Computer-mediated Communication

Related Faculty

Morgan Ames

Assistant Professor of Practice
Alumni (MIMS 2006)

Science and technology studies; computer-supported cooperative work and social computing; education; anthropology; youth technocultures; ideology and inequity; critical data science

Jenna Burrell

Adjunct Professor

how systematically excluded communities adapt technology, algorithmic fairness and transparency, human control over algorithms, ethnography

Coye Cheshire

Professor

Trust, social exchange, social psychology, and information exchange

Recent Publications

Examining children’s design processes, perspective-taking, and collaboration when using VR head-mounted displays

Sep 1, 2022

AI generated image with fragments of US flags floating amidst blurry tan and blue blocks. An outline of what appears to be a child in a dress standing at a podium.

Blank Slate: Freedom, Connection, and Accountability in U.S. Virtual Schools

Dec 17, 2021

For a small portion of U.S. schoolchildren and their teachers, going to school online was the norm even before the COVID-19 pandemic forced a mass shift to remote learning.

Sensemaking and the Chemtrail Conspiracy on the Internet: Insights from Believers and Ex-believers

Oct 13, 2021

Sensor-Mediated Empathy: A Mixed Methods Investigation of Social Biosensing

Nov 12, 2020

In Search of a “Fair Explanation”: Helping Young People to Consider the Possibilities, Limitations, and Risks of Computer- and Data-Mediated Systems

Dec 1, 2019

Sensing is Believing: What People Think Biosensors Can Reveal About Thoughts and Feelings

Jun 13, 2019

Mind-Reading and Telepathy for Beginners and Intermediates: What People Think Machines Can Know About the Mind, and Why Their Beliefs Matter

Dec 15, 2018

What can machines know about the mind? This dissertation seeks to understand people’s beliefs about this question: how these beliefs affect and arise from interactions with digital sensors, from prior beliefs about the mind and the body; and how these beliefs may shape the design of technical systems in the future.

The purpose of this dissertation is twofold. First, it surfaces that the boundary between sensing bodies and sensing minds is unstable, deeply entangled with social context and beliefs about the body and mind. Second, it proposes the porousness of this boundary as a site for studying the role that biosensing devices will play in near future. As biosensors creep into smart watches, bands, and ingestibles, their ability to divine not just what these bodies do, but what they think and feel, presents an under-explored avenue for understanding and imagining how thesetechnologies will come to matter in the course of life.

robots.txt: An Ethnographic Investigation of Automated Software Agents in User-Generated Content Platforms

Dec 15, 2015

Invisible Users: Youth in the Internet Cafes of Urban Ghana.

May 1, 2012

Behaviors, Adverse Events and Dispositions: An Empirical Study of Online Discretion and Information Control

Aug 1, 2010