Showing papers in "Information, Communication & Society in 2012"

Critical questions for big data

Abstract: The era of Big Data has begun. Computer scientists, physicists, economists, mathematicians, political scientists, bio-informaticists, sociologists, and other scholars are clamoring for access to the massive quantities of information produced by and about people, things, and their interactions. Diverse groups argue about the potential benefits and costs of analyzing genetic sequences, social media interactions, health records, phone logs, government records, and other digital traces left by people. Significant questions emerge. Will large-scale search data help us create better tools, services, and public goods? Or will it usher in a new wave of privacy incursions and invasive marketing? Will data analytics help us understand online communities and political movements? Or will it be used to track protesters and suppress speech? Will it transform how we study human communication and culture, or narrow the palette of research options and alter what ‘research’ means? Given the rise of Big Data as a socio-tech...

THE TENSION BETWEEN PROFESSIONAL CONTROL AND OPEN PARTICIPATION: Journalism and its boundaries

Abstract: Amid growing difficulties for professionals generally, media workers in particular are negotiating the increasingly contested boundary space between producers and users in the digital environment. This article, based on a review of the academic literature, explores that larger tension transforming the creative industries by extrapolating from the case of journalism – namely, the ongoing tension between professional control and open participation in the news process. Firstly, the sociology of professions, with its emphasis on boundary maintenance, is used to examine journalism as boundary work, profession, and ideology – each contributing to the formation of journalism's professional logic of control over content. Secondly, by considering the affordances and cultures of digital technologies, the article articulates open participation and its ideology. Thirdly, and against this backdrop of ideological incompatibility, a review of empirical literature finds that journalists have struggled to reconcile this k...

Fabrication as ethical practice

Abstract: This article focuses on innovative methods for protecting privacy in research of Internet-mediated social contexts. Traditional methods for protecting privacy by hiding or anonymizing data no longer suffice in situations where social researchers need to design studies, manage data, and build research reports in increasingly public, archivable, searchable, and traceable spaces. In such research environments, there are few means of adequately disguising details about the venue and the persons being studied. One practical method of data representation in contexts in which privacy protection is unstable is fabrication, involving creative, bricolage-style transfiguration of original data into composite accounts or representational interactions. This article traces some of the historical trends that have restricted such creative ethical solutions; emphasizes a researcher's obligation to protect research participants' privacy in mediated research contexts; and offers an introductory framework for reconsidering h...

ALGORITHMIC IDEOLOGY: How capitalist society shapes search engines

Abstract: This article investigates how the new spirit of capitalism gets inscribed in the fabric of search algorithms by way of social practices. Drawing on the tradition of the social construction of technology (SCOT) and 17 qualitative expert interviews it discusses how search engines and their revenue models are negotiated and stabilized in a network of actors and interests, website providers and users first and foremost. It further shows how corporate search engines and their capitalist ideology are solidified in a socio-political context characterized by a techno-euphoric climate of innovation and a politics of privatization. This analysis provides a valuable contribution to contemporary search engine critique mainly focusing on search engines' business models and societal implications. It shows that a shift of perspective is needed from impacts search engines have on society towards social practices and power relations involved in the construction of search engines to renegotiate search engines and their alg...

(re-)discovering the audience

Abstract: Current technological, organizational and institutional changes fundamentally alter the relationship between journalism and its audience – with consequences not only for journalistic practice, but also for theoretical and methodological issues of media research. After briefly recounting three perspectives on the audience, the paper outlines key aspects of the sociological theory of inclusion and explicates them in a novel and comprehensive heuristic model of audience inclusion in journalism. It introduces two constructs which apply both to journalism and the audience: (1) inclusion performance subsumes inclusion practices and their manifest results, and (2) inclusion expectations subsume attitudes, norms and perceptions with respect to audience inclusion in journalism. The degree of congruence between performances of journalists and audience members is interpreted as inclusion level; the degree of congruence between the expectations is interpreted as inclusion distance. This model can serve as a heuristic...

How long is a tweet? Mapping dynamic conversation networks on Twitter using Gawk and Gephi

Abstract: Twitter is now well established as the world's second most important social media platform, after Facebook. Its 140-character updates are designed for brief messaging, and its network structures are kept relatively flat and simple: messages from users are either public and visible to all (even to unregistered visitors using the Twitter website), or private and visible only to approved ‘followers’ of the sender; there are no more complex definitions of degrees of connection (family, friends, friends of friends) as they are available in other social networks. Over time, Twitter users have developed simple, but effective mechanisms for working around these limitations: ‘#hashtags’, which enable the manual or automatic collation of all tweets containing the same #hashtag, as well allowing users to subscribe to content feeds that contain only those tweets which feature specific #hashtags; and ‘@replies’, which allow senders to direct public messages even to users whom they do not already follow. This paper doc...

