Join panelists Taina Bucher (University of Oslo), Brian Jefferson (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign), and Niall Docherty (Microsoft Research) to discuss digital temporalities as they intersect with apparatuses of power and knowledge.

Monday April 12th — 9am CDT/3pm BST/4pm CEST — Online

Hosted by the Social Media Collective

Each speaker will give a ten-minute presentation, followed by interactive break-out rooms and a participatory discussion. The event will be held virtually and is scheduled to last 90 minutes. The event is free and open to the public. Please visit the Eventbrite page to register to attend, and receive a Teams link:

Digital Time/Power Symposium: tickets, Mon 12 Apr 2021 at 15:00 | Eventbrite

Event Description

This is an interactive event, with discussions in the breakout rooms providing the grounds for a collective conversation surrounding digital time/power to emerge. The talks will invite dialogue amongst participants by questioning the way temporality is targeted, discursively produced, and materially managed in distinct sociotechnical environments.

Taina Bucher will examine the specific temporal regime of algorithmic media as characterized by a logic of right-time, or kairos. Bucher is an associate professor in media and communication at the University of Oslo.

How do media platforms determine when the time is right, with what implications? Where does right-time materialize in digital media and could we address the empirical realities of this fabrication?

Brian Jefferson will discuss how the digital revolution has both accelerated geographic development and underdevelopment. Brian is an associate professor of geography and geographic information systems at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign.

In what ways has the digital revolution upended and reproduced established inequalities? What does this tell us of technological progress?  

Niall Docherty will explore how tools of digital well-being promise a certain future of human flourishing inflected by neoliberal discourses of responsibilization and self-control. Niall is a postdoctoral researcher at Microsoft Research New England, within the Social Media Collective.

What are the political, economic, and social futures promised to users through adopting “healthy” digital habits? How do narratives of the good life condition action online?

In collectively examining these types of questions and more, the symposium will cultivate an interdisciplinary discussion able to explore varied experiences of digital temporality and power. This will be a great chance to meet with other critical digital theorists and share ideas with the broader research community.

We look forward to your participation!

APPLICATION DEADLINE: December 1, 2020

The Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for a two-year social media postdoctoral researcher. This position is an ideal opportunity for a scholar whose work draws on communication, media studies, anthropology, sociology, and/or science & technology studies to bring empirical and critical perspectives to bear on complex socio-technical issues. We also consider applications from candidates that might bridge SMC with one or more areas of the MSRNE lab, including machine learning and statistics, economics and computational economics, theoretical mathematics, and computational biology.

Postdoctoral researchers receive a competitive salary and benefits package, and are eligible for relocation expenses. Postdoctoral researchers are hired for a two-year term appointment following the academic calendar, starting in July 2021. The position is located in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The Social Media Collective is comprised of full-time researchers, postdocs, visiting faculty, Ph.D. interns, and research assistants. Current projects in New England include:

– How do people build social capital with each other in remote and hybrid work, and how do those processes facilitate or harm inclusion? (Nancy Baym)

– How do social media platforms, through algorithmic design and content policies, serve as custodians of public discourse? (Tarleton Gillespie)

– What are the cultural, political, and ethical implications of on-demand platform economies as new forms and sites of semi-automated, globally-distributed digital labor? (Mary L. Gray)

– how do discourses and designs of ideal social media habits function within apparatuses of platform capitalism? (Niall Docherty)

SMC postdocs may also have the opportunity to visit and collaborate with researchers in our sister labs in New York City and Montreal.

Microsoft Research provides a vibrant multidisciplinary research environment, with an open publication policy and close links to top academic institutions around the world. The postdoctoral research positions offer emerging scholars an opportunity to develop their research career and to interact with some of the top minds in the research community.

Qualifications

Required Qualifications:

• PhD in anthropology, communications, media studies, sociology, science & technology studies, or a related field. 
• A research program demonstrated by journal and conference publications.

