danah boyd | apophenia

Much to my happiness, the internets are in a frenzy about the “Stop Online Piracy Act” (aka SOPA). Congress is currently in recess, but the House announced a hearing on the potential impact to the Domain Name Service on January 18 and everyone expects the Senate to begin discussing a similar bill “PROTECT IP Act” when they return to DC on January 24. There’s a lot to these bills – and the surrounding furor – and I’m not going to go into it, but I recommend reading the actual bill and Open Congress info, the Wikipedia article, EFF’s blog, and the various links at Stop American Censorship. Tomorrow – January 18th – a bunch of geeks are planning a SOPA Blackout Day to voice their discontent.

I abhor SOPA for the same reasons as other geeks. I’m horrified that Congress has crafted a law that will screw with the architecture of the internet in ways that will undermine free speech. I love Josh Kopstein’s post “Dear Congress, It’s No Longer OK To Not Know How The Internet Works.” And I’m glad that geeks are getting vocal, even if – as Clay Johnson has pointed out – geeks don’t quite get how Congress works. I’m stoked that the White House has asked for a civil conversation around piracy (while also opposing SOPA’s key pieces). And I find it utterly hysterical that Rupert Murdoch has come to geeks’ turf (Twitter) to convey his pro-SOPA opinions, even as Obama steps in to state that he opposes SOPA.

In talking with non-geeks, I can’t help but be fascinated that the debate has somehow been framed in the public eye as “pro-piracy” vs. “anti-piracy.” Needless to say, that’s the frame that Murdoch is advocating, even as geeks are pushing for the “pro-internet” vs. “pro-censorship” frame. What’s especially intriguing to me is that the piracy conversation is getting convoluted even among politicos, revealing the ways in which piracy gets flattened to one concept. Teasing this issue out is especially important when we’re talking about regulations that are meant to help with piracy. There are many different aspects of piracy, but for simplicity sake, I want to focus on two aspects that feed into bills like SOPA and PROTECT IP: piracy as a competitive issue vs. piracy as a cultural issue. This can often be split as software piracy vs. media piracy, but not always.

There are actually reasons to not be in favor of all forms of piracy, even if you’re an unrepentant media pirate. Imagine that you are an appliance manufacturer in the United States. You make things like toasters. You are required to abide by American laws. You must pay your employees at least a minimum wage; you must follow American safety regulations. All of this raises the overhead of your production process. In addition, you must also do things like purchase your software legally. Your designers use some CAD software, which they pay for. Your accountants use accounting software, which they pay for. Sure, you’ve cut some costs by using “free” software but, by and large, you pay a decent amount of money to software companies to use the systems that they built.

You really want to get your toasters into Wal-Mart, but time and time again, you find yourself undercut by competitors in foreign countries where the safety laws are more lax, the minimum wage laws are nonexistent, and where companies aren’t punished for stealing software. Are you grouchy? Of course you are. Needless to say, you see this as an unfair competition issue. There aren’t legal ways of bending the market to create fair competition. You can’t innovate your way out of this dilemma and so you want Congress to step in and make sure that you can compete fairly.

Combating software piracy in the supply chain is a reasonable request and part of what makes bills like PROTECT IP messy is that there’s a kernel of this issue in these bills. Bills like this are also meant to go after counterfeit products. Most folks really want to know what’s in baby formula or what’s in the medicines they purchase. Unfortunately, though, these aspects of piracy quickly gets muddled with cultural facets of piracy, particularly once the media industries have gotten involved.

Since the rise of Napster, the media industry has been in a furor over media piracy. Not only do they get pissed when people rip and distribute media content on the internet, they throw a fit whenever teenagers make their own music videos based on their favorite song. Even though every child in America is asked to engage in remix in schools for educational purposes (“Write a 5-paragraph essay as though you were dropped into Lord of the Flies”), doing so for fun and sharing your output on the internet has been deemed criminal. Media piracy is messy, because access to content is access to social status and power in a networked era. Some people are simply “stealing” but others are actually just trying to participate in culture. It’s complicated. (See: “Access to Knowledge in the Age of Intellectual Property” and “Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates” to go deeper.)

