A digital sociologist, Jen Schradie graduated from the Harvard Kennedy School and received her PhD from UC Berkeley’s Center for New Media and the Department of Sociology. A leading scholar of technology and inequality, from AI and Algorithms to Startups and Social Media. Her research on digital democracy has been featured on CNN and the BBC and in the New Yorker, Le Monde, and WIRED, among others. She was awarded the UC Berkeley Public Sociology Alumni Prize and her Harvard University Press book, The Revolution That Wasn’t: How Digital Activism Favors Conservatives, won the Charles Tilly Distinguished Scholarship Award from the American Sociological Association and was published in French. She was awarded the UC Berkeley Public Sociology Alumni Prize and has directed six documentary films. In her spare time, she has been an extra in a Madonna movie, played banjo at a Bluegrass festival in the alps, and taught yoga to cancer survivors.
Digital Power Gaps – Content, Activism, Startups, Information, and AI
For two decades, my data has challenged clichés that the internet is utopian or dystopian. Before today’s alarm over misinformation, AI, and democracy, my research reveas an uncomfortable truth: online platforms amplify the power of those who already have it. The result is digital power gaps. Across projects I have shown how structural inequalities infuse every ‘new’ digital promise.
