Gina Neff
Biographic Data
| ID | 250901 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gina Neff |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gina |
| FAMILY NAME | Neff |
| SIGNATURE | NEFF G |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Washington |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9090-924X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 388 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2004 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The quasi-domestication of social chatbots: The case of Replika
In this paper, we turn to the domestication theory to study what strategies users develop to appropriate social chatbots – dynamic algorithmic tools mimicking human interactions via large language models and scripted dialogue content. As an example, we use the case of Replika, a popular but controversial social chatbot designed to serve as companions, friends, and even romantic partners for millions of people. In 2023, Replika underwent a series …
Conjuring algorithms: Understanding the tech industry as stage magicians
In this article, we introduce the term “conjuration of algorithms” to describe how the tech industry uses the language of magic to shape people’s perceptions of algorithms. We use the image of the magician as a metaphor for how the tech industry strategically deploys narrative devices to present their algorithms. After presenting a brief history of the Western European and North American understanding of stage magic, we apply three principles of …
The challenge of repurposed technologies for youth: Understanding the unique affordances of digital self-tracking for adolescents
Adults’ digital self-tracking practices are relatively well studied, but these pre-existing models of digital self-tracking do not fit for how adolescents use these technologies. We apply the mechanisms-and-conditions framework of affordance theory to examine adolescents’ imagined affordances of self-tracking apps and devices. Based on qualitative data from an online survey of 16- to 18-year-olds in the United Kingdom, we find the following three…
Who does the work of data
This forum is dedicated to personal health in all its many facets: decision making, goal setting, celebration, discovery, reflection, and coordination, among others. We look at innovations in interactive technologies and how they help address current critical healthcare challenges. --- Yunan Chen, Editor
The gendered affordances of Craigslist “new-in-town girls wanted” ads
Sex-for-rent schemes have emerged on online sites as rental options. We analyzed 583 advertisements that were posted on Craigslist in London and Los Angeles and interviewed 34 women who were or had been in these arrangements. This research yielded four key tensions: (1) navigating innuendo (mis)interpretation versus preserving arranged ambiguity, (2) the guise of amateurism and romance versus persistent specificity, (3) calculated sacrifice versu…
Self-Tracking
What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data a…
Technologies for Sharing: Lessons from Quantified Self about the political economy of platforms
Quantified Self (QS) is a group that coordinates a global set of in-person meetings for sharing personal experiences and experiments with self-tracking behaviours, moods, and activities. Through participation in US-based QS events and watching online QS presentations from around the globe, we identify a function of ambiguous valuation for supporting sharing communities. Drawing on Stark's (2011 Stark, D. (2011). The sense of dissonance: Accounts …
Self-Tracking
People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they…
Surviving the New Economy
1. Myths and Realities about High-Tech Work in the New Economy-A Personal View 2. The Lure of Risk: Surviving and Welcoming Uncertainty in the New Economy 3. The New Economy as History 4. No Deal or New Deal? Knowledge Workers in the Information Economy 5. The Second Adolescence of the New Economy: China's Engineers At Work 6. Globalization and Labor Resistance to Restructuring in Information Technology 7. Boom and Bust: Lessons from the Informat…
Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory
In this essay, we reconstruct a keyword for communication-affordance. Affordance, adopted from ecological psychology, is now widely used in technology studies, yet the term lacks a clear definition. This is especially problematic for scholars grappling with how to theorize the relationship between technology and sociality for complex socio-technical systems such as machine-learning algorithms, pervasive computing, the Internet of Things, and othe…
Learning from documents: Applying new theories of materiality to journalism
This article briefly reviews theories of materiality emerging in communication technology studies and organizational communication and then suggests three ways that journalism scholars might apply these theories to studies of news production. How journalists work, how journalism is shaped within newsrooms, the ways the news industry is changing, and ultimately, the effects of digital transitions can all benefit from including a focus on the ‘obje…
What we talk about when we talk data: Valences and the social performance of multiple metrics in digital health
Data as a discursive concept in and around data-intensive health and wellness communities evokes multiple social values and social lives for data. Drawing on two years of qualitative, ethnographic observations, participation, and interviews in these communities, our work explores the gap between discourses of data, the practices with and around data, and the contexts in which data "live." Across the communities of technology designers, "e-health"…
