How do people in a precarious profession leverage technology to grow their business and improve their quality of life? Sex workers sit at the intersection of multiple marginalized identities and make up a sizeable workforce: the United Nations estimates that at least 42 million sex workers are conducting business across the globe. Yet, little research has examined how well technology fulfills sex workers’ business needs in the face of unique social, political, legal, and safety constraints.

Hundreds of millions of people learn something new online every day. Simultaneously, the study of online education has blossomed within the human computer interaction community, with new systems, experiments, and observations creating and exploring previously undiscovered online learning environments. In this study we endeavor to characterize this entire landscape of online learning experiences using a national survey of 2260 US adults who are balanced to match the demographics of the U.S. We examine the online learning resources that they consult, and we analyze the subjects that they pursue using those resources. Furthermore, we compare both formal and informal online learning experiences on a larger scale than has ever been done before, to our knowledge, to better understand which subjects people are seeking for intensive study. We find that there is a core set of online learning experiences that are central to other experiences and these are shared among the majority of people who learn online. We conclude by showing how looking outside of these core online learning experiences can reveal opportunities for innovation in online education.

As research relies on data traces about people's online behavior, it is important to take a step back and ask: who uses the systems where these traces appear? This talk will discuss online participation from a digital-inequality perspective showing how differences in online behavior vary by socio-demographic characteristics as well as people's Internet skills. The presentation breaks down the various steps necessary for engagement - the pipeline of online participation - and shows that different factors explain different parts of the pipeline with skills mattering at all stages. Drawing on several data sets, the talk explores whose traces are most likely to show up on various systems and what this means for potential biases in what researchers draw from analyzing digital trace data.

Given the ever-rising frequency of malware attacks and other problems leading people to lose their files, backups are an important proactive protective behavior in which users can engage. Backing up files can prevent emotional and financial losses and improve overall user experience. Yet, we find that less than half of young adults perform mobile or computer backups regularly. To understand why, we model the factors that drive mobile and computer backup behavior, and changes in that behavior over time, using data from a panel survey of 384 diverse young adults. We develop a set of models that explain 37% and 38% of the variance in reported mobile and computer backup behaviors, respectively. These models show consistent relationships between Internet skills and backup frequency on both mobile and computer devices. We find that this relationship holds longitudinally: increases in Internet skills lead to increased frequency of computer backups. This article provides a foundation for understanding what drives young adults’ backup behavior. It concludes with recommendations for motivating people to back up, and for future work, modeling similar user behaviors.

When users post on social network sites, they can engage in audience-reaching strategies, in an effort to reach desired audience members, as well as audience-limiting strategies, in an effort to avoid unwanted audience members. While much research has focused on users' audience-limiting strategies, little research has explicitly focused on users' audience-reaching strategies. Additionally, little work has explored either strategy at the post level. Using mixed methods involving a diary study and follow-up interviews focused on a diverse group of users' posts, this article reveals several audience-reaching strategies users engaged from altering their content to tagging. However, users in this study rarely used strategies to exclude people proactively and technologically outside of their targeted audiences, and instead broadcasted widely. Participants described several rationales for sharing broadly from skill-related issues to a reliance on the audience or site to filter the content.

Abstract Finding information on the Web can be a much more complex search process than previously experienced on many pre‐Web information retrieval systems given that finding content online does not have to happen via a search algorithm typed into a search field. Rather, the Web allows for a myriad of search strategies. Although there are numerous studies of Web search techniques, these studies often limit their focus to just one part of the search process and are not based on the behavior of the general user population, nor do they include information about the users. To remedy these shortcomings, this project looks at how people find information online in the context of their other media use, their general Internet use patterns, in addition to using information about their demographic background and social support networks. This article describes the methodology in detail, and suggests that a mix of survey instruments and in‐person observations can yield the type of rich data set that is necessary to understand in depth the differences in people's information retrieval behavior online.