Hot off the presses, I’m excited to share this paper, Running Out of Time: The Impact and Value of Flexibility in On-Demand Crowdwork, co-authored with my colleagues Ming Yin (MSRNYC and incoming Assistant Prof at Purdue) and Sid Suri. From the abstract: With a seemingly endless stream of tasks, on-demand labor markets appear to offer … [Read more…]
A version of this essay originally appeared in the Op-Ed Section of The Los Angeles Times, January 10, 2016 The global digital assembly line has arrived. Its workers labor at computer keyboards, performing the behind-the-scenes tasks that make the Internet appear intelligent and functional. They assign labels like “family” or “theme park” to photos, check … [Read more…]
I just published a small piece from our crowdwork research in the LA Times this Sunday. It reflects on the challenges that workers face in a world of “taskified” labor—particularly the problem of getting paid when no one’s legally on the hook for sending you your last paycheck. Please share with any colleagues who might be thinking … [Read more…]
The LGBT Technology Partnership released research that I co-authored with media scholar and sociologist Jessie Daniels earlier this year. In it, we lay out the reasons that LGBT-identifying individuals and our communities became early adopters of broadband technology and why the Internet continues to play such a pivotal part in our political and social lives. … [Read more…]
[Cross-posted to the Social Media Collective] When the Facebook Emotions Study first made international news, I felt strongly (still do) that researchers, from those honing algorithms to people like me studying the social impact of media and technologies, need to come together. There are no easy answers or obvious courses of action. But we all … [Read more…]
I realized after posting my thoughts on how to think about social media as a site of human interaction (and all the ethical and methodological implications of doing so) that I forgot to leave links to what are, bar none, the best resources on the planet for policy makers, researchers, and the general public thinking … [Read more…]
I’m frustrated that the state of public intellectualism allows us, individually, to jump into the conversation about the recently published Facebook “Emotions” Study [1]. What we—from technology builders and interface designers to data scientists and ethnographers working in industry and at universities alike—really (really) need right now is to sit down together and talk. Pointing the finger … [Read more…]
By Sara C. Kingsley and Dr. Mary L. Gray (cross-posted at CultureDigitally and the Center for Popular Economics Ray and Charles Working on a Conceptual Model for the Exhibition Mathematica, 1960, photograph. Prints & Photographs Division, Library of Congress (A-22a) http://www.loc.gov/exhibits/eames/images/uc9616.jpg “Certainly the cost of living has increased, but the cost of everything else has … [Read more…]
I’ve been feeling the need to freshen up the Blog-ish. What better way to do that than to post a link to a new blog post by another researcher I really love to read: Check out Mack Hagood’s new piece on tinnitus and the prospects of an applied sound studies: http://soundstudiesblog.com/2012/07/16/listening-to-tinnitus-roles-of-media-when-hearing-breaks-down/
Mary L. Gray Senior Researcher Microsoft Research New England, Cambridge, MA Versions of this post will be cross-posted to socialqueery; the Huffington Post; SocialMediaCollective; and Cultural Digitally Associate Professor of Communication and Culture, Indiana University Tyler Clementi’s death on 22 September 2010 was one of the first in a wave of highly publicized youth suicides that fall. … [Read more…]