If We Build it, Will They Come? Designing a Community-Based Online Site for Parents

Abstract Parents are busy people. Designing social software for parents requires understanding the particular needs and constraints governing their lives. In this paper, we present a study of a community-based site called ParentNet. Based on prior formative work, ParentNet was designed to support parents in keeping up with their children's social media use. With 10 months of deployment and 133 participants, ParentNet was successful in some regards and unsuccessful in others. Drawing from log data and focus groups, we arrive at three findings. First, parents may not easily switch from existing school communication platforms that they are already familiar with. Second, school support was critical for promoting adoption. Third, parents felt like they had too much technology in their lives and were not looking for more platforms to keep up with. We conclude with lessons for designing for parents and a discussion of technology overuse as a design constraint

Supporting the Complex Social Lives of New Parents

One of the many challenges of becoming a parent is the shift in one’s social life. As HCI researchers have begun to investigate the intersection of sociotechnical system design and parenthood, they have also sought to understand how parents’ social lives can be best supported. We build on these strands of research through a qualitative study with new parents regarding the role of digital technologies in their social lives as they transition to parenthood. We demonstrate how sociotechnical systems are entangled in the ways new parents manage their relationships, build (or resist building) new friendships and ad hoc support systems, and navigate the vulnerabilities of parenthood. We discuss how systems designed for new parents can better support the vulnerabilities they internalize, the diverse friendships they desire, and the logistical challenges they experience. We conclude with recommendations for future design and research in this area

Has Instagram Fundamentally Altered the 'Family Snapshot'?

This paper considers how parents use the social media platform Instagram to facilitate the capture, curation and sharing of ‘family snapshots’. Our work draws upon established cross-disciplinary literature relating to film photography and the composition of family albums in order to establish whether social media has changed the way parents visually present their families. We conducted a qualitative visual analysis of a sample of 4,000 photographs collected from Instagram using hashtags relating to children and parenting. We show that the style and composition of snapshots featuring children remains fundamentally unchanged and continues to be dominated by rather bland and idealised images of the happy family and the cute child. In addition, we find that the frequent taking and sharing of photographs via Instagram has inevitably resulted in a more mundane visual catalogue of daily life. We note a tension in the desire to use social media as a means to evidence good parenting, while trying to effectively manage the social identity of the child and finally, we note the reluctance of parents to use their own snapshots to portray family tension or disharmony, but their willingness to use externally generated content for this purpose

If we build it, will they come? Designing a community-based online site for parents

Parents are busy people. Designing social software for parents requires understanding the particular needs and constraints governing their lives. In this paper, we present a study of a community-based site called ParentNet. Based on prior formative work, ParentNet was designed to support parents in keeping up with their children’s social media use. With 10 months of deployment and 133 participants, ParentNet was successful in some regards and unsuccessful in others. Drawing from log data and focus groups, we arrive at three findings. First, parents may not easily switch from existing school communication platforms that they are already familiar with. Second, school support was critical for promoting adoption. Third, parents felt like they had too much technology in their lives and were not looking for more platforms to keep up with. We conclude with lessons for designing for parents and a discussion of technology overuse as a design constraint.published or submitted for publicationis peer reviewe

Detecting spam in a Twitter network

Spam becomes a problem as soon as an online communication medium becomes popular. Twitter’s behavioral and structural properties make it a fertile breeding ground for spammers to proliferate. In this article we examine spam around a one-time Twitter meme—“robotpickuplines”. We show the existence of structural network differences between spam accounts and legitimate users. We conclude by highlighting challenges in disambiguating spammers from legitimate users