Social media allows people to quickly spread information and, in urban environments, its presence is ubiquitous. However, social media is also noisy, chaotic, and hard to understand for those unfamiliar with, for example, the intricacies of hashtags and social media lingo. It should be no surprise that, regardless of the popularity of social media, people are still using TV and newspapers as their main sources for local information, while social media is just beginning to emerge as a useful information source.  We created Whoo.ly to address this issue.

Whoo.ly reveals the latent neighborhood-specific information that already exists in social media. In our first prototype of the tool, we focused on Twitter posts to derive relevant news, people, and events that are set within a particular locality, often referred to as “hyperlocal information”.

Inspired by the typical journalistic questions, i.e., “what, who, where, and when”, Whoo.ly uses various machine learning algorithms to provide four types of hyperlocal content in a simple web-based interface:

• Active events: events that are trending in the locality.
• Top topics: most frequently mentioned terms and phrases from recent Twitter posts.
• Popular places: most frequently checked-in/mentioned.
• Active people: Twitter users mentioned the most).

We investigated the effectiveness of Whoo.ly as a tool for finding neighborhood information through a user study of 13 residents from three Seattle neighborhoods: Capitol Hill, Wallingford, and Rainey Valley. Participants found Whoo.ly to perform better than Twitter at these particular four tasks related to neighborhood information:

• finding recent events,
• finding local neighborhood reporters,
• finding neighborhood topics, and
• finding potential neighborhood friends.

The overall reaction to the information provided on Whoo.ly was quite positive.. The participants in our study found Whoo.ly easier to use than Twitter and the majority said they would prefer it as a tool for exploring their neighborhoods.

One of the interviewees mentioned:

Whoo.ly was set up specifically with the community in mind. It makes community news/events/issues/people etc. easily accessible.

Participants generally found it easier to complete
neighborhood exploration tasks using Whoo.ly

Whoo.ly was found to be more useful, easy to use,
with a better overview of the users’ neighborhoods, and a
sense of connection to their neighborhood communities.

Tools like Whoo.ly are beginning to uncover the future of computational civic media that we believe will be an important component of the information ecosystem.

For more, see our full paper  Whoo.ly: Facilitating Information Seeking For Hyperlocal Communities Using Social Media to be presented at CHI 2013.

Yuheng Hu, Arizona State University
Shelly D. Farnham, Microsoft Research
Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Microsoft Research

Crossposted from the Follow the Crowd Blog

Meanwhile, to my delight, technologists have started to recognize that they can develop innovative systems to help address human trafficking. NGOs have started working with computer scientists, companies have started working with law enforcement, and the White House has started bringing together technologists, domain experts, and policy makers to imagine how technology can be used to combat human trafficking. The potential of these initiatives tickles me pink.

Watching this unfold, one thing that I struggle with is that there’s often a disconnect between what researchers are learning and what the public thinks is happening vis-a-vis the commercial sexual exploitation of children (CSEC). On too many occasions, I’ve watched well-intentioned technologists approach the space with a naiveté that comes from only knowing about human trafficking through media portrayals. While the portraits that receive widespread attention are important for motivating people to act, understanding the nuance and pitfalls of the space are critical for building interventions that will actually make a difference.

To bridge the gap between technologists and researchers, I worked with a group of phenomenal researchers to produce a simple 4-page fact sheet intended to provide a very basic primer on issues in human trafficking and CSEC that technologists need to know before they build interventions:

How to Responsibly Create Technological Interventions to Address the Domestic Sex Trafficking of Minors

Some of the issues we address include:

1. Youth often do not self-identify themselves as victims.
2. “Survival sex” is one aspect of CSEC.
3. Previous sexual abuse, homelessness, family violence, and foster care may influence youth’s risk of exploitation.
4. Arresting victims undermines efforts to combat CSEC.
5. Technologies should help disrupt criminal networks.
6. Post-identification support should be in place before identification interventions are implemented.
7. Evaluation, assessment, and accountability are critical for any intervention.
8. Efforts need to be evidence-based.
9. The cleanliness of data matters.
10. Civil liberties are important considerations.

This high-level overview is intended to shed light on some of the most salient misconceptions and provide some key insights that might be useful for those who want to make a difference. By no means does it cover everything that experts know, but it provides some key touchstones that may be useful. It is limited to the issues that are most important for technologists, but those who are working with technologists may also find it to be valuable.

