Sociotechnical systems, such as language technologies, frequently exhibit identity-based biases. These biases exacerbate the experiences of historically marginalized communities and remain understudied in low-resource contexts. While models and datasets specific to a language or with multilingual support are commonly recommended to address these biases, this paper empirically tests the effectiveness of such approaches for gender, religion, and nationality-based identities in Bengali, a widely spoken but low-resourced language. We conducted an algorithmic audit of sentiment analysis models built on mBERT and BanglaBERT, which were fine-tuned using all Bengali sentiment analysis (BSA) datasets from Google Dataset Search. Our analyses showed that BSA models exhibit biases across different identity categories despite having similar semantic content and structure. We also examined the inconsistencies and uncertainties arising from combining pre-trained models and datasets created by individuals from diverse demographic backgrounds. We connected these findings to the broader discussions on epistemic injustice, AI alignment, and methodological decisions in algorithmic audits.

Abstract Teaching has often been characterized as a “labor of love.” Despite their passion, teachers often find themselves underpaid and unrecognized, leading them to engage in taxing emotional labor. Emotional labor in traditional educational settings is not new. However, teaching as online gig work has become increasingly data-driven and transnational. With the burgeoning popularity of online educational industries in China, U.S. teachers are entering the transitional gig economy to teach students, parents, and educational standards in cross-cultural contexts. Based on 24 semi-structured interviews with U.S. teachers who worked on Chinese gig-education platforms, this paper documents their challenges and how such platforms reconfigure their emotional labor, enabling them to reaffirm their identities as teachers and caregivers and rekindle the passion that gave their lives purpose and meaning. However, these platforms, underpinned by Chinese cultural values and data-driven technologies (e.g., datafication, algorithms, and surveillance) — which we dub transnational emotional computing — demand emergent forms of emotional labor with which participants must contend. This work contributes to a human-centered conceptualization of identity alignment and carries theoretical and design implications for the future of transnational gig platforms, especially for cross-cultural digital knowledge labor.

The creative internet is a network of online platforms, creative people, and communities where artists learn and grow together while also showcasing their artwork to others. While this space of people, technology, and routine presentation of art once held such promise for creatives, for many, that place is something that now only exists in memory. This paper presents an interview study with 22 visual artists who share their art in online social spaces. Taking a historical approach, we explore their journeys across the creative internet, the promise it held for them as artists, and how the creative internet became enshittified as online platforms got bigger. Through the lens of enshittification, we explore how changes in platform policy, design, and algorithmic mediation have shifted the creative practices of artists, and how, as artists contend with enshittified platform spaces, they are resilient and forward joy in their art. We discuss the role that nostalgia plays in the concept of enshittification, contributing insight into why people stay on increasingly hostile platforms, and suggest opportunities for platforms and artists alike to forward joy and resilience in the face of a now shittier internet.

While colonization has sociohistorically impacted people’s identities across various dimensions, those colonial values and biases continue to be perpetuated by sociotechnical systems. One category of sociotechnical systems–sentiment analysis tools–can also perpetuate colonial values and bias, yet less attention has been paid to how such tools may be complicit in perpetuating coloniality, although they are often used to guide various practices (e.g., content moderation). In this paper, we explore potential bias in sentiment analysis tools in the context of Bengali communities who have experienced and continue to experience the impacts of colonialism. Drawing on identity categories most impacted by colonialism amongst local Bengali communities, we focused our analytic attention on gender, religion, and nationality. We conducted an algorithmic audit of all sentiment analysis tools for Bengali, available on the Python package index (PyPI) and GitHub. Despite similar semantic content and structure, our analyses showed that in addition to inconsistencies in output from different tools, Bengali sentiment analysis tools exhibit bias between different identity categories and respond differently to different ways of identity expression. Connecting our findings with colonially shaped sociocultural structures of Bengali communities, we discuss the implications of downstream bias of sentiment analysis tools.

Online communities are susceptible to racist attacks, even when community policies explicitly prohibit racism. Drawing on the concept of symbolic boundary, we explored how community members sustained their communities against the perpetuation of racist logics and practices on Reddit. We drew on trace ethnography to analyze conversations about crime in two city subreddits (i.e., r/baltimore and r/chicago). The findings illustrate that the fragility of community boundaries was contributed by race baiting posts, covert racism, and racist brigading. At the same time, our research highlights that moderation efforts maintained and established institutional, cultural, and geographical boundaries to combat racist attacks. We discuss boundary as a design technique for building safe spaces for community members. Content warning: This work contains racist quotes that can upset or harm some readers.

