person
Angèle Christin
Angèle Christin is an associate professor in the Department of Communication at Stanford University. She studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her award-winning book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms (Princeton University Press, 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience data in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. Drawing on ethnographic methods, she shows how American and French journalists make sense of traffic numbers in different ways, which in turn has distinct effects on the production of news in the two countries. In a related study, she analyzed the reception of predictive algorithms in the U.S. criminal justice system. Her new book project, Follow Me: Influencers, Platforms, and the Contradictions of the Follower Economy, is an ethnographic study of content creators on social media platforms. Drawing on case studies ranging from vegan YouTubers to “dad” influencers, it shows how structural forces reproduce precarity and inequality in social media careers, while also nudging influencers toward interpersonal “drama” and sometimes the production of problematic online content.