We are very proud to announce that more than 30 current and past Social Media Collective researchers will be presenting their work at this year’s Association of Internet Researchers conference in Philadelphia. The SMC and AoIR go way back—the SMC’s Senior Principal Research Manager Nancy Baym led organizing efforts for the first AoIR conference in …
Category: papers
new essay by Elizabeth Fetterolf: “It’s Crowded at the Bottom: Trust, Visibility, and Search Algorithms on Care.com”
We're excited to share a new publication from Elizabeth Fetterolf, on how care workers perform their trustworthiness, and how platform algorithms grant them different kinds of visibility. Elizabeth is currently the research assistant for the Social Media Collective, having recently completed their M.Sc. in Sociology at the University of Oxford. "It's Crowded at the Bottom: …
SMC news: an essay in the new Fake News collection, and a podcast interview
A new edited collection from Melissa Zimdars and Kembrew McLeod called Fake News: Understanding Media and Misinformation in the Digital Age (published by MIT Press, with a clever cover) includes an essay from me called "Platforms Throw Content Moderation at Every Problem." It's just one of many excellent essays, I recommend you check out the …
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Night modes and the new hue of our screens
Information & Culture just published (paywall; or free pre-print) an article I wrote about “night modes,” in which I try to untangle the history of light, screens, sleep loss, and circadian research. If we navigate our lives enmeshed with technologies and their attendant harms, I wanted to know how we make sense of our orientation …
How machine learning can amplify or remove gender stereotypes
TLDR: It's easier to remove gender biases from machine learning algorithms than from people. In a recent paper, Saligrama, Bolukbasi, Chang, Zou, and I stumbled across some good and bad news about Word Embeddings. Word Embeddings are a wildly popular tool of the trade among AI researchers. They can be used to solve analogy puzzles. For instance, for …
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#trendingistrending: when algorithms become culture
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 …
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See you at IR 16!
The Social Media Collective is showing up in force at Internet Research 16 in Phoenix, Arizona starting next week. Along with many friends of the SMC, there will be some of our permanent researchers (Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie), postdocs current and past (Kevin Driscoll, Lana Swartz, Mike Ananny), past & present interns (Stacy Blasiola, Brittany …
Big Data, Context Cultures
The latest issue of Media, Culture, and Society features an open-access discussion section responding to SMC all-stars danah boyd and Kate Crawford's "Critical Questions for Big Data." Though the article is only a few years old, it's been very influential and a lot has happened since it came out, so editors Aswin Punathambekar and Anastasia Kavada commissioned …
Co-creation and Algorithmic Self-Determination: A study of player feedback on game analytics in EVE Online
We are happy to share SMC's intern Aleena Chia's presentation of her summer project titled "Co-creation and Algorithmic Self-Determination: A study of player feedback on game analytics in EVE Online". Aleena's project summary and the videos of her presentation below: Digital games are always already information systems designed to respond to players’ inputs with …
Should You Boycott Traditional Journals?
(Or, Should I Stay or Should I Go?) Is it time to boycott "traditional" scholarly publishing? Perhaps you are an academic researcher, just like me. Perhaps, just like me, you think that there are a lot of exciting developments in scholarly publishing thanks to the Internet. And you want to support them. And you also …
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