Media (e.g., film) are often designed around cisgender, heternormative logics and are not representative of the multiplicity of identities and identity expressions that exist in the world. Thus, media impedes the identity expression and performance of the communities who use them, as we do not see many parts of our identities represented or find that our identities are misrepresented. Video games, which are a genre of media, are especially problematic in how they perpetuate heteronormative normative logics. Unlike most media, however, video games give people agency over the aesthetics of game worlds--the characters and narratives--through the installation of mods. We conducted a content analysis coupled with a triangulation of mods through personal experience focused on the widely popular farming simulation game Stardew Valley. Drawing on a conceptual lens bringing together theories of identity and aesthetic agency, we highlight how the aesthetic agency afforded by mod installation provides opportunities for reclaiming representational diversity in game worlds along the following dimensions: sex and intimacy, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, and body diversity. We discuss the implications of mod installation, exploring its potential relationship with identity work and identity play. We then propose design guidelines for achieving aesthetic alignment.

Colonialism--the policies and practices wherein a foreign body imposes its ways of life on local communities--has historically impacted how collectives perceive themselves in relation to others. One way colonialism has impacted how people see themselves is through nationalism, where nationalism is often understood through shared language, culture, religion, and geopolitical borders. The way colonialism has shaped people's experiences with nationalism has shaped historical conflicts between members of different nation-states for a long time. While recent social computing research has studied how colonially marginalized people can engage in discourse to decolonize or re-imagine and reclaim themselves and their communities on their own terms--what is less understood is how technology can better support decolonial discourses in an effort to re-imagine nationalism. To understand this phenomenon, this research draws on a semi-structured interview study with YouTubers who make videos about culturally Bengali people whose lives were upended as a product of colonization and are now dispersed across Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. This research seeks to understand people's motivations and strategies for engaging in video-mediated decolonial discourse in transnational contexts. We discuss how our work demonstrates the potential of the sociomateriality of decolonial discourse online and extends an invitation to foreground complexities of nationalism in social computing research.

Despite significant research on online harm, polarization, public deliberation, and justice, CSCW still lacks a comprehensive understanding of the experiences of religious minorities, particularly in relation to fear, as prominently evident in our study. Gaining faith-sensitive insights into the expression, participation, and inter-religious interactions on social media can contribute to CSCW's literature on online safety and interfaith communication. In pursuit of this goal, we conducted a six-month-long, interview-based study with the Hindu, Buddhist, and Indigenous communities in Bangladesh. Our study draws on an extensive body of research encompassing the spiral of silence, the cultural politics of fear, and communication accommodation to examine how social media use by religious minorities is influenced by fear, which is associated with social conformity, misinformation, stigma, stereotypes, and South Asian postcolonial memory. Moreover, we engage with scholarly perspectives from religious studies, justice, and South Asian violence and offer important critical insights and design lessons for the CSCW literature on public deliberation, justice, and interfaith communication.

Social media platform success relies on users to consume, create, and share creative content. While some creatives aspire to become influencers, this is not the goal of all creatives, particularly those with smaller audiences. Through an interview study of 15 creatives on TikTok, we explore the often overlapping intentions for creating and sharing videos, as well as the challenges to maintaining these creative intentions and routines as they are shaped by platform logic. We find platforms introduce impediments which disrupt people’s creative routines and alienate people from their overlapping creative intentions; introducing challenges which alienate people from their sense of self, and their audiences. We construct a broader definition of creative labor - the work of professionalizing and monetizing a creative product shared on social media - reflecting on how the routine enactment of creative labor is impacted by infrastructural elements of technology.

Accessibility efforts, how we can make the world usable and useful to as many people as possible, have focused on how we can support and allow for the autonomy and independence of people with disabilities, neurodivergencies, chronic conditions, and older adults. Despite these efforts, not all technology is designed or implemented to support everyone's needs. TikTok. Recently, a community-organized push by creators and general users of TikTok urged the platform to add accessibility features, such as closed captioning, to allow more people to use the platform with greater ease. Through an interview study exploring the experiences of creatives on TikTok, we explore the creative practices of people with ADHD and those who experience similar challenges, focusing on the kinds of accessibility they create through their creative work. We find that creatives engage in critical infrastructuring--a process of bottom-up (re)design--to make the platform more accessible despite the challenges the platform presents to them as creators through creating and augmenting video editing and video captioning infrastructures. We then reflect on how the introduction of a top-down infrastructure - the implementation of an auto-captioning feature - shifts the critical infrastructure practices of TikTok creatives. Through their infrastructuring, creatives were revising the broader sociotechnical capabilities of TikTok to support their own needs as well as the broader needs of the TikTok community. We discuss how the routine of infrastructuring accessibility is a form of incidental care work and highlight how accessibility is an evolving sociotechnical construct, forwarding the concept of contextual accessibility.

