Recent Writing, as of March 2026

I write a monthly column for Prospect Magazine in the UK, covering the social implications of information technology. This month’s column is about how AI has been transforming programming, and how as an educator, I am worried about our ability to keep teaching “computational thinking”, something that’s essential for keeping AIs from going off the rails and doing dumb stuff very rapidly:

My columns at Prospect since December 2021 – there’s a lot of them!

Ryan McGrady and I just published a paper I am extremely proud of in the International Journal of Communication. It’s called “The Quotidian Web and the Accidental Archive” and it’s based on our explorations of a data set we created by taking a random sample of YouTube, as we described in JOQD a few years back.

An “accidental archive” photo from an unknown Hungarian photographer, mid 1980s

While you can describe YouTube as a whole through statistics, numbers don’t really capture the distinctive weirdness of low-view YouTube videos. They tend to be slices of life from around the world, glimpses into people’s homes, cars, habits and obsessions. Ryan and I started thinking of these videos collectively as a strange sort of archive, an “accidental archive”. There are other accidental archives in history, when a place is abandoned due to natural disaster or when unsorted and unedited media ends up preserved. Ryan and I write about a remarkable archive of photos from Hungary in the 1980s, and about what archeologists continue to learn from Pompeii, as well as making a case for preserving a random slice of YouTube so we can learn from it in the future.

Closely related is a paper we published last summer, along with Kevin Zheng, who developed your YouTube sampling strategy. It’s called “One Platform, Four Languages: Comparing English, Spanish, Hindi, and Russian YouTube”, and it suggests that Hindi speakers are using the YouTube platform in a substantially different way than speakers of these three other languages. Specifically, Hindi speakers get fewer views on their videos, and more interaction – this suggests that they’re not using YouTube to broadcast themselves to large audiences, but instead sharing moments with friends and family, an idea that we’re exploring in detail through ethnography and content analysis with collaborators versed in the language and culture – we hope to have a follow-up paper later this year.

Kevin, who co-authored the Four Language paper, started working with me as an undergrad. One of the things I’m proudest of at UMass is that much of the work I’m proudest of has been coauthored with undergrads. A good example is “Improving Social Media with Middleware”, which Isaac Brickman and I wrote together for Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, based on research for his UMass senior honors thesis. I spoke about middleware in DC last week at the National Press Club and virtually all the examples I used came from Isaac’s research.

More to come: there’s several other papers under review right now… as well as the usual crop of writing I’m excited about that’s gotten rejected and I have to figure out where to send it next!

The post Recent Writing, as of March 2026 appeared first on Ethan Zuckerman.