Timothy A Gibson
Biographic Data
| ID | 640270 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Timothy A Gibson |
| GIVEN NAMES | Timothy A |
| FAMILY NAME | Gibson |
| SIGNATURE | GIBSON T A |
| AFFILIATIONS | George Mason University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 20 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 92 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 20 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1998 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Good Trouble in the Time of Covid-19
The rapid circulation of COVID-19 misinformation posed one of the most vexing challenges to health communication scholars and practitioners during the pandemic. Within the communication field, our response to health misinformation has often focused on shoring up public trust in scientific knowledge and amplifying institutional expertise. But this strategy of rebuilding public trust in institutions has a serious weakness: it requires the leaders o…
Now Hiring Social Media Editors
Social Media Editors (SME) are involved in digital news circulation, engagement with online audiences, and the analysis and circulation of audience data. This article extends research on SMEs to investigate how employers make sense of these positions and the roles they are required to perform within news organizations. To do so, we analyze job listings for SMEs posted by US news companies in combination with interviews with SMEs. Employers play a…
Social Media Editors and the Audience Funnel: Tensions between Commercial Pressures and Professional Norms in the Data-Saturated Newsroom
This article explores the changing roles of Social Media Editors (SMEs) in the field of journalism, focusing on their unique position as mediators between online news consumers, marketing departments, and newsrooms. Based on in-depth interviews, our findings suggest that, far beyond their origins as comment field moderators, SMEs now play a crucial role in integrating complex behavioral data from social network sites and circulating this data in …
The rise and fall of Adrian Fenty, Mayor-Triathlete: Cycling, gentrification and class politics in Washington DC
Promoting cycling and building bike lanes would seem to be an uncontroversial way for progressive mayors to build up their 'green' and 'smart city' reputations. After all, cycling promotes health, reduces traffic and fights global warming. Yet, surprisingly, it was former Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty's enthusiasm for building bike lanes that, at least in part, brought his once-promising political career to a sudden end in 2010. Drawing on a s…
Property Outlaws in Cyberspace and Meatspace? Examining the Relationship between Online Peer Production and Support for Private Property Violations
Marxian theory has long viewed the institution of private property as central to labour exploitation. After all, private property laws allow those who control the means of production to expropriate surplus value from the dispossessed. An analogous relationship arguably defines life on the Internet, where users are forced to venture onto privately owned digital enclosures to access key services. Yet these online property relationships are anything…
In Defense of Law and Order: Urban Space, Fear of Crime, and the Virtues of Social Control
There is a long tradition in critical/cultural studies that views the raising of concerns about crime and disorder as an ideological gambit concealing a more sinister project of social control. This article offers a friendly critique and revision of this position, arguing that critical communication scholars should treat urban disorder and public fears of crime as serious policy problems, if only because pervasive fears of crime impose great harm…
Building a Blog Cabin during a Financial Crisis: Circuits of Struggle in the Digital Enclosure
In their studies of online media, political economists of communication have examined how firms like Google enclose users in a web of commercial surveillance, thus facilitating the commodification of their online labor. However, this focus on enclosure tends to overlook the political possibilities highlighted by autonomist Marxist theory—namely, that users, under certain circumstances, can appropriate these applications to contest conditions of e…
Primitive Accumulation, Eminent Domain, and the Contradictions of Neo-Liberalism
One of the distinguishing characteristics of neo-liberal capitalism, as Paul Smith has argued, is the prominent role played by primitive accumulation – that is, the process through which social resources currently outside the circuit of capital are expropriated, often by the state, and thrust into circulation. The persistence of primitive forms of accumulation raises an important contradiction between neo-liberal philosophy, which posits a non-in…
The Limits of Media Advocacy
