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Angela Xiao Wu

Associate Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication

Media, Culture, and Communication

angelaxwu@nyu.edu
Website

Wu works at the intersection of media and communication study and science and technology studies (STS), with a focus on the dynamic interactions of politics and infrastructures of knowledge production. Her research intervenes in fields such as critical data studies, platform studies, audience analysis, the political economy of media and media governance, and post/socialism studies.

Wu holds a PhD in Media, Technology and Society from Northwestern University. She received her Master of Philosophy (M.Phil.) in Communication from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK), and her B.A. in Journalism and Communication with a Minor in Applied Computer Science from Tsinghua University.

angelaxiaowu.com

Selected Publications

Peer-Reviewed Journal Articles 

Wu, A. X. (2024). The politics of platforms/pingtai平台: A Chinese genealogy. Communication and the Public, September. Doi:10.1177/20570473241280320 *Commentary*

Chen, Y., Lu, A.J., & Wu, A. X. (2023). ‘China’ as a ‘black box’? Rethinking methods through a sociotechnical perspective. Information, Communication and Society. doi:10.1080/1369118X.2022.2159488

Wu, A. X. (2022). Data science and the PhD question: The assetization of the doctoral habitus. IEEE Technology and Society Magazine, 41(4), 54–62. doi:10.1109/MTS.2022.3215880

Wu, A. X. (2022). Journalism via systems cybernetics: The birth of Chinese communication discipline and post-Mao press reforms. History of Media Studies, 2.doi:10.32376/d895a0ea.182c7595

Wu, A. X. (2022). The ambient politics of affective computing. Public Culture, 34(1), 21-45. doi:10.1215/08992363-9435427

Wu, A. X. & Li, L. (2021). Localism in internet governance: The rise of China’s provincial web. China Information. doi:10.1177/0920203X211055038

Wu, A. X., Taneja, H. & Webster, J. (2021). Going with the flow: Nudging audiences online. New Media & Society,23(10), 2979-2998. doi:10.1177/1461444820941183

Wu, A. X. & Taneja, H. (2021). Platform enclosure of human behavior and its measurement: Using behavioral trace data against platform episteme. New Media & Society, 23(9), 2650-2667. doi:10.1177/1461444820933547

Wu, A. X. (2020). Chinese computing and computing China as global knowledge production. Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, and Technoscience, 6(2). doi:10.28968/cftt.v6i2.34363 *Critical Perspectives*

Wu, A. X. (2020). The evolution of regime imaginaries on the Chinese internet. Journal of Political Ideologies, 25(2), 139-161. doi:10.1080/13569317.2020.1750759

Wu, A. X. & Dong, Y. (2019). What is ‘made-in-China feminism(s)’? Gender discontent and class friction in post-socialist China. Critical Asian Studies, 51(4), 471-492. doi:10.1080/14672715.2019.1656538

Wu, A. X. & Taneja, H. (2019). How did the data extraction business model come to dominate? Changes in the web use ecosystem before mobiles surpassed personal computers. The Information Society, 35(5), 272-285. doi:10.1080/01972243.2019.1644409

Taneja, H. & Wu, A. X. (2019). Web infrastructures and online attention ecology. International Journal of Communication, 13, 736-756.

Wu, A. X. (2018). Brainwashing paranoia and lay media theories in China: The phenomenological dimension of media use (and the self) in digital environments. Media, Culture & Society, 40(6), 909-926. doi:10.1177/0163443717734409

Taneja, H., Wu, A. X., & Edgerly, S. (2018). Rethinking the generational gap in online news use: An infrastructural perspective. New Media & Society, 20(5), 1792–1812. doi:10.1177/1461444817707348

Wu, A. X. & Taneja, H. (2016). Reimagining Internet geographies: A user-centric ethnological mapping of the World Wide Web. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 21(3), 230-246. doi:10.1111/jcc4.12157

Taneja, H. & Wu, A. X. (2014). Does the Great Firewall really isolate the Chinese? Integrating access blockage with cultural factors to explain web user behavior. The Information Society, 30(5), 297-309. doi:10.1080/01972243.2014.944728 

Wu, A. X. (2014). Ideological polarization over a China-as-superpower mind-set: An exploratory charting of belief systems among Chinese Internet users, 2008-2011. International Journal of Communication, 8, 2243–2272. 

Wu, A. X. (2014). The shared pasts of solitary readers in China: Connecting web use and changing political understanding through reading histories. Media, Culture & Society, 36(8), 1168-1185. doi:10.1177/0163443714545003

Wu, A. X. (2012). Hail the independent thinker: The emergence of public debate culture on the Chinese Internet. International Journal of Communication, 6, 2220-2244. 

Wu, A. X. (2012). Broadening the scope of cultural preferences: Film consumption and movie talk in the Chinese piracy market, 1980s - 2005. International Journal of Communication, 6, 501-529. 

  • Reprinted in: Piracy cultures: How a growing portion of the global population is building media relationships through alternate channels of obtaining content. Edited by M. Castells & G. Cardoso. Los Angeles: USC Annenberg Press, 2013.

Peer-Reviewed Conference Proceedings

Taneja, H. & Wu, A. X. (2018). Pathways to fragmentation: User flows and web distribution infrastructures. Proceedings of the 10th ACM Conference on Web Science (WebSci'18, May 27–30, 2018, Amsterdam, Netherlands), 255-259. doi:10.1145/3201064.3201107.

Book Chapter

Wu, A. X. (Forthcoming). Data. In C. Rojas, J. Li, & Y. Braester (Eds.), Oxford Handbook of Chinese Digital Media. Oxford University Press.

Invited Articles and Commentaries

Wu, A. X., Taneja, H., boyd, d., Donato, P., Hindman, M., Napoli, P., & Webster, J. (2020). Computational social science: On measurement. Science, 370(6521), 1174-1175. doi:10.1126/science.abe8308 *Letters*

Wu, A. X. (2015). Historicizing Internet use in China and the problem of the user figure. IEEE Annals of the History of Computing, 37(4), 2-4. doi:10.1109/mahc.2015.75  *Lead Think Piece*