“Today, we speak of a global community, made possible by communications technologies, and our geographically-specific notions of community are disrupted by the possibilities of the digital, where disembodied and socially distant beings create what they – and we, as scholars – also call community. But are the features and affordances of digital community distinct from […]
My brothers and sisters in data science, computational social science, and all of us studying and building the Internet of things inside or outside corporate firewalls, to improve a product, explore a scientific question, or both: we are now, officially, doing human subjects research. I’m frustrated that the state of public intellectualism allows us, individually, […]
Many of us who study new media, whether we do so experimentally or qualitatively, our data big or small, are tracking the unfolding debate about the Facebook “emotional contagion” study, published recently in the Proceedings of the National Academies of Science. The research, by Kramer, Guillory, and Hancock, argued that small shifts in the emotions […]
“What we are really concerned with when we invoke the “algorithmic” here is not the algorithm per se but the insertion of procedure into human knowledge and social experience. What makes something algorithmic is that it is produced by or related to an information system that is committed (functionally and ideologically) to the computational generation […]
“…the material, technical and organizational elements of prototypes are always also potentially symbolic. Advocates within an engineering firm or a political campaign can turn them into stories. Outsiders such as journalists can also take them up and turn them into the elements of national or even global memes. In each case, particular sociotechnical configurations become […]