This article argues that the theory and practice of media advocacy suffers from some inherent pragmatic and conceptual limits. One limit is practical: Media advocacy's reliance on journalists working in commercial media radically constrains advocates' ability to reach policy makers and citizens in anything more than an episodic way. Another limit is conceptual. By implicitly endorsing an elitist theory of democracy and focusing on mainstream jour…
Harry Potter and the Commodity Fetish: Activating Corporate Readings in the Journey from Text to Commercial Intertext
Recent years have seen a productive dialogue develop between political-economic and cultural approaches to media studies. In this spirit, this article draws on the analytic tools of political economy to produce a textual analysis of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. In particular, we argue that Rowling has woven throughout the Potter series a set of contradictory discourses related to class and consumerism. Yet out of this heteroglossia, AOL T…
Warning—The Existing Media System May Be Toxic to Your Health: Health Communication and the Politics of Media Reform
Our physical health depends, at least in part, upon the health of our media environment. Unfortunately, the commercial media system produces countless messages that not only misinform Americans about their health but also actively promote unhealthy behaviors. Rather than taking the existing media system as a given, this commentary argues that health communication scholars should work with media reformers to transform the media system in ways that…
La ville et le « spectacle: Commentaires sur l’utilisation du « Spectacle » dans la sociologie urbaine contemporaine
Depuis un certain temps, le concept de « spectacle urbain » occupe une place centrale dans les études portant sur l'urbanisation postfordiste, mais ne fait pas l'objet d'un examen sérieux de leur part. En commençant préalablement par une courte revue de la théorie du spectacle de Guy Debord, cet article propose d'examiner comment le « spectacle urbain » a été utilisé pour analyser trois aspects émergents de la vie urbaine contemporaine : (1) la p…
Nimby and the Civic Good
Policy scholars dedicated to efficient urban and industrial planning have long tried to understand the “NIMBY syndrome” in order to overcome local resistance to controversial land uses. However, environmental policy scholars have begun to rethink the NIMBY syndrome, arguing that the concept is authority‐centered and reduces land‐use disputes to a moral struggle between rational/civic‐minded planners and irrational/self‐interested opponents. After…
Selling city living: Urban branding campaigns, class power and the civic good
This article examines the process through which urban leaders ‘brand’ their cities to appeal to target markets of affluent suburbanites. Drawing on a case analysis of Washington, DC’s recent effort to attract new residents, this article follows the district’s ‘city living, dc style’ campaign through three key moments in its circulation: the moments of production, text and context. In doing so, the article explores the historical motives, the poli…
New Orleans and the Wisdom of Lived Space
This essay contrasts the failures of technocratic planners with the wisdom of citizens embedded in lived space, and it argues that the successful reconstruction of New Orleans depends on mobilizing the knowledge of local residents. For this reason, a more democratic process should replace current efforts to plan the future in the absence of the city’s poor
Indy Dreams and Urban Nightmares: Speed Merchants, Spectacle, and the Struggle over Public Space in the World-Class City
The Trope of the Organic City: Discourses of Decay and Rebirth in Downtown Seattle
Across the nation, the desire to reverse histories of urban decline has led city officials to plow public subsidies into big-ticket, privately controlled downtown redevelopment projects. But what determines the scope of public involvement in downtown redevelopment? Drawing on a larger study of Seattle development politics, this article argues that impersonal economic pressures alone do not determine the scope of public subsidies to downtown devel…
The Missing News: Filters and Blind Spots in Canada's Press
Beyond Cultural Populism: Notes Toward the Critical Ethnography of Media Audiences
In recent years, a backlash has been brewing against populist approaches to media and cultural studies that celebrate the ability of subcultural audiences to produce divergent or resistive readings of mass media texts. And rightly so. The decade of the 1980s produced a host of critical media studies that were marred, as Morley argues, by a facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and an undocumented claim that interpretive creativity c…
I Don't Want Them Living Around Here”: Ideologies of Race and Neighborhood Decay
Nimby and the Civic Good
Policy scholars dedicated to efficient urban and industrial planning have long tried to understand the “NIMBY syndrome” in order to overcome local resistance to controversial land uses. However, environmental policy scholars have begun to rethink the NIMBY syndrome, arguing that the concept is authority‐centered and reduces land‐use disputes to a moral struggle between rational/civic‐minded planners and irrational/self‐interested opponents. After…