COLLECTIVE ACTION ON THE WEB: A cross-cultural study of social networking sites and online and offline activism in the United States and Latin America

Abstract: Social networking sites (SNS) are credited with organizing protesters in Colombia and Guatemala, and mobilizing voters in the United States. With SNS increasingly used to mobilize collective action, this cross-cultural study surveyed activists in the United States and Latin America to examine how respondents perceived the usefulness and the potential of SNS for activism. This quantitative and qualitative research found that respondents from both regions use SNS to mobilize supporters both online and offline. Whether respondents' activism occurred mostly offline, mostly online, or equally offline and online, they all participated equally in offline activism. Countering previous research doubting the ability of online activism to inspire offline actions, results show respondents believe that online activism translates into offline activism, and that SNS play an important role in contemporary activism. Still, US activists were more likely than those in Latin America to use SNS for activism, or to say their a...

Social science research methods in internet time

Abstract: This article discusses three interrelated challenges related to conducting social science research in ‘Internet Time’. (1) The rate at which the Internet is both diffusing through society and developing new capacities is unprecedented. It creates some novel challenges for scholarly research. (2) Many of our most robust research methods are based upon ceteris paribus assumptions that do not hold in the online environment. The rate of change online narrows the range of questions that can be answered using traditional tools. Meanwhile, (3) new research methods are untested and often rely upon data sources that are incomplete and systematically flawed. The paper details these challenges, then proposes that scholars embrace the values of transparency and kludginess in order to answer important research questions in a rapidly-changing communications environment.

The myth of amateur crowds

Abstract: This paper analyzes the discourse of amateurism as it relates to crowdsourcing, a now relatively common model where organizations engage online communities to design goods and solve problems. This paper's findings are twofold: (1) crowdsourcing is discussed in the popular press as a process driven by amateurs and hobbyists, yet empirical research on crowdsourcing indicates that crowds are largely self-selected professionals and experts who opt-in to crowdsourcing arrangements; and (2) the myth of the amateur in crowdsourcing ventures works to label crowds as mere hobbyists who see crowdsourcing ventures as opportunities for creative expression, as entertainment, or as opportunities to pass the time when bored. This amateur/hobbyist label then undermines the fact that large amounts of real work and expert knowledge are exerted by crowds for relatively little reward and to serve the profit motives of companies. The myth of amateur crowds thus has critical implications for labor rights in the digital age. To...

Intersecting oppressions and online communities

Abstract: Employing qualitative methods and drawing from an intersectional framework which focusses on the multiple identities we all embody, this paper focusses on oppressions experienced by women of color in Xbox Live, an online gaming community. Ethnographic observations and narrative interviewing reveal that women of color, as outsiders failing to conform to the white male norm, face intersecting oppressions in main stream gaming. They are linguistically profiled within the space based on how they sound. Specifically, Latina women within the space experience nativism, racism, sexism, and even heterosexism as many identify as sexual minorities. African-American women experience racialized sexism stemming from the duality of their ascribed identities. The women within the study have responded by segregating from the larger gaming community and have created their own clans (similar to guilds) and game with other women. The purpose of the clans depends on the type of oppressions experienced by the women within the ...

Hidden levers of internet control

Abstract: Battles over the control of information online are often fought at the level of Internet infrastructure. Forces of globalization and technological change have diminished the capacity of sovereign nation states and media content producers to directly control information flows. This loss of control over content and the failure of laws and markets to regain this control have redirected political and economic battles into the realm of infrastructure and, in particular, technologies of Internet governance. These arrangements of technical architecture are also arrangements of power. This shift of power to infrastructure is drawing renewed attention to the politics of Internet architecture and the legitimacy of the coordinating institutions and private ordering that create and administer these infrastructures. It also raises questions related to freedom of expression in the context of this increasing turn to infrastructure to control information. This article explores the relationship between governance and infr...

