Five years ago, I was MSRNE Social Media Collective’s Ph.D. intern researching the ways in which people use video game engines to create physical comedy. To do so, I went through heaps of fascinating literature on humor, which I have drawn from many times since. Upon my return to Prague’s Charles University in 2013, I …
SMC at #4SBoston
The 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) is being held in our very own Boston, MA this year. The Social Media Collective's Tarleton Gillespie (Microsoft Research, New England and Department of Communication/Department of Information Science, Cornell University) and Mary L. Gray (Microsoft Research, New England and Berkman Center for …
The platform metaphor, revisited
This is cross-posted from the HIIG Science Blog, and is part of a series on metaphors and digital society hosted by Christian Katzenbach and Stefan Larsson. I recommend the other essays as well: Nik John on sharing, Noam Tirosh on revolution, and Christian Djeffal on artificial intelligence. Sometimes a metaphor settles into everyday use so comfortably, …
Author Interview: Meryl Alper on”Giving Voice”
Meryl Alper, Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at Northeastern University, recently published Giving Voice: Mobile Communication, Disability and Inequality with MIT Press. Giving Voice critically explores the idea that technology “gives voice to the voiceless” through the lens of disability. It does so through a rich, qualitative study of how parents and assistive technology professionals …
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Information wants to be free (maybe) – but do we want it to be leaky?
Of the many reactions to Trump’s election in 2016, one was an embrace of online tools for increased privacy. Interest in encryption soared, from email clients like Protonmail to messaging apps like Signal. Crypto parties – workshops where tech experts teach interested rookies how to use privacy tools – popped up across the United States. …
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How do mobile devs make privacy work?
I recently published a pair of articles with Katie Shilton exploring how mobile app developers help each other learn what privacy means and how to build that abstract value into their software. Katie and I analyzed hundreds of forum conversations about privacy among iOS and Android developers, and compared the different development cultures and privacy …
FATE postdoctoral position opens at MSR NYC
Exciting news! The FATE group (Fairness, Accountability, Transparency, and Ethics) at Microsoft Research New York City (MSR NYC) is looking for a postdoctoral researcher to start in July, 2017. This one-year position is an ideal opportunity for an emerging scholar whose work focuses on the social impacts of machine learning and AI. Application deadline: April 3, 2017. Postdoctoral researchers receive …
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Introducing our SMC interns for summer 2017!
We get the sharpest, most impressive crop of applicants for ourSocial Media Collective internship, it is no easy task to turn away so many extremely promising PhD students. But it is a pleasure to introduce those we did select. (Keep in mind that we offer these internships every summer; if you will be an advanced graduate student in …
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What’s queer about the internet now?
This past month, I organized the Queer Internet Studies Workshop with my longtime friend and collaborator, Jack Gieseking, and Anne Esacove at the Alice Paul Center at UPenn. This was the second QIS (the first was in 2014 at Columbia), and our plan was to organize a day long series of conversations, brainstorming sessions, panels, …
Learn It, Buy It, Work It! Performing Pregnancy on Instagram
Katrin Tiidenberg (Aarhus University, Denmark and Tallinn University, Estonia) and SMC Principal Researcher Nancy Baym (Microsoft Research, New England) have recently published an article in Social Media + Society that analyzes how pregnancy is performed on Instagram. According to Tiidenberg and Baym, 'Pregnancy today is highly visible, intensely surveilled, marketed as a consumer identity, and feverishly …
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