The Social Media Collective at Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for a social media postdoctoral researcher (start date: 1 July, 2014). 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 …
eyes on the street or creepy surveillance?
This summer, with NSA scandal after NSA scandal, the public has (thankfully) started to wake up to issues of privacy, surveillance, and monitoring. We are living in a data world and there are serious questions to ask and contend with. But part of what makes this data world messy is that it's not so easy …
Today’s Technological Middle School
Last night, I went to parent-teacher night at my daughter's school. Here is a list of things I wrote down that differ from when I went to middle school. Since I'm a social media researcher, many of them have to do with technology and social media. I thought someone else might find them of interest. …
The 3 things you can learn about your neighborhood using Whooly
Along with my colleagues Shelly Farnham, and Michal Lahav—and our interns Yuheng Hu, Emma Spiro, and Nate Matias—we have been exploring ways of discovering and fostering latent neighborhood information to help people understand what’s happening in their local communities. As part of this research, we have created Whooly an experimental mobile website that discovers and highlights neighborhood-specific information on Twitter in real-time. …
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Legal Portraits of Web Users
This Summer I became very interested in what I think I will be calling “legal portraits of digital subjects” or something similar. I came to this through doing a study on MOOCs with SMC this summer. The title of the project is “Students as End Users in the MOOC Ecology” (the talk is available online). …
Job Opening: MSR PhD Intern/Research Assistant (Bangalore, India)
Job Title: MSR PhD Intern/Research Assistant Regional Area: Bangalore/Hyderabad, India Primary Background: Anthropology Secondary Background: Journalism, Media, or Communication Studies Microsoft Research is looking for a junior researcher (students recently graduated from or currently enrolled in a Masters or PhD level program) to collaborate on an ethnographic study of crowdsourcing. Project responsibilities will primarily involve …
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When communication is not free
In the wake of so many news stories related to issues of surveillance and privacy, it’s perhaps particularly important to note that tomorrow, the FCC will consider an action that has the potential to reshape access to ICTs for one of the most heavily surveilled populations in the world – those who are incarcerated. While …
Why Digital Inequality Scholarship Needs Ethnography
Digital inequality scholarship is well-intentioned. It debunks myths about digital media’s inherent egalitarianism and draws attention to the digital dimensions of social inequalities. Digital inequality scholars have shown, for example, that people with access to networked media use those technologies in different ways, some of which are thought to be more beneficial than others. They …
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Tumblr, NSFW porn blogging, and the challenge of checkpoints
After Yahoo's high-profile purchase of Tumblr, when Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer said that she would "promise not to screw it up," this is probably not what she had in mind. Devoted users of Tumblr have been watching closely, worried that the cool, web 2.0 image blogging tool would be tamed by the nearly two-decade-old search giant. One population of Tumblr …
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Thoughts on the engagement of 6 million Facebook users
June 21, 2013 Facebook reported that a bug had potentially exposed 6 million Facebook users’ contact details. While this security breach is a huge at any scale and raises concerns regarding online privacy what I want to bring forward is that it also illuminates how our data is currently used by social media sites. In …
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Social Media Collective 