Ben Pettis

Ben Pettis is a scholar of platform and software studies, focusing on contemporary internet culture and the socio-technical factors that shape its circulation. His work seeks to establish histories of the internet that center non-dominant communities and focus on individuals’ everyday online experiences. He develops methods for studying and preserving various forms of online content and use digital tools to understand and critique how the internet becomes situated within day-to-day life. Pettis’ coding experience provides opportunities for attending to the issues of their research in the context of real-world projects and he has developed and contributed to numerous online projects, including the Media History Digital Library, PodcastRE, and an archive of Twitter’s Birdwatch fact-checking program. Through digital projects like these, Pettis examines alternative technological imaginaries and ways of building online systems for sharing and organizing information in more equitable ways.