VIRTUAL FEMINISMS: Girls’ blogging communities, feminist activism, and participatory politics

Abstract: While feminist media scholars have recognized the growing importance of feminist blogs, such as Jezebel, Racialicious, and Feministe, to contemporary feminism, the contribution of girls to this feminist blogosphere remains understudied. In this paper, the author addresses this research gap by investigating the complex and diverse ways that girls are using blogging communities to participate in a feminist political activism that reflects their needs as contemporary young feminists within a neoliberal cultural context. This analysis draws upon two case studies of popular blogs by teenage feminists, and interviews that were conducted with four girl bloggers who participated in these two communities. The author argues that through the practice of blogging, teenage girls are actively reframing what it means to participate in feminist politics, drawing on opportunities that the Internet provides to embrace new understandings of community, activism, and even feminism itself.

The Participatory Web: A User Perspective on Web 2.0

Abstract: This paper makes three contributions: first, we suggest a clear, concise definition of Web 2.0, something that has eluded other authors, including the Tim O'Reilly the originator of the concept. Second, prior work has focused largely on the implications of Web 2.0 for producers of content, usually corporations or government agencies. This paper is one of the few analyses of Web 2.0 from the point of view of users. Third, we characterize the creative activity of Web 2.0 users. In addition to their active content production, they are unusually active users of the Internet for entertainment. In multivariate models predicting Web 2.0, the most consistently important variables are technical ability, comfort revealing personal data and, particularly, Web 2.0 confidence. These variables suggest that despite the apparent simplicity of FaceBook or of typing a book review on Amazon, ability remains very important in the eyes of users. For many, there appears to be something daunting about contributing to Web 2.0 ac...

Interactions of the technical and the social

Abstract: This article compares two kinds of socio-technical formations: electronic financial networks and local social activist movements that are globally networked. Both cut across the global/national duality and each has altered the economic and political landscapes for, respectively, financial elites and social activists. Using these two cases helps illuminate the very diverse ways in which the growth of electronic networks partially transforms existing politico-economic orderings. They are extreme cases, one marked by hypermobility and the other by physical immobility. But they show us that each is only partly so: financial electronic networks are subject to particular types of embeddedness and local activist organizations can benefit from novel electronic potentials for global operation. Financial electronic networks and electronic activism not only reveal two parallel developments associated with particular technical properties of the new interactive digital technologies, but also reveal a third, radically ...

ONLINE HARASSMENT AMONG COLLEGE STUDENTS: A replication incorporating new Internet trends

Abstract: Increased time spent online in combination with current Internet trends such as social networking have led to new risks for online harassment. This problem has been given much attention for adolescents, but little has been done to describe the risks of online harassment experienced by young adults, even though they exhibit Internet behavior comparable to adolescents. This study is in part a replication of a previous study that surveyed online harassment within a college population (Finn 2004). Three questions are addressed: (1) What is the prevalence of online harassment among undergraduate students at a large southwestern university? (2) What is the relationship between the senders and receivers of harassing communications? (3) What are the demographic and computer use variables associated with increased risk of online harassment? A cross-sectional survey was administered to a convenience sample of 420 undergraduates, and the final response rate was 81.4 percent (n = 342). Survey questions included items...

The trend of class, race, and ethnicity in social media inequality

Abstract: Blogs were the original poster child of digital democracy as an egalitarian public forum. Some scholars have challenged this theory of equality based on race and ethnicity, but no empirical analysis of American adults has questioned a class-based divide over time. Blogs, as a form of digital content production, appear to mirror other technological innovations in which a small elite group of users begin to incorporate them in their daily living after which the innovation spreads quickly to the general population, as with basic Internet access. However, the author argues that unlike this consumptive practice, blogging fits into a productive framework that requires more resources. Furthermore, most studies on blogging and inequality, in general, derive from samples of college students, which make it difficult to understand class issues. By drawing on 13 national surveys of American adults from 2002 to 2008, this study incorporates class differences and finds that an educational gap in blogging persists, rath...

A GENEALOGY OF BADGES: Inherited meaning and monstrous moral hybrids

Abstract: The use of badges on the web, particularly on community sites, has become very popular, and these badges are becoming both more easily carried from one site to another and more valuable in the process. But badges are not new; the metaphor of the online badge draws on centuries of use in the offline world. And the use of badges online has the potential of bringing with it the echo of these earlier uses and the values that they were imbued with. This article explores online badges, drawing on their history and the ethical framework presented by Jane Jacobs in ‘Systems of Survival’ to suggest some ways of ensuring that badges are used effectively online.

