Jessica Maddox
Biographic Data
| ID | 4208296 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica Maddox |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica |
| FAMILY NAME | Maddox |
| SIGNATURE | MADDOX J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Alabama |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6549-1048 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 55 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 27 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2017 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
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The days of television have repeatedly been deemed over. Today, we are told, television is a dying medium replaced by viral and new digital platforms like TikTok where millions gather every day to consume content. This paper is an extended literature review of television and TikTok scholarship to highlight similarities and differences amongst key concepts in both fields. By focusing on political economy, textual analysis, and audience/reception s…
Mapping the relationship between journalistic discourse, tech industry layoffs, and artificial intelligence
The tech industry’s 2023–2024 mass layoffs represented a critical moment in which an infallible industry seemed to suddenly lay bare its weak spots. Historically, Big Tech and the American press have had a complementary relationship, journalism often reinforcing an industry long viewed as too big to fail. Through textual analysis of long-form coverage of the tech layoff crisis, we identify three themes. First, even amid layoffs, Big Tech is prese…
Groomers, ‘Titties’, & Streamers, Oh My
Twitch is the largest social live-streaming platform in the Global North, and has historically been an important advertising and community hub for the gaming industry (Johnson & Woodcock, 2018). Twitch’s owner, Amazon, demands increasing growth and profit (Yin-Poole, 2024), so the platform must continue attracting new streamers, viewers, and advertisers. However, these new audiences may be at odds with Twitch’s core base of white, Asian, cisgende…
Using Creator Studies insights to optimize participant recruitment on TikTok
Social media have long been thought of in qualitative inquiry as objects of study, as well as a tool to access hard to reach populations. However, less is known about how social media can be strategically harnessed to improve and optimize participant recruitment in qualitative studies for any study, not just those focusing on hard-to-reach populations. By critically reflecting on my own use of TikTok as a site of recruitment for a previously cond…
On Air and on TikTok
Using in-depth interviews with 17 U.S. on-air TV journalists, this study examines how broadcast journalists are using TikTok, and why they perceive it to be valuable for their professional brand. Using concepts of professional role orientation and role performance, findings indicate that journalists produce mostly behind-the-scenes style content and share very little news on the platform. Those interviewed suggest that the content is intended to …
Us, Them, Right, Wrong
As TikTok exploded in popularity following the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, use from individual users skyrocketed. During this time, political content became largely ubiquitous across the app. Politics play out daily on TikTok, as individuals craft messages within the technological affordances and sociocultural dynamics of the app. This study expands on research regarding civic engagement in digital public spheres by …
She’s my bitch eating crackers”
More real, or just more surveillance? Panopticism and shifting authenticity paradigms in BeReal
BeReal has become a popular app among younger social media users, with a premise that privileges a brief, random, and unvarnished look into one’s life once a day. Hailed as the ‘anti-Instagram’ or ‘anti-TikTok’, the app eschews filters, performance, influencers, and sponsored content in favor of authenticity. While curated authenticity has long been a hallmark of internet culture, BeReal seems to employ authenticity not as a performance strategy …
Micro-celebrities of information
Influencers are a defining feature of the contemporary social media landscape, but little has interrogated how these individuals may privilege information sharing as essential to their brand. This article interrogates the role of the knowledge influencer, or those who perform micro-celebrity to convey information and expertise to lay audiences. Knowledge influencers can be doctors, lawyers, or anyone, regardless of class, who is an expert in thei…
The Revolution Will Be Forwarded
WhatsApp is one the world's most popular social media apps, as well as one of the most popular chat-based, closed platforms. Utilizing the insights from 19 in-depth interviews, we approach WhatsApp from a cultural perspective of ritual communication, seeking to understand how people make sense of WhatsApp use in their daily lives. We found WhatsApp is largely used to maintain community and fellowship with friends, coworkers, family, and even acqu…
Assembling 'Sides' of TikTok
The term 'side' has emerged to describe communities on the short-form video app TikTok. But what discursive work does the metaphor of side do to describe online communities? Through a case study with a textual analysis of the culture, technology, interface, and platform vernaculars present in reading fandom TikTok, BookTok, we explore how user practice and app features intertwine to establish sides of TikTok as relational, individualistically pos…
