Dr. Kate Miltner: "School’s Out”
This Week's Guest: Dr. Kate Miltner
ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Is the digital world a reflection of our modern culture or driving it? If you’ve ever wondered about the stranger parts of this relationship between creator and creation, Kate Miltner is your person in the field. A technology and society researcher, Dr. Miltner examines the ways that technology, identity, and structural power intersect, conducting ethnographic research that digs into things we’re so close to, we may not even notice.
Dr. Miltner began by studying memes on an academic level, in particular those cute but grammatically incorrect Lolcat memes, and is now studying the “learn to code” movement, focusing on the issues of inclusion and belonging within coding boot camps/coding schools. Is this push to teach coding to anyone and everyone—often seen as a solution to several modern problems like diversity in tech and social mobility—really living up to all the hype?
LINKS AND ARTICLES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE
Kate’s almost-internship mentor, New York Times journalist Taffy Brodesser-Akner
ROLM phones as seen at Kate’s college
Photographer Nicola Tamindzic
Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, and Branding in the Social Media Age by Alice E. Marwick
Cheez Town Crier, the hub for Lolcats fans
This Woman Getting a Master's Degree In LolCats Will Be Richer Than You by Adrian Chen, Gawker (with the Princess Bride-esque final line: “Meme culture is serious business these days. Anyone who tries to convince you otherwise wants to sell you something.”
The World Made Meme: Public Conversations and Participatory Media, by Ryan Milner
“One part politics, one part technology, one part history”: Racial representation in the Unicode 7.0 emoji set” - Kate’s article in New Media and Society
April Wensel’s episode on Stayin’ Alive in Tech: “Better People”
Nathan Ensmenger's book: The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise (History of Computing)
Program or Be Programmed by Douglas Rushkoff
The Kapor Center: Leveling the Playing Field of Tech
ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (ACM FAccT)
More About Our Guest
Technology and Society Researcher
Dr. Kate Miltner is a TRAIN@Ed Postdoctoral Fellow at the Moray House School of Education and Sport, University of Edinburgh. This position is co-funded by the European Research Council Horizon 2020 Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions.
She received her PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California. She has an MSc in Media and Communications (Merit) from the London School of Economics and Political Science and received her BA in English (cum laude) from Barnard College, Columbia University.
Dr. Miltner has had research appointments in the Research department at Twitter and the Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England. She was a 2018 Joint Fellow at the UC Berkeley Center for Technology, Society and Policy and the UC Berkeley Center for Long-Term Cybersecurity.
Before her academic career, Dr. Miltner worked in social media strategy and advertising for close to a decade in New York, Los Angeles, and London. In her tenure at agencies including Saatchi and Saatchi and The Engine Group, she worked on clients in the CPG/FMCG (General Mills, Nestlé), Technology (Samsung, Telefonica), Automotive (Renault, Coda Automotive), Entertainment (20th Century Fox), and Beauty (Estée Lauder) categories.
For information about her consulting services, please use the Contact form on the homepage of her website.
