Alice Marwick
Microsoft Visiting Professor
Alice E. Marwick is an associate professor in the Department of Communication and principal researcher at the Center for Information, Technology and Public Life, which she co-founded, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She researches the social, political, and cultural implications of popular social media technologies. Her 2023 book, The Private is Political: Networked Privacy on Social Media (Yale), examines how the networked nature of online privacy disproportionately impacts marginalized individuals in terms of gender identity, race, sexuality, and socio-economic status. She is currently working on her third book, tentatively titled Down the Rabbit Hole: The Intellectual Journey of Violent Racists, Conspiracy Theorists, QAnons, Flat Earthers, and Other Americans on the Fringe, which uses digital ethnography, interviews, and qualitative content and discourse analysis to understand how people come to believe fringe, extremist, and conspiratorial disinformation they encounter on social platforms.
In 2017, Marwick co-authored Media Manipulation and Disinformation Online for Data & Society, a flagship report examining far-right online subcultures’ use of social media to spread disinformation, for which she was named one of 2017’s Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy magazine. She is the author of Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity and Branding in the Social Media Age (Yale 2013), an ethnographic study of the San Francisco tech scene which examines how people seek social status through online visibility, and co-editor of The Sage Handbook of Social Media (Sage 2017), as well as numerous academic papers and popular press articles. Marwick serves as editor-in-chief of the Bulletin of Technology and Public Life, is a faculty affiliate at the Center for Media Law and Policy at UNC, and an advisor to the Data & Society Research Institute. Her work has been supported by the Carnegie Foundation, the Knight Foundation, the Luminate Group, the Hewlett Foundation, the Digital Trust Foundation and the Social Science Research Council. She is a former Andrew Carnegie Faculty Fellow and has held fellowships at the Data & Society Research Institute and the Institute of Arts & Humanities at UNC-CH. In 2021 she won UNC’s Hettleman Prize for Artistic and Scholarly Achievement.
Marwick has a Ph.D. in media, culture and communication from New York University, a MA in communication from the University of Washington, and a B.A. from Wellesley College.