DOING YOUR HOMEWORK: THE USE OF SOCIAL MEDIA AS A FRIENDSHIP FILTER
Alecea Irene Standlee
Abstract: This article explores the emergence of technologically integrated relationship practices among college students in two U.S. universities. This work is situated within the significant body of social research and popular cultural discourse surrounding the consequences of technology and cultural integration among young adults. Analyzing interviews with 52 participants, I explore how they construct, establish and maintain cultural practices and social norms that shape peer interaction, social networks and interpersonal relationships in offline and online settings. This paper focuses specifically on the emergence of techno-social cultural norms that impact friendship and social network construction. Findings suggest the establishment and maintenance of friendships using social networks frequently includes the use of social media profiles as means to collect social and political attitude data on potential friends. Some participants report the use of such data as essential to the decision-making process utilized while establishing and maintaining offline friendships. Motivations for this practice include safety and security, social normativity and a desire for efficiency. Furthermore, participants articulate a social and politically homogeneous friendship network as a desirable outcome to data collection. These findings contribute to our ongoing understanding of the role of informational echo chambers within a technologically integrated social environment.
PLAYING WITH DATA AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Stefania Milan, Miren Gutierrez
The fundamental paradigm shift brought about by datafication alters how people enact their citizenship in their daily practices of participation. "Big data" has come to constitute a new terrain of engagement, which brings organized collective action, communicative practices and data infrastructure into a fruitful dialogue. While scholarship is progressively acknowledging the emergence of bottom-up data practices, to date no research has explored the influence of these practices on the activists themselves. Leveraging the disciplines of critical data studies and social movement studies, this article explores "proactive data activism", that is to say, grassroots connection with data that use, produce and appropriate data for social change, and examines its biographical, political, tactical and epistemological consequences. Approaching engagement with data as practice, this study focuses on the social contexts in which data are produced, consumed and circulated, and analyzes how tactics, skills and emotions evolve in interplay with data. Through content and co-occurrence analysis of semi-structured practitioner interviews (N=20), the paper shows how the employment of data and the data infrastructure in activism fundamentally transforms the way activists go about changing the world.
RECALIBRATING DAILY LIFE: SYNCHRONIZING, COORDINATING, AND SCHEDULING THROUGH SMARTPHONES
Martin Hand
This paper examines individual framings and experiences of temporal management via smartphone applications. It asks: to what extent and in what ways do configurations of smartphones and scheduling applications intervene in and restructure the temporality of practices and people’s experiences of time?
The paper draws upon in-depth semi-structured interview material with (a) professional urban and suburban householders (N=25), (b) individuals transitioning to retirement (N=20), and (c) university students (N=25) to examine how a range of temporal expectations are being perceived, articulated, and negotiated in practice. Interviews included talking through temporal data of many kinds on personal devices. The analytic questions guiding interviews were: where do identifiable expectations about temporal synchronization, coordination, duration, reciprocity, and productivity come from? What are the relations between institutionally defined temporal expectations and subjective experiences of temporal ordering? Does data produced through daily activities alter the temporal contours of those activities? Are social actors reorienting themselves in-time, in relation to mediatized temporal expectations?
In terms of findings, four modes of temporal management are identified and described in relation to demographic information. Following Sharma (2014), these are expressed here as ‘recalibrations’ – managing precariousness; synchronizing (to) the time of others; temporal self-disciplining; filling in future time - stressing the different ways in which temporal demands are perceived and experienced, leading to alternative efforts to coordinate and synchronize different elements of daily life through interconnected smartphone anchored applications.
REMOVING THE PHYSICAL BODY FROM INTERACTION - A PHENOMENOLOGICAL INVESTIGATION INTO LAYPEOPLE SHARING SELF-TRACKED EXERCISE DATA ON SOCIAL NETWORK SITES WHEN THEY FEEL UNEASY EXERCISING WITH PEOPLE
Joeb Høfdinghoff Grønborg
Self-tracking applications (apps) like $2 , $2 and $2 have made it effortless for laypeople to measure their exercise activity and turn it into detailed data on running time, distance, average pace, calories burned etc. The users can share the exercise data with personal networks of users (often named $2 ) on the apps’ internal $2 (Ellison & boyd, 2013) or external social network sites such as $2 or $2 .
Few studies, however, have shed light on how people use self-tracking in their everyday lives (Lupton, 2016) – e.g. why people share exercise data on social network sites.
Some people feel uneasy by exercising with – or in the presence of – people. In this paper, I provide a thick description of people that bypass their struggle with social exercise by sharing exercise data on social network sites. I utilize the lived experience of two female newcomers to exercise, Amanda and Dorte, to illustrate this. Firstly, using the philosopher and medical doctor Drew Leder’s phenomenological investigations into embodiment, I analyze how the females’ bodies $2 (Leder, 1990) when they exercise near/with people. Secondly, I examine how their networks of friends function as a beneficial form of exercise sociality that encourages Amanda and Dorte’s exercise activity.
My empirical data originates from an exploratory, interview study of 12 Danish, recreational athletes’ experiences with exercise-related self-tracking apps.