As researchers dedicated to addressing human trafficking and the commercial sexual exploitation of children, we want to make sure that the passion that innovative technologists are bringing to the table is directed in the most helpful ways possible. We hope that what we know can be of use to those who are also looking to end exploitation.

(Flickr image by Martin Gommel)

Image credit: Harvard Business Review.

SMC Principal Researcher Kate Crawford reached the number-one slot on the “Most Read” list of the Harvard Business Review this week with her sharp and insightful blog post on the weaknesses of big data.

Debunking the commonly held belief that “numbers speak for themselves” in large data sets, Kate brings the voice of reason to utopian and determinist claims that reams of “raw” data are the solution for a multitude of societal ills:

Data and data sets are not objective; they are creations of human design. We give numbers their voice, draw inferences from them, and define their meaning through our interpretations. Hidden biases in both the collection and analysis stages present considerable risks, and are as important to the big-data equation as the numbers themselves.

Kate goes on to argue that while they may seem abstract, data sets are “intricately linked to physical place and human culture”, and that both qualitative methods and computational social science will need to join forces in order to fulfill the true potential of big data science:  ”data with depth”.

To read the full piece, click here.

In return we will provide you with a $20 Amazon gift card.

If you are interested in participating please contact Nancy Baym as soon as possible. We will then follow up to coordinate. If you’re not in the Boston area and interested, let us know that too, you never know where projects will go.

At first blush, this seems like a win for students. Going off to college can be a scary proposition, full of uncertainty, particularly about social matters. Why not get a head start building friends from the safety of your parent’s house?

What most students (and parents) fail to realize is that the success of the American college system has less to do with the quality of the formal education than it does with the social engineering project that is quietly enacted behind the scenes each year. Roommates are structured to connect incoming students with students of different backgrounds. Dorms are organized to cross-breed the cultural diversity that exists on campus. Early campus activities are designed to help people encounter people whose approach to the world is different than theirs. This process has a lot of value because it means that students develop an appreciation for difference and build meaningful relationships that will play a significant role for years to come. The friendships and connections that form on campuses shape future job opportunities and help create communities that change the future. We hear about famous college roommates as exemplars. Heck, Facebook itself was created by a group of Harvard roommates. But the more basic story is how people learn to appreciate difference, often by suffering through the challenges of entering college together.

When pre-frosh turn to Facebook before arriving on campus, they do so to find other people who share their interests, values, and background. As such, they begin a self-segregation process that results in increased “homophily” on campuses. Homophily is a sociological concept that refers to the notion that birds of a feather stick together. In other words, teens inadvertently undermine the collegiate social engineering project of creating diverse connections through common experiences. Furthermore, because Facebook enables them to keep in touch with friends from high school, college freshman spend extensive time maintaining old ties rather than building new ones. They lose out on one of the most glorious benefits of the American collegiate system: the ability to diversify their networks.

Facebook is not itself the problem. The issue stems from how youth use Facebook and the desire that many youth have to focus on building connections to people that think like they do. Building friendships with people who have different political, cultural, religious beliefs is hard. Getting to know people whose life stories seem so foreign is hard. And yet, such relationship building across lines of difference can also be tremendously transformative.

To complicate matters more, parents and high school teachers have beaten into today’s teens’ heads that internet strangers are dangerous. As such, even when teens are turning to Facebook or other services to find future college friends, they are skittish about people who are discomforting to them because they’ve been socialized into being wary of anyone they talk with. The fear-mongering around strangers plays a subtle but powerful role in discouraging teens from doing the disorienting work of getting to know someone truly unfamiliar.

It’s high time we recognize that college isn’t just about formalized learning and skills training, but also a socialization process with significant implications for the future. The social networks that youth build in college have long-lasting implications for youth’s future prospects. One of the reasons that the American college experience is so valuable is because it often produces diverse networks that enable future opportunities. This is also precisely what makes elite colleges elite; the networks that are built through these institutions end up shaping many aspects of power. When less privileged youth get to know children of powerful families, new pathways of opportunity and tolerance are created. But when youth use Facebook to maintain existing insular networks, the potential for increased structural inequity is great.

Photo by Daniel Borman

This post was originally written for LinkedIn. Visit there for additional comments.

Noted freedom of expression scholar Cherian George has been denied tenure by the Singaporean government against the wishes of his faculty. His error was explaining basic tenets of political philosophy in an editorial.  I’m writing about it because this is an American problem.

