Associate Professor of Media, Data & Society
While I was updating my DevonThink today I visited their blog Devonian Times and noticed I missed one of the best April Fools’ jokes related to my research: CareTaker for Facebook is here! Some people say that our apps are not “social†enough now with Facebook and Twitter being still the main trends in the industry.… Read more On algorithmic friendship, a belated April Fools’ joke
Oliver Leistert introduced and moderated the session on the Mobile Use of Social Media with the often overlooked fact that Facebook nowadays has more mobile users than web users. This calls for a critical analysis of the Facebook platform expanding into the mobile market not only through apps but also through telecom infrastructures. Besides m.facebook.com, the mobile… Read more Oliver Leistert and Leighton Evans on the Political Economy of Facebook Mobile at Unlike Us #3
Facebook as an identity provider Tobias Leingruber, a member from the Free Art and Technology (F.A.T.) Lab, discussed the future of (online) identity in relation to Facebook. He started his talk with an anecdote of bouncers at nightclubs checking attendees’ Facebook accounts on their phones as a way of identification, see BBC’s article on “Bouncers ‘checking… Read more The Future of Identity in a Digital World by Tobias Leingruber at Unlike Us #3
At Unlike Us #3 Ben Grosser presented the Facebook Demetricator which is a web browser extension that hides all the metrics on Facebook and therewith demetricates Facebook’s interface. Grosser describes his project as a piece of critical software that intervenes in the numerical focus of Facebook. The quantification of social relations:Â More! Ben Grosser narrates a… Read more Facebook Demetricator and the Easing of Prescribed Sociality by Ben Grosser at Unlike Us #3
My co-authored article, with colleague Carolin Gerlitz, has been published in New Media & Society in Online First on February 4, 2013. Abstract The paper examines Facebook’s ambition to extend into the entire web by focusing on social buttons and developing a medium-specific platform critique. It contextualises the rise of buttons and counters as metrics… Read more The Like economy: Social buttons and the data-intensive web
This short paper was written for the BOBCATSSS 2012 conference proceedings. Republished here with permission. Download as PDF: The Like Economy: The Politics of Data and Dataflows in the Social Web. Helmond, Anne. 2012. “The Like Economy: The Politics of Data and Dataflows in the Social Web.†In Proceedings BOBCATSSS 2012 – 20th International Conference on… Read more Paper: The Like Economy. The Politics of Data and Dataflows in the Social Web