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Deep Ethnographic Research with Digital Detoxers

The next speaker at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is Theodora Sutton, who has studied a digital detox event in the San Francisco Bay area, Camp Grounded. This takes place in nature and bans digital technology, real names, work talk, watches, and drugs and alcohol.

The Limits of Scalability and Searchability in Online Support Groups

The first paper session after the opening keynote at the 2019 AoIR Flashpoint Symposium starts with Daphna Yeshua Katz and Ylva Hård af Segerstad, whose focus is on online support groups for stigmatised communities. They argue that such groups may actually limit these communities’ access to online support. This may be a problem related especially to scalability and searchability.

Under the Radar: Studying Internet Micro-Celebrity

I’ve arrived at the University of Urbino for the inaugural AoIR Flashpoint Symposium, our new initiative that highlights important current issues in Internet research through one-day, concentrated events. This year’s symposium operates under the title “Under the Radar: Private Groups, Locked Platforms, and Ephemeral Contents.”

The first keynote at the AoIR Flashpoint Symposium is by Crystal Abidin, whose focus is on Internet celebrities. There are a number of different types of such celebrities, from well-recognised global celebrities to more niche micro-celebrities who are known mainly to a specific subculture. These people cannot be identified from their engagement metrics alone: they require a different set of research approaches.

How Divergent Skills Affect the Online Participation Divide

At the conclusion of my travels in Canada and Europe, I’ve made my way to Lugano for ECREA2018. We start with the first of two keynotes, by Eszter Hargittai, whose focus is on the digital divide in online participation. The fundamental question here is who benefits the most from Internet participation, and who does not: do participation divides facilitate social mobility or reproduce social divides?

The key point here is that digital divides cannot be solved by mere connectivity: getting online does not equate to using the Internet effectively and efficiently. Rather, such uses continue to be moderated by socioeconomic status, technical and social contexts, personal Internet skills, and the types of uses being made. Internet skills here include especially an awareness of what is possible, and the ability to create and share content, amongst a long list of others – and it is important to focus on such skills because users’ skills levels can be addressed by a variety of interventions more quickly than a variety of more intractable factors.

Connective 'Alt-Right' Action on Reddit

The next speaker in this AoIR 2017 session is Alex Hogan, whose focus is on the impact of online political communities in politics. There is still considerable debate on whether online action promotes or retards other forms of collective action offline; the recent rise of the 'alt-right' adds another chapter to this discussion.

Towards More Ethical Management of Online Social Interactions

The next session at ANZCA 2017 deals with social media and ethics, and starts with Jonathon Hutchinson. This needs to be tackled from a number of different perspectives. For instance, what ethical choices are being made as publishers approve or reject the comments being posted in response to their articles? What are the implications of these choices, for public debate in general and for specific groups and individuals being vilified in particular?

A Taxonomy of Maker Spaces

After a great opening panel at ANZCA 2017 (which I didn't blog because discussion panels are generally too difficult to blog) I'm now in the first paper session, which starts with Pip Shea's paper on maker spaces. She presents a number of case studies from around the world, including the cross-sectarian Temple project from Northern Ireland; these create local civic communication worlds.

Factors Affecting the Success of Social Machines

The final speaker in this Web Science 2016 session is Clare Hooper, whose interest is in 'social machines' as defined by Tim Berners-Lee: systems were people do the creative work, and machines take care of the administration. Social machines will exist in the context of problems to be solved; they may be created by single stakeholders (as in the case of Galaxy Zoo), while others arise in a more emergent fashion (from online communities).

Modelling Convergent Social Tagging Processes

Next up at Web Science 2016 is Paul Seitlinger, whose interest is in social tagging practices. These provide a valuable insight into human cognition and offer an opportunity to validate lab-based models 'in the wild'. One key question in this is how semantic stabilisation, or consensual use of tags, comes into being. This is influenced by the interplay of both human and non-human actors.

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