Most in the media industry refuse to talk about media piracy beyond the economic components. But the weird thing about media piracy is that Apple highlighted that the media industry could actually innovate their way around this problem. Sure, it doesn’t force everyone to pay for consuming content, but when was that ever the case? When I was in high school, I went over to friends’ houses and watched their TV and movies without paying for them. Even though the media industry is making buckets of money – and even though people have been shown to be willing to pay for content online when it’s easy – the media industry is more interested in creating burdensome regulations than in developing innovative ways for consumers to get access to content. (Yo HBO! Why the hell can’t I access your content legally online if I don’t subscribe to cable!?!?) I guess I shouldn’t be surprised… It’s cheaper to lawyer up than hire geeks these days.

Of course, it’s not like there aren’t a bazillion laws on the books to curb media piracy. What frustrates the media industry is that they don’t have jurisdiction over foreign countries and foreign web servers. Bills like SOPA aren’t really meant to curb piracy; they’re meant to limit Americans’ access to information flows in foreign countries by censoring what kinds of information can flow across American companies’ servers. Eeek. I can’t help but think back to a point that Larry Lessig makes in “Republic, Lost” where he points out that there are more laws to curb media piracy on the books than there are to curb pollution. Le sigh.

Don’t get me wrong: there are definitely piracy practices out there that I’d like to see regulators help curb. For example, I’m actually quite in favor of making sure that companies can’t engage in unfair competition. I agree with the White House that certain kinds of piracy practices undermine American jobs. But I’m not in favor of using strong arm tactics to go after individuals’ cultural practices. Nor am I interested in seeing “solutions” that focus on turning America into more of a bubble. Shame on media companies for trying to silence and censor information flows in their efforts to strong arm consumers. This isn’t good for consumers and it’s certainly not good for citizens.

As we go deeper into an information age, I think that we need to have serious conversations about what is colloquially termed piracy. We need to distinguish media piracy from software piracy because they’re not the same thing. We need to seriously interrogate fairness and equality, creative production and cultural engagement. And we need to seriously take into consideration why people do what they do. I strongly believe that when people work en masse to route around a system, the system is most likely the thing that needs the fixing, not the people.

These issues are challenging and they require people to untangle a wide variety of different conflicting and interwoven practices. Unfortunately, challenging cultural conversations are really hard to have when the government chooses to fast track faulty legislation on the behalf of one industry and to the detriment of another. SOPA has turned into a gnarly battle between old and new media, but the implications of this battle extend far beyond the corporate actors. My hope is that SOPA goes away immediately. But I also hope that we can begin the harder work of actually interrogating how different aspects of piracy are affecting society, business, and cultural practices.

In the meantime, I ask you to stand with me to oppose SOPA. Learn what’s happening and voice your opinion. Legislative issues like this affect all of us.

::bounce:: I am *ecstatic* to announce that Nancy Baym, Kate Crawford, and Mary L. Gray are all joining Microsoft Research New England in Cambridge, MA. See Jennifer Chayes’ announcement. ::bounce::

Three years ago (this week), I joined Microsoft Research to help integrate social scientists and computer scientists. I have known about and admired MSR since my undergraduate days when I was studying computer science. From the perspective of a researcher, it seemed like heaven-on-earth. As I slowly shifted disciplines, I was saddened to think that I had moved myself away from MSR so I was utterly delighted when, in 2008, I learned that Jennifer Chayes wanted to start a lab that brought computer scientists and social scientists together in new ways. I was even more ecstatic when she invited me to help with this endeavor. Over the last three years, I’ve invited numerous scholars to come to MSR as visitors, postdocs, and interns. In particular, I’ve focused on bringing in social scientists from fields that haven’t commonly been in conversation with industrial researchers. This loose network of folks have come to be known as the “Social Media Collective.” Much to my absolute pleasure, Nancy, Kate, and Mary are going to come to MSR to join the Collective.

The Social Media Collective focuses on research related to socio-technical issues, primarily from a social scientific perspective. Most of us use qualitative research methods, but there are also quantitative, computational, and experimental folks among us. We primarily look at topics related to the rise of social media, but we do so from a variety of different disciplinary lenses. Our work tends to have implications for a wide array of audiences: scholarly, technical, policy, business, and public. Nancy, Kate, and Mary are three of the leading scholars in this arena and I’m ecstatic that they’ll be coming to MSR to advance this line of inquiry.