Hiding in the echo chamber
During a time of heightened political polarization in India, use of the communication app WhatsApp skyrocketed. Alongside benefits of the app come a slew of dangerous outcomes, such as the proliferation of misinformation on the chat-based app. To this end, we conducted 19 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Indian users of WhatsApp over the age of 40. The aim of study was to examine how WhatsApp users engage with the platform and the conten…
The Internet Is for Cats
Thus spoke Zuckerberg
As technology chief executive officers have become public figures, their personae operate as loci for journalistic discourse about the intersection of moral responsibilities, regulation, and political-economic power of the tech industry. They possess a power often construed as beyond the reach of politics or civil society to address. This study considers how the ubiquity of tech power has become a kind of common sense in journalistic discourse, s…
Of essential workers and working from home
This article considers how reporting about work during the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a field of discourse that challenged the ideological workings of neoliberalism. By documenting the risks and stresses workers of all classes faced during the first year of the pandemic, the reporting began to question neoliberal capitalism as socially unsustainable. Drawing on a corpus of 151 long-form articles and commentary, we show how journalistic discour…
The Internet Is for Cats
Oral Healthcare Implications of Dedicated Online Communities
The current study explores communication expressed by participants in a subreddit surrounding oral health care, moderated by dentists and dental hygienists. The corpus was analyzed through Leximancer, a computer-assisted program used for computational content analyses of large data sets. Users' personal disclosures about ongoing dental concerns, advice about others' self-care, and the role of interpersonal communication with and among health care…
Leaning in, pushed out
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the postfeminist ideal of “having it all” became more contradictory, as women struggled to juggle work and childcare. This research, using critical discourse analysis, examines how lifestyle and explanatory journalism made sense of this problematic ideal as it became evidently untenable during the pandemic. Here, journalism operates as a discursive structure, obscuring its own complicity in sustaining postfeminist an…
“Exactly What I Needed for a Good Night’s Rest”
ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, has become an international phenomenon. But what exactly ASMR is remains misunderstood. ASMR itself is a relatively new term, coined by scientists in 2010, but it describes an age-old feeling: the sensation of tingling on the scalp and spine. Biologically, it has been compared to fission or paresthesia. ASMRtists refer to this feeling as tingles. To this end, this research is informed by the results …
What do creators and viewers owe each other? Microcelebrity, reciprocity, and transactional tingles in the ASMR YouTube community
ASMR has skyrocketed to international popularity in recent years, and a thriving community and cultural exists around the phenomenon on YouTube. However, misunderstandings about the practice persist, and little is known about this community in terms of its texts and practices. This research draws on a multiyear digital ethnography into the ASMR culture and community on YouTube, where I analyze how microcelebrity, the attention economy, platform-s…
Interrogating LeftTube
For the past several years, media commentary and cultural analysis has grown increasingly fixated on YouTube as a radicalization hub, particularly around extremist, alt-right content. However, a growing community of leftist YouTube content creators, loosely coalescing into the platform’s “LeftTube,” have developed dialogic relationships with some of YouTube’s most extreme content. This work focuses on one specific LeftTube creator, ContraPoints, …
The secret life of pet Instagram accounts
A popular sentiment is that the Internet is for cute animal photos, but little has explored the visual cultures of pets and social media. The relationship between pets and social media is particularly prominent on Instagram, where pet owners often run Instagram accounts on behalf of their pets. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 23 individuals who run Instagram accounts for their pets, I discuss three dimensions of pet photos and social media:…
Guidelines Without Lines, Communities Without Borders
When faced with conflicts, social media platforms harken back to their front-facing, user-friendly documents. These documents, often called community standards, or something similar, lay out the practices allowed on their sites. It is well documented in legal scholarship how technology companies incorporate particular First Amendment jurisprudence into these community standards documents, and this work aims to empirically examine this claim. Spec…
Be a badass with a good ass”
