Internet Power and Social Context: A Globalization Approach to Web Privacy Concerns

Contemporary perspectives on the Internet don\u27t recognize negotiations about its meaning that take place in many societies, causing the Web to be defined simultaneously in terms of local cultures and world markets. We propose a “globalization” perspective that can help researchers situate a society’s cultural and technological practices within broad political and economic parameters, identify global forces and local voices, and study dynamics of their co-existence. As an exploratory foray, we compare U.S. and Israeli parents\u27 attitudes toward Web privacy. The findings call attention to a need for historical and geographical considerations at every level of Web research

NEOLIBERAL CARTOGRAPHY: A VISUAL-SEMIOTIC ANALYSIS OF THREE NAVIGATION APPS

The proposed presentation adopts visual-semiotic tools to analyze the virtual environment conjured by the apps Waze, Moovit and Gett. Recent work has pointed to the complicated relationship between maps and the spaces they purportedly depict, interpreting maps as simulacra that are intimately intertwined in the ideology and design of gaming. In the presentation, we develop a semiotic walkthrough method that allows us to identify four representational practices of these widely used navigation apps: the map is personalized and adopts the perspective of the user – in Waze the arrow represents the user rather than e.g. the North; the map is commercial in that it is informed by the economic model of the app, e.g Waze presenting only those gas stations that pay the company; the map offers a visual depiction of time – arguably, time rather than space is its raison d’être; and lastly, the map is reflexive, incorporating users’ data both to regulate their behavior (speed alert) and to seemingly subvert surveillance (police alert). In this cartographic regime, the map user adopts a “self as business” (Gershon, 2017) logic in which navigation must constantly create value, as the map becomes less a tool for regulating behavior and more, a tool for producing it (Zuboff, 2019)

Smartphone resistance as media ambivalence

In this paper, we develop the notion of media ambivalence to account for such seemingly unrelated practices as content filtering, screen-time limitation and social media rejection. We propose that as compared to resistances to dedicated communication technologies with an on/off button, resistances in a neoliberal age of ubiquitous, convergent media are temporary and local. Analyzing interviews with smartphone resisters, we discuss their critique of smartphone culture; their investment in their feature phones and their pride and unease over using them; and their sense that their resistance cannot last. Interpreting smartphone resistance as a form of media ambivalence, we suggest that in terms of scope, contemporary resistance is aimed at a single medium, platform or practice that is singled out of the convergence; that its meaning develops over time along with technological and cultural changes; and that it acquires personal, social and political significance from related uses and resistances

The Expert And The Networked Public: Professional And Amateur Wedding Photographers In The Facebooked Wedding

A typical middle class wedding in Israel is documented by roughly 3000-6000 still photos taken by a networked public of friends, family, service providers and professional photographers; they are uploaded and shared throughout the ceremony, and archived thereafter in various online, offline and printed photo albums. Conceiving of the wedding as a paradigmatic site of cultural production and reproduction, this paper explores the practices through which professional photographers distinguish themselves from amateurs just as digital photography became ubiquitous. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with wedding photographers and newlywed couples and an analysis of Facebook pages of wedding photographers and newlywed groups, we will suggest that as independent, "artisanal photographers" (Frosh, 2017) whose livelihood depends on direct sales to the market, wedding photographers managed to distinguish themselves from the networked public of amateur photographers by upskilling professionally (friending and coaching in addition to documenting); technologically (displaying superior equipment); and artistically (mastering the staged-authentic style). Yet in Facebook's wedding circuit economy, their work remains precarious

VOICES FROM THE MARGINS: PRIVACY DISCOURSE IN GITHUB README FILES

Most digital products use technologies that enable the collection, analysis and transfer of a considerable amount of personal information to the cloud, where it is stored and processed. Thus much of the responsibility for the users’ personal information is in the hands of the developers and the code that they author. This research adopts a materialist perspective to study developers’ discourse around the privacy solutions they embed in the code. Defining GitHub as a discursive platform, we draw on a sample of almost 60,000 README files to analyze the ways in which developers present code to other developers. We find that the files promote two approaches, privacy-by-policy and privacy-by-design. We suggest that the distinction between the two is in fact a distinction between developers who uphold privacy as a value and developers who regard it as an imposition to comply with

IDENTIFYING WITH PRIVACY: REFERENCES TO PRIVACY IN DEVELOPERS’ GITHUB PROFILES

The proposed presentation explores the ways in which developers use the notion of privacy in their GitHub biographies. Initially a code-sharing platform, GitHub has become in recent years a major recruitment site. In that environment, a valuable potential worker is one who knows how to extract and make the most of users’ personal information. At the same time, in an open source platform, “privacy” maintains its romantic allure as a worthwhile endeavor. How do developers manage this tension? And what may its negotiation imply for the production of privacy? Analyzing the 2025 GitHub bios in which developers use the word “privacy,” we explore two articulations of privacy in developers’ self-presentation: privacy as a profession, and privacy as a passion