• Nancy Baym is a communication scholar, currently at University of Kansas. She helped define the field of internet studies with her work on personal connections, fandom, and online communities.
• Kate Crawford is a media studies scholar, currently at the University of New South Wales. She weaves together a diverse set of interests to examine mobile media, intimacy, and listening, with an eye towards public policy implications.
• Mary L. Gray is an anthropologist, currently at Indiana University. Her work on rural queer youth has helped complicate our understandings of marginalized populations’ use of technology.

Each of these phenomenal scholars has a long history of helping us understand the relationship between technology and society and I’m sooo soooo soooo excited that they’re coming to MSR. As all of you who know me know, I love MSR. I also love Nancy, Kate, and Mary. So the combination makes me feel like a kid in a candy store.

MSR is a truly special place: an interdisciplinary home base for folks who are interested in studying issues related to technology. I still remember the day that Nancy, Kate, and Mary came back from talking to a group of computer scientists and mathematicians about the very meaning of “communication.” Needless to say, social scientists don’t use that term in the same way as mathematicians. But instead of being horrified, these three were glowing because they ended up diving deep into the kind of intense conversations that only scholars relish. That’s when I knew that MSR was the place for them.

Microsoft Research is so lucky that Nancy, Kate, and Mary are coming to MSR. And I’m super lucky that I’m going to have three more awesome colleagues. ::bounce::

I love talking with smart journalists. When they’re good at what they do, journalists can really prompt me to think deeply (and differently) about issues. Nothing makes me happier than coming out of a discussion with a journalist with my brain on fire. My conversation with Bob Safian from Fast Company did precisely that. I left that chat high as a kite with all my synapses buzzing. The funny thing? I didn’t know why he was asking all of those interesting questions. Then, a few weeks later, I was asked to do a photoshoot. And that too ended up being way way way too much fun. Totally silly. The groomer even got me to wear heels for the first time in 15 years. (When I was 18, I wore heels as part of a beauty pageant – yes, I entered a beauty pageant on a dare – and I fell off the stage. I haven’t worn heels since.)

Anyhow, that fabulous conversation and playful photoshoot ended up turning into a cover story for Fast Company: “The Secrets of Generation Flux.” I can’t tell you how honored and humbled I am to be featured on the cover of Fast Company along with some folks who I greatly admire: Beth Comstock, Baratunde Thurston, Raina Kumra, Bob Greenberg, DJ Patil, and Pete Cashmore. Plus, it makes me smile so much to be surrounded by so many fearless, goofy folks doing their thing because they believe in what they do. And I can’t tell you how good it feels to be recognized for being a troublemaker after so many years of being told that my rabble rousing would produce no good.

I am a very lucky girl and I thank my lucky stars for letting me be as successful as I’ve been. Who would’ve thought that I’d end up seeing my face on the newsstands?? ::giggle::

OMG do I love vacation. A chance to live a different lifestyle, explore the world, and refresh my brain. This year’s adventure began in Easter Island where we traversed the island looking at the amazing Moai statues and engaging in all sorts of discussions about the fraught/uncertain history of the Rapa Nui people.

Next, we headed back to the mainland of Chile and ventured down to Patagonia where we managed to do the famed W trek in Torres del Paine, finishing only hours before the park was shut down due to a fire started by a tourist. It kills me to think that most of the amazing trail we trekked is now burnt to a crisp.

After finishing the W, we ventured into Argentina, first to El Calafate where we got to listen to Parito Moreno crackling its amazing glacier sounds. And then we headed up to El Chalten in order to trek all around Fitz Roy where we miraculously got a brilliantly cloudless day for our trek to the base.

And then we headed up to Buenos Aires. Needless to say, lots more happened amidst all of those adventures, but I’ll leave you with one final fun image. This is of me wearing my Selk’Bag (a fabulous alternative to sleeping bags for those who can’t sleep like a mummy).

Anyhow, I’m back and will be back to work momentarily. I hope you had a fabulous holiday!!!