Selling city living: Urban branding campaigns, class power and the civic good
This article examines the process through which urban leaders ‘brand’ their cities to appeal to target markets of affluent suburbanites. Drawing on a case analysis of Washington, DC’s recent effort to attract new residents, this article follows the district’s ‘city living, dc style’ campaign through three key moments in its circulation: the moments of production, text and context. In doing so, the article explores the historical motives, the poli…
Social Media Editors and the Audience Funnel: Tensions between Commercial Pressures and Professional Norms in the Data-Saturated Newsroom
This article explores the changing roles of Social Media Editors (SMEs) in the field of journalism, focusing on their unique position as mediators between online news consumers, marketing departments, and newsrooms. Based on in-depth interviews, our findings suggest that, far beyond their origins as comment field moderators, SMEs now play a crucial role in integrating complex behavioral data from social network sites and circulating this data in …
The Missing News: Filters and Blind Spots in Canada's Press
Harry Potter and the Commodity Fetish: Activating Corporate Readings in the Journey from Text to Commercial Intertext
Recent years have seen a productive dialogue develop between political-economic and cultural approaches to media studies. In this spirit, this article draws on the analytic tools of political economy to produce a textual analysis of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. In particular, we argue that Rowling has woven throughout the Potter series a set of contradictory discourses related to class and consumerism. Yet out of this heteroglossia, AOL T…
La ville et le « spectacle: Commentaires sur l’utilisation du « Spectacle » dans la sociologie urbaine contemporaine
Depuis un certain temps, le concept de « spectacle urbain » occupe une place centrale dans les études portant sur l'urbanisation postfordiste, mais ne fait pas l'objet d'un examen sérieux de leur part. En commençant préalablement par une courte revue de la théorie du spectacle de Guy Debord, cet article propose d'examiner comment le « spectacle urbain » a été utilisé pour analyser trois aspects émergents de la vie urbaine contemporaine : (1) la p…
The Trope of the Organic City: Discourses of Decay and Rebirth in Downtown Seattle
Across the nation, the desire to reverse histories of urban decline has led city officials to plow public subsidies into big-ticket, privately controlled downtown redevelopment projects. But what determines the scope of public involvement in downtown redevelopment? Drawing on a larger study of Seattle development politics, this article argues that impersonal economic pressures alone do not determine the scope of public subsidies to downtown devel…
Now Hiring Social Media Editors
Social Media Editors (SME) are involved in digital news circulation, engagement with online audiences, and the analysis and circulation of audience data. This article extends research on SMEs to investigate how employers make sense of these positions and the roles they are required to perform within news organizations. To do so, we analyze job listings for SMEs posted by US news companies in combination with interviews with SMEs. Employers play a…
The Limits of Media Advocacy
This article argues that the theory and practice of media advocacy suffers from some inherent pragmatic and conceptual limits. One limit is practical: Media advocacy's reliance on journalists working in commercial media radically constrains advocates' ability to reach policy makers and citizens in anything more than an episodic way. Another limit is conceptual. By implicitly endorsing an elitist theory of democracy and focusing on mainstream jour…
New Orleans and the Wisdom of Lived Space
This essay contrasts the failures of technocratic planners with the wisdom of citizens embedded in lived space, and it argues that the successful reconstruction of New Orleans depends on mobilizing the knowledge of local residents. For this reason, a more democratic process should replace current efforts to plan the future in the absence of the city’s poor
Beyond Cultural Populism: Notes Toward the Critical Ethnography of Media Audiences
In recent years, a backlash has been brewing against populist approaches to media and cultural studies that celebrate the ability of subcultural audiences to produce divergent or resistive readings of mass media texts. And rightly so. The decade of the 1980s produced a host of critical media studies that were marred, as Morley argues, by a facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and an undocumented claim that interpretive creativity c…
The rise and fall of Adrian Fenty, Mayor-Triathlete: Cycling, gentrification and class politics in Washington DC
