Holy Tweets: Exploring the Sharing of the Quran on Twitter

While social media offer users a platform for self-expression, identity exploration, and community management, among other functions, they also offer space for religious practice and expression. In this paper, we explore social media spaces as they subtend new forms of religious experiences and rituals. We present a mixed-method study to understand the practice of sharing Quran verses on Arabic Twitter in their cultural context by combining a quantitative analysis of the most shared Quran verses, the topics covered by these verses, and the modalities of sharing, with a qualitative study of users' goals. This analysis of a set of 2.6 million tweets containing Quran verses demonstrates that online religious expression in the form of sharing Quran verses both extends offline religious life and supports new forms of religious expression including goals such as doing good deeds, giving charity, holding memorials, and showing solidarity. By analysing the responses on a survey, we found that our Arab Muslim respondents conceptualize social media platforms as everlasting, at least beyond their lifetimes, where they consider them to be effective for certain religious practices, such as reciting Quran, supplication (dua), and ceaseless charity. Our quantitative analysis of the most shared verses of the Quran underlines this commitment to religious expression as an act of worship, highlighting topics such as the hereafter, God's mercy, and sharia law. We note that verses on topics such as jihad are shared much less often, contradicting some media representation of Muslim social media use and practice.Comment: Paper accepted to The 23rd ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW) 202

Against Marrying a Stranger Marital Matchmaking Technologies in Saudi Arabia

Websites and applications that match and connect individuals for romantic purposes are commonly used in the Western world. However, there have not been many previous investigations focusing on cultural factors that affect the adoption of similar technologies in religiously conservative non-Western cultures. In this study, we examine the socio-technical and cultural factors that influence the perceptions and use of matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia. We report the methods and findings of interviews with 18 Saudi nationals (nine males and nine females) with diverse demographics and backgrounds. We provide qualitatively generated insights into the major themes reported by our participants related to the common approaches to matchmaking, the current role of technology, and concerns regarding matchmaking technologies in this cultural con-text. We relate these themes to specific implications for designing marital matchmaking technologies in Saudi Arabia and we outline opportunities for future investigations.Comment: 11 pages, 1 table, DIS 201

Heading for the Clouds? Implications for Cloud Computing Adopters

Cloud computing projects have many implications, including issues such as security, compliance, funding, cohesion with existing systems, operational resource requirements, and number of employees involved. In order to gain a better understanding of why businesses are interested in adopting cloud services in spite of these potential difficulties, we interviewed senior IT personnel at five different organizations about their processes related to “cloud” decisions, their thoughts before and during the process, and the outcome of their endeavor. Our results provide insights from their perspectives into the similarities and differences among the organizations and the implications of “going into the cloud”. We conclude with a list of recommended questions and areas to consider for use by other organizations looking into adopting cloud services. The ultimate goal is to help businesses considering a cloud computing project by providing advice from other organizations based on their experience

ISISisNotIslam or DeportAllMuslims?: Predicting Unspoken Views

This paper examines the effect of online social network interactions on future attitudes. Specifically, we focus on how a person's online content and network dynamics can be used to predict future attitudes and stances in the aftermath of a major event. In this study, we focus on the attitudes of US Twitter users towards Islam and Muslims subsequent to the tragic Paris terrorist attacks that occurred on November 13, 2015. We quantitatively analyze 44K users' network interactions and historical tweets to predict their attitudes. We provide a description of the quantitative results based on the content (hashtags) and network interaction (retweets, replies, and mentions). We analyze two types of data: (1) we use post-event tweets to learn users' stated stances towards Muslims based on sampling methods and crowd-sourced annotations; and (2) we employ pre-event interactions on Twitter to build a classifier to predict post-event stances. We found that pre-event network interactions can predict someone's attitudes towards Muslims with 82% macro F-measure, even in the absence of prior mentions of Islam, Muslims, or related terms