Like Prof. George, I am also a professor working in the area of Internet policy. I first encountered George’s work on the subject in 2003 as guest editor for The Communication Review, where I published his research on Singaporean and Malaysian approaches to Internet censorship. I was fascinated by his comments about what happens in Singaporean Internet forums when the government is criticized. He is well-known in my circles for his 2006 book Contentious Journalism and the Internet.

Unlike Prof. George, I am an American academic with no particular connection to Singapore. And yet – strangely, unexpectedly – the Singaporean government routinely appears in my professional life and in American academia. While in Singapore for an international conference, my taxi driver asked me what I did for a living. When I said that I was a professor, he asked when I was relocating. He explained that “Singapore buys the best American professors.” He went on to highlight two specific professors in science and medicine that had been lured to Singapore.  (“What a place!” I thought, “where the average taxi driver cares so much about science!”)

While at my previous position at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign the university accepted a $75m grant from the Singaporean government to establish The Advanced Digital Sciences Center at the Fusionopolis Complex, Singapore. An annual group of Singaporean Ph.D. students now visit Illinois for two years and ultimately receive an Illinois Ph.D. As a part of this program, Illinois faculty were offered the opportunity to as much as double their faculty salary and research budgets in exchange for spending a significant amount of time in Singapore and signing the intellectual property they produced over to the Singaporean government. Some faculty who considered participating jokingly called the incentives “danger pay” but that joke doesn’t seem funny to me anymore.

Just last week, while attending the annual conference of information schools in Texas, a colleague stood up and pitched the faculty attendees to consider the possibility of research funding via the Singaporean government instead of through our usual funders. If we went with Singapore, our grant amounts would be 2x to 5x more.

I had little sense that anything was at stake in Singapore’s periodic but insistent appearance in my American professional life until this week’s revelation that Prof. Cherian George was denied tenure there at NTU. Yes, when I visited the country in 2007 all of the Westerners joked about the official ban on chewing gum. Someone nervously pointed out to me that possession of 15 grams of a controlled substance will get you mandatory death by hanging. But research collaboration with Singapore seemed to be a great opportunity.

The case of Prof. Cherian George has made me revise my opinion, and I suggest you do as well. The case poses the question: what does it take for an academic there to incur the wrath of the government? The answer is remarkably little.

In 2005 George published an editorial in the Straits-Times explaining some of the basic political philosophy of Hannah Arendt. When I found out it likely played a role in George’s firing I read it expecting a fiery polemic. It reads… like an editorial explaining some of the basic political philosophy of Hannah Arendt.

Arendt was a genius and yes, she was no friend to oppressive regimes. (She famously wrote: “To substitute violence for power can bring victory, but the price is very high; for it is not only paid by the vanquished but it is also paid by the victor.”) If this is the kind of writing the rulers of Singapore consider dangerous, a liberal education there is simply impossible, as is a modern university. George’s editorial received a direct rebuke from the Prime Minister’s office.

Prof. George is a distinguished, productive, and well-respected scholar with degrees from Cambridge, Columbia, and Stanford who has repeatedly asserted that Singapore should abide by international standards of human rights, and this latter point was his downfall. As a researcher working in the same field I can say that his research record is exemplary. It is beyond question.

In 2009, George was promoted to associate professor, told that he had met all of the academic requirements for tenure, but that his tenure had been blocked by the board of trustees for what the university told him were “non-academic factors.” George reported that in a 2009 meeting the president of the university asked him to explain what reasons the government might have to block his tenure. Last year George was asked to re-apply for tenure. It has just been denied. This is supposedly on the basis of his “research and teaching,” but this is an outrageous falsehood.

In fact, the claim is so outrageous that protests against his firing are being led by his external tenure reviewers. (At least, those based in countries that have protections for the freedom of expression.) George is an academic “superstar” according to external reviewer Prof. Karin Wahl-Jorgensen at Cardiff University in the UK, and the case for tenure was “watertight.” Prof. Philip Howard at the University of Washington, a fellow of the Center for Technology Policy at Princeton and another external reviewer, writes in protest that George’s career is being “derailed by the political elites” in Singapore. I agree.

The George case is important for all American academics. The dire financial situation at the University of Illinois made lucrative research deals with authoritarian governments more attractive, and these sorts of collaborations have already been covered extensively in the Western press. I see now that this coverage has missed the mark. It has emphasized the growing trend of international campuses and the reliance on international money in American higher ed, but the coverage has failed to specify the sophisticated Singaporean higher education strategy of targeted bribery and the Singaporean danger to freedom in the American academy.

