Hi there,

I am Anca Țenea, and I am a Fulbright Visiting Researcher at The Graduate Center, CUNY. Back home, in Romania, I am a Ph.D. student at the Center of Excellence in Image Studies, at the University of Bucharest, and I look at the entanglement between social media’s algorithms or architecture and human emotions.

I have started this research by asking myself if I am possibly locked into an affective (or emotional) bubble after clicking on the same subjects on my Facebook feed, which basically drove me pretty much the same spectrum of emotions. Do I feed my angry feelings about the political news with what recommendation algorithms think I need to read in order to keep me engaged? Could I maybe keep myself joyful by only reacting with “love” to puppy videos? And where does my data stand in the whole story?

I have started to pair these questions with many other concepts, like echo chambers and filter bubbles, information fatigue, attention economy, emotional contagion and algorithmic accountability; and the recent happenings and news in our “Platform Society” (a term I am borrowing from this great book) enhanced both my understanding and curiosities towards this subject. Rather than throwing away my smartphone and my laptop, I have decided to investigate the subjects beyond the stereotypes that make us all fear AI, the Internet, and sometimes technology in general, which could allow us make use of data in new ways build something useful. And this is why I’m at the Graduate Center, where I am learning from all these cool people how to make data work in a useful way for me and for the society, as a humanist.

This site is the place where I will try to keep the track of conferences and events I am attending (not only on topics of social media, but also on Internet & Communication), share insights that I find valuable, projects, and articles that might be useful for people with similar interests, and I also conduct some interviews with the great people I’m meeting.

During this year, I am also working on a Data Analysis and Visualization project meant to play with the data I am generating while living in NYC. At the end of my staying here, I will bring my datafied self out of the closet, and play with mapping, Sentiment Analysis or text mining in order to observe some patterns of my life here.

In the meanwhile, come and say hi, share your projects and thoughts on the subjects I am exploring here. You can always reach me out at anca.tenea@gmail.com.

This site (thehashtags.commons.gc.cuny.edu) is not an official site of the Fulbright Program or the U.S. Department of State. The views expressed on this site are entirely mine and do not represent the views of the Fulbright Program, the U.S. Department of State, or any of its partner organizations.

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