This year the Virginia Club of New York will consider the question, “What are social media doing to our relationships?” Have social media broken us apart? Have they isolated us? Or have they brought us new ways to organize and express ourselves democratically? Perhaps they are just different ways of amplifying the habits and desires we have long held and expressed. The media panel will feature a short address by Eric Klinenberg, an NYU sociologist and co-author (with comedian Aziz Ansari) of Modern Romance (2015). He is also the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (2013). Responding to Eric will be UVA sociology Ph.D. candidate Francesca Tripodi, who is doing her research on inequality in participatory media environments (including reality television, Yik Yak, and Wikipedia).Then other UVA alumni will discuss how social media has affected their lives and work.

Come learn from fellow Wahoo’s on how social media has impacted our society, particularly interpersonal relationships.

$10 – Members 

$20 – Non-Members 

Tickets will be sold at the door. Non-UVa alumni are welcome to attend.

Moderator:

Siva Vaidhyanathan

Siva Vaidhyanathan is the Robertson Professor of Media Studies and director of the Center for Media and Citizenship at the University of Virginia. He is the author of The Googlization of Everything — and Why We Should Worry from the University of California Press, published in 2011. He has written two previous books: Copyrights and Copywrongs: The Rise of Intellectual Property and How it Threatens Creativity (New York University Press, 2001) and The Anarchist in the Library: How the Clash between Freedom and Control is Hacking the Real World and Crashing the System (Basic Books, 2004). He also co-edited (with Carolyn Thomas) the collection, Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). Vaidhyanathan has written for many periodicals, including American Scholar, Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, The New York Times Magazine, Salon.com, Slate.com, openDemocracy.net, BookForum, Columbia Journalism Review, Washington Post,Esquire.com, The Virginia Quarterly Review, The New York Times Book Review, and The Nation. After five years as a professional journalist, he earned a Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Texas at Austin in 1999. Vaidhyanathan has also taught at Wesleyan University, the University of Wisconsin at Madison, Columbia University, New York University, and the University of Amsterdam. He is a fellow at the New York Institute for the Humanities and a Faculty Associate of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. He was born and raised in Buffalo, New York and resides in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Panelists

Eric Klinenberg

Professor of Sociology and Director of the Institute for Public Knowledge at New York University. He is the author of Going Solo: The Extraordinary Rise and Surprising Appeal of Living Alone (The Penguin Press, 2012), Fighting for Air: The Battle to Control America’s Media (Metropolitan Books, 2007), and Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago (University of Chicago Press, 2002), as well as the editor of Cultural Production in a Digital Age and of the journal Public Culture. His scholarly work has been published in journals including the American Sociological Review, Theory and Society, and Ethnography, and he has contributed to The New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Rolling Stone, Time Magazine, Fortune, The Wall Street Journal, The Nation, The Washington Post, Slate, Le Monde Diplomatique, The London Review of Books, and the radio program, This American Life.

Francesca Tripodi

Francesca is a PhD candidate in Sociology at the University of Virginia researching how media interacts with society. Through ethnography, interviews, and focus groups, her dissertation focuses on how participatory media products (reality television, Yik Yak, and Wikipedia) influence ideas of community identity, a phenomenon she has termed “integrated audiences.”  Francesca was previously a Praxis fellow at the UVa Scholar’s Lab, where she helped build a pedagogical tool for critically interpreting texts (ivanhoe.scholarslab.org), and is currently a PhD intern in the UVa Office of the Dean of Students where she works on the development, coordination and assessment of Green Dot, a program designed to address the problem of sexual violence on college campuses. You can access her recent publications about Yik Yak at ftripodi.com or follow her on Twitter @ftripodi.

Bailey Stephens (CLAS ’09)

Bailey Stephens has worked for Major League Baseball Advanced Media for the past six years in several different capacities. For nearly four of those years, Bailey served as one of the original members of the MLB social media team. As a Social Media Producer, Bailey helped drive social content development and strategy for @MLB and the 30 clubs. Prior to joining the social team, Bailey was an editorial content producer for MLB.com. Currently, Bailey serves as a Manager of Product Development at MLBAM, where she focuses on the development of social products across MLB’s digital properties, among other projects.  Bailey graduated from UVA in 2009, with B.A. in English, and a minor in Media Studies.