For instance, extensive media coverage of controversial Yale-N.U.S., “Singapore’s first liberal arts college” and a project of Yale University, focused on the threat to student freedoms. 

As a New York Times article puts it, quoting Ravinder Sidhu, “The main issue is whether students at the Yale-N.U.S. College will be able to engage in all of the activities associated with an education in the humanities — freedom of thought, the cultivation of the imagination, the ability to think critically about the arguments offered by those in authority, and the ability to fashion arguments and dissent in a civil manner.”

The important problem above is framed as: When Yale-N.U.S. teaches Arendt, will the students be able to talk about it?  But I predict that the problem may never come up.

Student freedom of expression is indeed foundational but this coverage leaves unmentioned the threat that these institutional arrangements are placing on the freedom of research and teaching. It leaves unmentioned the serious risks that any American academic takes when engaging in a Singaporean venture.

What if you went to Singapore and accidentally let it slip that you thought human rights were a good idea?  It is so clean and nice there, it’s easy not to notice that Singapore’s government is (I’ve just noticed) grouped with comparable Liberia, Palestine, Georgia, and Haiti by The Economist’s “Democracy Index.”

If your money has been doubled presumably that takes the sting off. One defense of Yale-N.U.S. was that engagement with countries like China and Haiti have generally been a good thing for Western institutions and the countries involved. But China and Haiti do not typically pay well. 

When I mentioned to a colleague that I was writing this, he shared the story of 75-year-old Alan Shadrake, an author and British citizen who wrote a book critical of the Singaporean justice system and its use of the death penalty. When visiting Singapore for a book launch in 2010, Shadrake was arrested for defamation and the offense of “scandalizing the court system” (a Singaporean offense). He was found guilty and jailed, despite the protests of Amnesty International. My colleague mentioned that after I publish this article I should not travel to Singapore again.

Yet I’d like to go back. I found Singapore to be a wonderful place. I’m a fan of international collaboration in higher education and I have many collaborators in Singapore. I want to stand in support of my colleagues – the faculty and students who have been overruled by the government in the case of Prof. Cherian George.

As an American academic, I think the best way to support Singaporeans now is to withdraw from any research collaboration involving the Singaporean government. We should not host international research conferences in Singapore. Stay out of Singapore until it is clear that quoting Arendt won’t get you fired (or jailed). Let’s hope that day will come soon.

(This was cross-posted to Multicast.)

“Networked Norms: How Tech Startups and Teen Practices Challenge Organizational Boundaries”

(Image courtesy of victuallers2)

Twitter message [edited] alerting citizens of drug-related violence.

Tweets per day for each of the four cities

We then examined the people Tweeting. We focused on their level of activity (number of tweets) and notoriety (number of followers). When we did this, we noticed a small number of highly-followed users –media organizations, celebrities, etc.– that had posted  a handful of tweets about the violence in those cities. For example, the account for CNN en Español has more than a million followers but had tweeted only once with the hashtag related to the city of Monterrey. Meanwhile, we observed another small group of people also with a lot of followers but who had contributed a lot of tweets (this group is located towards the top right corner of the plots below). We refer to these people as “curators.”

Twitter activity in four cities showing the follower count and tweets count for each person.

We reached out to several of these curators, and were able to interview some. We learned some of them receive news reports from social media and others from contacts they have across the city. They also mentioned they consider their work to be altruistic in nature, as a form of “community service,” and that they see their work as a response to what they perceive was an abandonment from the media and the government. For example, one curator said:

When I started… the news media, the journalists, and the government were nonexistent, they did not inform on what was happening on the streets…

Another one added:

they forgot they have an obligation with the people… they started hiding information. Then, society started demanding information. This is when social networks took over…

Although traditional journalists regularly serve as curators, both on Twitter and in the mainstream media outlets, the rise of citizen curators suggests that existing outlets are not meeting public need. Both government officials and journalists have idiosyncratically engaged on Twitter, but much of the citizen curators’ success in building an audience stems from their willingness to curate information even when government agencies, journalists, and other media outlets are not, often for fears of reprisals from organized crime.

This practice of civic media curation is not without controversy. First, some of the curators we talked with reported working up to 15 hours a day on Twitter, and being quite upset when others “steal” their tweets. They raised several issues of validation of information. On the other hand, several journalists have raised skepticism about the potential for social media to spread fear and misinformation. Indeed, the fear of inaccurate information spreading has prompted some government agencies to clamp down on citizen curators. What’s more, some citizen curators have been targeted by drug cartels, while others have been accused of collaborating with them, giving further arguments to the problems of shifting from crowdsourcing news reporting to actually crowdsourcing crime reporting.