StrongIsTheNewSkinny has become a bodily mantra found across social media, and it is a postfeminist beauty myth. But given postfeminist contradictions, this presents a terrain in which only certain women are even allowed to attempt to achieve the unobtainable body. This is compounded by race and cisgenderism. To unpack this tenuous relationship, this work uses critical discourse analysis to examine image macros associated with the hashtag. The ke…
Kim Kardashian is my new BFF
Mobile-based celebrity games are a by-product of a new, more feminized video game industry. Within celebrity games, the player engages with celebrity culture in a variety of ways, often being transformed into their own brand of celebrity. Celebrity games are a form of hypertrophic media, based on the dyadic interactions between the player and celebrity. Within this, one becomes a looking-glass celebrity—an enculturation process by which the celeb…
The secret life of pet Instagram accounts
A popular sentiment is that the Internet is for cute animal photos, but little has explored the visual cultures of pets and social media. The relationship between pets and social media is particularly prominent on Instagram, where pet owners often run Instagram accounts on behalf of their pets. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 23 individuals who run Instagram accounts for their pets, I discuss three dimensions of pet photos and social media:…
Thus spoke Zuckerberg
As technology chief executive officers have become public figures, their personae operate as loci for journalistic discourse about the intersection of moral responsibilities, regulation, and political-economic power of the tech industry. They possess a power often construed as beyond the reach of politics or civil society to address. This study considers how the ubiquity of tech power has become a kind of common sense in journalistic discourse, s…
Guidelines Without Lines, Communities Without Borders
When faced with conflicts, social media platforms harken back to their front-facing, user-friendly documents. These documents, often called community standards, or something similar, lay out the practices allowed on their sites. It is well documented in legal scholarship how technology companies incorporate particular First Amendment jurisprudence into these community standards documents, and this work aims to empirically examine this claim. Spec…
Interrogating LeftTube
For the past several years, media commentary and cultural analysis has grown increasingly fixated on YouTube as a radicalization hub, particularly around extremist, alt-right content. However, a growing community of leftist YouTube content creators, loosely coalescing into the platform’s “LeftTube,” have developed dialogic relationships with some of YouTube’s most extreme content. This work focuses on one specific LeftTube creator, ContraPoints, …
Assembling 'Sides' of TikTok
The term 'side' has emerged to describe communities on the short-form video app TikTok. But what discursive work does the metaphor of side do to describe online communities? Through a case study with a textual analysis of the culture, technology, interface, and platform vernaculars present in reading fandom TikTok, BookTok, we explore how user practice and app features intertwine to establish sides of TikTok as relational, individualistically pos…
Be a badass with a good ass”
StrongIsTheNewSkinny has become a bodily mantra found across social media, and it is a postfeminist beauty myth. But given postfeminist contradictions, this presents a terrain in which only certain women are even allowed to attempt to achieve the unobtainable body. This is compounded by race and cisgenderism. To unpack this tenuous relationship, this work uses critical discourse analysis to examine image macros associated with the hashtag. The ke…
Of essential workers and working from home
This article considers how reporting about work during the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a field of discourse that challenged the ideological workings of neoliberalism. By documenting the risks and stresses workers of all classes faced during the first year of the pandemic, the reporting began to question neoliberal capitalism as socially unsustainable. Drawing on a corpus of 151 long-form articles and commentary, we show how journalistic discour…
Fear and Selfie‐Loathing in America
She’s my bitch eating crackers”
Leaning in, pushed out
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the postfeminist ideal of “having it all” became more contradictory, as women struggled to juggle work and childcare. This research, using critical discourse analysis, examines how lifestyle and explanatory journalism made sense of this problematic ideal as it became evidently untenable during the pandemic. Here, journalism operates as a discursive structure, obscuring its own complicity in sustaining postfeminist an…
Kim Kardashian is my new BFF
Mobile-based celebrity games are a by-product of a new, more feminized video game industry. Within celebrity games, the player engages with celebrity culture in a variety of ways, often being transformed into their own brand of celebrity. Celebrity games are a form of hypertrophic media, based on the dyadic interactions between the player and celebrity. Within this, one becomes a looking-glass celebrity—an enculturation process by which the celeb…
Of Internet born
This paper examines 96 US and British Commonwealth articles on the 2014 Wisconsin Slender Man stabbing. Using critical textual analysis, this study examined how media took a horror-themed meme from the underbelly of the Internet and curated a moral panic, once the meme was thrust into the international limelight. Because memes are a particular intersection of images and technology, media made sense of this meme-inspired attack in three ways: (1) …