Penguins and statues and glaciers oh my! I’m off to see the wizard, the wonderful wizard of … OH MY GOD I AM ON VACATION!!!! Can you hear my enthusiasm? My complete and utter joy? Cuz I’m bouncing up and down here. For the next month I will be here:

And here:

Yes, that’s Easter Island and Patagonia. OMG OMG OMG.

During this period, I will be properly off the grid. No email, no internets, no nothing. More importantly, during this period, I will be taking an Email Sabbatical. What this means is that my INBOX will not be receiving any email. None. Zilch. All headed off to /dev/null for a cruel digital death. If you need to reach me, email me after January 10.

I know that asking for people’s patience on this one is hard, particularly for those of you who don’t know me and think that I’m a cruel evil diva for needing a break. But I’m a workaholic who works constantly during the year. In order to function, I need to take time off. And the only way to get a proper break is to vacation just as hard as I work. And this means saying goodbye to email and, more importantly, not letting myself anxiously worry about all that’s waiting for me when I return.

Vacations are precious. Life is precious. Have an amazing holiday season and I look forward to seeing you in the new year!

Photo Credits: Peter Albrecht and Stuck in Customs

Over the last couple of years, I’ve laid awake at night asking myself uncomfortable questions about bullying and teen suicide. I don’t have answers to most of the questions that I have, but I’m choosing to voice my questions, fears, and doubts because I’m not confident that our war on bullying is taking us down the right path. I’m worried about the unintended consequences of our public discourse and I’m worried about the implications that our decisions have on youth, particularly in this high-stakes arena. So I’m asking these four tough questions in the hopes that we can collectively step back and think critically about how we’re addressing bullying as a public issue.

1. What if the stranger danger / sexual predator moral panic increased LGBT suicide?

When I was growing up online, talking to strangers allowed me to getting different perspectives on the world. As a queer teen, the internet allowed me to connect with people who helped me grapple with hard questions around sexuality. I very much thank the internet for playing a crucial role in helping me survive high school. In 2001/2, I visited the online forums that I grew up in, only to find that they were filled with hateful messages directed at LGBT youth by religious ideologues who, quite simply, told these kids they were going to hell. I learned that LGBT networks had gone underground.

As the sexual predator moral panic kicked in in 2005, youth started telling me about how all internet strangers were dangerous. They swallowed the message they’d been told, hook, line, and sinker. What really startled me were all of the LGBT youth I met who told me that they had no one to talk with… I’d ask them if they connected with other LGBT folks online and they’d look at me with horror before talking about how scary/sketchy/bad strangers were.

By many accounts, the early internet seems to be correlated with a decline in suicide among LGBT youth, perhaps because of its ability to connect LGBT to information and support structures. What if the stranger danger rhetoric undermines that? Who do LGBT youth turn to when they’re feeling isolated? Is it possible that the culture of fear we’ve created has increased suicide rates? If so, who’s responsible?

2. What if “It Gets Better” increases emotional devastation for some LGBT youth?

Most LGBT-identified teens who have committed suicide since the “It Gets Better” campaign have been involved in the campaign in some way. Jamey Rodemeyer notoriously made a video before he killed himself. Countless adults (and youth) have celebrated “It Gets Better” as a powerful message filled with hope. But “It Gets Better” isn’t the same as “I can make it better.” Abstraction and patience don’t help when you’re in pain Right Now.

When you’re 14 and coming to terms with your sexuality, six months feels like a decade and 4 years feels like eternity. Along comes a message of hope and it’s really exciting and you get pumped up, like the way you feel when a new song comes on the radio that you feel really speaks to you. You dive in, you create your story, you make your own video. And then what? The humdrums at school continue on and you continue to get teased, only worse this time because you publicly pronounced your story. You felt like you were part of a movement but no one reached out to you, no one helped you make it better. No community was made, no support group was developed. You’re still alone. No one seems to care. You crash and burn.

