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 …
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Call for applications! MSR Social Media Collective PhD interns, for summer 2017
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 …
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Negotiating Identity in Social Media: Ph.D. course in Aarhus after AoIR
Registration open for: “Negotiating Identity in Social Media: Relational, emotional, and visual labor” with Nancy Baym, Annette Markham and Katrin Tiidenberg. REGISTRATION: https://auws.au.dk/negotiationofidentityinsocialmedia Time: Oct 11-14, 2016 (Just after the AoIR conference in Berlin) Place: Aarhus University and DOKK 1, Aarhus, Denmark Online: We'll post an online participation option soon. Check back! Instructors: Nancy Baym …
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Three flawed assumptions the Daily Beast made about dating apps
Last week, the Daily Beast published an article by one of its editors who sought to report about how dating apps were facilitating sexual encounters in Rio’s Olympic Village. Instead, his story focused mainly on athletes using Grindr, an app for men seeking men, and included enough personal information about individuals to identify and out …
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Awakenings of the Filtered
I was delighted to give the Robert M. Pockrass Memorial Lecture at Penn State University this year, titled "Awakenings of the Filtered: Algorithmic Personalization in Social Media and Beyond." I used the opportunity to give a broad overview of recent work about social media filtering algorithms and personalization. Here it is: https://youtu.be/ZxS15iIK2JA I tried to argue that …
Algorithms, clickworkers, and the befuddled fury around Facebook Trends
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 …
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Facebook Trending: It’s made of people!! (but we should have already known that)
Gizmodo has released two important articles (1, 2) about the people who were hired to manage Facebook's "Trending" list. The first reveals not only how Trending topics are selected and packaged on Facebook, but also the peculiar working conditions this team experienced, the lack of guidance or oversight they were provided, and the directives they …
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Astro Noise: A survival guide for living under total surveillance
Documentary film maker Laura Poitra's exhibit in the Whitney Museum presented an immersive installation covering issues of mass surveillance, the war on terror, Guantánamo Bay, occupation, the US drone program and torture. Some of these issues have been investigated in her films, including Citizenfour, which won the 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary, and in …
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We’re all selfish superficial and too fat? Tedx talk by Kat Tiidenberg
This is a video and the transcript of my Ted talk at Ted x TTU in April 2016. It's about body image, consumer economy and selfies. http://youtu.be/q6Mp-kTwjYA * I have some sayings here; let’s do a show of hands if you’ve heard these: “don’t judge a book by its cover” or “beauty is only skin …
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We are hiring a Research Assistant
The Social Media Collective is looking for a Research Assistant to work with us at Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Starting in July 2016 the MSR Social Media Collective will consist of Nancy Baym, Tarleton Gillespie, Mary L. Gray, Dan Greene, and Dylan Mulvin in Cambridge, Kate Crawford and danah boyd in New York City, as well …
