Living With Everyday Evaluations on Social Media Platforms

The Like button is simultaneously a means of social interaction and a tool to evaluate social media content. Likes are built into the infrastructure of platforms, fueling personalized searches, recommendations, and targeted advertisements while contributing to the economic valuation of platforms and users alike. Working at the intersection of infrastructure and practice, we analyze the experience of everyday evaluations on social media to understand how platforms shape what people care about. Based on in-depth interviews with 25 artists who use Instagram, we identify three overlapping orientations to the Like button: affective, relational, and infrastructural. We show how the flexibility of the button creates ambiguity around the meaning of a Like which drives practices of metaevaluation, and argue that the platform architecture incentivizes an economic approach to evaluation that crowds out other value schemas, shaping how artists use the platform, make art, and even understand themselves. We conclude with a discussion of the broader implications of everyday evaluations, algorithms, and platforms. &nbsp;</p

Beyond the Grave: Facebook as a Site for the Expansion of Death and Mourning.

Online identities survive the deaths of those they represent, leaving friends and families to struggle with the appropriate ways to incorporate these identities into the practices of grief and mourning, raising important questions. How are practices of online memorialization connected to conventional rituals of grief and mourning? What is the role of online digital identity postmortem? How do trajectories of death and dying incorporate both online and offline concerns? Based on our qualitative study of death and mourning online, we identify the way that social networking sites enable expansion-temporally, spatially, and socially-of public mourning. Rather than looking at online practices as disruptions of traditional practices of grief and memorialization, we examine them as new sites in which public mourning takes place. Keywords death, dying, bereavement, social network sites, Facebook In the few short years since its launch, Facebook has permeated the daily lives of its users. More than just a space where one can craft an online profile or connect with other users, Facebook is a space where one can share the details of one&apos;s life, from the mundane (&quot;Joe is enjoying his morning coffee&quot;) to the monumental (&quot;Joe is engaged&quot;). As Facebook has become further integrated into both the everyday and major events of our lives, and its user base has become both larger and more diverse, practices surrounding death have likewise begun to emerge. c Jed R. Brubaker, Gillian R. Hayes, and Paul Dourish We are grateful to all of those who participated in this study. We are also grateful to Margarita Rayzberg, Lynn Dombrowski, Ellie Harmon, and Sen Hirano, who provided feedback during the writing of this piece. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation under EAGER number 1042678. Address correspondence to Jed R. Brubaker, Department of Informatics, Donald Bren Hall 5042, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences, University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA 92697-3440, USA. Web: http://www.jedbrubaker.com; E-mail: jed. [email protected] While existing work has documented how bereaved users reappropriate social network sites (SNSs) to memorialize the dead postmortem (e.g., Brubaker and Hayes 2011; Carroll and Landry 2010; DeGroot 2008), in this article we adopt a perimortem perspective and turn our attention to the experiences of users during the time surrounding death. Specifically, we consider the ways in which Facebook is associated with an expansion of death-related experiences-temporally, spatially, and socially. Facebook creates a new setting for death and grieving-one that is broadly public with an ongoing integration into daily life. Critically, this is not simply about death, but about the trajectories of social engagement around death-in preparation, at the moment of passing, in the discovery of the death of a friend, and in the ongoing memorialization and grieving. In this article, we present findings from interviews conducted during an ongoing study of death in the context of SNSs. Based on an analysis of qualitative data from interviews with sixteen Facebook users, we highlight the role of Facebook in learning about the death of a friend, providing a mediated space for grieving and remembrance, and participating in an expanding set of death-and griefrelated practices. This article is structured as follows: We first provide background from the field of death and dying. We then review related literature focused on online systems and death-including collaborative systems, cybermemorials, and SNSs. We then describe our methods and results of this study. We close with a discussion of the relationship between SNS activities and the evolving ecology of deathrelated practices in which Facebook is situated. RELATED WORK The American Way of Death Cultural beliefs are deeply embedded within human experiences of grief and practices around death. Kastenbau

Design Considerations and Implications in Post-Mortem Data Management

We present an interview study on the management of post-mortem data on Facebook. Design considerations for post-mortem social media data management were developed, and their use in the design and development of a prototype system named Epilogue is discussed. Our hope in this paper is to bring awareness to designers who may have the opportunity to improve post-mortem data interactions.ye

Understanding international perceptions of the severity of harmful content online

Online social media platforms constantly struggle with harmful content such as misinformation and violence, but how to effectively moderate and prioritize such content for billions of global users with different backgrounds and values presents a challenge. Through an international survey with 1,696 internet users across 8 different countries across the world, this empirical study examines how international users perceive harmful content online and the similarities and differences in their perceptions. We found that across countries, the perceived severity consistently followed an exponential growth as the harmful content became more severe, but what harmful content were perceived as more or less severe varied significantly. Our results challenge platform content moderation&rsquo;s status quo of using a one-size-fits-all approach to govern international users, and provide guidance on how platforms may wish to prioritize and customize their moderation of harmful content. &nbsp;</p

User Response to Facebook's Custom Gender Options

Facebook’s recent implementation of “custom” gender options and gender-neutral pronouns provided transgender and gender-non-conforming users with new ways to represent gender identity online. We analyze user response to and use of these affordances. We found that while many transgender and gender non-conforming Facebook users used and appreciated the new options for gender representation, the system still constrained self-presentation for some. Additionally, use of custom gender options complicated gender identity disclosure for many participants. Results highlight tensions around the ability of classification systems to categorize identities.ye

The seven year glitch:Unpacking beauty and despair in malfunction

I(am)MEI: 013709002488246. I was born in many countries - my accelerometer came from Germany, my battery from China, the lithium in my battery was mined in Chile, my gyroscope from Switzerland, my camera... from Japan. I was assembled carefully from these component parts, and had two less than careful owners before R picked me up from a reseller, and brought me back to his house in London, UK. We had a good time together - at first: he revelled in my speed and ability to find things, we viewed the world via a lens with infinite options. But I was not built to last. This is my story

Facebooking in "face": Complex identities meet simple databases

Online systems often struggle to account for the complicated self-presentation and disclosure needs of those with complex identities or specialized anonymity. Using the lenses of gender, recovery, and performance, our proposed panel explores the tensions that emerge when the richness and complexity of individual personalities and subjectivities run up against design norms that imagine identity as simplistic or one-dimensional. These models of identity not only limit the ways individuals can express their own identities, but also establish norms for other users about what to expect, causing further issues when the inevitable dislocations do occur. We discuss the challenges in translating identity into these systems, and how this is further marred by technical requirements and normative logics that structure cultures and practices of databases, algorithms and computer programming