About

Jennifer Holt is a Professor and Chair of the Department of Film and Media Studies at UCSB. She is a former Fellow with the Center for Democracy & Technology in Washington, D.C. Her courses include Media Criticism, Media Historiography, Television History, Media Industries, and The Future of Media. Her current research focuses on digital media policy and cloud infrastructures. Holt is the author of 'Cloud Policy: A History of Regulating Pipelines, Platforms, and Data' (MIT Press, 2024) and 'Empires of Entertainment' (Rutgers, 2011). She is also the co-editor of several works including 'Distribution Revolution', 'Connected Viewing: Selling, Streaming & Sharing Media in the Digital Age', and 'Media Industries: History, Theory, Method'. Her scholarly work has been published in various journals and anthologies, and she is a co-founder of the open-access Media Industries journal. Holt has provided consulting for Warner Bros. Home Entertainment and has presented her research to the Federal Communications Commission in Washington, D.C. She has lectured extensively across the United States and internationally in countries such as Australia, Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, England, Finland, France, Italy, Lebanon, the Netherlands, Norway, Sweden, and Turkey.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• World Wide Web
• Physics
• Media studies
• Geography

Selected publications

• Media Industries: A Decade in Review

  2025-10-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Since 2008, there has been a stunning expansion in research, teaching, and collective conversation on the media industries. This chapter highlights some of the most compelling, inspiring, and provocative scholarship in the field to be published in the past decade, focusing on four areas: creative labour and media work, digital distribution, platforms and algorithmic culture, and infrastructure.

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• Cloud Policy

  The MIT Press eBooks · 2024-02-27 · 9 citations

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  How the United States' regulation of broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and data—together understood as “the cloud”—has eroded civil liberties, democratic principles, and the foundation of the public interest over the past century. Cloud Policy is a policy history that chronicles how the past century of regulating media infrastructure in the United States has eroded global civil liberties as well as democratic principles and the foundation of the public interest. Jennifer Holt explores the long arc of regulating broadband pipelines, digital platforms, and the data centers that serve as the cloud's storage facilities—an evolution that is connected to the development of nineteenth- and twentieth-century media and networks, including railroads, highways, telephony, radio, and television. In the process, Cloud Policy unearths the lasting inscriptions of policy written for an analog era and markets that no longer exist on the contemporary governance of digital cloud infrastructure. Cloud Policy brings together numerous perspectives that have thus far remained largely siloed in their respective fields of law, policy, economics, and media studies. The resulting interdisciplinary argument reveals a properly scaled view of the massive challenge facing policymakers today. Holt also addresses the evolving role of the state in the regulation of global cloud infrastructure and the growing influence of corporate gatekeepers and private sector self-governance. Cloud policy's trajectory, as Holt explains, has enacted a transformation in the cultural valuation of infrastructure as civic good, turning it into a tool of commercial profit generation. Despite these current predicaments, the book's historical lens ultimately helps the reader to envision restorative interventions and new forms of activism to create a more equitable future for infrastructure policy.

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• The SAGE Handbook of the Digital Media Economy

  SAGE Publications Ltd eBooks · 2022 · 32 citations

  • Sociology
  • Computer Science
  • Media studies
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• Policy studies and the case for plurality

  2021-09-22

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  This chapter addresses interdisciplinarity and method as it relates to policy research and media industry studies. Historically, policy scholarship has been largely dominated by methods linked to the law and social sciences, mirroring the perspectives and methods embraced by policymakers. In this chapter, we argue that there is a need to move beyond these limitations and embrace a plurality of methodologies in order to illuminate how policies around media technologies, distribution, content, and industry behavior are evolving in ways that are not always immediately obvious or beneficial to most citizens. Policy analysis demands interdisciplinary approaches in order to access its true spectrum of cultural concerns, its historical lessons, and create work that is legible across disciplinary divides. As such, we examine the contributions of historical, discursive, and ethnographic methods to the study of policy. Specifically, we consider the ways in which these methods facilitate the interrogation of power as it operates in media industries, the defending of public values, and expand the range of perspective and voices represented in such debates. Such a multiplicity of sources and methods also allows industry scholars to most effectively articulate the public stakes of media policy so that its critical importance might resonate more widely with industry scholars, students, and ultimately all citizens seeking change.

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• More than a number: The telephone and the history of digital identification

  European Journal of Cultural Studies · 2021-03-07 · 3 citations

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  This article examines the telephone’s entangled history within contemporary infrastructural systems of ‘big data’, identity and, ultimately, surveillance. It explores the use of telephone numbers, keypads and wires to offer new perspective on the imbrication of telephonic information, interface and infrastructure within contemporary surveillance regimes. The article explores telephone exchanges as arbiters of cultural identities, keypads as the foundation of digital transactions and wireline networks as enacting the transformation of citizens and consumers into digital subjects ripe for commodification and surveillance. Ultimately, this article argues that telephone history – specifically the histories of telephone numbers and keypads as well as infrastructure and policy in the United States – continues to inform contemporary practices of social and economic exchange as they relate to consumer identity, as well as to current discourses about surveillance and privacy in a digital age. This article is based on a paper presented at the Media in Transition symposium (Utrecht, June 28, 2018), in the Industries and Infrastructures panel organised by Judith Keilbach. Also published in this issue of ECS are Amanda D. Lotz, ‘Unpopularity and cultural power in the age of Netflix: new questions for cultural studies’ approaches to television texts’ and Vicki Mayer, ‘From peat to Google power: communications infrastructures and structures of feeling in Groningen.’

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• The Labor of Digital Privacy Advocacy in an Era of Big Tech

  Media Industries · 2021-10-05 · 1 citations

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  This article explores the labor of contemporary digital privacy advocates and their myriad efforts to protect and preserve public interests during the era of Big Tech companies. It is based on qualitative interviews with professional staff, lawyers, and policy analysts at multiple major advocacy organizations in Washington, DC. We have employed a grounded theory approach to address four labor-related themes that consistently emerged across our interviews: coalition building, agenda formulation, the art of navigating public- and private-sector relationships, and balancing a domestic and global policy landscape. In the current policy landscape, there is an intensifying degree of advocacy–industry coordination taking place, in part because of US regulatory roll-backs under the Trump administration and a gridlocked Congress. As a result, advocacy organization staff members often rely on companies for information to do their assessment and agenda-setting work. They also apply pressure to these companies and force them to think about how their technologies and operations impact users and publics around the world; they mount legal challenges to various media and tech initiatives to ensure public interests are protected; and some end up working with or for these companies in ways that may impart and integrate the values of advocacy organizations within profit-driven organizations. This article explores the multiple dimensions of advocacy labor which itself is often excluded from media policy and industry analysis.

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• 29. NYPD Blue

  New York University Press eBooks · 2020 · 15 citations

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  • Geography
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• 3. 1984–1986: Outsiders Moving in—Murdoch and Turner

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• 2. 1983–1985: Broadcast and the Blueprints of Empires

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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• 5. 1989–1992: Big Media without Frontiers

  Rutgers University Press eBooks · 2020-12-31

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Frequent coauthors

• Kevin Sanson

  9 shared

• Karen Petruska

  7 shared

• Aynne Kokas

  University of Virginia

  6 shared

• Nina Huntemann

  6 shared

• Jonathan Gray

  6 shared

• Michael Curtin

  6 shared

• Tim Anderson

  New Zealand Brain Research Institute

  6 shared

• C. A. Lucas

  University of Liverpool

  6 shared