Jo Pierson

Seeing the bigger picture: a user perspective on 360° TV

Omnidirectional video (ODV) is a type of video in which viewers can look around in 360° as if turning the camera themselves. This type of video presents opportunities for new interactive television formats. The development of such new formats, however, is accompanied by challenges in terms of user experience and technical and creative development. In this paper, we discuss which issues and opportunities users anticipate. These findings are the result of a human-centered design study in which we first introduced potential users to ODV, gathering their feedback, and then encouraged them to envision suitable ODV-based enhancements of television genres.

Ensuring Trust, Privacy, and Etiquette in Web 2.0 Applications

An analysis of three user studies of Web 2.0 applications reveals the most important requirements related to ethical issues. The development of features that support these requirements should be tailored to the type of application and specific community needs.

Social media and cookies: challenges for online privacy

– The advent of Web 2.0 or so‐called social media have enabled a new kind of communication, called mass self‐communication. These tools and the new form of communication are believed to empower users in everyday life. The authors of this paper observe a paradox: if this positive potential is possible, the negative downside is also possible. There is often a denial of this downside and it is especially visible in social media at the level of privacy and dataveillance. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate this point through an analysis of cookies., – The paper illustrates how mass self‐communication in social media enables a new form of vulnerability for privacy. This is best shown by redefining privacy as flows of Personal Identifiable Information (PII) that are regulated by informational norms of Nissenbaums concept of contextual integrity. Instead of analysing these contexts on a general level, the paper operationalises them on the user level to illustrate the lack of user awareness regarding cookies. The results of the research were gathered through desk research and expert interviews., – The positive aspects of cookies, unobtrusiveness and ease of use, are also the main challenges for user privacy. This technology can be disempowering because users are often hardly aware of its existence. In that way cookies can obfuscate the perceived context of personal data exposure., – The research shows how user disempowerment in social media is often overlooked by overstressing their beneficial potential.

Does Mobile Television Challenge the Dimension of Viewing Television? An Explorative Research on Time, Place and Social Context of the Use of Mobile Television Content

Television is one of the last media technologies to become disconnected from a fixed place like home. Media like newspaper, radio, audio recordings and computing have already been introduced in a mobile setting since some time. However with the wide spread and strong domestication of mobile devices, and the dominant character of television in households, it seems that the transition to mobile television is inevitable. Viewing patterns and behavior are strongly determined by dimensions of time, place and social context and it is exactly on those dimensions that the mobility aspect has a great impact. The question we therefore address in this paper is to what extent that relationship between mobility and these dimensions will influence the uptake and usage of mobile television.

Who’s my audience again? Understanding audience management strategies for designing privacy management technologies

Social network site users are often confronted with invisible audiences. Although various settings for managing audiences are available, we argue that these do not always match the users’ interpretations. This study explores the audience-management strategies of 18 young adults when categorizing their (invisible) audiences in Facebook, using card sorting as a research method. Approximately 1254 out of 1800 people (cards) were categorized based on the shared-community strategy, in which the participants referred to multiple community roles. The theoretical framework of Symbolic Interactionism and the Communication Privacy Management Theory are used to frame the problematic nature of invisible audiences. Implications for designing privacy-management technologies are discussed.

The promise of audience transparency. Exploring users' perceptions and behaviors towards visualizations of networked audiences on Facebook

We study the affordances of visualizations of Facebook friends using an interview and survey study.We study how users interact with visualizations of Facebook friends by logging mouse interactions.The data indicate that audience visualizations are especially perceived useful for grouping and reflection purposes.The data suggests a shift from audience control to audience transparency. The presence of multiple audiences and the collapse of boundaries between them in Facebook make it difficult for users to know and to control who has access to their online contributions. Previous research has shown how visualizations of Facebook friends are useful, but mainly focused on the instrumental goal of controlling access. It is unclear, however, what value users themselves see in visualizations and whether knowledge and/or control are important to them. In this research, these questions were studied by evaluating FreeBu, a semi-automatic and interactive grouping technology that visualizes Facebook friends. The results indicate that audience visualizations are especially perceived useful for grouping and reflection purposes. Moreover, we found how users are attracted to larger groups, those with whom they communicate more, bridges and outliers in their network. The combined findings suggest that awareness is considered at least as important as control. Therefore, a shift from audience control to audience transparency is recommended.

MEDEA: Crowd-Sourcing the Recording of Metal-Detected Artefacts in Flanders (Belgium)

Abstract Since 2016, hobby metal-detecting is legal in Flanders (Belgium), although it was unofficially tolerated for many years before. However, research on metal-detected artefacts in Flanders is hindered by a low reporting rate. The MEDEA project aims to address this by encouraging detectorists to record their finds on an online platform. Finds experts are invited to enrich records with further information and thus instigate a rewarding feedback cycle. This paper discusses MEDEA’s ‘Human-Centred Design’ development process and the design choices underpinning the platform. MEDEA may be seen as an example of ‘Open Archaeology’ and related trends in digital humanities.

Audience measurement and digitalisation: digital tv and internet

The paper explores the potential challenges in digital TV audience measurement and Internet audience measurement related to three important consequences of digitalisation: the convergence of media, the specialisation of media in relation to the differentiation of audiences and the shift in control from broadcasters to audience members.

Governing online platforms: From contested to cooperative responsibility

ABSTRACT Online platforms, from Facebook to Twitter, and from Coursera to Uber, have become deeply involved in a wide range of public activities, including journalism, civic engagement, education, and transport. As such, they have started to play a vital role in the realization of important public values and policy objectives associated with these activities. Based on insights from theories about risk sharing and the problem of many hands, this article develops a conceptual framework for the governance of the public role of platforms, and elaborates on the concept of cooperative responsibility for the realization of critical public policy objectives in Europe. It argues that the realization of public values in platform-based public activities cannot be adequately achieved by allocating responsibility to one central actor (as is currently common practice), but should be the result of dynamic interaction between platforms, users, and public institutions.

Managing social adoption and technology adaption in longitudinal studies of mobile media applications

In this paper we present a case study of a longitudinal in-situ observation that involves a new social application for mobile communication. Our study demonstrates the need for an adaptive approach to planning, design, and implementation that is responsive to emerging social and infrastructure conditions. This represents a shift from traditional longitudinal studies that observe prototype systems with fixed sets of affordances. In the case of mobile and social applications there is a complex interaction between the social dynamics, the new technology, and the mobile infrastructure. Exploratory research thus requires approaches that can deal with such complex conditions. That includes a high level of prototype plasticity to ensure adoption and sustained use that is needed for longitudinal in-situ research. The social aspects dictate specific forms of instrumentation to enable observation of social interactions and mechanisms to inject the new technology into an existing social and communication ecosystem. Our study demonstrates the evolving use of complementary techniques and in-situ modifications of the prototype to support longitudinal observations in a real setting.