This project is directly concerned with issues of scale in social-computational systems. How can we exploit the power of contemporary networks to bring people together to act and operate at scale? In particular, can we draw lessons from sociological investigations of social movements to turn current interests in social media and social networking into larger-scale actions? In his book on “smart mobs,” Rheingold (2002) documents the role of mobile technologies as coordinative tools in large-scale social action; although in most of the cases he documents, technology is used to support real-time coordination of existing interesting groups. Our question is, can social media help to engender those social interest groups and social movements on a large scale over time?

We are performing a a mixed-method investigation of social-computational systems, combining:

• The deployment and iterative refinement of a prototype technology for personal reflection in environmental sustainability, designed along lines suggested by research in social movements and media discourse;
• Quantitative assessment of the growth and development of participation in the communities linked by this system and relations to the structural properties of social networks and temporal aspects of information flow;
• Qualitative examination of the processes of identification with and enrollment into a social movement through the sharing of participation and resources for situating oneself within.

team : //

Paul Dourish, Melissa Mazmanian, Ellie Harmon, Jed Brubaker

The mass adoption of social network sites includes, as a natural consequence, the growing presence of profiles representing individuals who are no longer alive. However, the death of a user does not result in the elimination of his or her account nor the profile’s place inside a network of digital peers. Indeed, the fact that friends use a user’s profile page, post mortem, to say last goodbyes, share memories, and coordinate funereal arrangements is well known, if not frequently discussed.  Death plays an increasingly significant role, then, in the experience of social networking. More broadly, the entwining of online and offline experience highlights the importance of thinking about digital representations as things that might well survive their owners or referents.

Focusing on death highlights three important themes for social networks and the representation of identity for their users:

Embodiment concerns the way that data objects and digital representations “stand for” human bodies. It encapsulates issues of access, issues of ownership, issues of management, issues of presence, issues of personhood, and issues of participatory status, both at the technical level and at the social.

Representation invokes the traditional considerations of online identity, the presentation of self, and the crafting of acceptable personas as well as consideration of the ways in which records are created with specific purposes and representations in mind. Representation relates to embodiment in that it speaks to the relationship that holds between the data object and the human body, but it incorporates too the active, purposive, strategic practices of re-present-ing, that is, of making something present again, with particular ends in mind.

Temporality concerns the notion of “lifecycles” as it has been applied in system development—the circumstances under which digital systems come into being, are put to use, and are taken out of service. The life of a user and the life of that user’s data are frequently not the same, an issue particularly acute when considering the continuation of dead user profiles in SNS.

team : //

Jed Brubaker, Janet Vertesi, Gillian Hayes, Paul Dourish

publish : //

Brubaker, J. R. & Vertesi, J. (2010). Death and the Social Network. To be presented at the CHI 2010 Workshop on HCI at the End of Life: Understanding Death, Dying, and the Digital, Atlanta, GA, USA. [pdf]

Founded in 2004, PatientsLikeMe currently provides fourteen different “disease communities” in which approximately 47,000 patients interact using social networking tools akin to those seen on Facebook and health management tools similar to those found in personal health record systems such as Google Health.

This project investigates PatientsLikeMe relative to two important topics in the medical informatics and CSCW communities:

1. patient-centered care, in which patients and clinicians are a collaborative team, and
2. the various demands for medical data from both patients and institutional interests

Combining features from both PHR and social network sites (SNS), PLM attempts to address demands for patient-centeredness and involvement through empowering patients in the treatment of their diseases. Interactions are predominantly inter-patient and do not include medical professionals, raising questions about the potential of favoring peer advice over prescribed treatment plans. Additionally, the collection and sale of user data prompts questions related to data ownership, use, and validity.

Adoption of PatientsLikeMe points to the importance of online spaces in which patients can share experiences and receive peer-support consistent with their treatment plans. Investigating the ways in which PLM captures, stores, and presents health information inside of a social network context provides important implications for the design of collaborative patient systems such as PHRs and other online health communities.

team : //

Jed Brubaker, Caitie Lustig, Gillian Hayes

publish : //

Brubaker, J. R., Lustig, C., & Hayes, G. R. (2010). PatientsLikeMe: Empowerment and Representation in a Patient-Centered Social Network. Presented at the CSCW 2010 Workshop on CSCW Research in Healthcare: Past, Present, and Future, Savannah, GA, USA. [pdf]

What happens to an identity when it is stored inside a database?

