Fenwick McKelvey is a third-year PhD Candidate ABD (Fall ‘08) in the Communication & Culture program at Ryerson and York Universities. He researches digital political communication, and digital research methods. His dissertation charts the politics of traffic management software – how it controls information,  how it meets resistance, and how it can be studied. He is a research associate with the Infoscape Research Lab: Centre for the Study of Social Media.

His dissertation studies an emerging form of control online, a transmissive control. New traffic management software being installed in Internet – otherwise called Internet traffic management practices – afford network owners greater control over the data transmitted through their wires, altering the passage of packets through networks. This control has allowed providers in Canada to create tiers of speed, fast lanes and slow lanes. These tiers prioritize and de-prioritize our communication, and in doing so, re-wire Internet time from its fragmented origins to its current tiers.

A graduate of the MA program in Communication & Culture, his MA work explored the code and politics of web2.0 by studying The Pirate Bay and Drupal. He holds a BA with Honours in Multidisciplinary Studies focusing on Political Science, International Development Studies, and Spanish. From 2004 to 2005, Fenwick completed an internship with Human Rights Internet, working with a Women’s rights organization in Rosario, Argentina.