The Social Matrix of the Emergent Web: Governance, Exchange, Participation, & Engagement
Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries
Why employees of pioneering Internet companies chose to invest their time, energy, hopes, and human capital in start-up ventures. In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks—left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be cr…
A Case Study of the Failure of Digital Communication to Cross Knowledge Boundaries in Virtual Construction
When can digital artefacts serve to bridge knowledge barriers across epistemic communities? There have been many studies of the roles new information and communication technologies play within organizations. In our study, we compare digital and non-digital methods of inter-organizational collaboration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on three construction projects and interviews with 65 architects, engineers, and builders across the USA, we find …
The Changing Place of Cultural Production: The Location of Social Networks in a Digital Media Industry
This article examines the role of place and placemaking within cultural industries in the digital era. The data for this article are drawn from a data set of attendance at more than nine hundred social networking events over a six-year period in New York City’s Internet, or “new media,” industry. These data confirm that place became more,not less,important to cultural production over this period. Networking, or the processes of the formation of s…
Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: Cool" Jobs in "Hot" Industries
This article compares the work of fashion models and "new media workers" (those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet as dot-com workers) in order to highlight the processes of entrepreneurial labor in culture industries. Based on interviews and participant-observation in New York City, we trace how entrepreneurial labor becomes intertwined with work identities in cultural industries both on and off the job. While workers are draw…
How Do Organizations Matter? Mobilization and Support for Participants at Five Globalization Protests
A key challenge to understanding the eruption of globalization protest since the late 1990s is the lack of data on the protesters themselves. Although scholars have focused increasingly on these large protest events and the transnational social movements that play a role organizing them, information about the protesters remains scant. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data collected from a random sample of protesters at five global…
Sous la culture des fondations
Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: Cool" Jobs in "Hot" Industries
This article compares the work of fashion models and "new media workers" (those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet as dot-com workers) in order to highlight the processes of entrepreneurial labor in culture industries. Based on interviews and participant-observation in New York City, we trace how entrepreneurial labor becomes intertwined with work identities in cultural industries both on and off the job. While workers are draw…
Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory
In this essay, we reconstruct a keyword for communication-affordance. Affordance, adopted from ecological psychology, is now widely used in technology studies, yet the term lacks a clear definition. This is especially problematic for scholars grappling with how to theorize the relationship between technology and sociality for complex socio-technical systems such as machine-learning algorithms, pervasive computing, the Internet of Things, and othe…
The Changing Place of Cultural Production: The Location of Social Networks in a Digital Media Industry
This article examines the role of place and placemaking within cultural industries in the digital era. The data for this article are drawn from a data set of attendance at more than nine hundred social networking events over a six-year period in New York City’s Internet, or “new media,” industry. These data confirm that place became more,not less,important to cultural production over this period. Networking, or the processes of the formation of s…
How Do Organizations Matter? Mobilization and Support for Participants at Five Globalization Protests
A key challenge to understanding the eruption of globalization protest since the late 1990s is the lack of data on the protesters themselves. Although scholars have focused increasingly on these large protest events and the transnational social movements that play a role organizing them, information about the protesters remains scant. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data collected from a random sample of protesters at five global…
The gendered affordances of Craigslist “new-in-town girls wanted” ads
Sex-for-rent schemes have emerged on online sites as rental options. We analyzed 583 advertisements that were posted on Craigslist in London and Los Angeles and interviewed 34 women who were or had been in these arrangements. This research yielded four key tensions: (1) navigating innuendo (mis)interpretation versus preserving arranged ambiguity, (2) the guise of amateurism and romance versus persistent specificity, (3) calculated sacrifice versu…
