On September 9, 2015, the Data & Society Research Institute hosted Platformation, a one-day summit that brought together a diverse group of stakeholders to discuss platform economies and the labor that fuels them. Participants included platform business leaders, researchers, labor organization representatives, policy experts, and those contributing labor to this growing sector. You can read the full …
Continue reading Platformation: Greetings from the future of work!
Earlier in the month, the new Sage journal Social Media & Society announced a special issue curated and written by Culture Digitally scholars. SMC's own Tarleton Gillespie edited and wrote the issue's Introduction along with Hector Postigo, and the two collaborators blogged about the special issue here, here, and here. A number of articles in this issue grapple with new ways of understanding the relationship between technology …
The Pacific Standard magazine has been running a series where academics, business leaders, technologists and labor leaders have contributed to the discussion on the most consequential changes in labor and the future of work. We invite you to read the contributions from members of our SMC family. "Caring for the Crowdworker going at it alone" …
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 …
SMC is excited to welcome Tom Streeter, who will be soon making occasional visits to our New England lab, beginning later this month. To mark his arrival, we wanted to highlight the essay he has just published in the International Journal of Communication: “Steve Jobs, Romantic Individualism, and the Desire for Good Capitalism.” (Borrowing from the summary …
The Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for two social media postdoctoral researchers (start date: 5 July, 2016). This position is an ideal opportunity for a scholar whose work draws on anthropology, communication, media studies, sociology, and/or science and technology studies to bring empirical and critical perspectives to complex socio-technical issues. Application …
Continue reading The Social Media Collective is Hiring Postdocs
During her summer with us at Microsoft Research, PhD candidate Stacy Blasiola did a qualitative analysis of how Facebook users make sense of News Feed and algorithmic systems. Take a look at the presentation she did on her findings. (Video 1) (Video 2) (Video 3) (Video 4)
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 …
Presentation by intern Nathan Matias on the project he worked on during the summer at the SMC. He has continued to work on his research, so in case you have not read it here is a more updated post on his work: Followup: 10 Factors Predicting Participation in the Reddit Blackout. Building Statistical Models of …
Continue reading Presentation; Between Platforms and Community: Moderators on Reddit
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 …
