Mike Ananny

Departing glances: A sociotechnical account of ‘leaving’ Grindr

Grindr is a popular location-based social networking application for smartphones, predominantly used by gay men. This study investigates why users leave Grindr. Drawing on interviews with 16 men who stopped using Grindr, this article reports on the varied definitions of leaving, focusing on what people report leaving, how they leave and what they say leaving means to them. We argue that leaving is not a singular moment, but a process involving layered social and technical acts – that understandings of and departures from location-based media are bound up with an individual’s location. Accounts of leaving Grindr destabilize normative definitions of both ‘Grindr’ and ‘leaving’, exposing a set of relational possibilities and spatial arrangements within and around which people move. We conclude with implications for the study of non-use and technological departure.

Toward an Ethics of Algorithms Convening, Observation, Probability, and Timeliness

Part of understanding the meaning and power of algorithms means asking what new demands they might make of ethical frameworks, and how they might be held accountable to ethical standards. I develop a definition of networked information algorithms (NIAs) as assemblages of institutionally situated code, practices, and norms with the power to create, sustain, and signify relationships among people and data through minimally observable, semiautonomous action. Starting from Merrill’s prompt to see ethics as the study of “what we ought to do,” I examine ethical dimensions of contemporary NIAs. Specifically, in an effort to sketch an empirically grounded, pragmatic ethics of algorithms, I trace an algorithmic assemblage’s power to convene constituents, suggest actions based on perceived similarity and probability, and govern the timing and timeframes of ethical action.

Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability:

Models for understanding and holding systems accountable have long rested upon ideals and logics of transparency. Being able to see a system is sometimes equated with being able to know how it works and govern it—a pattern that recurs in recent work about transparency and computational systems. But can “black boxes’ ever be opened, and if so, would that ever be sufficient? In this article, we critically interrogate the ideal of transparency, trace some of its roots in scientific and sociotechnical epistemological cultures, and present 10 limitations to its application. We specifically focus on the inadequacy of transparency for understanding and governing algorithmic systems and sketch an alternative typology of algorithmic accountability grounded in constructive engagements with the limitations of transparency ideals.

A Liminal Press: Situating News App Designers within a Field of Networked News Production

In this project we use interview data from the United States and Europe to map field dynamics within an emerging techno-journalistic space of news app design. We describe this space in terms of institutional theory and field-level studies of news production and report on a series of interviews we conducted with senior news app designers and lead programmers. Part of a larger empirical study on mobile news app design, we focus here on analyzing how designers understand their work in relation to journalism as a profession and process, and how they see themselves as like or unlike others in their field. We conclude with reflections on how these designers are helping to constitute the organizational field of news app design by creating and sustaining boundary infrastructures that constitute an emerging “liminal press.”

Press-Public Collaboration as Infrastructure Tracing News Organizations and Programming Publics in Application Programming Interfaces

Understanding and evaluating systems for open collaboration depends, in part, on appreciating their normative and institutional contexts. In this article, I examine press-public collaboration by tracing how and why news organizations both distance themselves from and depend on networked actors outside the newsroom to achieve professional and organizational goals. I situate contemporary press-public networks within infrastructure scholarship, review their relationship to models of the public sphere, and trace the motivations and assumptions embedded within news organizations’ application programming interfaces, software toolkits that let those outside the newsroom access and repurpose journalistic data.

“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.

Networked News Time

What kind of news time does a public need? The production, circulation, and interpretation of news have always followed timelines and rhythms, but these have largely been seen as artifacts of press sociology, not central aspects of journalism’s public mission linked to the design and deployment of journalism infrastructure. Since different types of news time make possible different kinds of publics, any critique of the press’s material cultures of time-keeping is a critique of the press’s power to convene particular people and issues, at particular times. Motivated by the temporal needs of one type of public (a pragmatic public that ensures a public right to hear), this paper proposes a unit for studying news time (the temporal assemblage), and traces it across four intertwined sites in the contemporary, networked press: labor routines, platform rhythms, computational algorithms, and legal regulations. Beyond this article’s investigation of this public in relation to these dynamics, my aim is to contribute to the emerging “slow journalism” movement by asking: how slow—or fast—do different publics need news to be? And how are networked press paces set?

From Noxious to Public? Tracing Ethical Dynamics of Social Media Platform Conversions

Sometimes, some social media marketplaces turn from noxious to public. Why do such conversions happen, what do they reveal about a platform’s definition of “public,” and when should they happen? Drawing on contemporary examples, this article examines some of the empirical and normative dimensions of platform conversions.