Learning from documents: Applying new theories of materiality to journalism
This article briefly reviews theories of materiality emerging in communication technology studies and organizational communication and then suggests three ways that journalism scholars might apply these theories to studies of news production. How journalists work, how journalism is shaped within newsrooms, the ways the news industry is changing, and ultimately, the effects of digital transitions can all benefit from including a focus on the ‘obje…
What we talk about when we talk data: Valences and the social performance of multiple metrics in digital health
Data as a discursive concept in and around data-intensive health and wellness communities evokes multiple social values and social lives for data. Drawing on two years of qualitative, ethnographic observations, participation, and interviews in these communities, our work explores the gap between discourses of data, the practices with and around data, and the contexts in which data "live." Across the communities of technology designers, "e-health"…
The challenge of repurposed technologies for youth: Understanding the unique affordances of digital self-tracking for adolescents
Adults’ digital self-tracking practices are relatively well studied, but these pre-existing models of digital self-tracking do not fit for how adolescents use these technologies. We apply the mechanisms-and-conditions framework of affordance theory to examine adolescents’ imagined affordances of self-tracking apps and devices. Based on qualitative data from an online survey of 16- to 18-year-olds in the United Kingdom, we find the following three…
Conjuring algorithms: Understanding the tech industry as stage magicians
In this article, we introduce the term “conjuration of algorithms” to describe how the tech industry uses the language of magic to shape people’s perceptions of algorithms. We use the image of the magician as a metaphor for how the tech industry strategically deploys narrative devices to present their algorithms. After presenting a brief history of the Western European and North American understanding of stage magic, we apply three principles of …
Sous la culture des fondations
The Changing Place of Cultural Production: The Location of Social Networks in a Digital Media Industry
This article examines the role of place and placemaking within cultural industries in the digital era. The data for this article are drawn from a data set of attendance at more than nine hundred social networking events over a six-year period in New York City’s Internet, or “new media,” industry. These data confirm that place became more,not less,important to cultural production over this period. Networking, or the processes of the formation of s…
Entrepreneurial Labor among Cultural Producers: Cool" Jobs in "Hot" Industries
This article compares the work of fashion models and "new media workers" (those who work in the relatively new medium of the Internet as dot-com workers) in order to highlight the processes of entrepreneurial labor in culture industries. Based on interviews and participant-observation in New York City, we trace how entrepreneurial labor becomes intertwined with work identities in cultural industries both on and off the job. While workers are draw…
How Do Organizations Matter? Mobilization and Support for Participants at Five Globalization Protests
A key challenge to understanding the eruption of globalization protest since the late 1990s is the lack of data on the protesters themselves. Although scholars have focused increasingly on these large protest events and the transnational social movements that play a role organizing them, information about the protesters remains scant. We address this research gap by analyzing survey data collected from a random sample of protesters at five global…
A Case Study of the Failure of Digital Communication to Cross Knowledge Boundaries in Virtual Construction
When can digital artefacts serve to bridge knowledge barriers across epistemic communities? There have been many studies of the roles new information and communication technologies play within organizations. In our study, we compare digital and non-digital methods of inter-organizational collaboration. Based on ethnographic fieldwork on three construction projects and interviews with 65 architects, engineers, and builders across the USA, we find …
The Social Matrix of the Emergent Web: Governance, Exchange, Participation, & Engagement
Venture Labor: Work and the Burden of Risk in Innovative Industries
Why employees of pioneering Internet companies chose to invest their time, energy, hopes, and human capital in start-up ventures. In the dot-com boom of the late 1990s, employees of Internet startups took risks—left well-paying jobs for the chance of striking it rich through stock options (only to end up unemployed a year later), relocated to areas that were epicenters of a booming industry (that shortly went bust), chose the opportunity to be cr…
What we talk about when we talk data: Valences and the social performance of multiple metrics in digital health
Data as a discursive concept in and around data-intensive health and wellness communities evokes multiple social values and social lives for data. Drawing on two years of qualitative, ethnographic observations, participation, and interviews in these communities, our work explores the gap between discourses of data, the practices with and around data, and the contexts in which data "live." Across the communities of technology designers, "e-health"…