Volunteer moderators serve as gatekeepers for problematic content, such as racism and other forms of hate speech, on digital platforms. Prior studies have reported volunteer moderators' diverse roles in different governance models, highlighting the tensions between moderators and other stakeholders (e.g., administrative teams and users). Building upon prior research, this paper focuses on how volunteer moderators moderate racist content and how a platform's governance influences these practices. To understand how moderators deal with racist content, we conducted in-depth interviews with 13 moderators from city subreddits on Reddit. We found that moderators heavily relied on AutoMod to regulate racist content and racist user accounts. However, content that was crafted through covert racism and "color-blind'' racial frames was not addressed well. We attributed these challenges in moderating racist content to (1) moderators' concerns of power corruption, (2) arbitrary moderator team structures, and (3) evolving forms of covert racism. Our results demonstrate that decentralized governance on Reddit could not support local efforts to regulate color-blind racism. Finally, we discuss the conceptual and practical ways to disrupt color-blind moderation.

While people’s identities can be marginalized through various forces, colonialism is one of the primary ways that continues to influence people’s lives and identities. Colonialism refers to the policies and practices where foreign powers migrate to other lands and alter the social structures, and thus identities, of local populations. What is less understood is how online spaces can support people in the aftermath of colonization in revising, repairing, and strengthening their identities—the process of identity decolonization work. Using trace ethnography beginning on 15 May, 2020 and ending on 15 July, 2020 and drawing on Poka Laenui’s framework of decolonization, we explore how South Asian Bengalis on the platform Bengali Quora (BnQuora) engage in collaborative identity decolonization work to reclaim narrative agency. We discuss how narratives serve to help people bounce back from threat or vulnerability—a concept we dub narrative resilience. We also describe potential implications for future scholarship focused on decolonization that extends multiple ongoing conversations around ICT for development, social justice, decolonial HCI, and identity research within the CHI community.

Researchers heavily use online platforms for collecting trace data, i.e., data capturing user interaction on and with sociotechnical systems. Human-computer interaction scholars have highlighted the role of reflexivity while analyzing such data in the case of marginalized communities. Drawing on sociomaterial perspectives, we highlight how data collection approaches involving lists of search phrases and APIs can embed researchers’ positionality, perspectives, and biases within the datasets. In this note, we reflect on the data collection approaches of two papers that studied the sociohistorically marginalized Bengali communities on the question-and-answer site Bengali Quora. We illustrate how recommendation systems and data labeling workers can be included in the data collection process to democratize and limit bias while broadening and contextualizing the trace datasets for research.

As our social worlds increasingly shift online, many of the technologies people encounter are mediated by algorithms. Algorithms have become deeply embedded into people's online lives, often working to tailor and personalize their routine encounters with the world. How does one domesticate, or make one's own, an algorithmic system? One of the goals as people adopt new technologies is to weave them into their everyday routines, establishing a pattern of use in order to make that technology their own. In this paper we focus on people's experiences domesticating the short-form video sharing application, TikTok. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore how people's routine experiences with TikTok's For You Page algorithm influence and inform their domestication process. We first highlight people's motivations for adopting TikTok and the challenges they encounter in this initial acquisition phase of domestication. After adopting the platform, we discuss the challenges people experience across the final three phases of domestication: objectification, incorporation, and conversion. We find that though they enjoy TikTok, our participants feel that they are never fully able to domesticate TikTok. As they are never able to fully control their digital selves, and thus integrate it into their routine lives, TikTok is in constant misalignment with their personal moral economy. We discuss the implications of domesticating algorithmic systems, examining the questions of whose values shape the moral economy created by and through people's uses of algorithmic systems, and the impact of nostalgia on the domestication process.

With the emergence of Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs), people are being exposed to an increased volume of crime-related information, which induces fear. While the fear of crime has been explored around people's experiences with crime, little is known about how people frame their conversations about crime online. In this study, we explore how citizens talk about crime on Reddit. By collecting crime conversations from the subreddit r/baltimore, we find that, on the surface, redditors discuss topics such as comparing crime rates in Baltimore with other cities in an effort to destigmatize the depictions of Baltimore as a city rife with crime. On a deeper level, we find that through their conversations about crime, redditors are engaging in discourse frames that both re-enforce and fight against platformed racism. On the one hand, some redditors perpetuate racially coded language that is rife with anti-Black stereotypes, framing their conversations using old and new racism to cover their racism and discrimination against Black people. On the other hand, others push back against platformed racism by drawing attention to individual racism and systemic racism, and situating crime in root, societal causes. We then discuss how platformed racism operates in online conversations, and develop the concepts of weaponized identity and digital gentrification, which we argue are ways in which people, through their engagements in digital platforms, continue to perpetuate white hegemonic power structures in society. Finally, we discuss implications for how to design to support the fight against platformed racism in sociotechnical systems like Reddit. As a content note and warning, this paper discusses racist content which may be upsetting or harmful to some readers.

