Patrick Jones is a doctoral candidate in Media Studies at the University of Oregon’s School of Journalism and Communication. He has a BA in Philosophy from the University of Puget Sound and an MA in International Studies from the University of Oregon. His research focuses on the relationships among digital technology, global media, and political practice. His dissertation work investigates the history and contemporary use of electronic voting technologies in India and the United States. He has presented work at several major conference and has recently published a co-authored article in American Quarterly with Dr. Gretchen Soderlund that explores how conspiracy, as a form politics, affectively operates in contemporary American television. In 2015, Patrick, fellow NMCC member, Laura Strait, and Dr. Biswarup Sen co-organized a conference entitled New Media and Democracy: Global Perspectives, which the NMCC co-sponsored. Patrick has also been involved the Digital Scholarship Center Affiliates program, which works closely with the NMCC.

Patrick was drawn to the NMCC because of its interdisciplinary focus and collaborative spirit. He believes that “being a part of the NMCC has allowed me to take classes in the history, political science, and philosophy departments, familiarized me with conferences and academic resources I didn’t know existed, and has created opportunities for me to meet with and engage scholars from across the University of Oregon. The NMCC has played an important role in my development as a scholar and a teacher.”

Patrick’s dissertation entitled “Delivering Democracy: the history and deployment of electronic voting technologies in India and the United States,” is one of the first critical inquiries into how electronic voting technologies (EVTs) shape electoral processes in the 21st century. It explores the intersection of technical infrastructures and capabilities, economic processes, administrative procedures and legal framework(s) that configure contemporary controversies around the use of digital voting technologies in each country and argues that EVTs are a unique form digital media that allows one’s vote to be integrated into a broader spectrum of social and political communication. Patrick’s future work will continue to interrogate the constitutive role that digital technology plays both in our everyday political lives and the formation of global norms, institutions, and processes.

Patrick’s New Media Resources

Online Tools  

Microsoft’s Social Media Collective

Culture Digitally Blog

Data&Society

Digital Methods Initiative

AI Now Institute

Patrick’s New Media Bibliography

After Method: Mess in Social Science Research, John Law (2004)

Analytic Activism: Digital Listening and the New Political Strategy (Oxford Studies in Digital Politics), David Karpf, 2017

Digital Sociology: The Reinvention of Social Research, Noortje Marres (2017)

The Hybrid Media System: Politics and Power, Andrew Chadwick (2013)

Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (Inside Technology), Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, Kirsten A. Foot, eds. (2014).

Political Machines: Governing a Technological Society, Andrew Barry (2001)

Prototype Politics: Technology-Intensive Campaigning and the Data of Democracy, Daniel Kreiss (2016)

Reverse Engineering Social Media: Software, Culture, and Political Economy in New Media Capitalism, Robert Gehl (2014).

Back to Top