Information systems, such as electronic health records (EHRs) and case note software, increasingly support direct service providers (DSPs) in social service administration. Previous scholarship examined how these digital interventions enhance care but also create unintended consequences for DSPs and their clients. Despite broad interest in how DSPs and other frontline social service workers utilize information technology, few studies examine how they avoid digital tools, particularly when documentation stakes are high for both clients and DSPs. We report findings from interviews with 16 DSPs, who remain keenly aware that the information they document may become visible to others now and in the future. To protect themselves and their clients, they develop practices to resist recording data in digital records such as EHRs. We offer a typology of resistant data practices and design considerations grounded in the experiences and understanding of power within the roles of DSPs.

Individuals' social class background shapes their life experiences and outcomes, including their familial upbringing and educational attainment. However, we know little about how social class background influences the hiring practices of professional settings, and specifically, the ways in which evaluators conceptualize a potential link between social class background and hiring. Through interviewing 50 evaluators at large technology companies, we find that only 19 of them discussed how social class background affects applicants' access to resources, and none articulated the ties between social class background and preferred interpersonal interactional styles. This is particularly troubling because all evaluators described assessing the key hiring criteria of "innovation potential" based on whether applicants display what we term a "transboundary interactional style." This style involves demonstrating an ease with articulating cross-disciplinary ideas as well as facilitating back-and-forth scholarly conversations and debates. While evaluators characterized this style as stemming from applicants' individual personalities, we draw on past sociological literature to suggest that this style is also cultivated in upper-middle-class environments. Given technology companies' expressed desire to hire a diverse workforce by minimizing biases in evaluators' assessments, we conclude with ideas for evaluators to develop more equitable hiring practices.

Social class contexts shape parents’ guiding principles around teens’ smartphone use. These contexts can affect how parents coach and censor their teens’ smartphone use and can create tensions in the home. Through 174 interviews (87 parent-teen dyads), we find that upper-middle-class families generally adopt an orientation toward scaffolded achievements and working-class families tend to embrace an orientation toward empowered self-sufficiency. We further find that these class-based orientations contribute to parent-teen tensions. For upper-middle-class families, tensions arise when parents insist that teens should use smartphones to get help with academic and enrichment activities and teens disagree about whether their phone-related activities align with this goal. In contrast, we find that conflict can occur in working-class families when teens use their smartphones to get assistance and parents interpret such activity as teens being lazy or not self-sufficient. These findings highlight the role of social class contexts in shaping families’ orientations toward teens’ smartphone use and phone-related tensions.

While studies have shown that graduates from elite universities enjoy high employment rates, they do not tell the story of how students from different social class backgrounds experience the hiring process. We address this question by interviewing upper-middle-class (UMC) and working- and middle-class (WMC) Computer Science Ph.D. students at prestigious universities who are applying for lucrative internships at established technology companies. We find that while these students are aware of and have access to the "same" resources (e.g., social connections and insider knowledge about employers' expectations), the tactics they use to act on these resources and their emotional experience of the hiring process vary along social class lines. In short, the class-based norms of UMC applicants align with those of employers. The majority of WMC applicants, however, discuss experiencing tension between their class-based norms and employers' dominant values. In contrast to their UMC counterparts, these applicants report spending substantial amounts of time preparing for the hiring process and describe the hiring process as emotionally draining. This research provides insight into the emotional burdens facing even the most privileged WMC applicants. Our findings also have implications for how organizations should take into account social class backgrounds in their hiring practices.

Abstract Personal informatics tools can help users self-reflect on their experiences. When reflective thought occurs, it sometimes leads to negative thought and emotion cycles. To help explain these cycles, we draw from Psychology to introduce the concept of rumination—anxious, perseverative cognition focused on negative aspects of the self—as a result of engaging with personal data. Rumination is an important concept for the Human Computer Interaction community because it can negatively affect users’ well-being and lead to maladaptive use. Thus, preventing and mitigating rumination is beneficial. In this conceptual paper, we differentiate reflection from rumination. We also explain how self-tracking technologies may inadvertently lead to rumination and the implications this has for design. Our goal is to expand self-tracking research by discussing these negative cycles and encourage researchers to consider rumination when studying, designing, and promoting tools to prevent adverse unintended consequences among users.

