(x-posted on Super Bon!) In late March and early April, I attended three events that together signal some interesting shifts in thinking about music technology and sound. The first, a day-long symposium on March 24th I co-organized with Nancy Baym, was entitled "What Is Music Technology For?" It came after a weekend-long instalment of MusicTechFest, …
Category: Uncategorized
Adding the bling: The role of social media data intermediaries
Last month, Twitter announced the acquisition of Gnip, one of the main sources for social media data—including Twitter data. In my research I am interested in the politics of platforms and data flows in the social web and in this blog post I would like to explore the role of data intermediaries—Gnip in particular—in regulating access to social media …
Continue reading Adding the bling: The role of social media data intermediaries
SMC is hiring a Research Assistant!
UPDATE: At this time we have a great pool for 2014 and are no longer accepting applications. ---- Microsoft Research (MSR) is looking for a Research Assistant for its Social Media Collective in the New England lab, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Social Media Collective consists of Nancy Baym, Mary Gray, Jessa Lingel, and Kevin …
Call For Papers: Studying Selfies: Evidence, Affect, Ethics, and the Internet’s Visual Turn
Studying Selfies: Evidence, Affect, Ethics, and the Internet’s Visual TurnA special section of the International Journal of Communication (IJoC)Guest-edited by:Dr. Theresa SenftMaster Teacher in Global Liberal StudiesNew York University Terri.senft@nyu.eduDr. Nancy BaymPrincipal ResearcherMicrosoft Research baym@microsoft.com OverviewThe fact that “selfie” was Oxford English Dictionary’s word of the year for 2013 indicates that the selfie is a topic …
Matrix Algebra: how to be human in a digital economy
By Sara C. Kingsley and Dr. Mary L. Gray (cross-posted to CultureDigitally and The Center for Popular Economics) Ray and Charles Working on a Conceptual Model for the Exhibition Mathematica, 1960, photograph. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress (A-22a) “Certainly the cost of living has increased, but the cost of everything else has …
Continue reading Matrix Algebra: how to be human in a digital economy
A “pay it back tax” on data brokers: a modest (and also politically untenable and impossibly naïve) policy proposal
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 …
Welcoming the SMC interns for 2014!
This was an incredible, overwhelming year for internship applications. We had well over 200 PhD students apply, and we were deeply impressed by the quality of suggested projects. Thanks to everyone for your submissions. Here are the four people who will be joining us over the summer – congratulations to you all. We’re looking forward …
New anthology on media technologies, bringing together STS and Communication perspectives
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 …
What Came Before Social Media?
(or, Social Media circa 1994) (or, Happy 20th Birthday, My Home Page!) Thanks to the rigorous use of backups, I've just noticed that it is the twentieth anniversary of my personal home page. In the spirit of commemoration, I've uploaded the original version (c. 1994). For reasons I don't remember now, I named it "booger.html." …
Lectio Precursoria: Interpersonal Boundary Regulation in the Context of Social Network Services
Interpersonal boundary regulation constitutes of the efforts needed to make the world work, that is, for people to achieve contextually desirable degrees of social interaction and to build and sustain their relations with others and with the self. In my dissertation, I examined the topic in the context of social network services. I defended the …
Social Media Collective 