In this paper, we explore how sociotechnical systems support and impede the identity performances and identity expression of communities that have experienced a long history of colonialism, where colonization is the practice through which a foreign power reshapes the social structures and systems of other societies. We conducted a trace ethnography among members of a specific digital platform-Bengali Quora (BnQuora). BnQuora is part of the question and answer (Q&A) platform Quora, where people with this particular ethnolinguistic identity come together to engage in conversations about their identities; identities which were shaped through a long history of colonization in the Global South. In drawing on a conceptual framework that brings together identity performativity, governance, content moderation, and surveillance, we find that the sociotechnical mechanisms of governance that mediate people's performances on the BnQuora platform give rise to a kind of platform identity-certain identities are privileged while others are pushed to the margins based on linguistic practices, nationalities, and religious affiliations. We illustrate this through the themes of moderators as prison guards, collective surveillance as enforcing a majority identity, algorithmic coloniality, and staging as self-imprisonment. Finally, we discuss the ways in which governance shapes a platform's identity and can create, strengthen, and reinforce coloniality.

While many technology-based approaches to support people living with HIV target specific clinical goals, recent work has begun to consider how to design support in the context of HIV stigma. Here, we consider two challenges; the first, and central challenge is how to work with a small group of stakeholders to design for the much larger, but hard to access, population of HIV-positive individuals. Addressing the first challenge, we introduce the Narrative Tapestry design process, which is our main contribution, and helps create a generative third space wherein stakeholders draw on their cultural knowledge to reflect on common experiences of living with HIV. The second challenge is how to design a platform that is less likely to disintegrate as people transition through phases of living with a stigmatized identity. Applying the Narrative Tapestry process led us to insights that both demonstrate the value of the design process and partially address this second challenge. We find that social support can be a critical lifeline following an HIV diagnosis, but that when people have normalized their identity, this need can give way to a desire to address stigma directly. We propose combining social support tools with a set of features that enable people to work as change-agents to address stigma in their local communities. We argue that this type of platform would help to retain senior members who can serve both as community caretakers as well as role models for newcomers.

Online social support communities can significantly improve health outcomes for individuals living with disease. Although they are well studied in the literature, little research examines how sociotechnical design changes influence the sustainability of support communities for different medical conditions. We compare the impact of a single design change on 49 disease‐specific health support forums hosted on the WebMD platform, a popular online health information service. A statistical analysis showcases changes in posting patterns before and after the design intervention; a subsequent interpretive examination of forum content reveals how the design change affected members' perceived affordances of the platform. Our findings suggest that, despite differences between communities, the design change triggered a common set of cascading effects: it made it difficult for core users to create and maintain relationships, that led them to ultimately leave the site, and, in turn, reduced the activity drawing newcomers to the platform. Using these findings, we argue that the design of sustainable and robust online communities must account for systemic, sociotechnical dynamics.

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities use online platforms like Reddit to build capacity for resilience from white hegemony. We conduct interviews with 21 moderators of AAPI subreddits to understand how sociotechnical systems contour and contribute to the marginalization of online communities. We examine marginalization through the analytic framework of decolonization and uncover the threats and tactics that AAPI redditors encounter and employ to decolonize their collective identity. We find that moderators of AAPI subreddits develop collective resilience within their online communities by reclaiming space to confront brigade invasion, recording collective memory to circumvent systemic erasure, and revising cultural narratives to deconstruct colonial mentality. We describe how algorithmic configurations within sociotechnical systems reaffirm existing hegemonic values and discuss how users and designers of sociotechnical systems may work toward resisting white hegemony.

Online communities provide spaces for people who are vulnerable and underserved to seek support and build community, such as LGBTQ+ people. Today, some online community spaces are mediated by algorithms. Scholarship has found that algorithms have become deeply embedded in the systems that mediate our routine engagements with the world. Yet, little is known about how these systems impact those who are most vulnerable in society. In this paper, we focus on people's everyday experiences with one algorithmic system, the short video sharing application TikTok. TikTok recently received press that it was suppressing and oppressing the identities of its growing LGBTQ+ user population through algorithmic and human moderation of LGBTQ+ creators and content related to LGBTQ+ identity. Through an interview study with 16 LGBTQ+ TikTok users, we explore people's everyday engagements and encounters with the platform. We find that TikTok's For You Page algorithm constructs contradictory identity spaces that at once support LGBTQ+ identity work and reaffirm LGBTQ+ identity, while also transgressing and violating the identities of individual users. We also find that people are developing self-organized practices in response to these transgressions and violations. We discuss the implications of algorithmic systems on people's identity work, and introduce the concept of algorithmic exclusion, and explore how people are building resilience following moments of algorithmic exclusion.

