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 …
“Socially Mediated Publicness”: an open-access issue of JOBEM
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 …
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Panel discussion on the #YoSoy132: Mexico’s Networked Social Movement – Sep 20, 5pm at the NERD Center
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 …
Turn This into That: a Remixing Experiment
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, …
Can objects be evil? A review of “Addiction by Design”
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 …
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SMC seeks a Research Assistant
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 …
Book club digest: Networked
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
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 …
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Big Data, Big Questions, or, Accounting for Big Data
In exciting news, Mary L. Gray and I are kicking off a special section for IJoC that takes a critical look at big data: from the disciplinary perspectives and methods, to issues of access and epistemology. Please pass on to your networks, or even better, send us an abstract. Call for Papers “Big Data, Big …
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Participatory Culture: What questions do you have?
Henry Jenkins, Mimi Ito, and I have embarked on an interesting project for Polity. Through a series of dialogues, we're hoping to produce a book that interrogates our different thoughts regarding participatory culture. The goal is to unpack our differences and agreements and identify some of the challenges that we see going forward. We began …
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Social Media Collective 