When it comes to designing web services, an individual user is often taken as the starting point. In many cases, it's a good, practical assumption to make. It can, however, prove to be problematic when it comes to the so called 'sharing economy' where people share resources, such as physical space and tangible items, with …
Continue reading Account Sharing in the Context of Networked Hospitality Exchange
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 …
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 …
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. …
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. …
Continue reading The 3 things you can learn about your neighborhood using Whooly
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 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 …
Continue reading Job Opening: MSR PhD Intern/Research Assistant (Bangalore, India)
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 …
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 …
Continue reading Why Digital Inequality Scholarship Needs Ethnography
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 …
Continue reading Tumblr, NSFW porn blogging, and the challenge of checkpoints
Social Media Collective 