Christian Sandvig
Biographic Data
| ID | 315809 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Christian Sandvig |
| GIVEN NAMES | Christian |
| FAMILY NAME | Sandvig |
| SIGNATURE | SANDVIG C |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9025-536X |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 335 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 11 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2001 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2016 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
First I "like" it, then I hide it: Folk Theories of Social Feeds
Many online platforms use curation algorithms that are opaque to the user. Recent work suggests that discovering a filtering algorithm's existence in a curated feed influences user experience, but it remains unclear how users reason about the operation of these algorithms. In this qualitative laboratory study, researchers interviewed a diverse, non-probability sample of 40 Facebook users before, during, and after being presented alternative displ…
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure st…
Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online
Behind-the-scenes stories of how Internet research projects actually get done. The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected…
"I always assumed that I wasn't really that close to [her]": Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds
Our daily digital life is full of algorithmically selected content such as social media feeds, recommendations and personalized search results. These algorithms have great power to shape users' experiences, yet users are often unaware of their presence. Whether it is useful to give users insight into these algorithms' existence or functionality and how such insight might affect their experience are open questions. To address them, we conducted a …
The Social Industry
Historical mass media and contemporary social media are typically seen as opposites. 'The culture industry' was the term used by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s to explain the emerging commercial mass media. The culture industry was portrayed as a semi-fascist apparatus of indoctrination. It selected cultural products and made them popular based on obscure determinations of economic value. In contrast, the common view of contemporary social med…
The Network in the Garden: Designing Social Media for Rural Life
History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet little is known about how rural communities use modern technologies, which therefore results in a collective lack knowledge about how to design for rural life. To address this gap, the present empirical article investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. With a data set collected from a broadly popular so…
Software Defaults as De Facto Regulation the Case of the Wireless Internet
Today's internet presumes that individuals are capable of configuring software to address issues such as spam, security, indecent content, and privacy. This assumption is worrying - common sense and empirical evidence state that not everyone is so interested or so skilled. When regulatory decisions are left to individuals, for the unskilled the default settings are the law. This article relies on evidence from the deployment of wireless routers a…
US communication policy after convergence
The laws and policies that govern communication in the US have evolved over time to treat different media with distinct doctrines. The press, the post, broadcasting and the telephone each abide by different rules, defining who can build and operate the underlying communication systems, who can use them, along what patterns, to convey what information. As these regimes evolved, they adjusted to reflect social, political, economic and technological…
The Internet at Play: Child Users of Public Internet Connections
This article reports an ethnographic study of a subsidized computer center for children in an inner-city library. Unsurprisingly, young children play with the Internet. Surprisingly, this creates conflict with the justifications given for such centers by adults and public policy, leading to an atmosphere of tension between differing understandings of the Internet's purpose: as a place for ritual and play vs. as a place for the transmission of inf…
Disorderly infrastructure and the role of government
Public Internet Access for Young Children in the Inner City: Evidence to Inform Access Subsidy and Content Regulation
Significant U.S. policy initiatives in the late 1990s were intended to control Internet access, privacy, and indecency--specifically among children. This study reflects on these using quantitative data from a computer center in a children's library in the inner city. Researchers gathered 16 weeks of page requests ( n = 203,647) using "click stream" and behavioral data, and analyzed these using nonparametric tests. Findings show that users are hig…
Attention to Counter-Attitudinal Messages in a State Election Campaign
Research following the "selective exposure" model has focused on avoidance of political messages with which a person might disagree. But positive attention to such "counter-attitudinal" messages is worthy of study, in part because normative theories of democracy value exposure to information that might disturb citizens' political predispositions. Surveys of youth (N = 417) and parents (N = 430) examine attention to newspaper, television, and Web …
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure st…
Attention to Counter-Attitudinal Messages in a State Election Campaign
Research following the "selective exposure" model has focused on avoidance of political messages with which a person might disagree. But positive attention to such "counter-attitudinal" messages is worthy of study, in part because normative theories of democracy value exposure to information that might disturb citizens' political predispositions. Surveys of youth (N = 417) and parents (N = 430) examine attention to newspaper, television, and Web …
US communication policy after convergence
The laws and policies that govern communication in the US have evolved over time to treat different media with distinct doctrines. The press, the post, broadcasting and the telephone each abide by different rules, defining who can build and operate the underlying communication systems, who can use them, along what patterns, to convey what information. As these regimes evolved, they adjusted to reflect social, political, economic and technological…
The Internet at Play: Child Users of Public Internet Connections
