Dr. 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.

His current book project is tentatively titled Terms of Use: How Platforms Construct Us and How We Can Fight Back. In it, Pettis shows how the internet constructs us as users—not only through interfaces and algorithms, but through the layered ideologies of platforms, corporations, and code. This book argues that while science and technology studies (STS) has long distinguished between imagined and actual users, the internet demands a new framework: the becoming-User. The becoming-User is a multidimensional subject position shaped by imagined user roles, technical infrastructures, and everyday digital labor. The way that corporate platforms imagine their users is always different from how actual people engage with the technology, and this gap can be a productive site for reconfiguring our online experiences. By attending to the in-between space where users are continually shaped by platforms, interfaces, and institutions, the project reveals how individuals can reclaim agency and imagine more equitable futures for the internet beyond corporate control.

Pettis received their Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, M.A. from Colorado State University, and B.A. from the University of Oregon. His work has appeared in journals such as Internet Histories, the International Journal of Communication, and Convergence. He holds an honorary appointment as Digital Humanities Fellow at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research.