Matthew Jordan

Matt Jordan is a critical media scholar who works on the role of media in everyday culture. He was a double major in history and English at Allegheny College, and earned an MA from Drew University in modern European intellectual history. His doctorate, from Claremont Graduate University, is in European Studies.

He teaches undergraduate courses in Film Studies and a Media Studies course on Media and Democracy. His graduate teaching and research explores how different popular media forms and media technologies are used – and have been used - to constitute and reify aspects of personal identity and cultural ideology. He has written extensively on the ways in which cultural ideologies are constructed by way of ongoing conversations in communication culture in Europe, Britain and America. His latest book, Danger Sound Klaxon! The Horn That Changed History, examines the global rise and fall of the Klaxon automobile horn as a communication technology. Along with his various academic publications on sound, technology and media, his popular press essays on media culture, democracy and society have appeared in Quartz, The Washington Post, Fortune, The Huffington Post, Scroll, The New Republic, Smithsonian and have been translated for readers in Denmark, Brazil and Japan.

He is executive producer of the Penn State Humanities Institute’s Emmy-Nominated documentary seriesHumIn Focus, which is broadcast on WPSU and on the web. Along with being the Film Production and Media Studies department head in the Bellisario College, he is also leading Penn State’s News Literacy Initiative, which includes hosting a radio show/podcast called "News over Noise."

• HumIn Focus

• How to cover Trump? CNN on defensive as media wring hands — again
• Super Bowl car ads sell Americans the idea that new tech will protect them
• What’s that sound? Automobile horn changed history and communications technology
• Penn State launches News Literacy Initiative
• 'Watching people throw poo at each other': Oz, Fetterman ads set campaign spending record
• https://theconversation.com/canadian-trucker-protests-show-how-the-loudest-voices-in-the-room-distort-democracy-177022
• Second episode of WPSU-TV's 'HumIn Focus' examines immigration on Nov. 24
• Why it’s so hard to automate ‘clickbait’ away
• VIDEO: Social Media and False Information (Brookings Institution / May 31, 2018)
• PODCAST: Facebook is not a democracy
• Our centuries-long quest for ‘a quiet place’
• From fake news to fabricated video, can we preserve our shared reality?
• A century ago, progressives were the ones shouting 'fake news'
• Long Strange Trip Remembers The Grateful Dead
• AUDIO: Starving the Beast - Defunding Higher Education
• VIDEO: Talking Together About Guns: Armor of Light
• In a post-truth election, clicks trump facts
• College Town Film Festival celebrates independent film
• Democratic ideals versus realpolitik, a populist struggle for all times
• Netflix isn't made for the U.S. anymore -- it's for the whole world
• How ratings-driven debates are weakening American democracy
• Should movie studios be worried about Netflix's first feature film?
• Bracketology
• Penn Staters lending talents to inaugural Thaw Festival
• Festival will celebrate independent film with screenings, discussions
• Movie theaters are on life support – how will the film industry adapt?
• Latest HumIn Focus episode examines history, complexities of American democracy
• Penn State students, professors discuss the repurposing of Pepe the Frog and meme culture
• What does the Penn State community think of celebrity involvement in politics?
• Emily Wilder and journalism’s longstanding Achilles’ heel – partisans who cry bias