Of Internet born
This paper examines 96 US and British Commonwealth articles on the 2014 Wisconsin Slender Man stabbing. Using critical textual analysis, this study examined how media took a horror-themed meme from the underbelly of the Internet and curated a moral panic, once the meme was thrust into the international limelight. Because memes are a particular intersection of images and technology, media made sense of this meme-inspired attack in three ways: (1) …
Kim Kardashian is my new BFF
Mobile-based celebrity games are a by-product of a new, more feminized video game industry. Within celebrity games, the player engages with celebrity culture in a variety of ways, often being transformed into their own brand of celebrity. Celebrity games are a form of hypertrophic media, based on the dyadic interactions between the player and celebrity. Within this, one becomes a looking-glass celebrity—an enculturation process by which the celeb…
Fear and Selfie‐Loathing in America
Be a badass with a good ass”
StrongIsTheNewSkinny has become a bodily mantra found across social media, and it is a postfeminist beauty myth. But given postfeminist contradictions, this presents a terrain in which only certain women are even allowed to attempt to achieve the unobtainable body. This is compounded by race and cisgenderism. To unpack this tenuous relationship, this work uses critical discourse analysis to examine image macros associated with the hashtag. The ke…
“Exactly What I Needed for a Good Night’s Rest”
ASMR, or Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response, has become an international phenomenon. But what exactly ASMR is remains misunderstood. ASMR itself is a relatively new term, coined by scientists in 2010, but it describes an age-old feeling: the sensation of tingling on the scalp and spine. Biologically, it has been compared to fission or paresthesia. ASMRtists refer to this feeling as tingles. To this end, this research is informed by the results …
What do creators and viewers owe each other? Microcelebrity, reciprocity, and transactional tingles in the ASMR YouTube community
ASMR has skyrocketed to international popularity in recent years, and a thriving community and cultural exists around the phenomenon on YouTube. However, misunderstandings about the practice persist, and little is known about this community in terms of its texts and practices. This research draws on a multiyear digital ethnography into the ASMR culture and community on YouTube, where I analyze how microcelebrity, the attention economy, platform-s…
Interrogating LeftTube
For the past several years, media commentary and cultural analysis has grown increasingly fixated on YouTube as a radicalization hub, particularly around extremist, alt-right content. However, a growing community of leftist YouTube content creators, loosely coalescing into the platform’s “LeftTube,” have developed dialogic relationships with some of YouTube’s most extreme content. This work focuses on one specific LeftTube creator, ContraPoints, …
The secret life of pet Instagram accounts
A popular sentiment is that the Internet is for cute animal photos, but little has explored the visual cultures of pets and social media. The relationship between pets and social media is particularly prominent on Instagram, where pet owners often run Instagram accounts on behalf of their pets. Drawing upon in-depth interviews with 23 individuals who run Instagram accounts for their pets, I discuss three dimensions of pet photos and social media:…
Guidelines Without Lines, Communities Without Borders
When faced with conflicts, social media platforms harken back to their front-facing, user-friendly documents. These documents, often called community standards, or something similar, lay out the practices allowed on their sites. It is well documented in legal scholarship how technology companies incorporate particular First Amendment jurisprudence into these community standards documents, and this work aims to empirically examine this claim. Spec…
Oral Healthcare Implications of Dedicated Online Communities
The current study explores communication expressed by participants in a subreddit surrounding oral health care, moderated by dentists and dental hygienists. The corpus was analyzed through Leximancer, a computer-assisted program used for computational content analyses of large data sets. Users' personal disclosures about ongoing dental concerns, advice about others' self-care, and the role of interpersonal communication with and among health care…
Leaning in, pushed out
During the Covid-19 pandemic, the postfeminist ideal of “having it all” became more contradictory, as women struggled to juggle work and childcare. This research, using critical discourse analysis, examines how lifestyle and explanatory journalism made sense of this problematic ideal as it became evidently untenable during the pandemic. Here, journalism operates as a discursive structure, obscuring its own complicity in sustaining postfeminist an…
Hiding in the echo chamber
During a time of heightened political polarization in India, use of the communication app WhatsApp skyrocketed. Alongside benefits of the app come a slew of dangerous outcomes, such as the proliferation of misinformation on the chat-based app. To this end, we conducted 19 semi-structured, in-depth interviews with Indian users of WhatsApp over the age of 40. The aim of study was to examine how WhatsApp users engage with the platform and the conten…