Social media has become quite visible across the globe for helping people deal with crises like floods, earthquakes, and terrorism. As social medial designers grapple with these challenges, one intervention becomes apparent: there is a significant need for developing technical strategies to assess trust without revealing identity information. Most identity schemes focus on assessing whether or not someone is who they say they are. Indeed, Twitter has implemented “verified” identities. Verification, while valuable for certain types of interaction, is not necessarily what the curators need. While verification may be a decent proxy, all they and their readers really need to know is whether or not the information that is being presented is credible.

For more, see our full paper  to be presented at CSCW 2013, The New War Correspondents: The Rise of Civic Media Curation in Urban Warfare, authored by Andrés Monroy-Hernández, danah boyd, Munmun De Choudhury, Scott Counts.

Cross-posted at the Crowd Research Blog

SMC: So what brings you to MSR today?

JM: Visiting with Nancy Baym, and chatting to just see how things work here.

SMC: What’s the most fun thing that you learned during your visit today?

JM: You have a wide assortment of coffee-related products.

SMC: Ah, yes, our famous beverage bar!  So, out of our many options, what was your drink of choice today?

JM: I had a double espresso, which was quite excellent.

Suggested citation: Gray, Mary L. “ ‘CAUTION!! Boundary Work Ahead for Internet Studies …or, Why the Twilight of the ‘Toaster Studies’ Approach to Internet Research is a Very, Very Good Thing”. Paper presented at IR13, University of Salford, Manchester, October 19, 2012.

CAUTION!! Boundary Work Ahead for Internet Studies

or,

Why the Twilight of the ‘Toaster Studies’ Approach to Internet Research is a Very, Very Good Thing

My thanks to the organizers, particularly Feona Attwood and Ben Light. I’m honored to share this session with 2 scholars I read and admire. They, along with the other plenary speakers and keynote, produce scholarship critical to the relevance and future of internet studies. Their momentum is why I think we’re heading toward the twilight of a techno-centric approach to internet studies.

This year’s conference theme asks us to examine the place of the Internet in the contemporary world and in relation to a range of existing and emerging technologies. To consider its impact in a context where life is entangled with technologies of all kinds.

My talk headed off in a preachy direction as I was composing my thoughts. I want to address the importance of queer and feminist theories to digital media studies. They are rich analytic tools for getting at marginal(ized) media use. But they offer much more than that. They also provide a lens for interrogating the production of normative media use and, by extension, sociocultural norms. These are 2 different but related enterprises. By design, these approaches use media as a way into sets of larger social questions. I’ll draw on my own work to explain what I mean and cite a couple of cases that model how to study digital media without re-instantiating technological objects as the center of the action. I fought but then gave into the urge to call out unbridled enthusiasm about “big data” as a particular kind of fetishizing of networked media. I’ll end on talking about the boundary work ahead for internet research as an inter-discipline and the challenges we face writing for publics (including ourselves) that want technologies to give us clear answers.

I would argue that despite the interdisciplinarity that defines internet research today, it often channels, implicitly or explicitly, communication studies’ “cultivation analysis” paradigm. Cultivation theory, first developed by journalist and media scholar George Gerbner in 1968, how media exposure or use (TV for most of Gerbner’s work) affected viewers’ perceptions of the world.

While a great deal of productive scholarship came out of this theory, in the popular imagination, it became the perfect explanation for everything from rising teen pregnancy to fear of the world.

Domestication Theory offered a far more relational approach to media consumption. Consumers and technologies shape one another as media make their way into the intimate lives of individuals through processes of Appropriation, Objectification, Incorporation, Conversion (Silverstone 1996; D. Miller 1988).

This introduced a way of talking about the social inflected in the technical. But, arguably, it also, inadvertently, keeps our attention on the technology or individual negotiations and exceptional use.

Correctives to early studies of nuclear family use of TV, phones, and later cellphones were studies that looked at the exceptional lives of single parents, working poor, and others less likely to be (or assumed to be) early adopters. The detailed, descriptive attention to media adoption makes it much harder to zoom out and consider the reinscription of normative users and those who will be seen as always already late to the party.

Feminist and queer critiques give us a way to think about: the normative focus on the family to the exceptional exclusion of others; the ways mobile media are framed from the get-go as frictionless and inter-personal when, in many cases, we see how they tether users to broader publics and cultural systems of surveillance.

