A Consumer Behavior Perspective of Adopting Mobile Contact Tracing Apps in a Public Health Crisis: Lessons from ABTraceTogether for COVID-19 Pandemic

Responses to the COVID-19 pandemic included m-Health innovations, such as contact tracing and exposure notification applications to track virus exposure. Such apps were released by over 45 international governments throughout 2020, becoming the first m-Health innovation with such widescale deployment. Most regions relied on voluntary adoption, and many failed to receive a critical mass of users. Some of these apps can track and share user’s locations, social contacts, and health information, which sparked concerns and misperceptions about the privacy and security of user data. It is important to understand consumer behavior and adoption challenges based on people’s perceptions of benefits, barriers, and risks. To investigate this, we sent an online questionnaire to over 600 participants with open-ended questions asking about their experience with one such app, ABTraceTogether. This chapter covers qualitative findings regarding device and application-level issues participants identified as barriers to their adoption and continued usage of the app, which are accessibility, battery life, downloading challenges, device memory, network connectivity and costs, operating system compatibility, performance issues, and usability. Insight on consumer behavior gained from this study can guide m-Health design and promotion to aid future health crises and personal wellbeing

Does Rotten Tomatoes Spoil Users? Examining Whether Social Media Features Foster Participatory Culture

Participatory culture, as conceived by Henry Jenkins, existed prior to the advent of the World Wide Web. Now, due to the increasing popularity of social media tools, participatory culture is flourishing online as well. One popular movie review website, Rotten Tomatoes, demonstrates this trend. The website includes a suite of interactive, social media tools. Based on an ethnographic observation, participatory culture was seen to be occurring on the site. The power of the website to provide an open and accessible means of cultural dialogue and to encourage civic participation can be observed particularly when online user activity moves beyond discussions of film aesthetics to encompass larger societal and cultural issues. However, despite the site’s intriguing potential, there are various flaws observed that prevent a greater flourishing of participatory culture

On Tags and Signs: A Semiotic Analysis of Folksonomies

After ten years working in the Internet industry, Glen Farrelly is currently pursuing a master's in communications from Royal Roads University. Glen has also studied the Internet at University of Toronto's Strategic e-Business program and at Humber College's Internet Management program. His career highlights include six years managing a financial services website, developing websites with a dot.com start-up, and writing online travelogues for Canadian Geographic. His research interests include website usability and accessibility, social media and online participatory culture, Canadian Internet history and policy. Glen explores Internet topics in his blog (www.glenfarrelly.com) and for Backbone Magazine

Negotiating multifaceted identity online in social networking websites

Our real-world identities can be multifaceted and contextually fragmented - we behave one way at work, and another when drinking with friends. Yet social-networking websites collapse these distinctions and the online flattening of offline relationships has progressed without adequate means to negotiate this experience

Claiming Places: An Exploration of People's Use of Locative Media and the Relationship to Sense of Place

This dissertation explores the role of locative media in people’s place-making activities and sense of place. Sense of place is a human need that entails people’s meanings, memories, and feelings for a location. Recent technological and market developments have introduced powerful geographic information tools and place-related media. By identifying a user’s location, locative media deliver geographically relevant content that enable people to capture and preserve place information, virtually append it to space, and broadcast it to others. Despite locative media’s growing prominence, the influence on sense of place is not well understood. A major finding of this research is that use of locative media can contribute meaningfully to a person’s positive sense of place, including fostering existential connection. This study refutes scholarly and popular dismissals of the medium as only detracting from sense of place. Locative media was found to enable people to make spaces their own by offering geographic relevant information and experiences, recording and sharing place-related impressions, and presenting places in new and enjoyable ways, such as through defamiliarization and decommodification. This study demonstrates the importance of access to our hybrid spaces, unfettered by corporate restriction, to create meaningful place relationships. However, it was also found that locative media can distract from sense of place through the loss of serendipitous discovery. This study used qualitative field reports and semi-structured interviews with 22 people, predominantly from Ontario, Canada. Participants reported using 44 locative media applications in a variety of contexts and locations. Crawford’s urban counter dynamics (2012) and Bott’s sense of place work (2000) were employed as analytical frameworks. Methodologically, this study demonstrates the utility of Bott’s sense of place framework and provides an effective mix of methods for future studies. This research contributes to place theory and mobile media studies by examining the role of locative media in sense of place. From an information studies perspective, it offers evidence of the use and value of geographic relevance and vocality of information. Design guidelines are offered to aid the development of locative media to foster user engagement and conservation attitudes towards place.Ph.D

COVID-19 contact tracing applications: An analysis of individual motivations for adoption and use

In attempts to remediate the COVID-19 pandemic, governments internationally released contact tracing and exposure notification mobile applications seeking to limit the transmission of the disease by recording app user’s contact with other apps users. To address user adoption and usage challenges, we conducted a qualitative study of approximately 300 users and 300 non-users of one such contact tracing application, ABTraceTogether. This article highlights four of our main findings: having a sense of individual agency, trust in the application developers and sponsors, belief in the efficacy of the app, and altruism or pro-social beliefs. These findings are useful for application developers to target development and promotional issues to address adoption and usage challenges

Reality recalled: Elders, memory and VR

Reality Recalled explores memory, embodiment, and social interactions of elders and others with digital media experiences and VR. We advocate for a holistic view of the term `virtual' in its conceptual categorization within technology, and make a case for enlarging the audiences and extending the benefits of virtualized realities. In our methods, we argue that design and research decisions should be predicated on inclusivity, usability and the pursuit of pleasurable collaborative meaning making. When human interaction takes place in `real' and virtualized space, the mind is the ultimate virtual playground and memory acts as its controller. Through our research designs and testing with digital media projects, VR, and our current and prospective prototypes, we demonstrate the generation of new conceptual lenses, technological forms and experiences that may enrich the lives of elders, with potential benefits for other communities of participants