"Mothers as Candy Wrappers": Critical Infrastructure Supporting the Transition into Motherhood

Copyright © ACM. The transition into motherhood is a complicated and often unsupported major life disruption. To alleviate mental health issues and to support identity re-negotiation, mothers are increasingly turning to online mothers\u27 groups, particularly private and secret Facebook groups; these can provide a complex system of social, emotional, and practical support for new mothers. In this paper we present findings from an exploratory interview study of how new mothers create, find, use, and participate in ICTs, specifically online mothers\u27 groups, to combat the lack of formal support systems by developing substitute networks. Utilizing a framework of critical infrastructures, we found that these online substitute networks were created by women, for women, in an effort to fill much needed social, political, and medical gaps that fail to see \u27woman and mother\u27 as a whole being, rather than simply as a \u27discarded candy wrapper\u27. Our study contributes to the growing literature on ICT use by mothers for supporting and negotiating new identities, by illustrating how these infrastructures can be re-designed and appropriated in use, for critical utilization

"Hey, Can You Add Captions?": The Critical Infrastructuring Practices of Neurodiverse People on TikTok

Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many people as possible, have explicitly focused on how we can support and allow for the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurotypes, chronic conditions, and older adults. Despite these efforts, not all technology is designed or implemented to support everyone's needs. Recently, a community-organized push by creators and general users of TikTok urged the platform to add accessibility features, such as closed captioning to user-generated content, allowing more people to use the platform with greater ease. Our work focuses on an understudied population -- people with ADHD and those who experience similar challenges -- exploring the creative practices people from this community engage in, focusing on the kinds of accessibility they create through their creative work. Through an interview study exploring the experiences of creatives on TikTok, we find that creatives engage in critical infrastructuring -- a process of bottom-up (re)design -- to make the platform more accessible despite the challenges the platform presents to them as creators. We present these critical infrastructuring practices through the themes of: creating and augmenting video editing infrastructures and creating and augmenting video captioning infrastructures. We reflect on the introduction of a top-down infrastructure - the implementation of an auto-captioning feature - shifts the critical infrastructure practices of content creators. Through their infrastructuring, creatives revised sociotechnical capabilities of TikTok to support their own needs as well as the broader needs of the TikTok community. We discuss how the routine of infrastructuring accessibility is actually best conceptualized as incidental care work. We further highlight how accessibility is an evolving sociotechnical construct, and forward the concept of contextual accessibility.Comment: To be published in: Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. CSCW '2

The Technology Crisis in US-based Emergency Management: Toward a Well-Connected Future

For many years, CI has tried to show the value of computational techniques for response to hazard events but has yet to see success outside of post-hoc analyses. Meanwhile, emergency management (EM) has been struggling to cope with the impact of computation. This duality wherein we know technology can be useful yet also complicates EM (and has not yet been fully integrated into EM) is what we dub the technology crisis in EM. To begin to address this crisis and revitalize CI, we argue that it is necessary to develop an inventory of what technologies EM is competent with and to design training that can extend that competency. This research reports a survey of EM Practitioners in the United States. We offer one of the first inventories of EM technologies and technological skills and identify how current EM technological integration issues are a crisis

The "Colonial Impulse" of Natural Language Processing: An Audit of Bengali Sentiment Analysis Tools and Their Identity-based Biases

While colonization has sociohistorically impacted people's identities across various dimensions, those colonial values and biases continue to be perpetuated by sociotechnical systems. One category of sociotechnical systems--sentiment analysis tools--can also perpetuate colonial values and bias, yet less attention has been paid to how such tools may be complicit in perpetuating coloniality, although they are often used to guide various practices (e.g., content moderation). In this paper, we explore potential bias in sentiment analysis tools in the context of Bengali communities that have experienced and continue to experience the impacts of colonialism. Drawing on identity categories most impacted by colonialism amongst local Bengali communities, we focused our analytic attention on gender, religion, and nationality. We conducted an algorithmic audit of all sentiment analysis tools for Bengali, available on the Python package index (PyPI) and GitHub. Despite similar semantic content and structure, our analyses showed that in addition to inconsistencies in output from different tools, Bengali sentiment analysis tools exhibit bias between different identity categories and respond differently to different ways of identity expression. Connecting our findings with colonially shaped sociocultural structures of Bengali communities, we discuss the implications of downstream bias of sentiment analysis tools