The Internet Is for Cats
Thus spoke Zuckerberg
As technology chief executive officers have become public figures, their personae operate as loci for journalistic discourse about the intersection of moral responsibilities, regulation, and political-economic power of the tech industry. They possess a power often construed as beyond the reach of politics or civil society to address. This study considers how the ubiquity of tech power has become a kind of common sense in journalistic discourse, s…
Of essential workers and working from home
This article considers how reporting about work during the COVID-19 pandemic operated as a field of discourse that challenged the ideological workings of neoliberalism. By documenting the risks and stresses workers of all classes faced during the first year of the pandemic, the reporting began to question neoliberal capitalism as socially unsustainable. Drawing on a corpus of 151 long-form articles and commentary, we show how journalistic discour…
The Internet Is for Cats
More real, or just more surveillance? Panopticism and shifting authenticity paradigms in BeReal
BeReal has become a popular app among younger social media users, with a premise that privileges a brief, random, and unvarnished look into one’s life once a day. Hailed as the ‘anti-Instagram’ or ‘anti-TikTok’, the app eschews filters, performance, influencers, and sponsored content in favor of authenticity. While curated authenticity has long been a hallmark of internet culture, BeReal seems to employ authenticity not as a performance strategy …
Micro-celebrities of information
Influencers are a defining feature of the contemporary social media landscape, but little has interrogated how these individuals may privilege information sharing as essential to their brand. This article interrogates the role of the knowledge influencer, or those who perform micro-celebrity to convey information and expertise to lay audiences. Knowledge influencers can be doctors, lawyers, or anyone, regardless of class, who is an expert in thei…
The Revolution Will Be Forwarded
WhatsApp is one the world's most popular social media apps, as well as one of the most popular chat-based, closed platforms. Utilizing the insights from 19 in-depth interviews, we approach WhatsApp from a cultural perspective of ritual communication, seeking to understand how people make sense of WhatsApp use in their daily lives. We found WhatsApp is largely used to maintain community and fellowship with friends, coworkers, family, and even acqu…
Assembling 'Sides' of TikTok
The term 'side' has emerged to describe communities on the short-form video app TikTok. But what discursive work does the metaphor of side do to describe online communities? Through a case study with a textual analysis of the culture, technology, interface, and platform vernaculars present in reading fandom TikTok, BookTok, we explore how user practice and app features intertwine to establish sides of TikTok as relational, individualistically pos…
Us, Them, Right, Wrong
As TikTok exploded in popularity following the initial lockdowns of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020, use from individual users skyrocketed. During this time, political content became largely ubiquitous across the app. Politics play out daily on TikTok, as individuals craft messages within the technological affordances and sociocultural dynamics of the app. This study expands on research regarding civic engagement in digital public spheres by …
She’s my bitch eating crackers”
Groomers, ‘Titties’, & Streamers, Oh My
Twitch is the largest social live-streaming platform in the Global North, and has historically been an important advertising and community hub for the gaming industry (Johnson & Woodcock, 2018). Twitch’s owner, Amazon, demands increasing growth and profit (Yin-Poole, 2024), so the platform must continue attracting new streamers, viewers, and advertisers. However, these new audiences may be at odds with Twitch’s core base of white, Asian, cisgende…
Using Creator Studies insights to optimize participant recruitment on TikTok
Social media have long been thought of in qualitative inquiry as objects of study, as well as a tool to access hard to reach populations. However, less is known about how social media can be strategically harnessed to improve and optimize participant recruitment in qualitative studies for any study, not just those focusing on hard-to-reach populations. By critically reflecting on my own use of TikTok as a site of recruitment for a previously cond…
On Air and on TikTok
Using in-depth interviews with 17 U.S. on-air TV journalists, this study examines how broadcast journalists are using TikTok, and why they perceive it to be valuable for their professional brand. Using concepts of professional role orientation and role performance, findings indicate that journalists produce mostly behind-the-scenes style content and share very little news on the platform. Those interviewed suggest that the content is intended to …
Sociology (18 works) · Computer Science (15 works) · Political science (15 works) · Media studies (14 works) · Law (12 works) · Psychology (12 works) · Business (9 works) · Gender, Feminism, and Media (9 works) · Politics (8 works) · Art (7 works)