skip to main content
Explore Scholarly Publications and Datasets in the NSF-PAR

Title: Collection Innovation
As people increasingly innovate outside of formal R&D departments, individuals take on the responsibility of attracting, managing, and protecting social, financial, human, and information capital. With internet technology playing a central role in how individuals work together to produce something that they could not produce alone, it is necessary to understand how technologies are shaping the innovation process from start to finish. We bring together human-computer interaction researchers and industry leaders who have worked with people and platforms designed to support collective innovation across diverse domains. We will discuss the current and future research on the role of platforms in collective innovation, including topics in social computing, crowdsourcing, peer production, online communities, gig economy, & online marketplaces.
Authors:
; ; ; ;
Award ID(s):
1717473 1745463 1442840 1422066
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10171240
Journal Name:
CSCW’19 Companion
Page Range or eLocation-ID:
106 to 110
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; ( , Journal of Physics: Complexity)
    Abstract

    Expressing identity socially involves a balance between conformity and innovation. One can adopt existing labels to express belonging to a certain community or introduce new labels to express an individual sense of identity. In such a process of co-creation, the existing identity labels of a community shape one’s sense of identity, while individual expression changes that of a community. Social media has introduced new opportunities to study the expression of collective identity. Here we study the group behavior of individuals defining their identities with hashtag self-labels in their Twitter profiles from mid-2017 through 2019. These timelines of personal self-labeling show behavior incorporating innovation, conservation, and social conformity when defining self. We show that the collective co-labeling of popular concepts in the context of identity, such as #resist and #maga, follow the dynamics of a modified Yule-Simon model balancing novelty and conformity. The dynamics of identity expression resemble the collective tagging processes of folksonomies, indicating a similarity between the collective tagging of external objects and the collective labeling of ourselves. Our work underpins a better understanding of how online environments mediate the evolution of collective identity which plays an increasingly important role in the establishment of community values and identitymore »politics.

    « less
  2. ; ; ; ; ; ( , Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting)
    Introduction Social media has created opportunities for children to gather social support online (Blackwell et al., 2016; Gonzales, 2017; Jackson, Bailey, & Foucault Welles, 2018; Khasawneh, Rogers, Bertrand, Madathil, & Gramopadhye, 2019; Ponathil, Agnisarman, Khasawneh, Narasimha, & Madathil, 2017). However, social media also has the potential to expose children and adolescents to undesirable behaviors. Research showed that social media can be used to harass, discriminate (Fritz & Gonzales, 2018), dox (Wood, Rose, & Thompson, 2018), and socially disenfranchise children (Page, Wisniewski, Knijnenburg, & Namara, 2018). Other research proposes that social media use might be correlated to the significant increase in suicide rates and depressive symptoms among children and adolescents in the past ten years (Mitchell, Wells, Priebe, & Ybarra, 2014). Evidence based research suggests that suicidal and unwanted behaviors can be promulgated through social contagion effects, which model, normalize, and reinforce self-harming behavior (Hilton, 2017). These harmful behaviors and social contagion effects may occur more frequently through repetitive exposure and modelling via social media, especially when such content goes “viral” (Hilton, 2017). One example of viral self-harming behavior that has generated significant media attention is the Blue Whale Challenge (BWC). The hearsay about this challenge is that individuals at allmore »ages are persuaded to participate in self-harm and eventually kill themselves (Mukhra, Baryah, Krishan, & Kanchan, 2017). Research is needed specifically concerning BWC ethical concerns, the effects the game may have on teenagers, and potential governmental interventions. To address this gap in the literature, the current study uses qualitative and content analysis research techniques to illustrate the risk of self-harm and suicide contagion through the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter Posts. The purpose of this study is to analyze the portrayal of BWC on YouTube and Twitter in order to identify the themes that are presented on YouTube and Twitter posts that share and discuss BWC. In addition, we want to explore to what extent are YouTube videos compliant with safe and effective suicide messaging guidelines proposed by the Suicide Prevention Resource Center (SPRC). Method Two social media websites were used to gather the data: 60 videos and 1,112 comments from YouTube and 150 posts from Twitter. The common themes of the YouTube videos, comments on those videos, and the Twitter posts were identified using grounded, thematic content analysis on the collected data (Padgett, 2001). Three codebooks were built, one for each type of data. The data for each site were analyzed, and the common themes were identified. A deductive coding analysis was conducted on the YouTube videos based on the nine SPRC safe and effective messaging guidelines (Suicide Prevention Resource Center, 2006). The analysis explored the number of videos that violated these guidelines and which guidelines were violated the most. The inter-rater reliabilities between the coders ranged from 0.61 – 0.81 based on Cohen’s kappa. Then the coders conducted consensus coding. Results & Findings Three common themes were identified among all the posts in the three social media platforms included in this study. The first theme included posts where social media users were trying to raise awareness and warning parents about this dangerous phenomenon in order to reduce the risk of any potential participation in BWC. This was the most common theme in the videos and posts. Additionally, the posts claimed that there are more than 100 people who have played BWC worldwide and provided detailed description of what each individual did while playing the game. These videos also described the tasks and different names of the game. Only few videos provided recommendations to teenagers who might be playing or thinking of playing the game and fewer videos mentioned that the provided statistics were not confirmed by reliable sources. The second theme included posts of people that either criticized the teenagers who participated in BWC or made fun of them for a couple of reasons: they agreed with the purpose of BWC of “cleaning the society of people with mental issues,” or they misunderstood why teenagers participate in these kind of challenges, such as thinking they mainly participate due to peer pressure or to “show off”. The last theme we identified was that most of these users tend to speak in detail about someone who already participated in BWC. These videos and posts provided information about their demographics and interviews with their parents or acquaintances, who also provide more details about the participant’s personal life. The evaluation of the videos based on the SPRC safe messaging guidelines showed that 37% of the YouTube videos met fewer than 3 of the 9 safe messaging guidelines. Around 50% of them met only 4 to 6 of the guidelines, while the remaining 13% met 7 or more of the guidelines. Discussion This study is the first to systematically investigate the quality, portrayal, and reach of BWC on social media. Based on our findings from the emerging themes and the evaluation of the SPRC safe messaging guidelines we suggest that these videos could contribute to the spread of these deadly challenges (or suicide in general since the game might be a hoax) instead of raising awareness. Our suggestion is parallel with similar studies conducted on the portrait of suicide in traditional media (Fekete & Macsai, 1990; Fekete & Schmidtke, 1995). Most posts on social media romanticized people who have died by following this challenge, and younger vulnerable teens may see the victims as role models, leading them to end their lives in the same way (Fekete & Schmidtke, 1995). The videos presented statistics about the number of suicides believed to be related to this challenge in a way that made suicide seem common (Cialdini, 2003). In addition, the videos presented extensive personal information about the people who have died by suicide while playing the BWC. These videos also provided detailed descriptions of the final task, including pictures of self-harm, material that may encourage vulnerable teens to consider ending their lives and provide them with methods on how to do so (Fekete & Macsai, 1990). On the other hand, these videos both failed to emphasize prevention by highlighting effective treatments for mental health problems and failed to encourage teenagers with mental health problems to seek help and providing information on where to find it. YouTube and Twitter are capable of influencing a large number of teenagers (Khasawneh, Ponathil, Firat Ozkan, & Chalil Madathil, 2018; Pater & Mynatt, 2017). We suggest that it is urgent to monitor social media posts related to BWC and similar self-harm challenges (e.g., the Momo Challenge). Additionally, the SPRC should properly educate social media users, particularly those with more influence (e.g., celebrities) on elements that boost negative contagion effects. While the veracity of these challenges is doubted by some, posting about the challenges in unsafe manners can contribute to contagion regardless of the challlenges’ true nature.« less
  3. ; ( , Scientific Reports)
    Abstract

