Major events of national importance reverberate throughout many levels of social life. They are discussed in the corridors of formal power, and in conversations by the water cooler. They also inspire an intensification of activity on social media. One of these activities is unfriending. Unfriending is a relatively under-researched social media practice, but it would […]
I wanted to circulate a new essay, “Governance of and by platforms,” set to appear in the SAGE Handbook of Social Media, edited by Jean Burgess, Thomas Poell, and Alice Marwick, being readied now for a 2017 publication. It also sets up the agenda of my forthcoming book, from Yale University Press, also set for next year. So, I very much […]
Last fall I began teaching the “Media, Technology & Culture” undergraduate course at UMass Amherst. I decided to run a “flipped classroom,” wherein students would listen to many (though not all) of the lectures outside of class and we’d spend our time in person discussing the material. In addition to opening up lots of class […]
The controversy about the human curators behind Facebook Trends has grown, since the allegations made last week by Gizmodo. Besides being a major headache for Facebook, it has helped prod a growing discussion about the power of Facebook to shape the information we see and what we take to be most important. But we continue […]
Gizmodo has released two important articles (1, 2) about the people who were hired to manage Facebook’s “Trending” list. The first reveals not only how Trending topics are selected and packaged on Facebook, but also the peculiar working conditions this team experienced, the lack of guidance or oversight they were provided, and the directives they […]