article rejection today. One reasons was, on our snowball sampling interviews, they said: “What did you do, just interview your friends?”
Journals, please do not send qual manuscripts to hardcore quant reviewers. I know some of you get it. But not all do.
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A few weeks back, someone I know colloquially from the conference circuit sent me this Facebook message in response to me changing my FB profile picture to a bridesmaid photo from my friend’s wedding. Men in academia, please don’t do this.
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Not sure if I’m getting too sassy or just fed up with being told by reviewers that 1, my research doesn’t matter, and 2, qualitative methods aren’t valid.
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I do teach TV writing! My students do half hours pilots. Here’s 5 (of many!) I’ll be showing in the spring:
1. The Good Place (world building)
2. Abbott Elementary (structure)
3. Ted Lasso (structure)
4. What We Do in the Shadows (dialogue)
5. Girls5eva (humor, jokes)
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I’m sorry but I need everyone to stop what they’re doing and look at this adorable picture of my dog.
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Excited and honored to have learned this morning that I am the recipient of the University of Alabama's 2023 President's Research Award for Emerging Scholar in the Humanities.
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If you’re wondering about why celebrities and Hollywood are so invested in the Georgia election, it has something to do with the $9.5 billion economic impact the film industry has in Georgia.
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I’m completely redesigning my doctoral seminar in qualitative methods - I’m looking for good articles that teach students how to actually analyze data and do write ups. Send me your favorites please!
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I'm teaching Social Media & Society for the first time this fall, and I thought I'd share my syllabus. I hope others find it helpful! I'm also sure I'll do things differently next time, but we all know we have to go through one semester to figure that out.
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Every time a Facebook “scandal” breaks, I’m always like, “wait, didn’t we already know this?”
And then I remember no one listens to academics who have been researching this stuff for decades and Facebook has been trying to gaslight the public for just as long.
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Enough with this humble bragging about your acceptances and rejections to prestigious schools and programs, state school folks rise up.
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I try to avoid commenting on how other people run their classrooms but I hope this professor never knows peace.
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Reviewer: I know this has become a trend in internet research, but this method of data collection is unsuitable for a high-impact journal like [REDACTED].
Me: *immediately searches the journal and finds six recently published articles using the exact method of data collection*
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My tenure and promotion file is due this week and I’m tempted to just submit this as my letter
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Update: This paper was just accepted in its current form to a top 20 communications journal.
Defend your work.
Not sure if I’m getting too sassy or just fed up with being told by reviewers that 1, my research doesn’t matter, and 2, qualitative methods aren’t valid.
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Well, y’all systemically gutted them and told everyone they would never get jobs studying them, so…??
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Okay so let me clear - my parents had bachelors degrees. I don’t claim first gen status for that reason. By the time I started graduate education, my mom had passed and my dad was long gone.
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Academia needs to be honest with prospective students about what “fully funded” really means. And programs need to be honest with students that they probably won’t make as much as they think on the other side, if they can even get an academic job due to the oversaturated market.
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@susanbordson
@Annie_Wu_22
Not a grand oversimplification at all. Any time we’re systemically silencing folks, or even trying to, it’s far from a simple issue
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I still had to take out loans during my program because “fully funded” doesn’t cover institutional fees, I was not paid for the summer months, and living off of $1200/month for nine months of the year is unsustainable.
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Prepping for the first lecture in social media & society tomorrow.
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Academia discourages those without professor parents, familial help, and generational wealth from entering. Add SCOTUS’s affirmative action position from the other day and this is extremely discouraging, to say the least.
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I just deleted my work email off my phone, and I feel very freed at this newly established boundary.
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Everyone is making industry and pop culture predictions for 2024. I thought I’d make some academia ones.
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The Internet is for Cats has a cover! The team at
@RutgersUPress
absolutely nailed it. It should be up on their website in a few days.
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Started the year with a desk reject, saying an article was “too descriptive.”
I’ve noticed over the last two years that “descriptive” has become a popular criticism for research. Let’s discuss why this is stupid.