    Mass communication over social media can drive rapid changes in our sense of collective identity. Hashtags in particular have acted as powerful social coordinators, playing a key role in organizing social movements like the Gezi park protests, Occupy Wall Street,#metoo, and#blacklivesmatter. Here we quantify collective identity from the use of hashtags as self-labels in over 85,000 actively-maintained Twitter user profiles spanning 2017–2019. Collective identities emerge from a graph model of individuals’ overlapping self-labels, producing a hierarchy of graph clusters. Each cluster is bound together and characterized semantically by specific hashtags key to its formation. We define and apply two information-theoretic measures to quantify the strength of identities in the hierarchy. First we measure collective identity coherence to determine how integrated any identity is from local to global scales. Second, we consider the conspicuousness of any identity given its vocabulary versus the global identity map. Our work reveals a rich landscape of online identity emerging from the hierarchical alignment of uncoordinated self-labeling actions.

  4. ; ; ; ( , International Conference on Social Media and Society)
    Recent research on conspiracy theories labels conspiracism as a distinct and deficient epistemic process. However, the tendency to pathologize conspiracism obscures the fact that it is a diverse and dynamic collective sensemaking process, transacted in public on the web. Here, we adopt a narrative framework to introduce a new analytical approach for examining online conspiracism. Narrative plays an important role because it is central to human cognition as well as being domain agnostic, and so can serve as a bridge between conspiracism and other modes of knowledge production. To illustrate the utility of our approach, we use it to analyze conspiracy theories identified in conversations across three different anti-vaccination discussion forums. Our approach enables us to capture more abstract categories without hiding the underlying diversity of the raw data. We find that there are dominant narrative themes across sites, but that there is also a tremendous amount of diversity within these themes. Our initial observations raise the possibility that different communities play different roles in the collective construction of conspiracy theories online. This offers one potential route for understanding not only cross-sectional differentiation, but the longitudinal dynamics of the narrative in future work. In particular, we are interested to examinemore »how activity within the framework of the narrative shifts in response to news events and social media platforms’ nascent efforts to control different types of misinformation. Such analysis will help us to better understand how collectively constructed conspiracy narratives adapt in a shifting media ecosystem.« less
  5. ; ; ; ; ; ( , 2018 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing)
    As people increasingly work different jobs, the responsibility of building long-term career satisfaction and stability increasingly falls more on the workers rather than individual employers. With technologies playing a central role in how people choose and access employment opportunities, it is necessary to understand how online technologies are shaping career development. We bring together leading human-computer interaction researchers, industry members, and community organizers, who have worked with systems and people across the socio-economic spectrum during the career development process. We will discuss research on the role of online technologies in career development, including but not limited to topics in crowd work, social media sites, and freelance work sites.
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email