We examine how and why Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) moderators on Reddit shape the norms of their online communities through the analytic lens of emotional labor. We conduct interviews with 21 moderators who facilitate identity work discourse in AAPI subreddits and present a thematic analysis of their moderation practices. We report on their challenges to sustaining moderation, which include burning out from volunteer work, navigating hierarchical structures, and balancing unfulfilled expectations. We then describe strategies that moderators employ to manage emotional labor, which involve distancing away from drama, building solidarity from shared struggles, and integrating an ecology of tools for self-organized moderation. We provide recommendations for improving moderation in online communities centered around identity work and discuss implications of emotional labor in the design of Reddit and similar platforms.

The transition into motherhood is a complicated and often unsupported major life disruption. To alleviate mental health issues and to support identity re-negotiation, mothers are increasingly turning to online mothers' groups, particularly private and secret Facebook groups; these can provide a complex system of social, emotional, and practical support for new mothers. In this paper we present findings from an exploratory interview study of how new mothers create, find, use, and participate in ICTs, specifically online mothers' groups, to combat the lack of formal support systems by developing substitute networks. Utilizing a framework of critical infrastructures, we found that these online substitute networks were created by women, for women, in an effort to fill much needed social, political, and medical gaps that fail to see 'woman and mother' as a whole being, rather than simply as a 'discarded candy wrapper'. Our study contributes to the growing literature on ICT use by mothers for supporting and negotiating new identities, by illustrating how these infrastructures can be re-designed and appropriated in use, for critical utilization.

Online communities provide support for those who are vulnerable, such as LGBTQ people while coming out. Research shows that social support and personal narrative construction are important when recovering from personal crises and traumatic events. As an online community focused on writing fanfiction and also consisting of a large number of LGBTQ members, transformative fandom provides an opportunity to examine the relationship between support, crisis, and narrative. Through an interview study with 31 LGBTQ fanfiction authors, our findings mirror Herman's model of trauma recovery: these spaces self-organize to support recovery work through constructing "community narratives" that help LGBTQ people establish safety when exploring their identity and build LGBTQ support structures without publicly outing themselves before they are ready, challenge stereotypes, and support others through reshaping existing media that perpetuate inaccurate or harmful LGBTQ narratives. These online communities embody "selective visibility"--that is, though not specifically designed as support structures for identity work and recovery, their design allows people to selectively find and create communities of support for stigmatized issues that they might be unable to safely seek out in other spaces. Based on lessons learned, we generate insights that can inform the design of safe support spaces online.

Social Media platforms are increasingly being used for political activities and communication, and research suggests that social media design and use is contributing to the polarization of the public sphere. This study draws on Habermas' ideals concerning deliberative democracy to explore if novel interface designs that diversify information sources through content recommendation, can decrease polarization. Through a design-probe interview approach and insights generated from 19 political and citizen experts in Finland and the United States, we found that our deliberative design can lead to depolarization, while creating additional complexity through which users question content and information. We discuss the need to move beyond naive content recommendation, and user interface level changes, in order to work towards a depolarized public sphere.

Getting a divorce. Being diagnosed with a disease. Going through a relationship breakup. Living through a natural disaster. All of these events are often life disrupting and debilitating. While some disruptive events are short-lived, some can be a routine part of everyday life. This leads to the question of how people who experience prolonged disruption in their lives build resilience---that is, how do they manage and overcome such events? To explore this question, this paper utilizes a case study approach to explore the use, creation, and re-appropriation of technology across three prolonged disruptions-the Second Gulf War in Iraq, veteran transitions, and the coming out experiences of LGBTQ-identifying people. Using a conceptual frame that brings together routine dynamics and infrastructuring, we find that engaging in routine infrastructuring practices generated resilience in people's daily lives---a phenomenon we dub 'routine infrastructuring' as 'building everyday resilience with technology.' We then theorize properties of infrastructure and infrastructuring practice that enable resiliency, and conclude with how infrastructuring is a form of care work that is oriented towards individuals, communities, and society.

Social media platforms have often been described as online spaces supporting political discourse. However, online discussions are often polarized; people tend to commune with those who are ideologically similar to them. The HCI response to this phenomenon has been to purposefully expose people to diverse viewpoints. This common design agenda is supported through analysis of link sharing, yet little attention has been paid to how users discuss these links. Therefore, the common design agenda may not mitigate polarization. We study the emergent discourse in 10 Finnish migration-related Facebook groups and examine how the same links are shared and discussed across anti- and pro-migration camps. Qualitative analysis of the posts and comments revealed that shared media links do not bridge polarized groups with regard to worldviews and opinions. We then demonstrate alternative design opportunities to resolve this issue and begin to develop a new design agenda to mitigate polarization.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs) are perceived as the "model minority" with a monolithic identity, in contrast to other marginalized racial groups in the United States. In reality, they are composed of different ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, and political ideologies. AAPIs share their political views online, engaging in the public sphere through a collaborative process we coin, "identity work as deliberation." Using the 2016 US Presidential Election as a case study, we retrieved 4,406 Reddit comments posted between October 2016 to December 2016. We examine how users engage in an online community through a deliberation lens to understand the extent to which Reddit supports identity work as a deliberative process. Under the collective AAPI umbrella, we find that ethnic identifications complicate the types of discussion possible within r/asianamerican. We discuss how the expression of identity, and thereby solidarity, in a politicized online setting may lead to a social movement.