In this work, we investigate whether and how the presence of political hashtags in social media news articles influences the way people discuss news content. Specifically, we examine how political hashtags in news posts act as a design characteristic that affects the quality of online discourse. We use a randomized control experiment to assess how the presence versus absence of political hashtags (particularly the most prevalently used #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter) in social media news posts shapes discourse across a general audience (n=3205). Key findings show differences in topical focus, emotional tone of discourse, and rhetorical styles between commenters who were shown news posts with political hashtags versus those shown news posts without the hashtags. Compared to the control group, those shown hashtagged news posts heavily focus on the politics of the hashtag, use more words associated with fear, anger, and disgust in their comments, and exhibit black-and-white rhetoric and less emotionally temperate expressions in their arguments.

To better understand how we can broaden participation in computing, this exploratory study examines the interview process for elite internships at established technology companies. Through conducting 36 interviews with evaluators at technology companies, we find that in addition to technical competence, evaluators often assess internship applicants based on explicit and implicit signals of industrial fit, organizational fit, and individual fit. These evaluative criteria are reminiscent of prior literature linking biases in hiring to social class background. By reflecting on how our findings relate to previous studies, we suggest that evaluators? assessments of fit are potentially linked to social class background, and this might be an invisible factor contributing to hiring biases at technology companies. Given that hiring only culturally similar employees can have negative individual, organizational, and societal consequences, we propose strategies for evaluators to broaden their evaluation perspectives and to enact inclusive interviewing practices. We conclude with a call for further research on the role of social class background in the hiring process.

Contemporary American experiences of death and mourning increasingly extend onto social network sites, where friends gather to memorialize the deceased. That "everyone grieves in their own way'' may be true, but it forecloses important questions about how people evaluate these expressions, their relationship to others who are grieving, and impacts on their own experiences of grief. Drawing from mixed-methods research conducted over five years, we describe how individuals position themselves within and evaluate expressions of networked grief. We start by identifying five orientations -- reinforcing, supporting, transferring, objecting, and isolating -- that describe how individuals evaluate actions of grievers, position themselves relative to the network, and act when they encounter grief. We then describe factors and tensions that influence how individuals arrive at these orientations. Based on our findings, we argue that the design of social media can be sensitized to diverse needs by adopting a situated perspective within a dynamic post-mortem network.

In this paper, we use a materiality lens to explore how information and communication technologies condition interaction between citizens and policymakers of the U.S. Congress. We work with ethnographic data - six months of observation in Washington D.C. and 48 interviews with staff in the House of Representatives. Customer relation management systems (CRMs) used by Congress are one of numerous technologies expected to enhance responsive communication between citizens and representatives. We find, instead, that these technologies promote the datafication of citizen information that configures and constrains how policymakers engage citizens as legitimate actors within the policy-making process. CRMs not only mediate communication between citizens and policymakers, they shape the idea of what communication between citizens and policymakers can be and how citizens are viewed in the eyes of policymakers and their staff. Thus, we extend our understanding of the ways in which material configurations of communication technologies influence not only how communication acts unfolds, but also how each partner conceives of and engages with the other. This has dramatic implications for the possibilities of digital communication channels to enhance, or uphold, the ideals of a representative democracy.

