Neta Alexander

Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Yale University. Before coming
to Yale, she taught at Colgate University and served as an Assistant Editor of Journal of Cinema
and Media Studies (JCMS). She earned a PhD from New York University and a MA from
Columbia University. Her work focuses on digital culture, film and media, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies. Her analysis of buffering revealed the understudied ways in
which latency and delay are inherent to digital systems and infrastructures. Her first book,
Failure (Polity, 2020), co-authored with Arjun Appadurai, reveals how Silicon Valley and Wall
Street monetize failure and forgetfulness. Her second book, Interface Frictions (forthcoming,
Duke University Press), explores four ubiquitous interface design features—refresh, playback
speed, autoplay, and Night Shift—to develop a theory of digital debility. Taken together, these
case studies demonstrate what can be gained from placing the non-average user at the center of
media history.

Her articles have appeared in Journal of Visual Culture, Cinema Journal, Film Quarterly, Media Fields Journal, and Flow Journal, among other publications. Her public scholarship, encompassing topics such as the Internet of Things, Netflix, and the app economy, has been published in The Atlantic, Public Books, Film Comment, The Brooklyn Rail, and Haaretz. Her writing has been translated into German, Slovenian, French, Italian, and Hebrew.