Megan is a scholar of digital cultures and community studying trust in the context of platformization. Her research investigates how the identity construction affordances of platforms enable online communities to mainstream outsider political messages and build trust with one another as well as the broader public. Megan has worked across a range of vernacular communities and institutional actors seeking to strengthen relationships online, including influencers and content creators, professional journalists, religious groups, and conspiracy theorists.

 

She takes a digital ethnographic approach while attending to the way economic conditions, and particularly the context of platformization, shape and constrain the discursive resources of online communities. Her work has shown that while institutional actors often attempt to increase trust by doubling down on professional norms, everyday users employ the expression of identity and its perceived authenticity as a marker of trustworthiness, belonging, and credibility.

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Megan’s dissertation, titled “The Authenticity Economy: Rhetorics of Platformization and Social Change in Online Communities,” develops a theoretical framework of platform rhetorics which foregrounds the affective circulation of monetization logics. It investigates in three case studies – Booktubers, knitters, and homesteaders – how the communities that form around YouTube influencers negotiate tensions that arise between the imperatives of content monetization and the ideal of community values. She argues that users employ authenticity discourse to establish shared community values outside the system of valuation defined by platform content monetization.

 

Her work appears in Media and Communication, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, Journalism Practice, and two edited collections. She has presented her research at the National Communication Association, Association of Internet Researchers, Rhetoric Society of America, International Communication Association, and International Society for the Study of Media, Religion, and Culture.

 

She is currently an Assistant Professor of Strategic Communication at Purchase College, SUNY. Previously, she earned her Ph.D. at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Department of Communication Arts in 2024.