Both hashtag activists and news organizations assume that trending political hashtags effectively capture the nowness of social issues that people care about [20]. In fact, news organizations with growing social media presence increasingly capitalize the use of political hashtags in article headlines and social media news post - a practice aimed to generate new readership through lightweight news consumption of content by linking a particular story to a broader topic [28]. However, response to political hashtags can be complicated as demonstrated with the events surrounding #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter. In fact, the semantic simplicity of political hashtags often belies the complexities around the question of who gets to participate [71], what intersectional identities are included or excluded from the hashtag [45], as well as how the meaning of the hashtag expands and drifts [10] depending on the context through which it is expressed. Overtime, reports show increasing backlash [70, 73, 74] and polarization [21, 52, 66, 67, 70] against key issues embodied by political hashtags. In this vein, we assume that political hashtags affect how people make sense of and engage with media content. However, we do not know how the presence of political hashtags -signaling that a news story is related to a current social issue - influences the assumptions potential readers make about the social content of an article. In this work we conducted a randomized control experiment to examine how the presence of political hashtags (particularly the most prevalently used #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter) in social media news posts shape reactions across a general audience (n=1979). Our findings show that compared to the control group, people shown news posts with political hashtags perceive the news topic as less socially important and are less motivated to know more about social issues related to the post. People also find the news more partisan and controversial when hashtags are included. In fact, negative perception associated with political hashtags (partisan bias & topic controversy) mediates people's motivation to further engage with the news content). High-intensity Facebook users and politically moderate participants perceive news with political hashtags as more partisan compared to posts excluding hashtags. There are also significant differences in discourse patterns between the hashtag and control groups around how politically moderate respondents engage with the news content in their comments.

Self-tracking data is often seen as a means to reflect and achieve a goal, usually focusing on positive insights and actions. Lately, some studies have discussed the negative consequences of self-tracking, suggesting that people interact with personal data in different ways. We explored how self-tracking activities and the emotional context characterize how people engage with personal health data through the analysis of a complex and emotionally-loaded use case: fertility self-tracking. We qualitatively analyzed patient-generated content in an online health community dedicated to fertility. We found five distinct types of engagement with data: positive, burdened, obsessive, trapped, and abandoning. Each of them is composed of an action and an emotional component that mutually influence each other. We discuss how the interplay of these components characterize a person's engagement with data, how the online forum made these issues visible, and how they are embedded in the self-tracking culture. We also provide insights into the implications of these issues for self-tracking tools. Finally, we hypothesize how people transition through the types of relationships with data, suggesting directions for future research in the area.

In a mixed methods study of parents and teens (n=200), 87% (n=174) of participants used language consistent with smartphone addiction narratives when asked about their smartphone feelings and use. Mental health researchers and clinicians do not consistently agree about whether smartphone addiction exists nor what it would look like if it does. Our goal in this study was to explore the patterns of responses that people invoked when talking about the role of smartphones in their lives and the lives of those around them. Responses suggested that both parents and teens are aware of and potentially influenced by a narrative that smartphones are addictive and can lead to negative, though largely undefined, consequences. We examine potential origins of this narrative, including media coverage, and examine the critical need for a deeper examination in the CSCW community of how this narrative could be influencing well-being, sense of self, and sensemaking around smartphone use.

Linguistic style and affect shape how users perceive and assess political content on social media. Using linguistic methods to compare political discourse on far-left, mainstream and alt-right news articles covering the #MeToo movement, we reveal rhetorical similarities and differences in commenting behavior across the political spectrum. We employed natural language processing techniques and qualitative methods on a corpus of approximately 30,000 Facebook comments from three politically distinct news publishers. Our findings show that commenting behavior reflects how social movements are framed and understood within a particular political orientation. Surprisingly, these data reveal that the structural patterns of discourse among commenters from the two alternative news sites are similar in terms of their relationship to those from the mainstream - exhibiting polarization, generalization, and othering of perspectives in political conversation. These data have implications for understanding the possibility for civil discourse in online venues and the role of commenting behavior in polarizing media sources in undermining such discourse.

Since Dourish's critique of 'implications for design' [15], researchers have asked how design and ethnography should or could relate in HCI. Here we reflect on two experiences with cross-informing ongoing ethnographic investigation with the early stages of research through design. One uses speculative design to reflect on and inform ethnographic fieldwork on busyness in middle-class familes; the other uses speculative design to complement late-stage analysis of a historical ethnography of rural technological infrastructure. Rather than trying to do away with the gap between ethnography and design by seamlessly integrating the two processes, we reworked the relationship between ethnography and design by closing the gap in the temporal workflows while simultaneously maintaining a distinction in the performance of the two roles. We found that this new gap resulted in a series of misunderstandings; but by putting the two roles in active dialogue, we were able leverage misunderstandings into mutual benefit.