A community of DIY cyborgs has emerged, known as 'grinders', who practice techno-body modification-the embedding of computing technology into the body. This paper reports on an ethnographic study following GrinderTech, an organization working to design, build and sell these technological artifacts, as it shifts from hacker collective to biotech startup. As technologies are embedded in the body, the boundary between human and machine starts to blur. We find that GrinderTech members, through the design and making of technologies for embedding, do so as a means to move beyond social and gendered binary constructions-or, societal norms that are practiced and performed, and re-enforced through language, as a way of creating power differentials in society, e.g. citizen/scientist and man/woman. Moreover, their motivations for designing and making these devices reflects their desire to re-imagine society. Finally, we re-conceptualize Human-Computer Interaction to include Integration-when technology is embedded in the human body-and discuss the theoretical and design implications of human-computer integration.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) tools are used to increase social interaction in collocated settings. Recent research has been primarily constructive (oriented to building of systems) or phenomenon-driven (serving attempts to understand interactions in collocated CMC). The paper contributes a theory-driven approach and examines collocated CMC as a Habermasean "public sphere": a space that supports inclusive, civil, and rational discussion. An in-the-wild experimental study comparing CMC with face-to-face (F2F) communication enabled ascertaining that CMC is more inclusive than F2F communication. Respectfulness levels did not differ but were established differently: via collective construction of a common narrative in F2F and through quick reactions in CMC. Similarly, while rationality figures were on a par, F2F communication allowed participants to justify their claims better. The article discusses how a theory-based approach can strengthen phenomenon-driven research with new conceptual frames and measurement tools, and steer constructive research with a normative framework.

Research suggests that the disclosure of struggles and the connection with sympathetic others are critical during periods of transition. Whereas disclosure has been studied in various contexts, the disclosure strategies of USA (US) veterans transitioning back into civil society has not been explored. Through a qualitative study with 15 veterans re-integrating into civil society, we find that the culture of hyper-masculinity learned and performed during military service leads to challenges to disclosure, or non-disclosure, post-service, negatively impacting how military veterans navigate the transition back into civil society. We explore the disclosure issues and strategies of veterans in both offline and online contexts, finding that veterans used online platforms to navigate the challenges limiting disclosure and connect with supportive resources. We conclude by introducing the concept of delayed disclosure--when people postpone making their struggles known in transition--and provide implications for policy, design and future work to help veterans manage their transitions.

High context societies are defined by their strong interpersonal relationships, where upholding the shared values of the community, writ large, are of the utmost importance. That is, they prioritize collective identity over individual identity. Through a qualitative case study drawing from a set of 90 semi-structured interviews with Iraqi citizens who were living in Iraq during the 2nd Gulf War, we show how through ICT uses and appropriation, people shape, or influence, social complexities within high context societies. We found that people appropriated ICTs in a way such that they could "save face" and manage other people's impressions of themselves and, in turn, maintain a positive collective identity. We then explore the use and appropriation of ICTs for impression management in high context societies as a complex process-one that is both social and technical-introduce the notion of technological imperialism, and develop a model of face saving practices that takes collective identity into account.

A critical element for a successful transition is the ability to disclose, or make known, one's struggles. We explore the transition disclosure practices of Reserve Officers' Training Corps (ROTC) students who are transitioning from an individualistic culture to one that is highly collective. As ROTC students routinely evaluate their peers through a ranking system, the act of disclosure may impact a student's ability to secure limited opportunities within the military upon graduation. Through a qualitative interview study of active ROTC students (N=14) examining how they use information communication technologies (ICTs) to disclose their struggles in a hyper-competitive environment, we find they engage in a process of highly selective disclosure, choosing different groups with which to disclose based on the types of issues they face. We share implications for designing ICTs that better facilitate how ROTC students cope with personal challenges during their formative transition into the military.

Social support can significantly improve health outcomes for individuals living with disease, and online forums have emerged as an important vehicle for social support. Whereas research has focused on the delivery and use of social support, little is known about how these communities are sustained. We describe one sociotechnical mechanism that enables sustainable communities to provide social support to a large number of people. We focus upon thirteen disease-specific discussion forums hosted by the WebMD online health community. In these forums, small, densely connected cores of members who maintain strong relationships generate the majority of support for others. Through content analysis we find they provide informational support to a large number of more itinerant members, but provide one another with community support. Based on these observations, we describe a sociotechnical mechanism of online support that is distinct from non-support oriented communities, and has implications for the design of self-sustaining online support systems.