This article reports an ethnographic study of a subsidized computer center for children in an inner-city library. Unsurprisingly, young children play with the Internet. Surprisingly, this creates conflict with the justifications given for such centers by adults and public policy, leading to an atmosphere of tension between differing understandings of the Internet's purpose: as a place for ritual and play vs. as a place for the transmission of inf…
The Network in the Garden: Designing Social Media for Rural Life
History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet little is known about how rural communities use modern technologies, which therefore results in a collective lack knowledge about how to design for rural life. To address this gap, the present empirical article investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. With a data set collected from a broadly popular so…
Disorderly infrastructure and the role of government
Attention to Counter-Attitudinal Messages in a State Election Campaign
Research following the "selective exposure" model has focused on avoidance of political messages with which a person might disagree. But positive attention to such "counter-attitudinal" messages is worthy of study, in part because normative theories of democracy value exposure to information that might disturb citizens' political predispositions. Surveys of youth (N = 417) and parents (N = 430) examine attention to newspaper, television, and Web …
Public Internet Access for Young Children in the Inner City: Evidence to Inform Access Subsidy and Content Regulation
Significant U.S. policy initiatives in the late 1990s were intended to control Internet access, privacy, and indecency--specifically among children. This study reflects on these using quantitative data from a computer center in a children's library in the inner city. Researchers gathered 16 weeks of page requests ( n = 203,647) using "click stream" and behavioral data, and analyzed these using nonparametric tests. Findings show that users are hig…
The Internet at Play: Child Users of Public Internet Connections
This article reports an ethnographic study of a subsidized computer center for children in an inner-city library. Unsurprisingly, young children play with the Internet. Surprisingly, this creates conflict with the justifications given for such centers by adults and public policy, leading to an atmosphere of tension between differing understandings of the Internet's purpose: as a place for ritual and play vs. as a place for the transmission of inf…
Disorderly infrastructure and the role of government
Software Defaults as De Facto Regulation the Case of the Wireless Internet
Today's internet presumes that individuals are capable of configuring software to address issues such as spam, security, indecent content, and privacy. This assumption is worrying - common sense and empirical evidence state that not everyone is so interested or so skilled. When regulatory decisions are left to individuals, for the unskilled the default settings are the law. This article relies on evidence from the deployment of wireless routers a…
US communication policy after convergence
The laws and policies that govern communication in the US have evolved over time to treat different media with distinct doctrines. The press, the post, broadcasting and the telephone each abide by different rules, defining who can build and operate the underlying communication systems, who can use them, along what patterns, to convey what information. As these regimes evolved, they adjusted to reflect social, political, economic and technological…
The Network in the Garden: Designing Social Media for Rural Life
History repeatedly demonstrates that rural communities have unique technological needs. Yet little is known about how rural communities use modern technologies, which therefore results in a collective lack knowledge about how to design for rural life. To address this gap, the present empirical article investigates behavioral differences between more than 3,000 rural and urban social media users. With a data set collected from a broadly popular so…
Digital Research Confidential: The Secrets of Studying Behavior Online
Behind-the-scenes stories of how Internet research projects actually get done. The realm of the digital offers both new methods of research and new objects of study. Because the digital environment for scholarship is constantly evolving, researchers must sometimes improvise, change their plans, and adapt. These details are often left out of research write-ups, leaving newcomers to the field frustrated when their approaches do not work as expected…
"I always assumed that I wasn't really that close to [her]": Reasoning about Invisible Algorithms in News Feeds
Our daily digital life is full of algorithmically selected content such as social media feeds, recommendations and personalized search results. These algorithms have great power to shape users' experiences, yet users are often unaware of their presence. Whether it is useful to give users insight into these algorithms' existence or functionality and how such insight might affect their experience are open questions. To address them, we conducted a …
The Social Industry
Historical mass media and contemporary social media are typically seen as opposites. 'The culture industry' was the term used by the Frankfurt School in the 1940s to explain the emerging commercial mass media. The culture industry was portrayed as a semi-fascist apparatus of indoctrination. It selected cultural products and made them popular based on obscure determinations of economic value. In contrast, the common view of contemporary social med…
First I "like" it, then I hide it: Folk Theories of Social Feeds
Many online platforms use curation algorithms that are opaque to the user. Recent work suggests that discovering a filtering algorithm's existence in a curated feed influences user experience, but it remains unclear how users reason about the operation of these algorithms. In this qualitative laboratory study, researchers interviewed a diverse, non-probability sample of 40 Facebook users before, during, and after being presented alternative displ…
Infrastructure studies meet platform studies in the age of Google and Facebook
Two theoretical approaches have recently emerged to characterize new digital objects of study in the media landscape: infrastructure studies and platform studies. Despite their separate origins and different features, we demonstrate in this article how the cross-articulation of these two perspectives improves our understanding of current digital media. We use case studies of the Open Web, Facebook, and Google to demonstrate that infrastructure st…
Computer Science (11 works) · World Wide Web (8 works) · Political science (7 works) · Social Media and Politics (7 works) · Sociology (7 works) · Internet privacy (6 works) · Law (5 works) · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection (4 works) · Social media (4 works) · The Internet (4 works)