Scott’s interests in cultural narratives and understandings of technology arose in Seattle, where he experienced the Y2K Millennium Bug panic and worked for an online food startup that succumbed to the dot-com bubble. Soon after, his advertising clients included technology companies such as AT&T Wireless, Netflix, and Microsoft.
Moving into graduate school, he earned a Master of Communication in Digital Media at the University of Washington, a program that trained professionals in new-media policy, content, and production. He continued to explore technology at the University of Southern California, earning his PhD in Communication, then as a member of the Department of Communication at Clemson University.
Technological themes have also appeared in his fiction and creative nonfiction, including his award-winning novel, One of These Things is Not Like the Other.
Current projects include using artificial intelligence to study engagement with campus historical markers (with funding from Watt Family Center for Innovation) and historic technologies for controlling love and sexuality.
“I’m not interested in machines,” Scott says, “I’m interested in users. The way humans struggle to find better ways to connect and communicate, and the stories we tell to understand those processes, fascinates me.”
Select Work
Pathology & Technology: Killer Apps and Sick Users (2018, Peter Lang) applied feminist and queer theory to analyze a century of associations between electric communication technologies and illness. Presented at the Oxford Internet Institute and reviewed in Media Science (Germany). Funding support from Huntington Library and Archives, USC Center for Feminist Research, and USC Stark Fellowships for Summer Research in Popular Media and Culture.
“Scott’s able hands reveal more than technical conditions: they reveal our many humanities” – Ben Peters, Associate Professor of Media Studies, University of Tulsa
Articles, reviews, and essays in Feminist Media Studies, American Quarterly, Cultural Studies, Television and New Media, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, Technoculture, Music, Sound and the Moving, International Journal of Communication, Resource Center for Cyberculture Studies, Journal of Communication Inquiry.
Book sections in Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies, The Long History of New Media: Technology, Historiography, and Newness in Context, Why are Faggots so Afraid of Faggots?: Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform, Eros Sex Machina, Blogs: Emerging Communication Media.