Mary L. Gray

The Crowd is a Collaborative Network

The main goal of this paper is to show that crowdworkers collaborate to fulfill technical and social needs left by the platform they work on. That is, crowdworkers are not the independent, autonomous workers they are often assumed to be, but instead work within a social network of other crowdworkers. Crowdworkers collaborate with members of their networks to 1) manage the administrative overhead associated with crowdwork, 2) find lucrative tasks and reputable employers and 3) recreate the social connections and support often associated with brick and mortar-work environments. Our evidence combines ethnography, interviews, survey data and larger scale data analysis from four crowdsourcing platforms, emphasizing the qualitative data from the Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) platform and Microsofts proprietary crowdsourcing platform, the Universal Human Relevance System (UHRS). This paper draws from an ongoing, longitudinal study of Crowdwork that uses a mixed methods approach to understand the cultural meaning, political implications, and ethical demands of crowdsourcing.

Accessible Crowdwork?: Understanding the Value in and Challenge of Microtask Employment for People with Disabilities

We present the first formal study of crowdworkers who have disabilities via in-depth open-ended interviews of 17 people (disabled crowdworkers and job coaches for people with disabilities) and a survey of 631 adults with disabilities. Our findings establish that people with a variety of disabilities currently participate in the crowd labor marketplace, despite challenges such as crowdsourcing workflow designs that inadvertently prohibit participation by, and may negatively affect the worker reputations of, people with disabilities. Despite such challenges, we find that crowdwork potentially offers different opportunities for people with disabilities relative to the normative office environment, such as job flexibility and lack of a need to rely on public transit. We close by identifying several ways in which crowd labor platform operators and/or individual task requestors could improve the accessibility of this increasingly important form of employment.

Contextualizing Gay-Straight Alliances: Student, Advisor, and Structural Factors Related to Positive Youth Development Among Members

Gay-straight alliances (GSAs) may promote resilience. Yet, what GSA components predict well-being? Among 146 youth and advisors in 13 GSAs (58% lesbian, gay, bisexual, or questioning; 64% White; 38% received free/reduced-cost lunch), student (demographics, victimization, attendance frequency, leadership, support, control), advisor (years served, training, control), and contextual factors (overall support or advocacy, outside support for the GSA) that predicted purpose, mastery, and self-esteem were tested. In multilevel models, GSA support predicted all outcomes. Racial/ethnic minority youth reported greater well-being, yet lower support. Youth in GSAs whose advisors served longer and perceived more control and were in more supportive school contexts reported healthier outcomes. GSA advocacy also predicted purpose. Ethnographic notes elucidated complex associations and variability as to how GSAs operated.

“Dolphins Are Just Gay Sharks” Glee and the Queer Case of Transmedia As Text and Object

The FOX television series Glee has been lauded for its progressive portrayals of gay characters and criticized for trafficking in stereotypes. We position Glee within a transmedia framework, using textual analysis of program storylines, ethnographic fieldwork, and messages about Glee circulated on the microblogging site Twitter, to examine fan responses to and uses of Glee. We find that young adults experience and deploy Glee in two ways. First, they use Glee as a text to interpret their own life experiences, and imagine how they might articulate queer desires and acceptance of them. Second, as a malleable and mobile symbolic object, Glee acts as a strategic device used to signal identifications with and levels of awareness and acceptance of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender (LGBT)–identifying people. Although some of the engagement with Glee on social media echoed textual themes, we also find devoted fan engagement that diverges from that of our ethnographic observations.

