As we watch what’s happening at Twitter – billionaire owner burning place to ground, employees leaving in revolt, users mourning their lost world and setting up accounts elsewhere, #RIPTwitter and related hashtags dominating their trending topics – it’s helpful, perhaps, to ask the question “what IS the Twitter that is dying?” In his already infamous …
Tag: Twitter
#trendingistrending: when algorithms become culture
I wanted to share a new essay, "#Trendingistrending: When Algorithms Become Culture" that I've just completed for a forthcoming Routledge anthology called Algorithmic Cultures: Essays on Meaning, Performance and New Technologies, edited by Robert Seyfert and Jonathan Roberge. My aim is to focus on the various "trending algorithms" that populate social media platforms, consider what they do as a set, and then …
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The 3 things you can learn about your neighborhood using Whooly
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. …
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Whoo.ly: Facilitating Information Seeking For Hyperlocal Communities Using Social Media
You hear sirens blaring in your neighborhood and, naturally, you are curious about the cause of commotion. Your first reaction might be to turn on the local TV news or go online and check the local newspaper. Unfortunately, unless the issue is of significant importance, your initial search of these media will be probably be …
Is Twitter us or them? #twitterfail and living somewhere between public commitment and private investment
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 …
Can an algorithm be wrong? Twitter Trends, the specter of censorship, and our faith in the algorithms around us
The interesting question is not whether Twitter is censoring its Trends list. The interesting question is, what do we think the Trends list is, what it represents and how it works, that we can presume to hold it accountable when we think it is "wrong?" What are these algorithms, and what do we want them to be? …
Using Off-the-shelf Software for basic Twitter Analysis
Mary Gray, Mike Ananny and I are writing a paper on queer youth and "Glee" for the American Anthropological Association's annual meeting (yes, I have the greatest job in the world). This is a multi-methodological study by design, because traditional television viewing practices have become so complex. Besides traditional audience ethnography like interviews and participant …
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How much is a life worth in pixels?
Analysis of yesterday's news coverage of the Mexican massacre Mexican Tweets More than fifty people were murdered yesterday in what is now the most violent episode in the ongoing Mexican Drug War. Most of the victims were women, some were pregnant. After learning about the horrific massacre in Monterrey, I spent several hours reading the …
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