Rethinking research ethics for mediated settings

Abstract: An important feature of e-research is the increased mediation of research practices, which changes not only the objects and tools of research, but also the relation between researcher and object, between researchers, and between researchers and their constituencies and stakeholders. This article focuses on the ethical aspects of e-research by analysing the implications of these changing relationships in the case of ethnography in mediated settings. It makes a specific contribution to the discussions about research ethics that are currently pursued and that tend to be catalysed by institutional review boards. The authors aim to link ethical discussions with the actual practices and conditions of qualitative social research. To do so, they review how researchers have used principles and ethical guides of traditional disciplines in ethnography, and show that several of concepts and categories on which these guidelines rely (personhood, privacy, harm, alienation, power) are otherwise enacted in mediated setti...

A movement of connected individuals

Abstract: The participants of the ‘unibrennt’ (‘university is burning’) protest movement, which saw the occupation of Vienna's largest lecture hall by students in October 2009, used social media such as Twitter and Facebook to a large extent. Communication, thus, was anchored in the participants' interconnected individual and personal (online) networks, so both in- and out-group communication took place within a media space that is referred to as networked publics. Based on the authors media ethnographical work which was followed by a qualitative analysis of conversations, this article discusses the form of community building and social organization that was facilitated by those means. The authors also look at the way in which involved actors (participants and non-participants) dealt with the social media's specific character, especially its high degree of transparency and accessibility which resulted in a conglomeration of internal and external discourses. Drawing on the concept of voluntary issue communities, thi...

Agile ethics for massified research and visualization

Abstract: In this paper, the authors examine some of the implications of born-digital research environments by discussing the emergence of data mining and the analysis of social media platforms. With the rise of individual online activity in chat rooms, social networking sites and micro-blogging services, new repositories for social science research have become available in large quantities. Given the changes of scale that accompany such research, both in terms of data mining and the communication of results, the authors term this type of research ‘massified research’. This article argues that while the private and commercial processing of these new massive data sets is far from unproblematic, the use by academic practitioners poses particular challenges with respect to established ethical protocols. These involve reconfigurations of the external relations between researchers and participants, as well as the internal relations that compose the identities of the participant, the researcher and that of the data. Consequently, massified research and its outputs operate in a grey area of undefined conduct with respect to these concerns. The authors work through the specific case study of using Twitter’s public Application Programming Interface for research and visualization. To conclude, this article proposes some potential best practices to extend current procedures and guidelines for such massified research. Most importantly, the authors develop these under the banner of ‘agile ethics’. The authors conclude by making the counterintuitive suggestion that researchers make themselves as vulnerable to potential data mining as the subjects who comprise their data sets: a parity of practice.

Ethical implications of lifestyle monitoring data in ageing research

Abstract: Lifestyle monitoring systems, intelligent proactive systems incorporating passive monitoring capabilities and allowing contemporaneous remote access to data promise potential benefits to service providers, service users and their carers and families and those engaged in ageing research. Research to date has focused primarily on technical issues, generally at the expense of detailed consideration of the ethical issues raised by these systems. The paper, which is based on a literature review, identifies ethical issues and questions for researchers around: informed consent; working with people who are cognitively impaired; surveillance and the passivity of monitoring; processes of care and using and linking lifestyle monitoring data. It concludes by emphasizing the importance of all parties exploring and discussing the tradeoff between potential benefits to multiple stakeholder groups and actual costs to the individual.

Hyperlinks as extensions of offline instrumental collective action

Abstract: Many nongovernmental organizations' (NGOs') instrumental collective action networks exist to produce tangible public goods. Moreover, these organizations' hyperlinks function to express collective identity. The extent to which both types of collective action are related is unknown. To examine this gap in the research, hyperlinks from 181 NGO websites were analyzed to determine if instrumental collective action offline is related to expressive collective action online. The results of this research suggest that NGO hyperlinks are an extension of offline instrumental collective action behavior. Several offline characteristics, including common social aims, financial ties, membership ties, collaborative ties, and media visibility, are related to hyperlinking. The results contribute to hyperlink scholarship by investigating the impact of offline instrumental collective action on online networks. Implications for the theory of collective action and information technology and society are drawn from the results.

HOW NEWSPAPERS BEGAN TO BLOG: Recognizing the role of technologists in old media organizations’ development of new media technologies

Abstract: In this article, I examine how ‘old’ media organizations develop ‘new’ media technologies by analyzing processes of technological innovation in two Danish newspaper companies that integrated blogs into their websites in very different ways in 2007. Drawing on concepts from science and technology studies and sociology and building on previous research on blogging by news media organizations, I analyze how the three different communities involved in the development process – journalists and managers, but also the often-overlooked community of technologists – articulated different versions of what blogging ought to be in each organization and tried to shape the technology and pull the development work in different directions. On the basis of interviews with key participants, I show how the two newspaper organizations (equally ‘old’ media) came to develop nominally the same ‘new’ medium (blogs) for nominally the same purpose (journalism) in quite different ways through tension-filled and often contentious col...

