[Air-L] 2024 AoIR Nancy Baym Annual Book Award

[Michelle, Association of Internet Researchers]

The AoIR Nancy Baym Annual Book Award committee is pleased to announce the
winner of this year’s competition. Close to 30 excellent books were
submitted for this year’s award and that fact alone is an index of the
intellectual vibrancy of AoIR as a community of scholars, researchers, and
teachers.

The winner of this year’s AoIR Nancy Baym Book Annual Award is Samuel
Woolley for *Manufacturing Consensus: Understanding Propaganda in the Era
of Automation and Anonymity* (Yale University Press). The committee
unanimously agreed that Chris Chesher’s *Invocational Media:
Reconceptualising the Computer* (Bloomsbury) is deserving of an honourable
mention.

The committee agreed that Wooley’s *Manufacturing Consensus* constitutes a
distinctive contribution to and, perhaps more significantly, a potentially
important political intervention in, the scholarship of dis/misinformation
in the social media platform ecology. The book addresses one of the most
important issues in contemporary internet research, namely the rise of
computational and algorithmic propaganda that affects social media users
across the globe. In advancing his argument, Wooley develops a nuanced and
supple STS framework for the critical analysis of computational propaganda,
which fruitfully engages and significantly revises the traditional
Herman/Chomsky model of mass media propaganda. Moreover, the book stands
out in the crowded field of dis/misinformation studies through its
inclusive optic that scans and assesses cases from around the globe and, in
so doing, actually gives voice to a heterogenous array of people,
experiences, and ideas. Finally, the committee agreed that Wooley’s writing
style appeals to both academic and non-academic audiences, striking a
balance between a readable format for non-experts, and complexity in terms
of method and theory. The book is based on solid scholarship but is
accessible to citizens and decision-makers. In today’s political
environment, it could be transformative. You can read more about Dr. Wooley
here https://samwoolley.org.

Chris Chesher’s I*nvocational Media: Reconceptualising the Computer *is
awarded an honourable mention. This is a theoretically interesting and
conceptually provocative work that offers an innovative way of guiding us
to historically reconsider the distinctive ontological registers of
computers as they mediate human-machine interactivity through symbolic and
computational practices of “invocation”. Members of the committee all
agreed that the book evinced the all-too-rare virtue of academic writing
that is theoretically rich but accessible to a wide audience beyond
scholars in this field.

AoIR is extremely grateful for the efforts of this year’s committee, and to
Michelle, AoIR's coordinator, for routing books all over the world and
keeping the committee organized.

Andrew Herman, chair, Wilfrid Laurier University (Canada)
Nancy Baym, Microsoft Research (USA)
Jun Liu, University of Copenhagen (Denmark)
Catherine Knight Steele, University of Maryland - College Park (USA
Jessa Lingel, University of Pennsylvania (USA)
John McNutt, University Delaware (USA)
Miriam Johnson, Oxford Brookes University (UK)