Mike Ananny is an associate professor of communication and journalism at USC Annenberg, where he studies how technologies and cultures of media production have the power to shape public life. Working across communication, journalism studies, media studies, and science and technology studies, he sees the future of public life in the practices, assumptions, and controversies driving social media platforms, data infrastructures, algorithms, and artificial intelligence.

Ananny is also on the faculty advisory committee of USC’s Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life and co-leads the interdisciplinary research collective “MASTS” (Media as SocioTechnical Systems). He was a 2019-2021 faculty fellow with USC’s Society of Fellows in the Humanities, a 2018-19 Berggruen fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University, and has held fellowships and scholarships with Columbia University’s Tow Center for Digital Journalism, Harvard’s Berkman-Klein Center on Internet and Society, Stanford’s Center on Philanthropy and Civil Society, the Pierre Elliott Trudeau Foundation, LEGO, and Interval Research. He was a founding member of Media Lab Europe, a postdoc with Microsoft Research’s Social Media Collective, and has consulted for LEGO, Mattel, and Nortel Networks.

His Ph.D. is from Stanford University, S.M. from the MIT Media Lab, and B.Sc. from the University of Toronto. He regularly publishes in various academic and popular venues (including The Atlantic, WIRED, and the Nieman Lab), is the author of Networked Press Freedom (MIT Press, 2018) and is the co-editor of Bauhaus Futures (MIT Press, 2019).