Promoting cycling and building bike lanes would seem to be an uncontroversial way for progressive mayors to build up their 'green' and 'smart city' reputations. After all, cycling promotes health, reduces traffic and fights global warming. Yet, surprisingly, it was former Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty's enthusiasm for building bike lanes that, at least in part, brought his once-promising political career to a sudden end in 2010. Drawing on a s…
I Don't Want Them Living Around Here”: Ideologies of Race and Neighborhood Decay
I Don't Want Them Living Around Here”: Ideologies of Race and Neighborhood Decay
Beyond Cultural Populism: Notes Toward the Critical Ethnography of Media Audiences
In recent years, a backlash has been brewing against populist approaches to media and cultural studies that celebrate the ability of subcultural audiences to produce divergent or resistive readings of mass media texts. And rightly so. The decade of the 1980s produced a host of critical media studies that were marred, as Morley argues, by a facile insistence on the polysemy of media products and an undocumented claim that interpretive creativity c…
The Missing News: Filters and Blind Spots in Canada's Press
The Trope of the Organic City: Discourses of Decay and Rebirth in Downtown Seattle
Across the nation, the desire to reverse histories of urban decline has led city officials to plow public subsidies into big-ticket, privately controlled downtown redevelopment projects. But what determines the scope of public involvement in downtown redevelopment? Drawing on a larger study of Seattle development politics, this article argues that impersonal economic pressures alone do not determine the scope of public subsidies to downtown devel…
Indy Dreams and Urban Nightmares: Speed Merchants, Spectacle, and the Struggle over Public Space in the World-Class City
Nimby and the Civic Good
Policy scholars dedicated to efficient urban and industrial planning have long tried to understand the “NIMBY syndrome” in order to overcome local resistance to controversial land uses. However, environmental policy scholars have begun to rethink the NIMBY syndrome, arguing that the concept is authority‐centered and reduces land‐use disputes to a moral struggle between rational/civic‐minded planners and irrational/self‐interested opponents. After…
Selling city living: Urban branding campaigns, class power and the civic good
This article examines the process through which urban leaders ‘brand’ their cities to appeal to target markets of affluent suburbanites. Drawing on a case analysis of Washington, DC’s recent effort to attract new residents, this article follows the district’s ‘city living, dc style’ campaign through three key moments in its circulation: the moments of production, text and context. In doing so, the article explores the historical motives, the poli…
New Orleans and the Wisdom of Lived Space
This essay contrasts the failures of technocratic planners with the wisdom of citizens embedded in lived space, and it argues that the successful reconstruction of New Orleans depends on mobilizing the knowledge of local residents. For this reason, a more democratic process should replace current efforts to plan the future in the absence of the city’s poor
La ville et le « spectacle: Commentaires sur l’utilisation du « Spectacle » dans la sociologie urbaine contemporaine
Depuis un certain temps, le concept de « spectacle urbain » occupe une place centrale dans les études portant sur l'urbanisation postfordiste, mais ne fait pas l'objet d'un examen sérieux de leur part. En commençant préalablement par une courte revue de la théorie du spectacle de Guy Debord, cet article propose d'examiner comment le « spectacle urbain » a été utilisé pour analyser trois aspects émergents de la vie urbaine contemporaine : (1) la p…
Harry Potter and the Commodity Fetish: Activating Corporate Readings in the Journey from Text to Commercial Intertext
Recent years have seen a productive dialogue develop between political-economic and cultural approaches to media studies. In this spirit, this article draws on the analytic tools of political economy to produce a textual analysis of J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. In particular, we argue that Rowling has woven throughout the Potter series a set of contradictory discourses related to class and consumerism. Yet out of this heteroglossia, AOL T…
Warning—The Existing Media System May Be Toxic to Your Health: Health Communication and the Politics of Media Reform
Our physical health depends, at least in part, upon the health of our media environment. Unfortunately, the commercial media system produces countless messages that not only misinform Americans about their health but also actively promote unhealthy behaviors. Rather than taking the existing media system as a given, this commentary argues that health communication scholars should work with media reformers to transform the media system in ways that…
Primitive Accumulation, Eminent Domain, and the Contradictions of Neo-Liberalism