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I waffled on whether to share this or not, but ultimately decided to make sure this type of behavior doesn’t get normalized. We have to look out for each other, and no one should have to take this for doing their job and simply existing on social media.
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Reviewing a mixed methods paper right now and you know what I’m not doing? Demanding the authors engage with reflexivity, critical concepts, inductive reasoning, etc.
Accept👏🏻authors👏🏻work👏🏻on👏🏻the👏🏻terms👏🏻they👏🏻set👏🏻out👏🏻
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Content creators need to take note and not be tempted to cross a picket line during the WGA strike.
I think content creators need to really familiarize ourselves with the strike and the wga’s requests. There’s a non-zero chance that the networks/studios reach out to creators to somehow try to fill the gap during the strike — friends, say no.
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So it’s going to give you more of a comment than a question?
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I babysat. I did freelance writing and social media strategy. Which, I should add, technically violated the terms of my funding because you are forbidden from seeking external income while on university assistantship.
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LinkedIn is a vastly understudied social media platform. Like people are just here…posting about jobs and performing capitalism all of the time?!??
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What professors in the South wear under our regalia
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Just got an accepted with minor revisions 🥰 and I’m excited for y’all to see this one. It’s a methodological piece rooted in my using TikTok to recruit participants, arguing that social media researchers can learn a lot about recruitment best practices from Creator Studies
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My work, “The secret life of pet Instagram accounts: Joy, resistance, and commodification in the internet’s cute economy” is now published! This is one of the first studies to look at pets on social media. DM me if you’d like a copy!
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Extremely frustrated that after three rounds of R&R, the journal rejected our paper because one reviewer kept claiming we weren’t taking their concerns seriously. Not only is that insulting and ego-filled, it’s also not a helpful comment to make a manuscript better.
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Re: Twitter.
I truly haven’t seen a billionaire implode something this badly since last week.
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Some advice for PhD students in choosing an advisor. “Fit” doesn’t always have to mean 100% alignment with research interests. It can be 75% research alignment, but as long as an advisor is supportive and not throwing up unnecessary roadblocks, it will be a “fit.”
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4.5 years ago I was told we could never offer content creation classes; those weren’t real skills; how could we justify teaching such things to parents?
Anyway today I launch my university’s (and dare I say the southeastern conference’s??) first how to be a content creator class
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I don’t regret what I’ve done. I love what I do. But I wish this country made it easier for me to live without stress and love what I do.
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I’m scheduled to give a talk at
@TempleUniv
next month. If
@TUGSA_6290
is still on strike, I will cancel.
My mother didn’t raise someone who crosses picket lines.
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The never-ending struggle of being a qualitative scholar.
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There are no words for how much I love this article, and as long as I teach qualitative methods to doctoral students we will always read this on the first day of seminar (like we are today).
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Before I embarked on my grad school journey, I remember questioning whether I should actually do this because of the loans. But my parents weren’t in the picture. I didn’t have family to help me. If I wanted to enter academia, student loan debt was the only way.
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I get a lot of hate mail and dick pics doing public scholarship, but getting this from an acquaintance is different.
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If you’re feeling down about an ICA rejection, please know that one time I won a top paper award and then got a desk rejection on the same paper from that same division’s journal.
Take everything in stride. Everything’s constructed in academia.
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Out now!! Open Access! I've never been so excited about a a paper: "Assembling “Sides” of TikTok: Examining Community, Culture, and Interface through a BookTok Case Study" --> Work done with my oustanding undergraduate research mentee, Fiona Gill.
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Journals: Take months, if not years, to get back to you.
Proofs: Do these in 48 hour or we’ll set your article on fire.
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Holy crap.
The Internet is for Cats, coming to a book seller near you on 11/11/22.
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Okay since we circle back to this topic every few months:
- don’t sleep with your students
- don’t be creepy with your students
- don’t abuse power over your students
- and stop rewarding people who are known to do these things with promotions, leadership, etc.
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You know tomorrow’s lecture in social media & society will be good when you’re building from these books:
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Lots of questions about why the jokes were so prevalent during the submarine disaster.
