Sarita Yardi

Dynamic Debates: An Analysis of Group Polarization Over Time on Twitter

The principle of homophily says that people associate with other groups of people who are mostly like themselves. Many online communities are structured around groups of socially similar individuals. On Twitter, however, people are exposed to multiple, diverse points of view through the public timeline. The authors captured 30,000 tweets about the shooting of George Tiller, a late-term abortion doctor, and the subsequent conversations among pro-life and pro-choice advocates. They found that replies between like-minded individuals strengthen group identity, whereas replies between different-minded individuals reinforce in-group and out-group affiliation. Their results show that people are exposed to broader viewpoints than they were before but are limited in their ability to engage in meaningful discussion. They conclude with implications for different kinds of social participation on Twitter more generally.

Structural Predictors of Tie Formation in Twitter: Transitivity and Mutuality

New ties are often formed between people who already have friends in common. Though the social sciences have addressed the effects of existing structural patterns on the formation of new ties, less attention has been given to ties in directed networks. Drawing from the microblogging service Twitter, we conducted a web-based experiment in which subjects were asked to rate their interest in forming ties to other people, blind to existing network connections between them. We show that two structural characteristics, transitivity and mutuality, are significant predictors of the desire to form new ties. Our findings shed light on tie formation, especially in online networks.

Blogging at work and the corporate attention economy

The attention economy motivates participation in peer-produced sites on the Web like YouTube and Wikipedia. However, this economy appears to break down at work. We studied a large internal corporate blogging community using log files and interviews and found that employees expected to receive attention when they contributed to blogs, but these expectations often went unmet. Like in the external blogosphere, a few people received most of the attention, and many people received little or none. Employees expressed frustration if they invested time and received little or no perceived return on investment. While many corporations are looking to adopt Web-based communication tools like blogs, wikis, and forums, these efforts will fail unless employees are motivated to participate and contribute content. We identify where the attention economy breaks down in a corporate blog community and suggest mechanisms for improvement.

What is computing?: bridging the gap between teenagers' perceptions and graduate students' experiences

Studies show that teenagers perceive computing to be boring, antisocial, and irrelevant to their lives. We interviewed 13 teenagers from local Atlanta schools and observed over 40 teenagers in after-school technology programs to learn more about their perceptions of computing. We then interviewed 22 graduate students in the Human-Centered Computing and Human-Computer Interaction programs at Georgia Tech in order to learn about the factors that motivated them to pursue degrees in computing. We found that teenagers perceived computing to be boring, solitary, and lacking real-world context, yet graduate students described their research as exciting, social, and having a direct and meaningful impact on the world around them. Our results suggest that there is an opportunity to increase interest in computing among teenagers by bridging the gap between their perceptions of computing and the actual opportunities that are offered in computing disciplines. In this paper, we first describe our interview results. We then discuss our findings and propose a design-based curriculum to teach teenagers core computing principles. The goal of this curriculum is to prepare and motivate them for careers in todays expanding, Internet-based, global economy. We suggest that by portraying computing as an innovative, creative, and challenging field with authentic, real-world applications, we may be able to motivate teenagers to become more excited to pursue careers in computing.

Income, race, and class: exploring socioeconomic differences in family technology use

Minorities are the fastest growing demographic in the U.S. and the poverty level in the U.S. is the highest it has been in 50 years. We interviewed middle to upper class, suburban, white American parents and low-income, urban, African-American parents to understand how each group incorporates technology into their lives. Participants had teens in their homes and devices like computers and cell phones played a powerful and preeminent role in family life. Our results show that socioeconomic differences both reflect and reinforce technology use at home. Specifically, low socioeconomic status families share devices more often and low socioeconomic status teens have more responsibility and independence in their technology use. We argue that that as low socioeconomic status families become the majority demographic, the CHI community needs to better understand how to design for these groups.

An HCI Approach to Computing in the Real World

We describe the implementation of a six-week course to teach Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) to high school students. Our goal was to explore the potential of HCI in motivating students to pursue future studies in related computing fields. Participants in our course learned to make connections between the types of technology they use in their daily lives and the design processes that went into creating these technologies. We suggest that by portraying computing through the lens of HCI, as an innovative, creative, and challenging field with authentic, real-world applications, we may be able to motivate students to become more interested in computing.

The effects of life disruptions on home technology routines

Conflict and disruption are a part of everyday life, yet research in the home largely examines consensus and rituals. In this paper, we use Holmes and Rahes categorization of major life events in order to investigate disruption within the home. We examine posts contributed to an online technology support board and show how life disruptions fundamentally impact technology practices and routines. We conclude that examining technology in the context of life disruption is a worthwhile area for further work.

Research ethics in the facebook era: privacy, anonymity, and oversight

Ethical standards for human subjects research have not kept up with new research paradigms. Several research areas are particularly problematic for the CHI community. Online social research is testing the boundaries of public observation, third-party disclosure, and anonymization methods. Furthermore, there are differences in norms about what is and is not ethical among various research disciplines studying the Web. This SIG brings together members of the CHI community who are interested in research ethics for studying the Web. We invite seasoned veterans from industry and academia, educators, and newcomers to the field to share their experiences and advice, ask questions, and to form an interest group that can help shape university and corporate best practices for online research.

Instant messaging bots: accountability and peripheral participation for textual user interfaces

Over the last several years, studies of instant messaging have observed its increasing role in the workplace[1] and in social situations[2]. We propose that modifying applications to interact with users over Instant Messaging (as IM bots) extends the collaborative benefits of IM into new areas. As IM Bots participating in group chatrooms, applications that had previously been restricted to a single user command line are able to engage in many to many interactions between users and applications. Current command line oriented user interfaces can be made into collaborative interfaces that exhibit (at a basic level) the ethnomethodological property of accountability as well as supporting legitimate peripheral participation.

VERN: facilitating democratic group decision making online

VERN is an online collaborative tool that coordinates and distributes the process of finding optimal meeting times across the members of a group. The system combines the underlying democratic process inherent in email chain conversations with a remapping of the voting process to a calendar-based graphical user interface. As an alternative to existing forms of constrained democracy in which members vote from a previously defined set of options, we offer VERN as a case study for the potential of using a visual interface to enable all group members to contribute equally without constraints to the group decision making process.