While studies of social movements have mostly examined prevalent public discourses, undercurrents' the backstage practices consisting of meaning-making processes, narratives, and situated work-have received less attention. Through a qualitative interview study with sixteen participants, we examine the role of social media in supporting the undercurrents of the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong. Interviews focused on an intense period of the movement exemplified by sit-in activities inspired by Occupy Wall Street in the USA. Whereas the use of Facebook for public discourse was similar to what has been reported in other studies, we found that an ecology of social media tools such as Facebook, WhatsApp, Telegram, and Google Docs mediated undercurrents that served to ground the public discourse of the movement. We discuss how the undercurrents sustained and developed public discourses in concrete ways.

This paper reports on a qualitative interview study of ICT use amongst a population undergoing transition following a life disruption. We interviewed 13 veterans who were re-integrating into civil society. Veterans are unique in that they experience several transitions at once-that is, after returning home, they often suffer from PTSD, become homeless, change occupations, etc. Amongst other things, veterans often undergo identity crises as caused by the lack of continuity between military and civilian social structures. We show how veterans are resilient through their uses of ICTs when navigating identity crises. We find that they use ICTs to develop identity awareness-that is, they connect with a human infrastructure through which they can develop a "big picture" understanding of unfamiliar rules and norms and receive support when navigating civil society. We discuss the implications of our study and identify implications for design.

Little is known about the challenges and successes people face when piecing together multiple social media to interact in the online public sphere when: seeking information, disseminating information, and engaging in political discussions. We interviewed 29 US citizens and conducted 17 talk-out-loud sessions with people who were using one or more social media technologies, such as Facebook and Twitter, to interact in the online public sphere. We identified a number of challenges and workarounds related to public sphere interactions, and used our findings to formulate requirements for new political environments that support the interactions in the public sphere. Through evolving requirements generation, we developed a new political deliberation technology, dubbed Poli, which is an integrated social media environment with the potential to enable more effective interactions in the public sphere. We discuss several remaining questions and limitations to our tool that will drive future work.

Little is known about why and how people use multiple social media platforms for political participation, or about the contexts through which social media is appropriated. This paper reports on a qualitative interview study of social media use by politically interested citizens. We interviewed 27 residents of the state of Hawaii who integrated one or more social media tools into their daily lives to participate in the online public sphere. Different social media environments offer both different affordances for action and different audiences, and we describe how media choice is driven by the match between motivations and affordances, and also by the imagined audience. We identified a number of motivations including understanding different viewpoints, formulating perspectives, engaging in positive discourse, repairing Hawaii's image, increasing political awareness and improving civic engagement. We discuss how these goals relate to both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations. Finally, we examine how social media choice and satisfaction were tied to the physical world context and people's sense of the audience within any particular medium.

Non-profit organizations (NPOs) are often resource-restricted and rely on volunteers to function. As such, their human infrastructure - the social system supporting work - is different from conventional organizations, and technologies that function in a traditional organization with a stable workforce may not work in NPOs. Through an investigation of the deployment of an Electronic Health Record (EHR) system in a safety-net free clinic serving underprivileged populations, we report how the EHR disrupted the human infrastructure - namely, the work typically enacted by volunteers. Specifically, there was a mismatch between the technological and human infrastructures leading to diminished volunteer roles, an increased workload for paid employees, and a negative impact on the quality of patient care. In turn, employees acted to reconcile the disrupted human infrastructure by creating new work roles for volunteers, re-establishing the quality of patient care, and developing workarounds for volunteers to resume their volunteer work. Finally we discuss how the commercial EHR system failed to support the fluid volunteer-based human infrastructure of the free clinic.

An increasing number of people are using microblogs to broadcast their thoughts in real time as they watch televised political events. Microblogging social network sites (SNSs) such as Twitter generate a parallel stream of information and opinion. It is presumed that the additional content enhances the viewing experience, but our experiment explores the validity of this assumption. We studied how tweeting, or passively observing Twitter during a debate, influenced affect, recall and vote decision. For most measures, participants' average feeling and recall toward the candidates did not depend on Twitter activity, but Twitter activity did matter for vote choice. People who actively tweeted changed their voting choice to reflect the majority sentiment on Twitter. Results are discussed in terms of the possibility that active tweeting leads to greater engagement but that it may also make people more susceptible to social influence.