So let’s talk about internet memes and…*checks notes* Albert Camus.
Basically, we can learn a lot about we we collectively respond to events with memes the way we do because of absurdism.
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I’m a social media researcher at the University of Alabama. Here are some thoughts on
#rushtok
- all mine, none of these thoughts represent my employer.
1. Some context. UA has the largest Greek life system in the country, with over 30% of undergrads in a frat or sorority.
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Once 🟦☁️ leaves beta, I don’t think it’s going to be the haven everyone currently thinks it is.
A thread on 🐘 and other decentralized bird app alternatives. With, I might add, some rather embarrassing confessions from someone who is supposed to be an expert in this.
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@KenonABrown
I saw a child run up to her mom in target today literally doing skips with her binder and I was triggered. And can predict her future.
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Update: Unprompted by us, the editor reached out to my coworker and I in a very kind, apologetic email and acknowledged the oversight in allowing this comment to make it through. They were very helpful, and I was glad the experience ended on a positive note.
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I wrote a whole book on how these lines between “cute/wholesome” and “ugly/horrific” social media get violated. When trust and safety aren’t taken seriously by platforms, the “good” becomes the easiest thing to manipulate because people aren’t paying attention to it.
Thread of new reporting:
For the last couple of weeks, if you searched "cat" on Twitter, the search box would autocomplete to "cat in a blender."
The video you would see when you clicked through appeared to show a kitten being slaughtered.
How did this happen? I found out.
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Listen. Nothing has made me a better academic writer than all of my public scholarship. It breaks you out of the “ivory tower” and teaches you how to avoid jargon and explain esoteric things to everyday people. It’s HARD. And it should be valued more.
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My tenure celebrations on a night of forecasted tornadoes in Alabama. I’m quite content.
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A little while back I asked for some help on here for the best resources on analysis for my doctoral qualitative research seminar. Many asked to see the final product. Here you go!
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My article, “The secret life of pet Instagram accounts: Joy, resistance, and commodification in the Internet’s cute economy” now is in issue at New Media & Society. Link below, DM me if you’d like a copy!
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Out now! DM me if you need access to a free PDF.
And once again, shout out to Convergence for having some of the most helpful reviews and the most streamlined process I've ever experienced!
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New pub! Out now in Information, Communication & Society: I document & analyze the performance strategies of veterinarians in conveying health and profession info on TikTok and Instagram.
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Ok, this is a silly internet quiz, but I think I’m going to have my phd students in my qualitative methods class take it. Also, my answer should surprise no one:
What is your epistemology?
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If you remember where you were when “yeah!” was first popular, go drink some water, stretch, use some retinol, and check on your retirement fund.
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Excited to be able to share this news - for the past few weeks I have been consulting with Senator Steve Padilla to update California's Coogan Act, which protects Hollywood's child entertainers, to include the children of influencers & family vloggers.
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Article acceptance!! My work on BeReal has been accepted in Convergence. I'm excited about this piece for a lot of reasons, even though BeReal's heyday is long over.
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Since tomorrow is my first PhD seminar in qualitative research methods, I thought I’d share the readings I have my students dive into throughout the semester.
Week 1: Dismantling the dominant paradigm:
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My entire experience of watching this season of Stranger Things is going to be viewed through the lens of I worked at Aeropostale in "Starcourt Mall" in high school.
Glad to see Gwinnett Place Mall is still good for something.
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@FreeBlackTX
My own methods professor and dissertation advisor,
@caa2410
, used to make Meryl Streep memes about methods before ever class. I was inspired by her!
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@APTherapyDogs
@BHMAirport
Sisie was the best part of my travel today!!! Thank you for the work you do!!!
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@amymarieboyle
I didn’t. Some friends encouraged me to, but I defriended and blocked instead.
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Thank you everyone, for showing my senior man so much love! I told him he was getting popular on the internet and he was unimpressed, as per usual.
I’m sorry but I need everyone to stop what they’re doing and look at this adorable picture of my dog.
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