In this paper, we examine stigma related to class identity online through an empirical examination of Elite University Class Confessions (EUCC). EUCC is an online space that includes a Facebook page and a surrounding sociotechnical ecosystem. It is a community of, for, and about low-income and first generation students at an elite university. By bringing in a community that learns and engages with users' socioeconomic struggles, EUCC engenders unique restorative properties for students experiencing class stigma. EUCC's restorative properties foster new ways of understanding one's stigmatized identity through meaning- making interactions in a networked sociotechnical system. We discuss how EUCC's design shapes the nature of user interactions around class stigma, and explore in depth how people experience stigma differently through the restorative properties of EUCC.

Parenting is a complex and morally loaded endeavor, especially in our technologically saturated world. Popular culture, news articles, and children's groups regularly suggest that parents should monitor and control children's experiences with media. Parents are thus encouraged to establish clear rules around technology exposure, screen time, and access to content. HCI parenting research tends to reflect these general messages and often assumes that media 'rules' are the norm, or at least the goal, in families. Through a two-year ethnographic study of nine families we find that the presence of technology rules is not as straightforward as literature and mainstream media suggest. In particular, our data proposes that media rules are highly variable across and within families, regularly undermined in practice, and more often around exposure than content. Further, we find that the impetuses for various family policies around media use are related to how rules are enacted in practice. Given the loaded emotional stakes that parents in this study place on negotiating media use and exposure, we argue that it is important for designers to take a more situated perspective on parenting practices.

In this paper, we introduce the notion of a temporal logic to characterize sets of organizing principles that perpetuate particular orientations to the lived experience of time. We identify a dominant temporal logic, circumscribed time, which has legitimated time as chunkable, single-purpose, linear, and ownable. We juxtapose this logic with the temporal experiences of participants in three ethnographic datasets to identify a set of alternative understandings of time -- that it is also spectral, mosaic, rhythmic, and obligated. We call this understanding porous time. We posit porous time as an expansion of circumscribed time in order to provoke reflection on how temporal logics underpin the ways that people orient to each other, research and design technologies, and normalize visions of success in contemporary life.

Constant connectivity and total availability to clients is the rule rather than the exception in many contemporary workplaces. Enabled by developments in information and communication technologies (ICTs), total availability of employees is possible and presumed. Scholars have explored how new technological affordances, cultural shifts, individual personality traits, and/or the development of social expectations that reinforce norms of constant connectivity have led to this state of affairs. We argue that a key factor has been overlooked in current scholarship about stress, intensive work, and constant connectivity. That is, current economic conditions are creating a marketplace in which firms increasing sell the availability of their employees as part of the services offered by the firm. In this paper we use qualitative data to illustrate how total availability is an integral aspect of the 'product' offered by professional service firms and is becoming increasingly prevalent in other service industries. We conclude with a discussion of how the HCI community might address this situation as a design challenge. Drawing on the work of Goffman and Perlow, we suggest that designers attend to the ways in which organizations might maintain front stage impressions of total availability while collectively managing individual time to restrict total availability behind the scenes.

In this paper, we describe results from fieldwork conducted at a social services site where the workers evaluate citizens' applications for food and medical assistance submitted via an e-government system. These results suggest value tensions that result - not from different stakeholders with different values - but from differences among how stakeholders enact the same shared value in practice. In the remainder of this paper, we unpack the distinct and conflicting interpretations or logics of three shared values - efficiency, access, and education. In particular, we analyze what happens when social services workers have ideas about what it means to expand access, increase efficiency, and educate the public that conflict with the logics embedded in the e-government system. By distinguishing between overarching values and specific logics, we provide an analytic framework for exploring value tensions as values are enacted in practice.