Our online identities are collaborations between user behavior and technology. Increasingly, computers speak on our behalf, representing our identities in configurations that are shaped by the technological systems through which they are communicated.

Given the rise of technologies that utilize identity, this project examines the role of persistence by considering:

1. the ways in which users and technology collaborate in the creation of digital identities,
2. the ways in which technology structures and stores these identities, and
3. the social behaviors these identities enable.

publish : //

Brubaker, J. R. (2009). I am an ID: Non/persisting our sociotechnical digital identities. M.A. thesis, Georgetown University, Washington D.C.

For the last two year, I have collected the anonymous messages containing “single-use identities” on craigslist Missed Connections. During this time, I have worked on a number of themes related to subjectivity and intertextual production of the self, including:

1. authorship
2. regulation
3. censorship

Publications : //

Brubaker, J. R. (2009). I judged you at Starbucks: Confession and regulation of contextual selves on craigslist Missed Connections. In F. Dervin, & Y. Abbas (Eds.), Digital Technologies of the Self. Cambridge Scholars.

// This chapter is grounded in a critical theory perspective, and like the rest of the chapters in this collection, engages Foucault’s later work on technologies of the self.

Brubaker, J. R. (2009). I am an ID: Non/persisting our sociotechnical digital identities. Master’s thesis at Georgetown University.

// Chapter 4 specifically pulls from this craigslist data.

Conferences : //

Brubaker, J. R. (2009, March). Authoring the Single-Use Identity: Intertechnical production of the non-persistent subject on craigslist Missed Connections. Paper presented at American Comparative Literature Association 2009 Annual Meeting: “Global Languages, Local Cultures”, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA.

// Seminar on “Intertechnical Bodies” co-chaired with Megan McCabe and Theodora Danylevich.

Brubaker, J. R. (2008, April). I judged you at Starbucks – m4m (craigslist missed connections): digital communication and the regulation of real world contexts. Paper presented at quickanddirty IV, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.

Brubaker, J. R. (2008, March). craigslist Missed Connections: Social Regulation in the Non-Persistent Web. Paper presented at the annual Space, Place and the Imagination conference, University of Rhode Island, Kingston, RI.

Related Work : //

Censoring Identity: Anonymous Censorship of Online Identities in craigslist Missed Connections (December, 2008)

What types of identifying practices result in the highest rate of anonymous censorship? In this project, I examined peer censorship (via craigslist moderation or “flagging” system) to determine what identities are removed from the system. Quantitative analysis found that posts authored by men and/or sexual minorities (m4m and w4w) had the highest rates of censorship. Qualitative analysis suggests that censorship is organized around three variables: familiarity, appropriateness, and legibility.

craigslist :: (theoretical) missed connections (December, 2007)

Who responds to missed connections on craigslist? This piece examines responses that are publicly posted back into craigslist, and theorizes about the disciplinary and regulatory effect that these posts might have.

Craigslist Missed Connections: Anonymously ISO Experience (posted to the gnovis Journal blog)

This is the blog post that started it all. A taste:

“I’ve missed the connection with DC.”

It was a simple statement – concise, to the point and honest. It was posted anonymously on Craigslist Missed Connections, addressed to a city that, for this writer, made anonymity more than possible.

There is no doubt that improving health care in the United States is a major focus for politicians on both sides of the aisle, corporations, and patient advocates.  In many cases, information technology is hoped to be the solution to a variety of problems in health care, such as improving efficiency, patient safety, accountability, billing, and more.

However, development and implementation of large-scale information systems, like electronic medical records (EMR), often require expertise that hospitals and clinics may not have and substantial financial investments that would only be recouped after many years. To successfully implement large-scale health information systems, such as EMRs, we must understand the human processes underlying their implementation, rather than the technological aspects only. Because the evaluation of large-scale health information systems can be incredibly complicated, most evaluations, to date, have been limited in time and scope. Our research team has a unique opportunity to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of the implementation of a large-scale health information technology system in a major research and teaching medical center

This is focused on:

1. understanding the human-centered and organizational issues of the records transition process;
2. identifying and evaluating user-level facilitators and barriers to EMR adoption and acceptance; and
3. identifying and evaluating the organizational factors in adoption and acceptance of EMR.

Team : //

Jed Brubaker, Leslie Liu, Sunyoung Park, Chris Combs, Gillian Hayes, Karen Cheng (CDU), Sheba George (CDU), Gene Spiritus (UCI MC), Sherrie Kaplan (UCI Public Health)