This paper reports on a qualitative study of social media use for political deliberation by 21 U.S. citizens. In observing people's interactions in the "sprawling public sphere" across multiple social media tools in both political and non-political spaces, we found that social media supported the interactional dimensions of deliberative democracy--the interaction with media and the interaction between people. People used multiple tools through which they: were serendipitously exposed to diverse political information, constructed diverse information feeds, disseminated diverse information, and engaged in respectful and reasoned political discussions with diverse audiences. When people's civic agency was inhibited when using a tool, they often adopted, or switched to, alternative media that could afford what they were trying to achieve. Contrary to the polarization perspective, we find that people were purposefully seeking diverse information and discussants. Some individuals altered their views as a result of the interactions they were having in the online public sphere.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of Facebook use amongst a population living through ongoing disruption. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens, as well as received survey responses from 218 individuals, who have been experiencing the current Gulf War since March 2003. We show how people in a society experiencing conflict use Facebook in ways that are different to uses in non-war societies. We find that Facebook supports people living in crisis environments at two levels. First, Facebook aids people directly to recover from disruption. People used Facebook to create "safe lists", to seek help and provide assistance, and to re-construct their social scaffolding. But at a deeper level, citizens also used Facebook to maintain and develop new social norms, and to re-direct their country. We discuss how disruption can serve as an opportunity by which people can re-invent their societies and how our understandings of Facebook should evolve.

This paper reports on an ethnographic study of the technology-enabled behavior that took place amongst a citizen population living in a conflict zone. We interviewed 65 Iraqi citizens who experienced the current Gulf War beginning in March 2003. In the context of a disrupted environment, trust in people and institutions can erode. We find that trust is contextual-as aspects of the physical world change, conceptions of trust can also change. We show how people were able to create a context of trust in the environment by using ICTs to manage their public identity, to conduct background checks, and to develop collaborative practices that relied on those with whom interpersonal trust previously existed. These new practices, in turn, enabled people to maintain work collaborations, to determine whether or not to continue interacting with others in public, to be able to travel safely, and to find trustworthy jobs. In developing these new practices we argue that technology enabled people to restore a sense of normalcy in an environment that had radically changed.

When societies experience disruption as caused by natural disasters, various official government agencies, relief organizations, and emergent citizen groups engage in activities that aid in the recovery effort—the process that leads to the resumption of normal life. In war environments however, societal trust can be affected and people may develop distrust of the institutions and associated individuals that provide and resolve breakdowns in infrastructure. This article reports on an ethnographic study of the use of information and communication technologies (ICTs) by citizens experiencing ongoing disruption in a conflict zone. We conducted 90 semistructured interviews with Iraqi civilians who experienced the 2 nd Gulf War beginning in March 2003. We show how citizens used ICTs to continuously resolve breakdowns in infrastructure during ongoing disruption caused by the conflict, by creating new, reliable technology-mediated social arrangements that enabled people to maintain daily routines for travel, education, and obtaining information. We then discuss new ways to think about infrastructure and implications for the disaster relief effort.

The blogosphere is changing how people experience war and conflict. We conducted an analysis of 125 blogs written by Iraqi citizens experiencing extreme disruption in their country. We used Hoffman's [8] stages of recovery model to understand how blogs support people in a region where conflict is occurring. We found that blogs create a safe virtual environment where people could interact, free of the violence in the physical environment and of the strict social norms of their changing society in wartime. Second, blogs enable a large network of global support through their interactive and personal nature. Third, blogs enable people experiencing a conflict to engage in dialogue with people outside their borders to discuss their situation. We discuss how blogs enable people to collaboratively interpret conflict through communities of interest and discussion with those who comment. We discuss how technology can better support blog use in a global environment.

We argue that the disruption associated with war can help develop a deeper theoretical and practical understanding of how Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) enable people to repair practices in the work, social, and education spaces. We focus on how people leverage various ICTs in order to reconstitute their social world, which will allow us to develop new technologies to aid those who experience similar situations.

Citizen response to disaster has begun to receive attention in the CHI community but little attention has so far been given to how citizens use technology to adapt when their country is at war. We report on an ethnographic interview study of how technology was adopted and used by citizens to be resilient during wartime. We interviewed 45 Iraqi citizens experiencing the current Iraq war. Based on our data we identified properties of resilience: reconfiguring social networks, self-organization, redundancy, proactive practices, and repairing trust in information. Technology supported people in being resilient by enabling them to control identity, to collaborate in travel, to create an organizational memory, and to provide alternative sources of news and information. As people adopted and used technology to be resilient we found a merging of old and new cultural practices. We discuss these systemic changes and describe implications for how technology can support people in being resilient in disrupted environments.

In CSCW, there has been little or no attention given to how people use technology to restore collaborations when there is a major environmental disruption. We are especially interested in studying resilience in collaboration-the extent to which people continue to collaborate with work groups or to socialize despite prolonged disruption. We conducted an empirical study of people living in two countries that experienced prolonged disruption through war in their work and personal lives. We describe how technology played a major role in providing people with alternative resources to reconstruct, modify, and develop new routines, or patterns of action, for work and socializing. People created new assemblages of technological and physical resources. We discuss how the use of new resources in creating new routines led to more of a reliance on virtual work and in some cases to deeper structural changes.