Getting “high” on a movement can be devastating for youth if there’s no support structure there when they fall. The Trevor Project did a great job of providing some of the needed support infrastructure, but communities themselves often aren’t prepared to support youth. Social services are underfunded. Schools are strapped for cash and getting rid of guidance structures. Parents are stressed out. Community groups are not always tolerant of questioning youth. Is it possible that hopeful messages like “It Gets Better” result in more devastating crashes, particularly for youth in not-so-supportive communities? Does the positive narrative outweigh the possible existential break that can come with being disappointed that things don’t get better?

3. What if the media spotlight around bullying causes harm to youth?

In January 2010, a Massachusetts-based girl named Phoebe Prince killed herself. The highly publicized story suggested that she was an innocent victim who was cruelly tormented by her peers. The story was told in such a cut-and-dry manner that it should’ve raised suspicions in anyone’s mind, but people glommed onto the narrative. Shortly later, the local District Attorney charged six students with various crimes in the case. But did they do what they were accused of doing or was this a witchhunt cloaked as justice? Those kids’ lives have been wrecked by the investigation, publicity, and charges. If they are the devils incarnate that the press want them to be, arguable they deserve it. But what if they didn’t? (If you want to read phenomenal coverage of this, check out Emily Bazelon’s 2010 feature series.)

In the summer of 1999, I was at a rave in a field in Colorado. I was in my tent, writing in my journal, when a group of kids asked me if they could come in. We got to talking and I learned that they had all been students at Columbine on that fateful day when the sanctity of their school was destroyed. I asked them about what it was like to be there and they said that it sucked, but nothing sucked more than the aftermath. They started telling me about how the press hounded them, how they couldn’t hang out with friends, how they had no place to go anymore because the press would sit on their lawns and beg them for more details. Paparazzi at its worst. The kids in my tent had all dropped out of school because of the press. WTF?

On one hand, it’s great that there’s public attention being given to bullying, suicide, and the hardships that youth face. On the other, I can’t help but wonder if the spotlight does additional damage. Does the spotlight help us find effective interventions or just force people to create bandaids? Does it increase justice or result in more kids’ lives being destroyed? Does it showcase the challenges that youth face or obscure them in caricatured forms that lose their nuance? In an effort to tell the story, do we create angels and demons that destroy any hope of creating change?

4. What if us adults are part of the problem?

I spend countless hours talking to youth, thinking about youth, and speaking out on behalf of youth. Nothing makes my heart ache more than seeing youth suffer. I can also still vividly remember my own experiences as a “weird” teen growing up in Pennsylvania who was regularly ostracized and teased. I remember what it was like to feel powerless and to reach that precarious state of anomie. I don’t want anyone to have to go through that which is why I’m so deeply committed to this struggle.

That said, I think that it’s outright dangerous to get so lost in our mission to combat bullying that we stop looking into the mirror. What are the norms that we set for young people when we talk poorly about our friends, family, neighbors, or colleagues at the dinner table? When we engage in road rage while driving? Why is it that we accept – if not encourage – meanness in our political sparring? Or on our TV talk shows? Why do marketers put their money behind reality TV shows that propagate the value of relationship drama as entertainment? Look around at the society we’ve created and it’s filled with harshness. To top it off, look at how much we pressure our youth, particularly middle class youth. Hyper-competition starts early and is non-stop. And look at how increased economic pressure in this country creates new tensions, particularly for working class youth. Then add in the fact that puberty is where all sorts of mental health issues start to appear. Where are the support structures for youth that go beyond the family? We’ve defunded social services left right and center.

In short, we’re creating a societal recipe for disaster even while we publicly pronounce our crusades to end bullying. We don’t need more pundits and journalists and politicians telling us we need to end bullying. We know that. We need to start building out the infrastructure to make it happen. And to realize that it’s a systems-level problem that is not easy to solve. There’s no silver bullet, no magical solution. It can’t be instantly stopped at the school door. It requires collective action, with an eye towards making the world a better place. It requires all-hands-on and a commitment from everyone – and I do mean everyone – to take responsibility for their own actions, values, and attitudes within society. Bullying doesn’t stop by blaming others. It doesn’t stop by creating new regulations. Or inventing new demons. Or scaring people shitless. It stops by collectively agreeing to engage in acts of tolerance, love, bravery, and respect. And that’s far harder to do than passing laws, prosecuting teens, or writing fear-mongering stories.

