I have the privilege of spending the year as a visiting researcher with the social media researchers at Microsoft Research New England. And for the last two weeks or so, its been a particularly stimulating time to be among them. Spurred by the controversial Facebook emotions study and the vigorous debate surrounding it, there's been a …
Continue reading Social Media Collective weigh in on the debates about the Facebook emotions study
I've just returned from the "Social, Cultural, and Ethical Dimensions of Big Data" event, held by the Data & Society Initiative (led by danah boyd), and spurred by the efforts of the White House Office of Technology and Policy to develop a comprehensive report on issues of privacy, discrimination, and rights around big data. And …
I'm thrilled to announce that our anthology, Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, edited by myself with Pablo Boczkowski and Kirsten Foot, is now officially available from MIT Press. Contributors include Geoffrey Bowker, Finn Brunton, Gabriella Coleman, Gregory Downey, Steven Jackson, Christopher Kelty, Leah Lievrouw, Sonia Livingstone, Ignacio Siles, Jonathan Sterne, Lucy Suchman, and Fred Turner. We’ve secured permission to share the …
After Yahoo's high-profile purchase of Tumblr, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that she would "promise not to screw it up," this is probably not what she had in mind. Devoted users of Tumblr have been watching closely, worried that the cool, web 2.0 image blogging tool would be tamed by the nearly two-decade-old search giant. One population of Tumblr …
Continue reading Tumblr, NSFW porn blogging, and the challenge of checkpoints
I want to recommend a new post at Culture Digitally, "Digital In/Justice," both because it may be of interest to the readers of this blog, and because it features Microsoft Research's Mary Gray. Culture Digitally arranges occasional dialogues, in which two or more scholars go back and forth in conversation on a topic they are …
This is about the fourth Olympics that's been trumpeted as the first one to embrace social media and the Internet -- just as, depending on how you figure it, it's about the fourth U.S. election in a row that's the first to go digital. It may be in the nature of new technologies that we …
Last week, Gawker received a curious document. Turned over by an aggrieved worker from the online freelance employment site oDesk, the document iterated, over the course of several pages and in unsettling detail, exactly what kinds of content should be deleted from the social networking site that had outsourced its content moderation to oDesk's team. …
Just a quick follow up on the discussion of SOPA; people keep asking me what kind of legislation would be more appropriate than SOPA and PIPA, and that might have a better chance of gaining the support of the technology industries, users, and Congress. I'm not in the business of writing laws, but as a …
Since I supported the blacking out of the MSR Social Media Collective blog to which I sometimes contribute, and the blacking out of Culture Digitally, which I co-organize, in order to join the SOPA protest led by the "Stop American Censorship" effort, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Reddit, and Wikipedia, I though I should weigh in …
Continue reading SOPA and the strategy of forced invisibility
The interesting question is not whether Twitter is censoring its Trends list. The interesting question is, what do we think the Trends list is, what it represents and how it works, that we can presume to hold it accountable when we think it is "wrong?" What are these algorithms, and what do we want them to be? …
Social Media Collective 