This post is in response to hearing Tarleton Gillespie’s AoIR plenary talk on SNS’ responses to trolling. First, a nod to Lisa Nakamura’s point that when we talk about discriminatory acts as trolling, it potentially deescalates the real harm engendered by racist, sexist and demeaning behaviors. This in fact reminds me of boyd and Marwick’s …
Continue reading An Anarchist Ethic for the Treatment of Trolls
For the past two years, social media platforms have been rolling out machine translation in the hopes of enabling multilingual interactions. However, the people interacting in these platforms often know each other already, and have a language in common (i.e., friends). But what happens when machine translation is used to facilitate interactions among strangers, who perhaps have common interests but not …
Continue reading Multilingual Interactions through Machine Translation—Numbers from Socl
Earlier this week, I caught Molly Crabapple’s talk at the Berkman Center, where she gave a determined defense of the value of art, and particularly activist, hand-drawn art, in the midst of participatory media. In particular, I was struck by her comment that camera phones enable protestors to rob authority figures of anonymity, for example, …
When it comes to designing web services, an individual user is often taken as the starting point. In many cases, it's a good, practical assumption to make. It can, however, prove to be problematic when it comes to the so called 'sharing economy' where people share resources, such as physical space and tangible items, with …
Continue reading Account Sharing in the Context of Networked Hospitality Exchange
The Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for a social media postdoctoral researcher (start date: 1 July, 2014). This position is an ideal opportunity for a scholar whose work draws on anthropology, communication, media studies, sociology, and/or science and technology studies to bring empirical and critical perspectives to complex socio-technical …
Social Media Collective 