Reconciling community and commerce

Abstract: Collaborative user-led content creation by online communities, or produsage (Bruns 2008a), has generated a variety of useful and important resources and other valuable outcomes, from open source software through the Wikipedia to a variety of smaller scale, specialist projects. These are often seen as standing in an inherent opposition to commercial interests, and attempts to develop collaborations between community content creators and commercial partners have had mixed success rates to date. However, such tension between community and commerce is not inevitable, and there is substantial potential for more fruitful exchanges and collaboration. This article contributes to the development of this understanding by outlining the key underlying principles of such participatory community processes and exploring the potential tensions which could arise between these communities and their potential external partners. It also sketches out potential approaches to resolving them.

When innovation meets legacy

Abstract: Journalism's transition from an industrial age to an information age and the unstable economics of profit-driven newsmaking have allowed for an unprecedented level of citizen input and involvement in the making of news. Here, new relationships between legacy and innovative newsmaking are forged and new models of newsmaking emerge. In this article, we discuss the case of The New Orleans Eye, an attempt at innovative newsmaking rooted in an individual citizen who started blogging in the wake of hurricane Katrina. The New Orleans Eye is a largely foundation-funded, non-profit online news organization composed of bloggers and former ink reporters, and has a unique relationship with the local Fox television station. We treat The New Orleans Eye as an example of a mixed-media system and discuss the tensions that emerge over innovative newsmaking within a context of a profit-driven legacy news industry and a neoliberal state.

BECOMING A TWEEP: How prior online experiences influence Twitter use

Abstract: Despite much excitement about the microblogging platform Twitter, little is known about predictors of its adoption and how its uses relate to other online activities in particular. Using a unique longitudinal data set from 2009 to 2010 surveying over 500 diverse young American adults about their online experiences, we look at how adoption of Twitter relates to prior engagement in other types of online activities. Our findings suggest that online skills as well as prior consumption and production activities especially in the domain of entertainment news are significant predictors of subsequent Twitter use. Our results caution about the potential biases that may result from studies that sample on Twitter users excluding other populations.

The labour of media use

Abstract: The ‘active audience’ has theoretically been conceptualized from two perspectives: in political economy, it is suggested that television audiences work for the networks while watching and that they contribute to the valorization process with their labour. Although contested, it has survived among media scholars, also feeding into the discussion on web surveillance techniques. The other conceptualization comes from reception theory, media ethnography and cultural studies, where the interpretive work by audiences is seen as productive and resulting in identities, taste cultures and social difference. This article relates these perspectives by considering audiences as involved in two production–consumptions circuits: (1) the viewer activities produce social difference (identities and cultural meaning) in a social and cultural economy, which is then (2) made the object of productive consumption as part of the activities of the media industries, the end product being economic profit. This article argues for th...

EUROPEANA: The digital construction of Europe's collective memory

Abstract: In this article a critical discourse analysis is conducted on the formal EU documents that led to the construction of the digital library Europeana. The analysis links these discourses to the actual user experience of the current beta version of Europeana and examines how they relate to the interactive, user-generated and participative features of Web 2.0. At ceremonial occasions and in the communication conducted on Europeana's portal, user-generated content is underscored. This is, however, neither mirrored in the discourse analysis nor when Europeana is further tested. Therefore, even though there is will to incorporate the digital flows and processes of mass self-communication within the sphere of Europeana, the library as the purveyor of the ‘right’ knowledge is still a dominant factor, and therefore the modern ‘produsers’ are left out.

The next decade in internet time

Abstract: In this paper, three features of the Internet/new media that have developed over the last decade are discussed: the relational Internet, the enclosed Internet, and the ‘mean world’ Internet. These features correspond to the three interrelated elements of new media infrastructure: the practices in which people engage to interact and share information and meaning; the tools, devices, or artifacts that people create and use in order to do so; and the social arrangements or institutional forms that develop out of and around those practices and tools. Together, the three features have had an important influence on the ways that new media are understood and used and have helped shift popular discourses and the study of new media from an emphasis on possibility, novelty, adaptability, and openness toward greater preoccupations with risk, conflict, vulnerability, routinization, stability, and control. Given these conditions, the author proposes that three problem areas – again corresponding to practices, tools, a...