Alice Marwick

Who they are

Marwick is Associate Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a principal researcher at its Center for Information, Technology and Public Life. She is also an affiliated researcher at Data & Society, whose own team page lists her as Director of Research. She took a BA in political science and women's studies at Wellesley College (1998), an MA in communication at the University of Washington (2005) and a PhD in media, culture and communication at New York University (2010). These details come from a secondary encyclopaedia entry and a team page, and posts change.

Her research covers social media, celebrity and internet fame, networked privacy, politics, race and gender online, and far-right extremism and misinformation. She wrote Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale University Press, 2013) and The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media (Yale University Press, 2023), and co-edited The SAGE Handbook of Social Media.

Key papers

Marwick, A. E. (2008). To catch a predator? The MySpace moral panic. First Monday, 13(6), 2 June 2008. doi:10.5210/fm.v13i6.2152.

Marwick, A. E. (2013). Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age. Yale University Press.

Marwick, A. E. (2023). The Private Is Political: Networked Privacy and Social Media. Yale University Press.

Key ideas

The 2008 paper examines technopanics, meaning moral panics over new technology. According to its abstract it compares the 1996 panic over online pornography with the panic over online predators and MySpace. It argues that both were fuelled by media coverage, that both used harm to children to justify restricting internet content, and that both led to legislation, including the proposed Deleting Online Predators Act, which she regards as misguided and as masking the real problem.

The point for this site is where the paper puts the drivers. The press and legislators sit at the centre of her account, not public fear alone. In the terms of Goode and Ben-Yehuda's three accounts of origin, that fits the elite-engineered and interest-group readings at least as well as the grassroots one. That comparison is this publication's reading of her abstract, not her wording.

Only the abstract and a summary of the paper were read for this site.

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