Transnational Saudi Arabian Youth and Facebook: Enacting Privacy and Identity

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Washington, 2017-08Theories of privacy and identity in relationship to the use of Information Communication Technology (ICT) have been a topic of research for decades. However, little attention has been paid to the perception of privacy and identity from the perspective of Muslim Arab technology users. Privacy and identity in the context of the Arab world is highly influenced by the Islamic religion and the deeply rooted Bedouin cultural traditions. I examined the use of social media, specifically, Facebook, Instagram, and Snapchat, by 34 transnational Saudi Arabian young adults (ages 18-35). The aim was to understand how they conceptualize and enact privacy and self-presentation as transnationals, that is, during back-and-forth movement from Saudi Arabia to the United States. Specifically, I employed a qualitative cross-sectional approach from three different points in their transnational experience: before coming to the US, during their time in the US and after their return to Saudi Arabia upon graduation. Resisting the culturally hegemonic form of privacy, this study provided culturally-inclusive and expansive design insights from an understudied user group to address some of the questionable privacy models in current social media design. I also provided empirical data that revealed new findings regarding Saudis’ sense of privacy and identity, their concerns with the design of current digital media technologies, and how they appropriate these platforms to accomplish their own privacy and identity needs. After experimenting with other methods, including standalone interviews, my study involved the development of what I called design sessions that included a combination of three qualitative methods: background questionnaire, in-depth interviews, and a collage construction activity. This method was powerful in eliciting value conceptualization, concerns, and emotions that I synthesized through a thematic analysis. I used this qualitative approach to provide a deeper, more nuanced understanding of this understudied, and often misunderstood, population in design and research. My dissertation addresses three research questions: RQ1: How do transnational Saudi youth conceptualize privacy (and other relatedly important values) while using social media during their transnational experience? RQ2: How do Saudi youth use and imagine using social networking sites before, during, after their extended study abroad? a) What are the daily privacy concerns associated with the use of Facebook – if any? b) Where concerns are present, what workarounds and privacy protection tactics do women and men employ, respectively, to the current privacy and security controls to serve their cultural-based needs? RQ3: What are the design insights and principles needed to guide the technical design of privacy aware and culturally-sensitive technologies? My dissertation goals include: 1) Enrich and expand the understanding of the specific culturally grounded practices of privacy and identity with regards to social media in general, but with recourse to an Arab context, using the transnational analytical lens. 2) Demonstrate how privacy is required, demanded, and experienced by a Muslim population going through the transnational journey of privacy across two cultural contexts vis-à-vis social media. Furthermore, from my empirical data, I theorized the concept of transnational privacy; the idea that transnational young people/students engage in privacy practices that stretch their original understanding of privacy to include patterns adopted in the hosting society. In time, transnationals learn to deftly navigate and adapt to the different norms of their originating society (Saudi Arabia) and their host society (United States). 3) Extend the studies of human values and technology appropriation to include Arabs, and to clarify the bidirectional effects caused by the mix of technology, privacy, and culture: social shaping of technology and social impact created by it. 4) Reflect on the contextually-appropriate use of certain methods, such as semi-structured interviews and visual elicitation techniques in an investigation rooted in socio-technical practices occurring in two extremely different contexts, by the same population. 5) Offer technology designers, policy makers, and the industry in general, culturally-sensitive design principles that incorporate previously unexplored characteristics of privacy and identity

ARCHITECTURE FOR UNDERSTANDING THE AUTOMATED IMAGINARY: A WORKING QUALITATIVE METHODOLOGY FOR RESEARCH ON POLITICAL BOTS

Social media – especially social networking sites – have substantially transformed the  ways in which people discuss current affairs and obtain political news and information.  Because of increased affordances for building and maintaining social connections,  young people are better able to cultivate a political identity and engage civically in both  authoritarian and democratic regimes [1]. Activist causes and democratic movements  have been born, organized and disseminated on sites including Facebook, Twitter,  Weibo, and YouTube [2]. Like any technology, though, the interfaces, applications, and  modes of communication on social networking sites are in constant negotiation,  transformation, and repurposing – and by a wide variety of social and political actors