Attention, Platforms, and What the AI Era Opens Up for CSS — Interview with Sandra González-Bailón

Attention, Platforms, and What the AI Era Opens Up for CSS — Interview with Sandra González-Bailón

In this interview recorded at the 2026 Tech for Open Minds Annual Conference, Sandra González-Bailón (Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania) takes a field-level view of where computational social science has been and where it’s going. She discusses Reddit archaeology, the arc of platform history, and a core thesis about the attention economy: attention is valuable, and the engaged minority commands far too much of it. She situates that argument within a framework of hybrid human-AI networks and reflects on what the AI era genuinely opens up for researchers — and what’s at stake if the field doesn’t rise to meet it. A reflective, ambitious conversation that gives the whole body of work a sense of consequence.