Colin Agur
Bio:
Colin Agur is postdoctoral associate at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School. He received his PhD in Communications from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, where his dissertation examined mobile phone networks in India. He is editor of a forthcoming volume (2016) on education and social media, to be published by MIT Press. He has published articles in Information & Culture, the Journal of Asian & African Studies, Journalism: Theory, Practice, Criticism, and Media, Culture & Society. His interests include information and communication technologies, telecommunications history and policy, political communication, and network theory. Originally from Canada, he has also lived in Australia, India, Mexico, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Colin’s Tow Fellowship project, Meeting in Digital Spaces: News Organizations Using Chat Apps to Cover Political Unrest, explores the ways that journalists at major American and other Western news organizations (e.g. the BBC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Quartz, Storyful, Bloomberg, Reuters, AP, and others) are using chat apps as meeting, newsgathering and distribution tools in coverage of domestic and international stories. It analyzes how journalists covered fast-moving events on different chat apps, the ways that journalistic chat app usage followed and differed from practices in ‘traditional’ social media reporting in previous crisis events (e.g. Occupy Wall Street, the Boston Marathon bombing, the Arab Spring protests, and the 2009 Tehran protests), and the spaces that are now features of reporting and news production.
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