(Re)Design to Mitigate Political Polarization : Reflecting Habermas' ideal communication space in the United States of America and Finland

Social Media platforms are increasingly being used for political activities and communication, and research suggests that social media design and use is contributing to the polarization of the public sphere. This study draws on Habermas' ideals concerning deliberative democracy to explore if novel interface designs that diversify information sources through content recommendation, can decrease polarization. Through a design-probe interview approach and insights generated from 19 political and citizen experts in Finland and the United States, we found that our deliberative design can lead to depolarization, while creating additional complexity through which users question content and information. We discuss the need to move beyond naive content recommendation, and user interface level changes, in order to work towards a depolarized public sphere.Peer reviewe

Hybrid media consumption: How tweeting during a televised political debate influences the vote decision

An increasing number of people are using microblogs to broadcast their thoughts in real time as they watch televised political events. Microblogging social network sites (SNSs) such as Twitter generate a parallel stream of information and opinion. It is presumed that the additional content enhances the viewing experience, but our experiment explores the validity of this assumption. We studied how tweeting, or passively observing Twitter during a debate, influenced affect, recall and vote decision. For most measures, participants’ average feeling and recall toward the candidates did not depend on Twitter activity, but Twitter activity did matter for vote choice. People who actively tweeted changed their voting choice to reflect the majority sentiment on Twitter. Results are discussed in terms of the possibility that active tweeting leads to greater engagement but that it may also make people more susceptible to social influence

Recovery, Resilience and Beyond: ICT Use During Ongoing Disruption

The role Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) play in enabling people to coordinate efforts in providing aid and assistance during disasters, like hurricanes and earthquakes, has emerged as an active research topic, as people can now participate in the recovery effort globally. The majority of these studies, however, have focused on the acute emergency phase during and shortly after a disaster strikes. It is still unclear what role ICTs, like Facebook, can serve during ongoing disruption as caused by violent conflict, and this dissertation attempts to address that gap. When people experience war, they are living under constant threats, such as bombings and militia attacks. Thus, it may be difficult for people to engage in emergency related behaviors, as well as maintain their daily routines. Two main problems may further limit people's ability to act in such contexts: (1) the degradation of societal trust and (2) increased distance, thus resulting in the breakdown of trust of not only the government, but of their community. Additionally, support networks are disrupted and many people may flee a war zone to seek safety in another location. Likewise, it may be difficult to travel safely and easily due to ongoing violence. In order to better understand how ICTs enable people to act when experiencing ongoing disruption, we used a combination of qualitative and quantitative research methods to longitudinally study the Iraqi population. We conducted 90 semi-structured interviews in both English and Arabic with Iraqis who had been experiencing the current Gulf War since March 2003. We also designed and deployed an online survey to better understand people's friendship formation behavior and Facebook use. Additionally, we collected archival materials like news articles and blog data, which we used to further inform our analysis. We found that Iraqis were using ICTs to engage in emergency related behaviors as part of the disaster recovery process, as well as to be resilient in maintaining and developing new routines. Firstly, Iraqi civilians used ICTs to manage their public identity, to develop collaborative practices that relied on those with whom interpersonal trust previously existed, and to conduct background checks. These new practices, in turn, enabled people to maintain and develop new routines for work, social life, and public discourse, to be able to obtain trustworthy jobs and services, and to continue interacting with others in public. Secondly, ICTs mediated the development of unofficial, trust-based social arrangements through which people then resolved continual breakdowns in the infrastructures supporting travel, education, and information. Thirdly, Iraqi civilians are now using Facebook to engage in emergency related behaviors, to maintain integral cultural practices, and to engage in new activities to improve their country. We then discuss how Iraqi citizens were using ICTs to regain security, to rebuild their society, and to engage in activities that are beyond what are considered routine