In the past few years, funny compilations of falls, glitches and fails from video games became popular even outside the gamer community. Acknowledged by their creators to be “random” and just “messing around”, the funny videos with goats floating up ladders, skateboarders falling through polygon walls and ridiculous car crashes in GTA have generated a …
Continue reading What is so interesting about the random, funny and glitchy
Xinru Page, Karen Tang, Fred Stutzman and I are organizing a two-day workshop on measuring networked social privacy at the CSCW 2013 conference next spring. We are inviting researchers from diverse backgrounds to come and work with us on what would it look like to "measure" networked social privacy in rigorous, productive ways. Please pass …
I want to recommend a new post at Culture Digitally, "Digital In/Justice," both because it may be of interest to the readers of this blog, and because it features Microsoft Research's Mary Gray. Culture Digitally arranges occasional dialogues, in which two or more scholars go back and forth in conversation on a topic they are …
I love being a scholar, but one thing that really depresses me about research is that so much of what scholars produce is rendered inaccessible to so many people who might find it valuable, inspiring, or thought-provoking. This is at the root of what drives my commitment to open-access. When Zizi Papacharissi asked Nancy Baym …
Continue reading “Socially Mediated Publicness”: an open-access issue of JOBEM
In collaboration with the MIT Center for Future Civic Media, Microsoft Research New England is hosting a discussion about the #YoSoy132 activist movement. Open to the public. What: #YoSoy132: Mexico's Networked Social Movement When: Thursday September 20 at 5:00 PM Where: Microsoft Conference Center (Barton Room) located at One Memorial Drive, First Floor, Cambridge, MA …
Two sides of social production: crowdsourcing and remixing Networked technologies have facilitated two forms of social production: remixing and crowdsourcing. Remixing has been typically associated with creative, expressive, and unconstrained work such as the creation of video mashups or funny image macros that we often see on social media websites. Crowdsourcing, on the other hand, …
Schüll, Natasha Dow. (2012) Addiction by Design: Machine Gambling in Las Vegas. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Addiction by Design is a nonfiction page-turner. A richly detailed account of the particulars of video gaming addiction, worth reading for the excellence of the ethnographic narrative alone, it is also an empirically rigorous examination of users, designers, and …
Continue reading Can objects be evil? A review of “Addiction by Design”
Call for Research AssistantMicrosoft Research (MSR) is looking for a Research Assistant for its Social Media Collective in the New England lab, based in Cambridge,Massachusetts. The Social Media Collective consists of Nancy Baym, danah boyd, Kate Crawford, Megan Finn, and Mary L. Gray, as well as faculty visitors and Ph.D. interns. An appropriate candidate will …
At SMC, we regularly meet to discuss interesting books in our field. These discussions tend to spark conversations about a variety of related topics. In an effort to be more inclusive, we thought we’d share the questions that our conversation sparked in the hopes that the SMC community would share your thoughts about these issues …
Elephants and Murky Waters: Why We Need to Examine Multiple Social Media Sites In her recent post on the Cyborgology blog, Jenny Davis brought the pervasive use of Facebook as a study site back into conversation. In brief, she argued that “studying Facebook—or any fleeting technological object—is not problematic as long as we theorize said object”. The …
Continue reading Elephants and Murky Waters: Why We Need to Examine Multiple Social Media Sites