Image Credit: Ashley Rose

Over the last six weeks, I’ve posted various opportunities for students, academics, and other scholars that I’m co-directing/hosting, many of which have deadlines looming. I want to summarize them in one post for those who either missed them or wanted some synthesis:

Microsoft Research Postdocs.

• Who: Newly minted/about-to-be-minted PhD students working on social media topics from a social science perspective
• Deadline: December 12, 2011
• More Information

Special issue of JOBEM on Socially-Mediated Publicness.

• Who: Scholars who want to publish their work on socially-mediated publicness in a fantastic journal experimenting with open-access
• Deadline: December 12, 2011 for brief abstracts; January 6, 2012 for complete articles
• More Information

Digital Media & Learning Summer Institute.

• Who: Graduate students/young postdocs doing work touching on policy and innovation around digital media & learning
• Deadline: January 9, 2012
• Application & More Info

Microsoft Research PhD Internships.

• Who: Current PhD students working on social media topics from a social science perspective
• Deadline: January 10, 2012
• More Information

Human Trafficking & Technology Research Grants.

• Who: Scholars who can research the role of tech in different facets of human trafficking
• Deadline: February 17, 2012
• Request for Proposals

Please check out this opportunities and make sure that the right people you know hear about them.

Given how many amazing opportunities I had as a graduate student and young scholar, I’m really excited to be able to give back to others. Thanks to all of my collaborators and the institutions that support us in being able to create exciting spaces for scholars to flourish.

Networked technologies – including the internet, mobile phones, and social media – alter how information flows and how people communicate. There is little doubt that technology is increasingly playing a role in the practices and processes surrounding human trafficking: the illegal trade of people for commercial sexual exploitation, forced labor, and other forms of modern-day slavery. Yet, little is known about costs and benefits of technology’s role. We do not know if there are more human trafficking victims as a result of technology, nor do we know if law enforcement can identify perpetrators better as a result of the traces that they leave. One thing that we do know is that technology makes many aspects of human trafficking more visible and more traceable, for better and for worse. Focusing on whether technology is good or bad misses the point; it is here to stay and it is imperative that we understand the role that it is playing. More importantly, we need to develop innovative ways of using technology to address the horrors of human trafficking.

To date, as researchers at USC have highlighted, there is little empirical research into the role that technology plays in human trafficking, let alone the commercial sexual exploitation of children. As a result, new interventions and policies are being driven by intuition, speculation, and extrapolation from highly publicized incidents. There’s no doubt that all forms human trafficking and modern day slavery are horrible, but if we actually want to help those that are victimized, we need to recognize that this is a complex issue and work to understand how the puzzle pieces fits together. My team at Microsoft Research is trying to untangle technology’s role in different facets of the human trafficking ecosystem, fully recognizing how complicated and messy it is. This is why we need your help.

Thanks to the generous support of the Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit and Microsoft Research, I’m proud to announce a pool of grant money for researchers who can help us understand critical elements of the puzzle. Please forward this far and wide because we’re hoping to find scholars with the skills, domain knowledge, and passion to really help us interrogate how technology is used in human trafficking. We need anthropologists, communications scholars, computer scientists, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists, etc.

• Request for Proposals
• Deadline for proposals: February 17, 2012

In order to help contextualize our RFP, we have prepared a framework document meant to map out one slice of the human trafficking ecosystem: “Human Trafficking and Technology: A framework for understanding the role of technology in the commercial sexual exploitation of children in the U.S.” This document is meant to articulate some of the complex issues and hard questions that we face in trying to understand technology’s role in one aspect of human trafficking. If you’re interested in this space, please be critical and challenge our thinking.

We are also looking to identify scholars who are working in this space, including graduate students and postdocs and researchers whose work is not yet published. Even if you’re not looking for grant money, please drop us a line if you’re grappling with technology’s role in human trafficking.

On a more personal note, I can’t tell you how lucky I feel to work for an organization that is willing to sponsor this line of inquiry. It’s amazing to work with colleagues who are all deeply passionate about really understanding this horrible practice in order to do what’s right. We’re all deeply committed to the importance of research and grounding our decisions in research. And we’re all deeply grateful to all of those out there who are determined to end the violence and oppression that comes with commercial sexual exploitation and modern day slavery.