One of the distinguishing characteristics of neo-liberal capitalism, as Paul Smith has argued, is the prominent role played by primitive accumulation – that is, the process through which social resources currently outside the circuit of capital are expropriated, often by the state, and thrust into circulation. The persistence of primitive forms of accumulation raises an important contradiction between neo-liberal philosophy, which posits a non-in…
The Limits of Media Advocacy
This article argues that the theory and practice of media advocacy suffers from some inherent pragmatic and conceptual limits. One limit is practical: Media advocacy's reliance on journalists working in commercial media radically constrains advocates' ability to reach policy makers and citizens in anything more than an episodic way. Another limit is conceptual. By implicitly endorsing an elitist theory of democracy and focusing on mainstream jour…
Building a Blog Cabin during a Financial Crisis: Circuits of Struggle in the Digital Enclosure
In their studies of online media, political economists of communication have examined how firms like Google enclose users in a web of commercial surveillance, thus facilitating the commodification of their online labor. However, this focus on enclosure tends to overlook the political possibilities highlighted by autonomist Marxist theory—namely, that users, under certain circumstances, can appropriate these applications to contest conditions of e…
Property Outlaws in Cyberspace and Meatspace? Examining the Relationship between Online Peer Production and Support for Private Property Violations
Marxian theory has long viewed the institution of private property as central to labour exploitation. After all, private property laws allow those who control the means of production to expropriate surplus value from the dispossessed. An analogous relationship arguably defines life on the Internet, where users are forced to venture onto privately owned digital enclosures to access key services. Yet these online property relationships are anything…
In Defense of Law and Order: Urban Space, Fear of Crime, and the Virtues of Social Control
There is a long tradition in critical/cultural studies that views the raising of concerns about crime and disorder as an ideological gambit concealing a more sinister project of social control. This article offers a friendly critique and revision of this position, arguing that critical communication scholars should treat urban disorder and public fears of crime as serious policy problems, if only because pervasive fears of crime impose great harm…
The rise and fall of Adrian Fenty, Mayor-Triathlete: Cycling, gentrification and class politics in Washington DC
Promoting cycling and building bike lanes would seem to be an uncontroversial way for progressive mayors to build up their 'green' and 'smart city' reputations. After all, cycling promotes health, reduces traffic and fights global warming. Yet, surprisingly, it was former Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty's enthusiasm for building bike lanes that, at least in part, brought his once-promising political career to a sudden end in 2010. Drawing on a s…
Social Media Editors and the Audience Funnel: Tensions between Commercial Pressures and Professional Norms in the Data-Saturated Newsroom
This article explores the changing roles of Social Media Editors (SMEs) in the field of journalism, focusing on their unique position as mediators between online news consumers, marketing departments, and newsrooms. Based on in-depth interviews, our findings suggest that, far beyond their origins as comment field moderators, SMEs now play a crucial role in integrating complex behavioral data from social network sites and circulating this data in …
Good Trouble in the Time of Covid-19
The rapid circulation of COVID-19 misinformation posed one of the most vexing challenges to health communication scholars and practitioners during the pandemic. Within the communication field, our response to health misinformation has often focused on shoring up public trust in scientific knowledge and amplifying institutional expertise. But this strategy of rebuilding public trust in institutions has a serious weakness: it requires the leaders o…
Now Hiring Social Media Editors
Social Media Editors (SME) are involved in digital news circulation, engagement with online audiences, and the analysis and circulation of audience data. This article extends research on SMEs to investigate how employers make sense of these positions and the roles they are required to perform within news organizations. To do so, we analyze job listings for SMEs posted by US news companies in combination with interviews with SMEs. Employers play a…
Political science (20 works) · Sociology (18 works) · Law (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Politics (14 works) · Media studies (7 works) · Computer Science (6 works) · Media Studies and Communication (6 works) · Economics (5 works) · Public relations (5 works)