Tero Karppi

Programs: CCIT; Graduate Appointment at Faculty of Information
Currently accepting PhD students: Yes
Specialization: Critical studies of social media; disconnection studies; affect theory; platform studies; computational culture. 

Tero Karppi is Associate Professor of Critical Computation and Digital Media at ICCIT. For a decade, Karppi has been working on the nascent field of disconnection studies focusing on how social media platforms engage their users and keep them captivated despite emerging desires to quit. He examines the role of social media in our daily lives and investigates how the power of these platforms is designed, established, and enacted.

Karppi is the author of Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds (Minnesota 2018), one of the authors of Undoing Networks (Minnesota/Meson 2021), and one of the editors of Reckoning with Social Media (Rowman & Littlefield 2021). Karppi’s research has been published in journals such as Theory Culture & Society, New Media & Society, and Convergence. An updated list of publications can be found here: https://terokarppi.com

Karppi has worked as a researcher at the University of Turku, and at the Game Research Laboratory, University of Tampere. Karppi did a PhD internship with Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research. Before joining U of T, Karppi was assistant professor of media theory at the Department of Media Study, at the University at Buffalo.

Karppi’s research is inspired by theories and approaches from media theory, internet studies, platform and software studies. Karppi is interested in supervising doctoral research focused on critical studies of digital and social media. 

Research
In November 2019, Dr. Tero Karppi is holding a symposium titled The Ends of Social Media. The symposium is an expansion of Karppi’s research agenda, which examines the limits, boundaries and breaking points of social media. The most well-known example of this work is Karppi’s recent book Disconnect: Facebook’s Affective Bonds (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). He is currently invested in two book projects related to the same theme. Karppi is also working on a critical investigation of tech patents and has presented this work widely in different conferences.