APPLICATION DEADLINE: JANUARY 1, 2017 Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for advanced PhD students to join the Social Media Collective (SMC) for its 12-week Internship program. The Social Media Collective (in New England, we are Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie, and Mary Gray, with current postdocs Dan Greene and Dylan Mulvin) bring together empirical and …
Continue reading Call for applications! MSR Social Media Collective PhD interns, for summer 2017
The controversy about the human curators behind Facebook Trends has grown, since the allegations made last week by Gizmodo. Besides being a major headache for Facebook, it has helped prod a growing discussion about the power of Facebook to shape the information we see and what we take to be most important. But we continue …
Continue reading Algorithms, clickworkers, and the befuddled fury around Facebook Trends
part of the 50th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-50) paper submission deadline: June 15, 2016, 11:59pm HST. For fifty years, the Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS) has been a home for researchers in the information, computer, and system sciences (http://www.hicss.org/). The 50th anniversary event will be held January 4-7, …
I wanted to share a new essay, "#Trendingistrending: When Algorithms Become Culture" that I've just completed for a forthcoming Routledge anthology called Algorithmic Cultures: Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies, edited by Robert Seyfert and Jonathan Roberge. My aim is to focus on the various "trending algorithms" that populate social media platforms, consider what they do as a set, and then …
Continue reading #trendingistrending: when algorithms become culture
Now that we have said goodbye to our most recent long-term visitor, Henry Jenkins, we can look ahead to our next, Paul Dourish. It's a fine time to do so, as he has just been awarded two honors that testify to his important contributions to the study of computation and society. His 1992 paper "Awareness and Coordination …
Continue reading kudos for upcoming SMC visitor Paul Dourish
We have had the distinct privilege of having Henry Jenkins visit our research group for the past few months. Give the immense impact of his work on the study of digital culture and digital industries, fan communities and the creative repurposing of media texts, and political participation and new forms of online activism, it was …
Nick Seaver and I have put together a list we wanted to share. It is an attempt to collect and categorize a growing critical literature on algorithms as social concerns. The work spans sociology, anthropology, science and technology studies, geography, communication, media studies, and legal studies, among others. Our aim was to catalog the emergence of “algorithms” as …
SMC is excited to welcome Tom Streeter, who will be soon making occasional visits to our New England lab, beginning later this month. To mark his arrival, we wanted to highlight the essay he has just published in the International Journal of Communication: “Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism, and the Desire for Good Capitalism.” (Borrowing from the summary …
Wired recently selected its 21 "must-follow" feeds in the world of business, and the Social Media Collective blog was among them! See the entire list here. We're thrilled, as so much of our goal is to span both scholarly and industry conversations around social media and its critical cultural implications. Stay tuned for more from this blog in the coming months.
On March 16, Facebook updated its "Community Standards,” in ways that were both cosmetic and substantive. The version it replaced, though it had enjoyed minor updates, had been largely the same since at least 2011. The change comes on the heels of several other sites making similar adjustments to their own policies, including Twitter, YouTube, Blogger, …
Continue reading Facebook’s improved “Community Standards” still can’t resolve the central paradox
Social Media Collective 