Coping and survival skills: the role school personnel play regarding support for bullied sexual minority-oriented youth

BACKGROUND Research has shown that bullying has serious health consequences, and sexual minority-oriented youth are disproportionately affected. Sexual minority-oriented youth include lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, or questioning (LGBTQ) individuals. This study examined the bullying experiences of sexual minority-oriented youth in a predominantly rural area of a Midwestern state. The purpose of this study was to have bullied youth describe their experiences and to present their perspectives. METHODS Using critical qualitative inquiry, 16 in-depth interviews were conducted in-person or online with youth, ages 15-20, who self-identified as having been bullied based on their perceived minority sexual orientation status. RESULTS The role of supportive school personnel was found to be meaningful, and supportive school personnel were mentioned as assisting with the coping and survival among this group of bullied sexual minority youth. CONCLUSIONS Supportive school personnel are crucial to the coping and survival of these youth. All school personnel need to be aware of the anti-bullying policies in their school corporations. They may then work to strengthen and enforce their policies for the protection of bullied youth.

CSCW and theSharing Economy: The Future of Platforms as Sites of Work Collaboration and Trust

Networked platforms for peer-to-peer exchange and on-demand labor, along with the practices that they foster, are attracting increasing attention from CSCW scholars. This workshop seeks to bring the emerging community together to explore how the new domain of “sharing economy” research could help shift forward broader conceptual and theoretical efforts within CSCW, and how, on the other hand, we might utilize prior work more effectively to inform our research agenda and efforts in this emerging sub-area of the field. In particular, the workshop focuses on the future of platforms as sites of work, collaboration and trust. The workshop approaches sharing and the “sharing economy” phenomenon inclusively, adopting a “big tent” approach to invite broad participation. The one-day event will consist of diverse activities, with an emphasis on in-depth conversations, community building, and support for establishing new collaborations.

Putting Social Media in Its Place: A Curatorial Theory for Media’s Noisy Social Worlds:

The quest to make sense of media’s impact—what it does to us—dominates communication theories and popular discourse about media. But the impulse to collar, cultivate, domesticate, or measure the impact of media on individuals and society can have pernicious effects, too. This essay calls for a set of new analytical models to account for media as messy instantiations of social interaction transforming before our very eyes. We need to shift from a media effects paradigm that narrowly focuses on the brightest signals of social media use and turn to what I will call here a curatorial theory of social media. This approach, inspired by research from several founding editors of Social Media + Society, focuses on media’s cultural work and myriad manifestations—from its technologies to the discourses that flow through and from them. Let us attend to the more elusive, noisy cultural and social forces that bring some aspects of media sharply into focus while obscuring others. And, above all, let us pay attention to the curatorial reworking of media that happens in particular places—nations, towns, bodies.

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.

Introduction to the Critical and Ethical Studies of Digital and Social Media Minitrack

This minitrack addresses the cultural and political impact of digital and social media (DSM) technologies. DSM radically alter how we conceptualize the production, circulation, and consumption of information, and transform how we work, live, and play together in communities. However, users of DSM are increasingly expressing unease, and sometimes outrage, at the social and political terms they find they must accept in embracing DSM as the primary mechanisms for sharing their work and participating with others. Session 1 examines the opportunities and tensions that arise as DSM increasingly mediate public, creative, and social endeavors. Session 2 addresses the ethical challenges of conducting research on DSM. Session 2 closes with a discussion with all the authors and the audience to bridge the two sessions.

Culture Digitally: Digital In/Justice

Culture Digitally is a collective of scholars, gathered by Tarleton Gillespie (Cornell University) and Hector Postigo (Temple University). With the generous funding of the National Science Foundation, the group supports scholarly inquiry into new media and cultural production through numerous projects, collaborations, a scholarly blog, and annual workshops. For more information on projects and researchers affiliated with Culture Digitally, visit culture digitally.org or follow @CultureDig). On occasion, we invite two or more of our participants to engage in an intellectual back-and-forth, on a theoretical point of interest that emerges from discussions at our meetings, around blog posts, or based on evident, shared interests. In these dialogues, they are encouraged to grapple with theoretical questions, but to do so quite a bit faster than the glacial pace of publishing typically allows. We imagine them as the digital equivalent of the scholarly exchange of letters between pre-eminent scientists. The thinking is meant to be raw and provocative, a chance for the dialogue participants to prod each other beyond their own certainties.