Tero Karppi

Tero Karppi is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Communication, Culture, Information, and Technology at the University of Toronto Mississauga, and holds a graduate appointment in the Faculty of Information. Professor Karppi focuses on Critical Computation and Digital Media. For a decade, he 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. Professor Karppi’s research is inspired by theories and approaches from media theory, internet studies, platform and software studies. He is interested in supervising doctoral research focused on critical studies of digital and social media.  

Professor 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). His research has been published in journals such as Theory Culture & Society, New Media & Society, and Convergence. An updated list of publications can be found on his personal website.

Professor 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 an Assistant Professor of media theory at the Department of Media Study, at the University at Buffalo.