A very similar version of this blog post originally appeared in Culture Digitally on June 5, 2015. Words Matter. As I write this in June 2015, a United Nations committee in Bonn is occupied in the massive task of editing a document overviewing global climate change. The effort to reduce 90 pages into a short(er), …
Continue reading Discourse Matters: Designing better digital futures
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
On Tuesday, Egyptian-American activist Mona Eltahawy was arrested for "criminal mischief" - or "the willful damaging of property" - when she responded to disturbingly racist ads that were posted in the New York City subway system with spray paint. Her act of political resistance went beyond spray paint however. In some ways, it was intentionally …
Continue reading Free Speech, Context, and Visibility: Protesting Racist Ads
This is about the fourth Olympics that's been trumpeted as the first one to embrace social media and the Internet -- just as, depending on how you figure it, it's about the fourth U.S. election in a row that's the first to go digital. It may be in the nature of new technologies that we …
Last week, Gawker received a curious document. Turned over by an aggrieved worker from the online freelance employment site oDesk, the document iterated, over the course of several pages and in unsettling detail, exactly what kinds of content should be deleted from the social networking site that had outsourced its content moderation to oDesk's team. …
In 2005, I started asking teenagers about their password habits. My original set of questions focused on teens' attitudes about giving their password to their parents, but I quickly became enamored with teens' stories of sharing passwords with friends and significant others. So I was ecstatic when Pew Internet & American Life Project decided to …
Continue reading How Parents Normalized Teen Password Sharing
In his seminal book "Code", Larry Lessig argued that social systems are regulated by four forces: 1) the market; 2) the law; 3) social norms; and 4) architecture or code. In thinking about social media systems, plenty of folks think about monetization. Likewise, as issues like privacy pop up, we regularly see legal regulation become …
Continue reading Designing for Social Norms (or How Not to Create Angry Mobs)
Social Media Collective 