Computing the everyday: social media as data platforms

We conceive social media platforms as sociotechnical entities that variously shape user platform involvement and participation. Such shaping develops along three fundamental data operations that we subsume under the terms of encoding, aggregation, and computation. Encoding entails the engineering of user platform participation along narrow and standardized activity types (e.g., tagging, liking, sharing, following). This heavily scripted platform participation serves as the basis for the procurement of discrete and calculable data tokens that are possible to aggregate and, subsequently, compute in a variety of ways. We expose these operations by investigating a social media platform for shopping. We contribute to the current debate on social media and digital platforms by describing social media as posttransactional spaces that are predominantly concerned with charting and profiling the online predispositions, habits, and opinions of their user base. Such an orientation sets social media platforms apart from other forms of mediating online interaction. In social media, we claim, platform participation is driven toward an endless online conversation that delivers the data footprint through which a computed sociality is made the source of value creation and monetization

Re-thinking bookmark management – Less choice is more efficient

This research investigates the role of a Controlled Vocabulary (CV) in next generation bookmark management systems. The search for a more efficient graphical user interface solution to deal with the massive information overload situation faced by most computer users today is a pressing problem. CVs allow categorization of title words and phrases into the appropriate location recognized by the user, so as to facilitate easier information storage and retrieval. The results of this user study involving 152 individuals indicated that there is potential for a well-defined two-tier controlled vocabulary system to assist user categorization, information storage and retrieval in personal information management systems