Thank you! And we look forward to hearing from you!

Related Posts:

• Microsoft Research Connections Blog Post
• Microsoft Digital Crimes Unit Blog Post

Image Source: Brandon Christopher Warren, Flickr

It’s that time of the year again. If you don’t know me, you probably don’t know that I work obscene hours for most of the year and then take a proper vacation during the winter months. As in no internet, no work, no geeking out on research. For me to continue doing the work that I do, I have to refresh. In order to refresh, I go offline. No email, no Twitter, no blogging. And only pre-downloaded Wikipedia-ing (because how can you tour foreign countries without wanting to know weird information about the universe?).

Over the years, I have learned that vacation isn’t vacation if you come home to thousands of pending emails. Cuz then you spend most of vacation worrying about the work that’s piling up. So, over seven years ago, I started instituting “email sabbaticals” in my life. While I’m away, my lovely procmail file (aka “filtering software”) will direct all of my email to /dev/null (aka “the permanent trash”). I will not be reachable. The only person that I stay in contact with while I’m gone is my mother because it’s just too cruel to my mom to disappear entirely. Twitter and my blog will also loudly proclaim my MIA-ness. But the bigger issue is that I will return to a zero-inbox. Nothing sent to me during my email sabbatical will survive. All senders will receive a lovely bounce message saying that their message will never get through. In this way, no one can put things in my to-do queue while I’m trying to take a break. I need to recharge and there’s no way to recharge when the pile-up grows ever unmanageable.

From December 15-January 10, you will not be able to reach me. So, if you need something from me, holler now. Or wait until I come back. But please recognize that I need a break.

To learn more about my crazy process, see: How to Take an Email Sabbatical

Microsoft Research New England (MSRNE) is looking for PhD interns to join the social media collective for Spring and Summer 2012. For these positions, we are looking primarily for social science PhD students (including communications, sociology, anthropology, media studies, information studies, etc.). The Social Media Collective is a collection of scholars at MSRNE who focus on socio-technical questions, primarily from a social science perspective. We are not an applied program; rather, we work on critical research questions that are important to the future of social science scholarship.

MSRNE internships are 12-week paid internships in Cambridge, Massachusetts. PhD interns at MSRNE are expected to devise and execute a research project during their internships. The expected outcome of an internship at MSRNE is a publishable scholarly paper for an academic journal or conference of the intern’s choosing. The goal of the internship is to help the intern advance their own career; interns are strongly encouraged to work towards a publication outcome that will help them on the academic job market. Interns are also expected to collaborate with full-time researchers and visitors, give short presentations, and contribute to the life of the community. While this is not an applied program, MSRNE encourages interdisciplinary collaboration with computer scientists, economists, and mathematicians. There are also opportunities to engage with product groups at Microsoft, although this is not a requirement.

Topics that are currently of interest to the social media collective include: privacy & publicity, internet public policy research, online safety (from sexting to bullying to gang activities), technology and human trafficking, transparency & surveillance, conspicuous consumption & brand culture, piracy, news & information flow, and locative media. That said, we are open to other interesting topics, particularly those that may have significant societal impact. While most of the researchers in the collective are ethnographers, we welcome social scientists of all methodological persuasions.

Applicants should have advanced to candidacy in their PhD program or be close to advancing to candidacy. (Unfortunately, there are no opportunities for Master’s students at this time.) While this internship opportunity is not strictly limited to social scientists, preference will be given to social scientists and humanists making socio-technical inquiries. (Note: While other branches of Microsoft Research focus primarily on traditional computer science research, this group does no development-driven research and is not looking for people who are focused solely on building systems at this time. We welcome social scientists with technical skills and strongly encourage social scientists to collaborate with computer scientists at MSRNE.) Preference will be given to intern candidates who work to make public and/or policy interventions with their research. Interns will benefit most from this opportunity if there are natural opportunities for collaboration with other researchers or visitors currently working at MSRNE.

Applicants from universities outside of the United States are welcome to apply.

