Week 4: Pervasive and Invasive

This week we were joined by Dan Richardson and Stuart Nicholson, along with a guest appearance from Kyle Montague.

Today’s session focused entirely on preparing for a pair of “debates” on ubiquitous computing. We kicked off by having each of the four reading groups be associated with one of the two following motions:

Motion #1: This house believes we are living in Weiser’s dreamt up future and it is even better than he imagined
Motion #2: This house would ban ubiquitous computing as it invades peoples lives and removes human agency

One of the groups was assigned as “for” and one as “against” the motion. Much time and energy was then spent carefully preparing well-evidenced 5-minute long arguments for or against the motions.

After this, each group took it in turns to present their cases, followed by a short period of time for responses to the cases presented by the other team.

Tasks for Week 5:

As usual there are new reading groups for next weeks session, which is on “Alone Together” (also known as, social computing).

Group 1: Dinislam, Alex, Lydia (Crowdsourcing and Human Computation)

Group 2: Mo, Tom, Sebastian (Facebook)

Group 3: Dalya, Rosie, Sean (Twitter)

Group 4: Dan, Sarah, Shichao (Vids and Pics)

Unlike the last several weeks, rather than one paper per group, each member of a group has a different paper to read, each related to the group’s theme.

Crowdsourcing and Human Computation:

• Turkopticon: Interrupting Worker Invisibility in Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Being A Turker
• Human Computation: A Survey and Taxonomy of a Growing Field

Facebook:

• A Pool of Dreams: Facebook, Politics and the Emergence of a Social Movement
• Digital Footprints and Changing Networks During Online Identity Transitions
• “It’s not that I don’t have problems, I’m just not putting them on Facebook”: Challenges and Opportunities in Using Online Social Networks for Health

Twitter:

• Debating Poverty Porn on Twitter: Social Media as a Place for Everyday Socio-Political Talk
• Major Life Changes and Behavioral Markers in Social Media: Case of Childbirth
• (How) Will the Revolution be Retweeted? Information Diffusion and the 2011 Egyptian Uprising

Vids and Pics:

• Health Vlogger-Viewer Interaction in Chronic Illness Management
• Constructing the Visual Online Political Self: An Analysis of Instagram Use by the Scottish Electorate
• Meerkat and Periscope: I Stream, You Stream, Apps Stream for Live Streams

There are the normal tasks for next week’s session:

(1) Individually read your set paper over the coming week, following the tips and tactics briefly discussed in this first session, and as detailed in the ‘Close and Critical Reading’ section of the Resources page.

(2) Write an approximately 500 word blog post that is a critical review of the paper (again, use the materials sent around at the start of the module and on the Resources page as an initial guide to help) and upload this onto the website before we meet next week.

(3) Identify one paper (from HCI or beyond) that 1) relates to the “platforms” your group has and 2) either discusses METHODOLOGICAL, ETHICAL or a CIVIC issue related to these.

(4) finally, meet in your learning triangle and Gabber about this week’s session! As before, meet in your triangle and “Gabber” around three topics (you can choose these when you open the app). Again, don’t spend too long on this – just grab a tea or coffee, and chat for 20 minutes or so.