Katrin Tiidenberg (Aarhus University, Denmark and Tallinn University, Estonia) and SMC Principal Researcher Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research, New England) have recently published an article in Social Media + Society that analyzes how pregnancy is performed on Instagram. According to Tiidenberg and Baym, 'Pregnancy today is highly visible, intensely surveilled, marketed as a consumer identity, and feverishly …
Continue reading Learn It, Buy It, Work It! Performing Pregnancy on Instagram
SMC member Mary L. Gray (Microsoft Research, New England; Berkman Kein Center for Internet and Society) and colleague Siddharth Suri (Microsoft Research, New York) have published an article for the Harvard Business Review asking, "just how artificial is Artificial Intelligence?" Whether it is Facebook’s trending topics; Amazon’s delivery of Prime orders via Alexa; or the …
Continue reading “Just how artificial is Artificial Intelligence?”
December 7-13th is Computer Science Education Week! Recently, feminist media scholars have demanded we take seriously seriously the dearth of women and people of color in computing fields. This week presents the opportunity to broadcast professional role models to inspire young minority techies in pursuit of their STEM dreams, both in industry and in academia. …
Just a reminder, January 1 is the deadline for applications for the summer 2017 internship program with the Social Media Collective, at Microsoft Research New England. All the information you need, about the internship, the necessary qualifications, and how to apply, can be found here. During their twelve-week stay, SMC interns devise and execute their own research project, …
Continue reading Reminder, the application deadline for 2017 SMC internships is fast approaching…
Uber has TV ads now. The one I see most often is called “Get Your Side Hustle On”. It opens with a thirty-something black male Uber driver telling us, somewhat wearily, “These days, everyone needs a side hustle.” Then the upbeat horns pick up, he and his passenger start dancing, and he tells us how …
This post was spurred by an email from Tarleton Gillespie and Hector Postigo to contribute to a collected series that appeared on Culture Digitally today. The focus of that series is for scholars to "think hard about our own work and research agendas, and how they should shift to face new political realities." --- I …
Pundits and commentators are just starting to pick through the rubble of this election and piece together what happens and what it means. In such cases, it is often easier to grab hold of one explanation — Twitter! racism! Brexit! James Comey! — and use it as a clothesline to hang the election on and shake …
Continue reading The accountability of social media platforms, in the age of Trump
In 1979, Harvard professors Stephen Jay Gould and Richard Lewontin identified what they saw as a shortcoming in American and English evolutionary biology. It was, they argued, dominated by an adaptationist program.[1] By this, they meant that it embraced a misguided atomization of an organism’s traits, which then “are explained as structures optimally designed by …
Continue reading Beyond bugs and features: A case for indeterminacy
The 17th annual meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers is being held this week (Oct 5-8) in Berlin, Germany. It is a thrill to see so many past and present SMC members presenting their latest work, especially with Kate Crawford as part of the conference’s plenary panel Thursday evening. Below is a cheat sheet …
Germaine Halegoua (University of Kansas), Alex Leavitt (Facebook), and Mary L. Gray recently published an article based on research conducted while Germaine was a Ph.D. Intern and Alex was a Research Assistant at MSR. The article, "Jumping For Fun?: Negotiating Mobility and the Geopolitics of Foursquare" was published in Social Media + Society and is available …
Social Media Collective 