LIVING WITH THE SMARTPHONE: RELIGIOUS MUSLIM FAMILIES IN ISRAEL PRACTICE MOBILITY AND PIETY

We explore practices and meanings involved in the adoption of the smartphone among religious Muslim families in Israel, analyzing interviews conducted with 25 families (91 members) that belong to an ethnic and national minority in the country. Our analysis suggests that the adoption of the smartphone involves a multilayered interpretive work. We focus on the family, asking how its members negotiate a medium that undermines traditional parental and religious authorities, while providing them with intense and renewed ways of practicing their familial ties and religious commitments. As against the backdrop of several mostly quantitative studies of Palestinian Arabs in Israel, we analyze our respondents’ discourse in order to outline the intricate relationships between mothers and fathers; between siblings; between parents and their children, and the children’s imagined peer group; and between the interviewees and their extended family. We complement this analysis with a focus on religion, describing a range of Muslim mobile apps that allow our interviewees to practice their religion, as well as widely used apps – mostly WhatsApp groups – which afford virtual gatherings for promoting charity, pilgrimage and Quran reading. The analysis highlights the particular tensions that are woven into our interviewees’ uses: they are concerned over their participation in social media, the authenticity of the texts they encounter, and their relationships with local and trans-local religious authorities. These questions are implicated in Muslim doctrines and in the predicament of Palestinian Arab families in Israel – and in the affordances of social media and online mobile phones

ALGORITHMIC PRODUCTION BEYOND SILICON VALLEY

The last years have seen a proliferation of research on the social ramifications of algorithms (Eubanks 2018; Noble 2018) and the power of algorithms was insightfully theorized (Gillespie 2016; Bucher 2018). At the same time, scholars have begun to examine the ties between algorithms and culture (Seaver 2017), describing algorithms as products of complex socio-algorithmic assemblages (Gillespie 2016, 24), with often very local socio-technical histories (Kitchin 2017). However, the spatial trajectories through which algorithms operate, and the specific sociocultural contexts in which they arise have been largely overlooked. Accordingly, research tends to focus on American companies and on the effects their algorithms have on Euro-American users, while, in fact, algorithms are being developed in various geographical locations, and they are being used in diverse socio-cultural contexts. That is, research on algorithms tends to disregard the heterogeneous contexts from which algorithms arise and the effects various cultural settings have on the production of algorithmic systems. This panel aims to fill these gaps by offering four empirical perspectives on algorithmic production in three prominent tech centers: China, Canada, and Israel. We will ask: How do cross-cultural encounters construct notions of privacy? How is algorithmic discrimination understood and acted upon in China? What symbolical and material resources were invested in making Canada’s AI hubs? And how Israeli tech companies use their algorithms to profile their Other? Hence, this panel offers to think beyond the Silicon Valley paradigm, and to aim towards a more diverse, culturally-sensitive approach to the study algorithms

Navigating Media Ambivalence: Strategies of Resistance, Avoidance, and Engagement with Media Technology in Everyday Life

As media technologies continue to infiltrate the domestic sphere with interactive opportunities, an increased interest in time and content management has surfaced. Social media websites such as Facebook and Twitter have been commonly associated with “wasted time” and the accessibility of unchecked content has placed a strain on the preservation of family ethics and values. On the other hand, media technologies continue to offer spaces of both meaningful and necessary communication, as well as enjoyment, education, creativity, and political action. Based on this cultural conundrum, important questions about social practice and media resistance follow: Under what logics are individuals and families using deciding to resist media technologies? What are the everyday practices of media ambivalence and resistance and how do they operate in the domestic sphere? In most research and popular discussion of media texts and platforms, the focus is understandably on current or potential users of media. This panel aims to provide space for discussing an important, though perhaps under-attended to, phenomenon within media consumption: the active non-use or negotiation of media by subjects who hold ambivalent attitudes toward communication technologies. Using empirical evidence and discourse analysis, each of the papers on this panel draws attention to the strategies employed by people who want to actively manage their own media use, as well as that of their families. The papers collected here consider a variety of communication technologies (email, television, smart phones, and social network sites) and focus on a range of factors (including gender, religion, and national context) that shape the attitudes taken and the tactics deployed in regulating media use. The first paper in this panel explores and analyzes technological and discursive “tactics” (i.e., “screen time”) that users employ to negotiate and limit media use for themselves and their families. Drawing upon qualitative interviews conducted in households in Israel, the authors try to make sense of these different practices through comparisons with research conducted about parents and children. The second paper looks at the role of gender, as a social practice, in the regulation of domestic media consumption—including the gender identification of the primary policing parent and resistance toward gendered symbols in media culture—in order to identify how gender norms are perpetuated through practices of media regulation. The third paper in this panel explores how Muslims in the United States devise evasive tactics that both engage and resist the proliferation of media technologies in the household. In particular, the author argues that given their media deficit in American society, Muslims often feel they cannot afford to resist media technologies, particularly smart phones and social media because of their connective qualities and their interventionist affordances. Finally, the last paper examines the practice of refusal of social media platforms, for example, the active resistance by potential users to participation on sites like Facebook. The author argues that this works against the potential for media refusal to function as effective strategy of collective action. Practices of social media refusal and the discourses around it serve as sites of symbolic and material struggle within the contemporary commercial media context. As a panel, the papers converse with each other to examine the ways that individuals and families confront their usage of new technologies in a media saturated age. In particular, the nuances of media resistance are analyzed at the discursive and textual level in order to understand the productive ways in which media technology is managed. In an age where individuals and families increasingly use technology to restrict their technology use, scholarship on media ambivalence becomes essential to understanding the contemporary media landscape