Sarita Yardi Schoenebeck

Sharing the small moments: ephemeral social interaction on Snapchat

ABSTRACT Ephemeral social media, platforms that display shared content for a limited period of time, have become a prominent component of the social ecosystem. We draw on experience sampling data collected over two weeks (Study 1; N = 154) and in-depth interview data from a subsample of participants (Study 2; N = 28) to understand college students’ social and emotional experiences on Snapchat, a popular ephemeral mobile platform. Our quantitative data demonstrated that Snapchat interactions were perceived as more enjoyable – and associated with more positive mood – than other communication technologies. However, Snapchat interactions were also associated with lower social support than other channels. Our qualitative data highlighted aspects of Snapchat use that may facilitate positive affect (but not social support), including sharing mundane experiences with close ties and reduced self-presentational concerns. In addition, users compared Snapchat to face-to-face interaction and reported attending to Snapchat content more closely than archived content, which may contribute to increased emotional rewards. Overall, participants did not see the application as a platform for sharing or viewing photos; rather, Snapchat was viewed as a lightweight channel for sharing spontaneous experiences with trusted ties. Together, these studies contribute to our evolving understanding of ephemeral social media and their role in social relationships.

Facebook is a luxury: an exploratory study of social media use in rural Kenya

Facebook use is pervasive in developed countries where computers, smartphones, high-bandwidth Internet, and electricity are ubiquitous. In this paper, we examine Facebook use in a country where social media participation is growing, but less developed technological infrastructures and uneven access to technology limit use. We conducted observations and 24 interviews at Internet cafés in rural Kenya. Our findings reveal how costs associated with using the Internet, limited access to computers and smartphones and unreliable electricity hinder online participation. We draw on these results to discuss the critical role of constraints in understanding social media use, to raise questions about broadening online participation and to highlight ethical issues researchers must consider when studying Facebook use in developing regions.

Managing Children's Online Identities: How Parents Decide what to Disclose about their Children Online

While extensive research has investigated the risks of children sharing their personal information online, little work has investigated the implications of parents sharing personal information about their children online. Drawing on 102 interviews with parents in the U.S., we investigate how parents decide what to disclose about their children on social network sites (SNSs). We find that mothers take on the responsibility of sharing content about their children more than fathers do. Fathers are more restrictive about sharing to broad and professional audiences and are concerned about sharing content that could be perceived as sexually suggestive. Both mothers and fathers work to leverage affordances of SNSs to limit oversharing. Building on prior work, we explore parental disclosure management, which describes how parents decide what to share about their children online. We also describe an emerging third shift of work that highlights the additional work parents take on to manage childrens identities online. We conclude with theoretical and practical implications for designing SNSs to better support family life online.

Networked Empowerment on Facebook Groups for Parents of Children with Special Needs

Theories of empowerment explain how people gain personal and political control to take action to improve their lives. However, empowerment theories were developed prior to the Internet and fail to account for the speed and scale that people can find one another online. One domain where empowerment is critical is caring for children with special needs, in which parents are required to navigate a complex maze of services and processes to access care for their child. We conducted 43 interviews with parents of children with special needs to investigate whether using social media sites helps them to perform this caregiving work. Critically, parents are able to do this through almost real-time access to other parents on Facebook. This work introduces the concept of networked empowerment, that describes how parents find other parents, access resources, and explore new ways for promoting health advocacy among caregivers at a local and national level. We conclude with design implications for facilitating faster and better access to information and support for caregivers.

Community Commerce: Facilitating Trust in Mom-to-Mom Sale Groups on Facebook

Consumers are turning to Facebook Groups to buy and sell with strangers in their local communities. This trend is counter-intuitive given Facebooks lack of conventional e-commerce features, such as sophisticated search engines and reputation systems. We interviewed 18 members of two Mom-to-Mom Facebook sale groups. Despite a lack of commerce tools, members perceived sale groups as an easy-to-use way to quickly and conveniently buy and sell. Most important to members was that the groups felt safe and trustworthy. Drawing on these insights, we contribute a novel framing, community commerce, which explains the trust mechanisms that enable transactions between strangers in some groups. Community commerce fosters trust through (a) exclusive membership to a closed group, (b) regulation and sanctioning of behavior at the admin, member, and group level, and (c) a shared group identity or perceived similarity (though, surprisingly, not through social bonding). We discuss how community commerce affords unique and sometimes superior trust assurances and propose design implications for platforms hoping to foster trust between members who buy, sell, or share amongst themselves.

The Crafting of DIY Fatherhood

Prior research shows that the social construction of gender evolves in relation to specific economic and social processes. This paper examines how the practice of DIY (do-it-yourself) making has become a productive frame for a collective of fathers in the U.S. to express masculinity, amidst increasingly precarious economics and shifting norms of gender and labor in the home. Drawing from a qualitative interview study with fathers (n=22) and visual analysis of DIY father blogs (n=29), we examine how DIY fatherhood was produced across the material and discursive practices of blogging. This paper contributes an empirical account of a contemporary phenomenon: the construction and performance of DIY practice as a category of fatherhood identity and domestic masculinity. Further, the paper describes how fathers engage in entrepreneurial thinking as a form of domestic male labor.

Facebook in context(s): Measuring emotional responses across time and space:

This article advances a contextual approach to understanding the emotional and social outcomes of Facebook use. In doing so, we address the ambiguity of previously reported relationships between Facebook use and well-being. We test temporal (shorter vs longer time spans) and spatial (at home vs away from home) dimensions of Facebook activity using an innovative approach. By triggering smartphone surveys in response to users’ naturalistic Facebook posting, we captured the immediate context of both mobile and desktop activities during daily life. Findings indicated positive—yet fleeting—emotional experiences up to 10 minutes after active posting and higher arousal for 30 minutes following posting at home. Nonetheless, Facebook activities predicted no changes in aggregate mood over 2 weeks, despite showing positive relationships to bridging social capital during the same period. Our results call attention to fleeting experiences (vs enduring consequences) and encourage future research to specify temporal and spatial boundaries.

Supporting reflection through play: field testing the home trivia system

In this work, we designed and field-tested a system called Home Trivia to explore how we can use activity traces captured in the home to allow household members to reflect on how they use technology, which has become an issue of increasing concern among families that have seen their home lives intertwined with Internet-enabled devices. Home Trivia captures traces of using technology at home and then shows those traces to family members as content of a puzzle game they can play together. The results of testing Home Trivia in the field show that the design of the game allows engagement and reflection to reinforce each other. Moreover, our work enriches and further develops the idea of using ambiguity as a resource for design with the insight that allowing users to reduce ambiguity through recollecting past events and communicating with others can help trigger reflection.

If we build it, will they come? Designing a community-based online site for parents

Parents are busy people. Designing social software for parents requires understanding the particular needs and constraints governing their lives. In this paper, we present a study of a community-based site called ParentNet. Based on prior formative work, ParentNet was designed to support parents in keeping up with their children’s social media use. With 10 months of deployment and 133 participants, ParentNet was successful in some regards and unsuccessful in others. Drawing from log data and focus groups, we arrive at three findings. First, parents may not easily switch from existing school communication platforms that they are already familiar with. Second, school support was critical for promoting adoption. Third, parents felt like they had too much technology in their lives and were not looking for more platforms to keep up with. We conclude with lessons for designing for parents and a discussion of technology overuse as a design constraint.

Parents? and Children?s Preferences about Parents Sharing about Children on Social Media

Prior research shows that parents receive a number of benefits through sharing about their children online, but little is known about children?s perspectives about parent sharing. We conducted a survey with 331 parent-child pairs to examine parents? and children?s preferences about what parents share about their children on social media. We find that parents and children are in agreement in their perception of how often and how much information parents share about their children on social media. However, there is disagreement about the permission-seeking process: children believe their parents should ask permission more than parents think they should, and parents believe they should ask for permission more often than they actually do, especially younger parents. We describe two categories of content that children are okay, or not okay, with their parents sharing about them. We offer design directions for managing parent sharing.