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I’m Molly Steenson, an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the School of Journalism & Mass Communication, where I focus on digital media and the history and implications of architectures of information.

My doctoral studies were at Princeton University School of Architecture, and my dissertation is titled “Architectures of Information: Christopher Alexander, Cedric Price, Nicholas Negroponte & the MIT Architecture Machine Group” (to defend this spring).

I’ve been working with the Web for 18 years and with what we now call social media for 20 years in a variety of roles and at a variety of companies. I continue this practice as a digital strategist and design researcher who examines how technology and interactivity fit into our contemporary cities and lives. This interest has sent me to India to study mobile phones, to China to study social networking sites, and to the 1960s to study the effect of artificial intelligence on architectural systems and interactivity.

As for the name of this site, Girlwonder is my long-standing digital home. My site has been online in some form or another since 1995 and as Girlwonder.com since 1997—its name is a vestige from my dotcom career in the 1990s and the pop culture feminist webzine I ran until 1999. It’s been with me so long at this point, it’s a part of me. You’ll also find the archives of my blog from 2005 onward.