PEOPLE AT MSRNE SOCIAL MEDIA COLLECTIVE

The Social Media Collective is organized by Senior Researcher danah boyd (http://www.danah.org) and includes Postdoctoral Researchers Mike Ananny (http://www.stanford.edu/~mja/), Alice Marwick (http://www.tiara.org/), and Andrés Monroy-Hernández (http://www.mit.edu/~amonroy/). Spring faculty visitors will include T.L. Taylor (IT University of Copenhangen) and Eszter Hargittai (Northwestern University). Summer visitors are TBD.

Previous interns in the collective have included Amelia Abreu (UWashington information), Scott Golder (Cornell sociology), Germaine Halegoua (U. Wisconsin, communications) Jessica Lingel (Rutgers library & info science), Laura Noren (NYU sociology), Omar Wasow (Harvard African-American studies), and Sarita Yardi (GeorgiaTech HCI). Previous and current faculty MSR visitors to the collective include: Alessandro Acquisti, Beth Coleman, Bernie Hogan, Christian Sandvig, Helen Nissenbaum, James Grimmelmann, Judith Donath, Jeff Hancock, Kate Crawford, Karrie Karahalios, Lisa Nakamura, Mary Gray, Nalini Kotamraju, Nancy Baym, Nicole Ellison, and Tarleton Gillespie.

If you are curious to know more about MSRNE, I suspect that many of these people would be happy to tell you about their experiences here. Previous interns are especially knowledgeable about how this process works.

APPLICATION PROCESS

To apply for a PhD internship with the social media collective:

1. Fill out the online application form: https://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/jobs/intern.aspx Make sure to indicate that you prefer Microsoft Research New England and “social media” or “social computing.” You will need to list two recommenders through this form. Make sure your recommenders respond to the request for letters.

2. Send an email to msrnejob -at- microsoft-dot-com with the subject “SMC PhD Intern Application: ” that includes the following four things:
a. A brief description of your dissertation project.
b. An academic article you have written (published or unpublished) that shows your writing skills.
c. A copy of your CV
d. A pointer to your website or other online presence (if available).
e. A short description of 1-3 projects that you might imagine doing as an intern at MSRNE.

We will begin considering internship applications on January 10 and consider applications until all social media internship positions are filled.

PREVIOUS INTERN TESTIMONIALS

“The internship at Microsoft Research was all of the things I wanted it to be – personally productive, intellectually rich, quiet enough to focus, noisy enough to avoid complete hermit-like cave dwelling behavior, and full of opportunities to begin ongoing professional relationships with other scholars who I might not have run into elsewhere.”
– Laura Noren, Sociology, New York University

“If I could design my own graduate school experience, it would feel a lot like my summer at Microsoft Research. I had the chance to undertake a project that I’d wanted to do for a long time, surrounded by really supportive and engaging thinkers who could provide guidance on things to read and concepts to consider, but who could also provoke interesting questions on the ethics of ethnographic work or the complexities of building an identity as a social sciences researcher. Overall, it was a terrific experience for me as a researcher as well as a thinker.”
– Jessica Lingel, Library and Information Science, Rutgers University

“Spending the summer as an intern at MSR was an extremely rewarding learning experience. Having the opportunity to develop and work on your own projects as well as collaborate and workshop ideas with prestigious and extremely talented researchers was invaluable. It was amazing how all of the members of the Social Media Collective came together to create this motivating environment that was open, supportive, and collaborative. Being able to observe how renowned researchers streamline ideas, develop projects, conduct research, and manage the writing process was a uniquely helpful experience – and not only being able to observe and ask questions, but to contribute to some of these stages was amazing and unexpected.”
– Germaine Halegoua, Communication Arts, University of Wisconsin-Madison

“The summer I spent at Microsoft Research was one of the highlights of my time in grad school. It helped me expand my research in new directions and connect with world-class scholars. As someone with a technical bent, this internship was an amazing opportunity to meet and learn from really smart humanities and social science researchers. Finally, Microsoft Research as an organization has the best of both worlds: the academic freedom and intellectual stimulation of a university with the perks of industry.”
– Andrés Monroy-Hernández, Media, Arts and Sciences, MIT