Stephen Yang | Researching Technology Futures

I'm Stephen Yang, a writer and researcher. I study the temporal politics of media, technology, and public life, with an eye on computational media and artificial intelligence.
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Presently, I'm pursuing my PhD at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California, where I'm supported by the National Science Foundation's Graduate Research Fellowship (NSF GRFP).

My research offers critically oriented principles of technology design and policy. I have held research appointments at Microsoft Research (Social Media Collective), Center for Democracy & Technology (AI Governance Lab), and Partnership on AI.

I'm always open to new connections and opportunities. You can find me on X (formerly Twitter) or reach out to me at stepheny [at] usc [dot] edu.

I study the temporal politics of media, technology, and public life. Specifically, I examine public relevance as a sociotechnical achievement of temporal coordinations. My research asks: How do media infrastructures—through their formatting of speed, rhythms, and temporal horizons—configure a shared sense of relevance in public life?
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By analyzing how time textures the conditions and possibilities of public life, my work rethinks the ethico-political tensions between speeding up and slowing down, between relentlessness and pauses, and between imagination and anticipation.

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I hold a B.S. in Communication and Information Science from Cornell University, where I graduated as the Degree Marshal of the Cornell Ann S. Bowers College of Computing and Information Science, a Merrill Presidential Scholar, and a Rawlings Presidential Research Scholar.

Outside of academia, I have worked in journalism and advertising at organizations such as the Taipei Times and Wunderman Thompson.

Growing up in Taiwan, I witnessed firsthand the rapid changes that came with the advent of computational media, through which I became intrigued by the ambivalence of progress and innovation.

Coming up...

April 2025 - I'm presenting my work, "Uncertainty as Spectacle: Real-Time Algorithmic Techniques on the Live Music Stage," the 20th Cinema and Media Studies Graduate Student Conference at the University of Chicago, April 25–26, 2025. The theme this year is "Failing Media."
June 2025 - I'll be presenting my work on TikTok trends and AI futures at the annual conference of the International Association of Communication!
June 2025 - I'll be participating in the Digital IDEAS Summer Institute at the University of Michigan!
September 2025 - I'll be presenting my work on the paradoxes between longtermism and accelerationism at the annual meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S)!

2025 (so far)

January 2025 — I'm honored to be selected as a finalist for the Paul & Daisy Soros Fellowship for New Americans! 77 finalists were selected from 2,617 applicants.
January 2025 — I presented my work, "Speculative Failure as Hopeful Contestation of AI Futures," as part of the Participatory AI - Research & Practice Symposium, an event organized by Connected by Data, Data & Society, and others ahead of the Paris AI Action Summit. Check out the recording here!

2024

October 2024 — I presented my work, "Infrastructuring Trends: Templates, Samples, and the Making of the Short Video Format on TikTok," at the annual conference of the Association of Internet Researchers (AoIR) in Sheffield!
Summer' 24 — I interned at the Center for Democracy & Technology, where I worked on AI policy research as part of the AI Governance Lab. Here's a research report I produced

April 2024 — I received funding from the Center on Science, Technology, and Public Life at USC to study the future imaginaries of Hollywood with the advent of AI.
Jan 2024 — As part of Data & Society's series on participatory methods series on AI design and accountability, I presented the EAAMO'23 paper on participatory approaches to AI design that I co-authored with Fernando Delgado, Michael Madaio, and Qian Yang!