UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An expert on digital media, promotional culture and platform capitalism will present a free public lecture at Penn State that will focus on digital platforms, their power and the role of the public in enabling or limiting that power.
The annual Pockrass Memorial Lecture, presented by Emily West, a professor at the University of Massachusetts, will focus on “Platform Power and the Manufacture of Public Trust.” The lecture is scheduled at 6 p.m. March 24 in Carnegie Cinema (113 Carnegie Building).
West’s research has focused on digital platforms and the rise of their corporate leaders to unprecedented economic, political and cultural power over the last three decades. Based on West’s study of tech giant Amazon, she focuses on how big companies like that acquire the public trust that allows them to achieve monopoly status, tremendous surveillance capabilities and ubiquity in the lives and institutions of society. Part of West's talk will focus on how those digital platforms now seek to contain the growing “techlash” against their power and social impacts, especially given the implications of generative AI for platform power.
West, a professor of communication at the UMass, is the author of “Buy Now: How Amazon Branded Convenience and Normalized Monopoly” (The MIT Press, 2022) and the co-editor of “The Routledge Companion to Advertising and Promotional Cultures, 1st and 2nd editions” (2013, 2023), with Matt McAllister, professor of film production and media studies at Penn State.
The annual Pockrass Memorial Lecture is named after the late Professor Robert M. Pockrass, a member of Penn State’s journalism faculty from 1948 to 1977. Pockrass, who specialized in public opinion and popular culture, served as the graduate officer and taught radio news writing for the School of Journalism, which later became the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications.