This week, CITAP had its annual retreat at the Umstead Hotel in Cary, NC!
One big question asked at the retreat: what problems do we see today at the intersection of technology and public life that we can address in our work? We’re ready to delve into answering this question and more in the year ahead.
We also got to welcome our future/incoming postdoctoral fellows, Nanditha Narayanamoorthy, Yvonne Eadon, and Yiping Xia! We’ll share more about them as their start dates approach, but we’re excited to have them as a critical part of CITAP’s team and to be able to learn from their areas of expertise.
Publications and appearances
As we’re all watching the Supreme Court decision in Dobbs v. Jackson, Meredith Pruden previewed her upcoming paper on the topic of abortion and white nationalist views. “While white nationalists (WN) condemn abortion among white women as a murderous sin, at times they encourage the practice among nonwhites to solve demographic threats to white dominance.” We will provide the link to the paper when it goes live.
And in previous work that takes on new relevance today: “None of it is enough. Citizen-consumers are ill-equipped for the electoral politics we have. That politics is bigger than our preferences. Big donors, both corporate and supranational, have more say than the majority.” Anne Helen Peterson highlighted a recent New York Times piece by Tressie McMillan Cottom and how “politics is bigger than our preferences.”
Also: “Fears of how law enforcement and anti-abortion vigilantes could use such data to hunt down those who run afoul of new laws have illuminated a terrifying rabbit hole of privacy abuse.” Zeynep Tufekci discussed how companies sell data that could be used to target women seeking abortion care.
“People think harassment is justified because there's a moral norm that they believe the target has violated and because they're part of a community with a set of moral norms and social values, by attacking somebody else they're shoring up their own sense of self and their own community values." Alice Marwick appeared on Charley Johnson’s Untangled podcast to discuss why harassment happens online, the morally motivated networked harassment (MMNH) model, and more.
“If you think that a strong work ethic can trump all manner of troubles, you might disdain the ‘weak’ people who go to a ‘predatory’ school.” Tressie McMillan Cottom was quoted in a Harper’s Magazine article on the “victim cloud” and scams.
“People often think of Google as this window into the wider world of information, but it’s often programmed to function based on these keywords. A lot of times people will see something on social media and they might question its validity. In this, I think a lot about how search engines are manipulated for political gain and the ways in which they’re connected to propaganda moves.” Francesca Tripodi joined Civic Genius on their podcast to discuss how search engines shape what we know and how we can boost our own media literacy.
“And we find that younger people – particularly social natives – are more likely than older groups to say they find the news hard to follow or understand. In moments of crisis, such as the pandemic or the Ukraine war, we’ve seen some news outlets using explainer and Q&A formats to address these issues. Our data suggest this process needs to go much further.” CITAP affiliate Kirsten Eddy wrote a piece for Nieman Lab looking at the rising generation of news consumers.
“Opacity in the ways that third-party providers operate makes it difficult for students and their families to recognize that their education is being provided by for-profit companies – not a public university. This is an example of what Cottom (2020a) refers to as ‘privatization by obfuscation.’” Tressie McMillan Cottom’s multiple works were cited in a new paper by UC Berkeley students on the private side of public universities and platform capitalism.
“…qualitative work is best suited to understanding complex sociotechnical contexts. I don’t really care that there are ten thousand tweets under a particular hashtag. I want to know why people are participating in that hashtag, what it means to them, how it fits into the rest of their life.” Alice Marwick spoke with Ben Clancy about her investigation of online extremism and the importance of qualitative data in understanding digital communication.
“Teens use the internet to experiment with things. They try on identities, they posture, they perform. And many of those things, when parents take them out of context, may seem problematic – when they’re posting profanity, slang, selfies – but when you actually see what the young person is doing, they’re experimenting with an identity, which is a very typical and healthy part of adolescent development.” Alice Marwick was included in an article discussing when parents should intervene between a teenager and their phone.
Coming soon
August 1: Submissions for the Labor Tech Book and Graduate Student Paper Awards are due.
To those of you who are in the Research Triangle area and are looking to explore new topics, the Night School Bar is offering an amazing set of arts & humanities classes, writing workshops, reading groups, and more this summer.
Rest of Web
danah boyd is looking for a few freelance research assistants for short-term work. Full description here.
We’re currently reading pieces on tech justice and disinformation within Latino online spaces if you’re looking for new and informative reads!