Talia Stroud - Digital communities, civic signals, and connective democracy

Natalie (Talia, as she goes by) Stroud has for years been studying the ways that our lives online show up in and shape our lives together. Her scholarship as her life are unexampled guides to the tumult, the challenges, and the opportunity presented by the advent and evolution of digital media.

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Talia is the E. M. “Ted” Dealey professor in the Department of Communication Studies and the School of Journalism at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of two books: 2012's Niche News: The Politics of News Choice, which won the International Communication Association Outstanding Book Award, and 2018's Digital discussions: How big data informs political communication, as well as countless peer-reviewed publications.

She is broadly interested in how the media affect our political behaviors and attitudes and how our political behaviors and attitudes affect our media use, in my opinion what are or should be 'crisis disciplines' in our day and age. In pursuing that inquiry, she leads or is an instrumental part of efforts spanning the spectrum of traditional (like academic publications) to non-traditional (working with social media sites to examine the health of interactions on them) activities - her way of designing research as creative as the questions she asks themselves.

She is one of the academic co-leads of a collaboration between Meta and the academic community to assess the effects of Facebook and Instagram in the 2020 U.S. presidential election. Talia is also one of the co-founders of the Civic Signals Initiative, one of the most compelling projects examining our online social spaces and their impacts on our conversations and interactions and, ultimately, civic health.

There are few thinkers better equipped to help us understand how we are engaging with each other online and in what ways digital media is shaping our societal discourse, organization, and relationality.

So, I wanted to talk to Talia about the state of our civic society, online and off, and about lives lived amidst the tumult of such drastic changes in how we connect and about what we are to and for each other.