Elizabeth Losh

How politicians' digital strategies appeal to the same fantasies of digital connection, access, and participation peddled by Silicon Valley. Smartphones and other digital devices seem to give us a direct line to politicians. But is interacting with presidential tweets really a manifestation of digital democracy? In Selfie Democracy, Elizabeth Losh examines the unintended consequences of politicians' digital strategies, from the Obama campaign's pioneering construction of an online community to Trump's Twitter dominance. She finds that politicians who use digital media appeal to the same fantasies of digital connection, access, and participation peddled by Silicon Valley. Meanwhile, smartphones and social media don't enable participatory democracy so much as they incentivize citizens to perform attention-getting acts of political expression. Losh explores presidential rhetoric casting digital media as tools of democracy, describes the conflation of gender and technology that contributed to Hillary Clinton's defeat in 2016, chronicles the Biden campaign's early digital stumbles in 2020, and recounts the TikTok campaign that may have spoiled a Trump rally. She shows that although Obama and Trump may seem diametrically opposed in both style and substance, they both used mobile digital media in ways that reshaped the presidency and promised a new kind of digital democracy. Obama used data and digital media to connect to citizens without intermediaries; Trump followed this strategy to its most extreme conclusion. What were the January 6 insurrectionists doing, as they livestreamed themselves and their cohorts attacking the Capitol, but practicing their own brand of selfie democracy?

Understanding Rhetoric is the first of its kind, illustrated guide to writing that delivers expert writing advice through engaging visuals.

Best Books of 2019—Scholarly KitchenObject Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Hashtags can silence as well as shout. They originate in the quiet of the archive and the breathless suspense of the control room, and find voice in the roar of rallies in the streets. The #hashtag is a composite creation, with two separate but related design histories: one involving the crosshatch symbol and one about the choice of letters after it.Celebration and criticism of hashtag activism rarely address the hashtag as an object or try to locate its place in the history of writing for machines. Although hashtags tend to be associated with Silicon Valley invention myths or celebrity power users, the story of the hashtag is much longer and more surprising, speaking to how we think about naming, identity, and being human in a non-human world.Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.