Learning from documents: Applying new theories of materiality to journalism
This article briefly reviews theories of materiality emerging in communication technology studies and organizational communication and then suggests three ways that journalism scholars might apply these theories to studies of news production. How journalists work, how journalism is shaped within newsrooms, the ways the news industry is changing, and ultimately, the effects of digital transitions can all benefit from including a focus on the ‘obje…
Surviving the New Economy
1. Myths and Realities about High-Tech Work in the New Economy-A Personal View 2. The Lure of Risk: Surviving and Welcoming Uncertainty in the New Economy 3. The New Economy as History 4. No Deal or New Deal? Knowledge Workers in the Information Economy 5. The Second Adolescence of the New Economy: China's Engineers At Work 6. Globalization and Labor Resistance to Restructuring in Information Technology 7. Boom and Bust: Lessons from the Informat…
Imagined Affordance: Reconstructing a Keyword for Communication Theory
In this essay, we reconstruct a keyword for communication-affordance. Affordance, adopted from ecological psychology, is now widely used in technology studies, yet the term lacks a clear definition. This is especially problematic for scholars grappling with how to theorize the relationship between technology and sociality for complex socio-technical systems such as machine-learning algorithms, pervasive computing, the Internet of Things, and othe…
Self-Tracking
What happens when people turn their everyday experience into data: an introduction to the essential ideas and key challenges of self-tracking. People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data a…
Technologies for Sharing: Lessons from Quantified Self about the political economy of platforms
Quantified Self (QS) is a group that coordinates a global set of in-person meetings for sharing personal experiences and experiments with self-tracking behaviours, moods, and activities. Through participation in US-based QS events and watching online QS presentations from around the globe, we identify a function of ambiguous valuation for supporting sharing communities. Drawing on Stark's (2011 Stark, D. (2011). The sense of dissonance: Accounts …
Self-Tracking
People keep track. In the eighteenth century, Benjamin Franklin kept charts of time spent and virtues lived up to. Today, people use technology to self-track: hours slept, steps taken, calories consumed, medications administered. Ninety million wearable sensors were shipped in 2014 to help us gather data about our lives. This book examines how people record, analyze, and reflect on this data, looking at the tools they use and the communities they…
The gendered affordances of Craigslist “new-in-town girls wanted” ads
Sex-for-rent schemes have emerged on online sites as rental options. We analyzed 583 advertisements that were posted on Craigslist in London and Los Angeles and interviewed 34 women who were or had been in these arrangements. This research yielded four key tensions: (1) navigating innuendo (mis)interpretation versus preserving arranged ambiguity, (2) the guise of amateurism and romance versus persistent specificity, (3) calculated sacrifice versu…
Who does the work of data
This forum is dedicated to personal health in all its many facets: decision making, goal setting, celebration, discovery, reflection, and coordination, among others. We look at innovations in interactive technologies and how they help address current critical healthcare challenges. --- Yunan Chen, Editor
The challenge of repurposed technologies for youth: Understanding the unique affordances of digital self-tracking for adolescents
Adults’ digital self-tracking practices are relatively well studied, but these pre-existing models of digital self-tracking do not fit for how adolescents use these technologies. We apply the mechanisms-and-conditions framework of affordance theory to examine adolescents’ imagined affordances of self-tracking apps and devices. Based on qualitative data from an online survey of 16- to 18-year-olds in the United Kingdom, we find the following three…
Conjuring algorithms: Understanding the tech industry as stage magicians
In this article, we introduce the term “conjuration of algorithms” to describe how the tech industry uses the language of magic to shape people’s perceptions of algorithms. We use the image of the magician as a metaphor for how the tech industry strategically deploys narrative devices to present their algorithms. After presenting a brief history of the Western European and North American understanding of stage magic, we apply three principles of …
The quasi-domestication of social chatbots: The case of Replika
In this paper, we turn to the domestication theory to study what strategies users develop to appropriate social chatbots – dynamic algorithmic tools mimicking human interactions via large language models and scripted dialogue content. As an example, we use the case of Replika, a popular but controversial social chatbot designed to serve as companions, friends, and even romantic partners for millions of people. In 2023, Replika underwent a series …
Political science (12 works) · Computer Science (10 works) · Sociology (10 works) · Psychology (7 works) · Business (5 works) · Economics (5 works) · Information Systems Theories and Implementation (5 works) · Public relations (5 works) · Data science (4 works) · Engineering (4 works)