The AoIR Nancy Baym Annual Book Award committee is pleased to announce the winner of this year’s competition. Close to 30 excellent books were submitted for this year’s award and that fact alone is an index of the intellectual vibrancy of AoIR as a community of scholars, researchers, and teachers.
The winner of this year’s AoIR Nancy Baym Book Annual Award is Samuel Woolley for Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era of Automation and Anonymity (Yale University Press). The committee unanimously agreed that Chris Chesher’s Invocational Media: Reconceptualising the Computer (Bloomsbury) is deserving of an honourable mention.
The committee agreed that Wooley’s Manufacturing Consensus constitutes a distinctive contribution to and, perhaps more significantly, a potentially important political intervention in, the scholarship of dis/misinformation in the social media platform ecology. The book addresses one of the most important issues in contemporary internet research, namely the rise of computational and algorithmic propaganda that affects social media users across the globe. In advancing his argument, Wooley develops a nuanced and supple STS framework for the critical analysis of computational propaganda, which fruitfully engages and significantly revises the traditional Herman/Chomsky model of mass media propaganda. Moreover, the book stands out in the crowded field of dis/misinformation studies through its inclusive optic that scans and assesses cases from around the globe and, in so doing, actually gives voice to a heterogenous array of people, experiences, and ideas. Finally, the committee agreed that Wooley’s writing style appeals to both academic and non-academic audiences, striking a balance between a readable format for non-experts, and complexity in terms of method and theory. The book is based on solid scholarship but is accessible to citizens and decision-makers. In today’s political environment, it could be transformative. You can read more about Dr. Wooley here https://samwoolley.org.
Chris Chesher’s Invocational Media: Reconceptualising the Computer is awarded an honourable mention. This is a theoretically interesting and conceptually provocative work that offers an innovative way of guiding us to historically reconsider the distinctive ontological registers of computers as they mediate human-machine interactivity through symbolic and computational practices of “invocation”. Members of the committee all agreed that the book evinced the all-too-rare virtue of academic writing that is theoretically rich but accessible to a wide audience beyond scholars in this field.
AoIR is extremely grateful for the efforts of this year’s committee, and to Michelle, AoIR’s coordinator, for routing books all over the world and keeping the committee organized.
Andrew Herman, chair, Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada)
Nancy Baym, Microsoft Research (USA)
Jun Liu, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
Catherine Knight Steele, University of Maryland – College Park (USA
Jessa Lingel, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
John McNutt, University Delaware (USA)
Miriam Johnson, Oxford Brookes University (UK)