Preferred Qualifications:

• A strong social scientific or humanistic methodological, analytical, and theoretical foundation.
• Strong communication skills.
• The ability to work in a highly collaborative and interdisciplinary environment.
• Demonstrated leadership potential in research.

Responsibilities

Postdoctoral researchers define their own research agenda. Postdocs are expected to be lively contributors to discussions in the SMC research group, and the MSR New England lab.

The ideal candidate may be trained in any number of disciplines, but should have a strong social scientific or humanistic methodological, analytical, and theoretical foundation, be interested in questions related to technology or the internet and society or culture, and be interested in working in a highly interdisciplinary environment that also includes computer scientists, mathematicians, and economists.

Application process

Submit an online application here. [11/18/20 – updated link]

To get started with your application, press the “Apply now” button. When prompted, upload your CV and provide names and contact information of three referees; one of your letter writers must be your dissertation advisor.

In addition, you must upload the following 3 documents, as attachments, to your online application:

1. a single research statement (4 page maximum length) that does the following:

• outlines the questions and methodologies central to your research agenda (~ two pages);
• offers a description of how your research agenda relates to research conducted by the Social Media Collective (~ one page);
• provides an abstract and chapter outline of your dissertation (~ one page)

2+3. two writing samples: journal articles, book chapters, or equivalent (uploaded as two separate attachments).

Remember to press the “Submit” button at the last screen.

Requests for recommendation letters will be automatically sent to your list of referees on your behalf. NOTE: THE APPLICATION SYSTEM WILL NOT REQUEST REFERENCE LETTERS UNTIL AFTER YOU HAVE SUBMITTED YOUR APPLICATION! We recommend that you warn your letter writers in advance, so they will have their letters ready to submit as soon as they receive the prompt. The email they receive will tell them they have two weeks to respond, but consideration of application begins very quickly after the deadline – so submitting early will give them adequate time to get their letters to us. Please make sure to check back with your referees to ensure they received the request for letters of recommendation and that they sent them. You can also check the progress on individual reference requests at any time by clicking the “status” tab within your application page.

To be assured of full consideration, all of your materials need to be submitted by December 1, 2020. For more information, see here.If you have any questions about the application process, you can contact Tarleton Gillespie at tarleton@microsoft.com and please include “SMC postdoc” in the subject line.

Microsoft is an equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to age, ancestry, color, family or medical care leave, gender identity or expression, genetic information, marital status, medical condition, national origin, physical or mental disability, political affiliation, protected veteran status, race, religion, sex (including pregnancy), sexual orientation, or any other characteristic protected by applicable laws, regulations, and ordinances. We also consider qualified applicants regardless of criminal histories, consistent with legal requirements.

If you need assistance and/or a reasonable accommodation due to a disability during the application or the recruiting process, please send a request via the Accommodation request form.

In the confusion of our current times, we were not as quick about announcing the newest members of the Social Media Collective as we usually are. Like everyone, we find ourselves out of step with the timelessness of pandemic time. But as these new faces are showing up and settling in with us – on our video screens, if not in the lab – we wanted to share the good news, tell you all about them and their work.

Below you’ll meet three SMC interns, the newest postdoc to join the Social Media Collective, and a summer/fall 2020 visitor whose (virtual) arrival is just days away. And as a sign of how late this post is, the first intern you’ll meet has already finished their internship!

Tristan Gohring is a PhD student in Informatics at Indiana University. Their research intersects the fields of science and technology studies, social informatics, and gender studies. Their primary research is about gender as a classification system, and how gender classification gets used and embedded in technologies such as identification documents and online forms and profile pages. (Tristan was part of the joint MSR / E+D JEM Project PhD internship program; they were interning with us when we all had to start working from home, and they bravely completed their internship under these unexpected circumstances. Tristan really helped us think through how to move the SMC internship online. Many thanks!)