Much of my work concentrates on what it means to be legible, visible as a citizen in the world and the cultural work it requires of all of us.

Specifically, I’ve spent the past several years learning from the lives of queer and questioning youth in the rural United States and how they negotiate a sense of difference in a place where they are presumed to be out of place. I started with the assumption that the internet would make their lives easier. I was wrong. Sometimes it matters. Sometimes it doesn’t. But “it” is always part of a process of negotiating the boundaries of public recognition and validation in places the depend on familiarity and localness over assertions of queer difference.

Here are some examples of what I call “boundary publics”.

Boundary publics negotiate…lack of info & limited public access + social marginalization + erasure from w/in gay imaginary = response to politics of visibility.

Yes, they involve digital media and the web. But those media are only part of the story. Sometimes they matter a great deal, other times, they don’t.

Tending to place and location in our research investigating the Internet in the contemporary world means we necessarily bear down on the power relations that shape the presence, absence, and silences that give texture and meaning to technologies’ role in everyday lives.

My projects are consumed with thinking about how mobility—designs and assumptions about moving through the world—also convey recognition, visibility in motion.

At the heart of my interests in mobile media are larger questions about the material conditions that animate and motivate the privileging of some representations of self over others.

The Boundary Work ahead (toward the end of toaster studies)

Tom Streeter and Zizi Papacharissi recently shared a discussion they’re having about what Zizi called the Habitus of the New. Tom noted: “the fact is, one can’t talk about current media and communication without facing up to the problem of novelty. Partly this is because of our sources of funding….the polity’s fascination with digital novelty often enough pays our bills.”

We write for publics, often ourselves included, looking for clear answers: technological innovation solves social problems.

(There’s a lot of hype out there)

Or we want to confirm that they make manifest our biggest dreams or our worst nightmares. This predisposition to the wow factor in digital media studies—the novelty of the newest LOLcat meme or latest social networking service—makes it hard to shift the conversation away from specific bits of technology to the social complexities that offer anything but clear, universal answers to our questions about media’s historical impact on society.

For example: This mad rush to quantify and model the big data of social networks. What’s that about? What do we feel we’re achieving in those moments?

Big data becomes the latest moment/potential intervention to call on our publics to resist the urge to assume we now see enough data to tell us what’s really going on and ask what kinds of relationality we can question from this new (proprietary) bird’s eye view. There is no moment of isolation that doesn’t circle back to a myth of overcoming our own location and place in the world through the liberatory power of technology.

My argument: We have reached a critical moment in internet studies: we need to challenge ourselves and our publics to think about the Internet in the contemporary world in far more nuanced, socially-situated ways. Our thinking, research, argumentation, and methodologies must practice leading with this nuance rather than ending on this note.

WHY? Because doing otherwise simply sets up emerging technologies as the next new “toaster” to study, ever distracting us from the social context that animates the cultural work of any technology, reproducing a habit of finding norms and variations rather than interrogating their production vis-à-vis media.

Complexity means focusing on the context of media use above and beyond the devices in play. We need to challenges ourselves and our audiences to think relationally, dialectically about our relationships with technology.

Our next challenge as media scholars will be pushing the conversation beyond technologies as the center of intellectual pursuits. In all cases, we must be able to articulate what our specific instantiation of technological engagement suggests more broadly. We must respond to our publics that we are not studying x, y, or z gadget or gizmo or meme but a case to help us better understand the world and our place in it. Our theories and methodologies must challenge our publics and each other to see the larger questions at stake when we study technology.

This no small request. Our publics do want to hear about how technology fixes social life or falls short in the process. They do not want to hear that technologies are only a representational object, a chimera of the nexus of social relations and material conditions that shape what we make and take away from technologies. So, our next hurdle: how do we bring our publics to a different relationship with technologies? How do we invite them to think about privacy or personally identifiable information or other manifestations that have been historically framed as individual experiences of technology as, instead, collective exchanges/participatory cultures/persona rights that include but necessarily exceed the bodies of individuals? How do we move publics to see mobile media as a metaphor for our long held modernist desires to conquer space, time, and social position? Can location ever matter more?

I hope this presentation helps illustrate the value of assuming much more about the power of social and cultural forces that make media meaningful and to resist centering technology in isolation of or independent from these forces.

Shifting to context will be hard as it will rob us from the novelty that makes us interesting to funders, reporters, and a general public hungry for the story that makes technology the hero or villain and retains the individual’s role as the arbiter of their own destiny in the face of technological change.