Alex Leavitt

Upvoting hurricane Sandy: event-based news production processes on a social news site

This paper uses the case of Hurricane Sandy and reddits topical community (subreddit) /r/sandy to examine the production and curation of news content around events on a social news site. Through qualitative analysis, we provide a coded topology of produced content and describe how types of networked gatekeeping impact the framing of a crisis situation. This study also examines, through quantitative modeling, what kind of information becomes negotiated and voted as relevant. We suggest that highly scored content shared in a social news setting focused more on human-interest media and perspective-based citizen journalism than professional news reports. We conclude by discussing how the mechanisms of social news sites conflict with the social norms and culture of reddit to produce differing expectations around news.

Virtual Team Networks: How Group Social Capital Affects Team Success in a Massively Multiplayer Online Game

Virtual teams have become a ubiquitous form of organizing, but the impact of social structures within and between teams on group performance remains understudied. This paper uses the case study of a massively multiplayer online game and server log data from over 10,000 players to examine the connection between group social capital (operationalized through guild network structure measures) and team effectiveness, given a variety of in-game social networks. Three different networks, social, task, and exchange networks, are compared and contrasted while controlling for group size, group age, and player experience. Team effectiveness is maximized at a roughly moderate level of closure across the networks, suggesting that this is the optimal level of the groups network density. Guilds with high brokerage, meaning they have diverse connections with other groups, were more effective in achievement-oriented networks. In addition, guilds with central leaders were more effective when they teamed up with other guild leaders.

The Role of Information Visibility in Network Gatekeeping: Information Aggregation on Reddit during Crisis Events

As social media platforms witness more and more contributions from participants during developing crisis events, some platforms provide affordances that support visibility for specific pieces of information. However, the design of information visibility, especially in the context of controlling information flows (through gatekeeping), may shape how participants collect and share up-to-date information in these systems. This paper looks at the field site of reddit.com through trace ethnography methods to understand how the design of reddits platform (from algorithms to user roles) impacts the visibility of information and subsequently how participants aggregate information in response to ongoing events. Through trace ethnographic analysis, we illustrate three themes related to tensions around visibility - behavioral, structural, and relational - and show how visibility shapes the work of producing information about crises in social news sites.

Uses of Multiple Characters in Online Games and Their Implications for Social Network Methods

In most sociotechnical systems, individuals are tracked through user accounts. This paper explores the various ways in which people create and use multiple user representations, specifically in online games. Using 8 years of population data from a popular multiplayer online game, EVE Online, we examine how multiple character creation and use occurs at scale and how operationalization of individuals between accounts and characters impacts methods. We suggest that conceptualizing participants in online games based on the assumption that one character equals one individual can lead to incorrect analyses regarding the demographics or behaviors of the population. Additionally, social network analysis suggests that a character-centric, rather than account-level, viewpoint can change the results of statistical relationships with network metrics such as eigenvector centrality.

Jumping for Fun? Negotiating Mobility and the Geopolitics of Foursquare

Rather than assume that there is some universal “right way” to engage social media platforms, we interrogate how the location-based social media practice known as “jumping” played out on the popular service Foursquare. We use this case to investigate how a “global” or universal system is constructed with an imagined user in mind, one who enjoys a particular type of mobility and experience of place. Through the analysis of official Foursquare policies and mission statements, discussions among developers, interviews with and conversations among Foursquare users, online traces left by jumpers, and correspondence between designers and users on discussion forums, we identify how certain practices and participants are discursively constructed as normative, while other practices and groups are marginalized. Through the study of “jumping,” and its association with Indonesian players in particular, we highlight tensions between the assumptions and industrial strategies of Foursquare designers and the emergent practices and norms of early adopters and avid participants. We argue that the practices of “Indonesian” Foursquare jumpers and the discourses surrounding their use of Foursquare illustrate that practices understood as transgressive or resistive might best be read as strategies for engaging with a platform as groups contend with marginalizing social, economic, and/or political conditions. The case study examined in this article highlights the practices of participants who attempt to integrate themselves into the design of a social media system and the “workarounds,” tensions, negotiations, and logics that manifest in that process.

Upvote My News: The Practices of Peer Information Aggregation for Breaking News on reddit.com

Citizen participation in crisis communication increasingly occurs in social media contexts. As some platforms -- e.g., social news sites -- evolve around collaborative voting, filtering, and information sharing, the aggregation of breaking news information during crisis situations appears more often as an emergent practice in these online communities. Drawing from 53 interviews and descriptive quantitative analysis of reddit posts and comments, this paper presents a qualitative case study examining reddit.com members aggregate information during crisis events within the context of reddits post/comment structure, crowd voting, and ranking algorithms. Using the lens of network gatekeeping, the paper shows how participants evaluate sources, organize information, and verify details to demonstrate how different affordances and limitations of information production allow or restrict particular types of network gatekeeping.

Doctoral Colloquium -- Open-Source Culture: The Production & Politics of Distributed Creative Peer Production

My research evaluates how the social, legal, and technical elements of distributed creative peer production intersect to produce successful media franchises. I examine two international case studies -- Hatsune Miku and Minecraft -- using a mixed method (ethnographic and computational social scientific) approach to illustrate the politics and processes behind creator, audience, and co-producer relationships.