Neta Alexander

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Assistant Professor

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Curriculum Vitae:

Neta Alexander is an Assistant Professor of Film and Media at Yale University. Before coming to Yale, she taught at Colgate University and served as an Assistant Editor of Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (JCMS). She earned a PhD from New York University and a MA from Columbia University.

Her work focuses on digital culture, film and media, science and technology studies, and critical disability studies. Her analysis of buffering revealed the understudied ways in which latency and delay are inherent to digital systems and infrastructures. Her first book, Failure (Polity, 2020), co-authored with Arjun Appadurai, reveals how Silicon Valley and Wall Street monetize failure and forgetfulness. Her second book, Interface Frictions: How Digital Debility Reshapes Our Bodies (Duke University Press, 2025), explores four ubiquitous interface design features—refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and Night Shift—to develop a theory of digital debility. Taken together, these case studies demonstrate what can be gained from placing the non-average user at the center of media history.

Prof. Alexander’s articles appeared in Journal of Visual Culture, Cinema Journal, Cinergie, Film Quarterly, Media Fields Journal, and Flow Journal, among other publications. She also contributed chapters to the anthologies The Netflix Effect (Bloomsbury, 2016), Compact Cinematics (Bloomsbury, 2017), Pandemic Media (Mason Press, 2021), Technics (University of Amsterdam, 2024), In/Convenience: Inhabiting the Logistical Surround (Amsterdam: Institute of Network Cultures, 2024) and Disability Media Studies (NYU Press, forthcoming). Her public scholarship, encompassing topics such as the Internet of Medical Things, predictive personalization, and the limitations of technology, has been published in the Atlantic, Public Books, Real Life Magazine, The Brooklyn Rail, and Haaretz. Her writing has been translated into German, Slovenian, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

Website: https://yale.academia.edu/NetaAlexander

Publications

Interface Frictions

In Interface Frictions, Neta Alexander explores how ubiquitous design features in digital platforms reshape, condition, and break our bodies. She shows that while features such as refresh, playback speed, autoplay, and night mode are convenient, they can lead to “digital debility”—the slow and often invisible ways that technologies may harm human bodies. These features all assume an able-bodied user and at the same time push users to ignore their bodily limitations like the need for rest, nourishment, or movement.

Failure

Wall Street and Silicon Valley – the two worlds this book examines – promote the illusion that scarcity can and should be eliminated in the age of seamless “flow.” Instead, Alexander and Appadurai propose a theory of habitual and strategic failure by exploring debt, crisis, digital divides, and (dis)connectivity. Moving between the planned obsolescence and deliberate precariousness of digital technologies and the “too big to fail” logic of the Great Recession, they argue that the sense of failure is real in that it produces disappointment and pain.