Amber Hamilton is a PhD Candidate in Sociology at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities interested in questions concerning race, technology, and digital media. Her dissertation, titled “Contestation and Articulations of Digital Blackness,” explores the embodiment of digital Blackness in the online lives of Black Twitter users and the multiple forms of cultural conversations that occur within the community to understand how race is articulated and maintained online. At the Social Media Collective, Amber is exploring the responses of social media and tech platforms to protests for racial justice in response to the murder of George Floyd. Amber holds an MA in Sociology from the University of Minnesota and a BA in Sociology from The Ohio State University.

Anna Gibson is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Communication at Stanford University working under the direction of Dr. Angèle Christin. She is interested in present and historical online communities, and her doctoral research focuses on the friction between these communities and the governance structures and organizations that make them possible. She was awarded a graduate fellowship at Stanford’s McCoy Family Center for Ethics in Society, and her work on the application of theories of democratic governance to social media platform content moderation practices has been published in Social Media + Society. This summer she is researching how platform companies talk about punishment with regards to content moderation.

Our newest postdoc, Niall Docherty recently completed his PhD at the Centre for Critical Theory, University of Nottingham. His thesis examines the material and discursive construction of Facebook’s ideal users, linking normative designations of “healthy” usership to neoliberal histories of governance through habit. Niall has a BA in Politics and an MA in Cultural Studies from Goldsmiths, University of London, specialising in political theory, Modern philosophy and governmentality studies. His future projects include developing a conceptually rigorous rubric of habit to study the quality, possibility and limitations of everyday social media usage; empirically investigating how discourses of well-being are articulated in different social media environments; and further exploring how expressions of ‘living well’ on social media sites are enacted by users to function within apparatus of platform capitalism.

And finally, our faculty visitor from July-December, Angèle Christin is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication and affiliated faculty in the Sociology Department and Program in Science, Technology, and Society at Stanford University. Drawing on ethnographic methods, she studies how algorithms and analytics transform professional values, expertise, and work practices. Her book, Metrics at Work: Journalism and the Contested Meaning of Algorithms  (Princeton University Press, 2020) focuses on the case of web journalism, analyzing the growing importance of audience analytics in web newsrooms in the U.S. and France. With the Social Media Collective, Angèle will work on a new research project on the paradoxes of algorithmic labor through an ethnographic study of influencers and influencer marketing firms on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok.

Our best wishes to our most recent faculty visitor Desmond Patton, who has returned to Columbia University’s School of Social Work, and Elena Maris, who just completed her SMC postdoc and is now an assistant faculty in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Chicago!

In a new op-ed, published yesterday in The Hill, Mary L. Gray and her co-authors argue for the importance of human labor behind contact tracing and argue for a more human-centered approach in current tech strategies.

As the Center for Disease Control (CDC) plans to massively scale up testing and contact-tracing for COVID-19, Gray argues cell phone location data for digital contact tracing is only a partial solution. “Successful contact tracing involves patiently helping people recall with whom they have interacted in the preceding weeks and assessing the risk associated with each of these interactions,” they argue. “Irrelevant contact data will needlessly consume precious human contact tracer time.”

Successful contact tracing programs rely on deeply human exchanges. It requires trust between the human contact tracers and those who have been exposed to life-threatening diseases. Technology can help in important ways—dynamic reference tools, secure databases, and centralized data storage— but ultimately, the best technological interventions to fight COVID-19 will be those designed with collaboration and equity in mind. Technological solutions must help the human contact tracers with the difficult work of building human connection and trust in our public health systems.

Mary Gray’s co-authors include Barbara Grosz, Higgins Research Professor of Natural Sciences in the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences at Harvard University and external faculty at the Santa Fe Institute, and Margaret Bourdeaux, MD, MPH, the policy liaison for Partners in Health COVID-19 Contact Tracing Program. She holds appointments at Harvard Medical School, Brigham and Women’s Hospital, and the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School of Government. 

Read the full op-ed here: https://thehill.com/opinion/technology/493648-how-human-centered-technology-can-beat-covid-19-through-contact-tracing