Electronic Medical Records promise to simultaneously enhance coordination and provide transparency and accountability in work process. As such, EMR are purported to benefit both hospitals and patients. In this paper we use grounded empirical data to explore how this promise plays out in the everyday tasks of healthcare providers. Building on the small body of CSCW literature that suggests that the accounting functions of EMR are impinging on the ability of medical personnel to coordinate work, we draw on the theoretical lens of new institutionalism to outline how certain institutional logics around safety and accountability are shaping the experience of EMR systems in situ. We suggest that the institutional logics that currently characterize U.S. healthcare are embedded in the EMR design itself, structuring how institutional values such as 'safety' are achieved and evaluated. Using over one year of ethnographic research in an obstetrical unit, we find that the institutional logics of 'safety' embedded in the EMR create negative organizational outcomes, effectively undermining coordination and necessitating inaccurate accounts of work. We provide design implications to address these issues in the current institutional environment and envision how systems might be designed to promote alternate logics of safety that are social, dynamic, and cast humans as expert agents in the system.

In this article, we present the results of a study examining challenges related to access and trust for nutrition assistance outreach workers and suggest design implications for these challenges. Outreach workers are e-government intermediaries who assist clients with accessing and using e-government online applications, systems, and services. E-government intermediaries are not typical end users; they use e-government systems on behalf of clients, and as such their challenges differ from those of primary users. We detail social and technical aspects of these challenges to develop a nuanced understanding of access and trust in the ecosystems surrounding e-government systems. First, we describe how the practical accomplishment of access involves multiple stakeholders, actors, and practices. Second, we highlight how trust emerges through the e-government intermediaries’ work to project themselves as professional and competent through their technical practice. Last, we propose design implications sensitive to both the social and technical aspects of these challenges.

As the smartphone proliferates in American society, so too do stories about its value and impact. In this paper we draw on advertisements and news articles to analyze cultural discourse about the smartphone. We highlight two common tropes: one calling for increased technological integration, the other urging individuals to dis-integrate the smartphone from daily life. We examine the idealized subject positions of these two stories and show how both simplistic tropes call on the same overarching values to compel individuals to take opposing actions. We then reflect on the conflicts individuals experience in trying to align and account for their actions in relation to multiple contradictory narratives. Finally, we call for CHI researchers to tell and provoke more complicated stories of technologies and their relationships with values in conversations, publications, and future designs.

Based on an 18-month qualitative study that included the creation and testing of design considerations and a prototype location-based information system (LBIS), this research provides empirical insight into the daily practices of a wide variety of individuals working to address food insecurity in one U.S. county. Qualitative fieldwork reveals that nonprofit organizations in the food assistance ecology engage in location-based information practices that could be enhanced by the design of a LBIS. Two practices that would benefit from a collaborative LBIS are 1) practices of matching in which nonprofit workers help individuals who are seeking assistance to food resources and 2) practices of distribution in which nonprofit workers help organizations access and deliver food resources to clients. In order to support such practices across organizations the cooperative design component of this research suggests that an LIBS should: support the role of intermediaries who engage in practices of matching and distribution; provide interactive mapping tools that match resources to need; enable organizations to control visibility over specific data; and document work and impact. This research further suggests that designers should explore the wide variety of spatial patterns that must align and overlap such that ecologies of nonprofit organizations might synergistically work together to address pressing social needs.

In this paper, we present the results of a study of the work practices of food assistance outreach workers. We introduce the construct of service mediation, which includes the technical, social, and knowledge labor practices involved in enabling access to and use of an e-government service. We explore the service mediation activities of outreach, technological assistance, providing knowledge, and ongoing engagement. These activities bring to light how successful service relationships involve fostering a process, bridging relationships, and providing broader scaffolding. The results of our research highlight the role service mediation plays in the use of services and service technologies in information-rich organizations. This research extends previous conceptualizations of mediation by documenting how mediators support broader service processes for their clients, transform potential beneficiaries into clients, and engage in long term assistance. Therefore, this work moves beyond prior conceptualizations of mediation that concentrate solely on enabling access and use of specific technologies.