Discussion Section and Readings

Section Weekly Requirements

• Do the weekly reading. Readings can be found for each week’s section in Canvas.
• Submit a "Two Paragraphs and a Pitch" reading response in response to the reading.
  • The response is due by Wed 11:59pm into Gradescope.
  • An outline for a good response is:
    • Paragraph 1: Summary of the reading and the core explanation or idea they are trying to convey.
    • Paragraph 2: Your reaction to the reading, connecting the topic to an example you see in the current platforms or social networks you interact with. The more specific, the better!
    • Pitch: A sentence or two describing a topic to discuss in section in reaction to this reading.
• Show up to all sections. We take attendance, and showing up late may result in partial attendance credit.
• As sections require working with your team members, it is not possible to make up sections. However, each student is granted one excused absence from section.

Participation is scored on active participation and memo completion.

Dropped or late responses

You may drop one week's reading response at your discretion during the quarter, with no grade penalty. Late responses will receive 10% off and must be submitted by Thursday 11:59pm.

If you have taken CS 347...

If you have taken CS 347, you may have already read some of these articles. It is fine to skim those papers to remind yourself of them, and write your responses off of that, rather than re-reading the articles from scratch. If you would like to stretch yourself, we recommend reading one of the Optional Readings for that week instead and submitting your Two Paragraphs and a Pitch based on that instead: just note in your submission that you already read the article for CS 347 (or another class) and opted for this alternate instead.

Week 1

No sections: sections and readings begin in Week 2. Make sure to sign up for a section.

Week 2

• Chen, Andrew. 2022. The Cold Start Problem, Harper Business. Chapters 4-7.
  • In this reading, Andrew Chen lays out his approach for starting social applications and bootstrapping them through the cold start problem. Which of his techniques do you most agree with? Which don't you buy?
• Optional readings (no responses for these):
• Goffman, Erving. 1978. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Chapter 6, “The Arts of Impression Management.” (pp. 132-151). London: Harmondsworth.
• Lieberson, Stanley. 2000. A Matter of Taste: How Names, Fashions, and Culture Change, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Chapter 6.
• Salganik et al. 2006. “Experimental Study of Inequality and Unpredictability in an Artificial Cultural Market” Science
• Alexander, Christopher. 1977. A Pattern Language.
• Rajadesingan, Ashwin, Paul Resnick, and Ceran Budak. 2020. “Quick, Community-Specific Learning: How Distinctive Toxicity Norms are Maintained in Political Subreddits.

Week 3

• Phan, Christine Xuan. “Fizz: A Case Study in Social Media Growth.” McCoy Center for Ethics in Society, Stanford University. 2024.
• In this case study, Phan details the rise of Fizz on college campuses and the design challenges it faces amidst this growth. How does a social platform survive massive growth? What design changes would you propose to Fizz, considering the dynamics of anonymity?
• Optional readings (no responses for these):
  • Arvind Narayanan. 2023. Understanding Social Media Recommendation Algorithms. Knight Foundation.
  • Halfaker, Aaron, et al. "The rise and decline of an open collaboration system: How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline." American Behavioral Scientist 57.5 (2013): 664-688.
  • Discord Bans WallStreetBets as Subreddit

Week 4

• Kraut, Robert, and Moira Burke. "Internet use and psychological well-being: Effects of activity and audience." Communications of the ACM 58.12 (2015): 94-100.
• In this article, Kraut and Burke dig into the age-old question of whether the internet makes you lonely. The answer depends strongly on who you use it to interact with: your strong ties or your weak ties. What do you think of this result? What implications might it have for how we design social media?
• Optional readings (no responses for these):
  • Rajkumar, Karthik, et al. "A causal test of the strength of weak ties." Science 377.6612 (2022): 1304-1310.
  • Granovetter, Mark. 1973. “The Strength of Weak Ties.” The American Journal of Sociology 78(6):1360-1380.
  • Gilbert, Eric, and Karrie Karahalios. "Predicting tie strength with social media." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2009.
  • Burke, Moira, and Robert E. Kraut. "Growing closer on Facebook: Changes in tie strength through social network site use." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on human factors in computing systems. 2014.

Week 5

• Hollan, Jim and Scott Stornetta. 1992. “Beyond Being There.” ACM CHI: Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems.
  • If you have already read “Beyond Being There” for CS 347, you are welcome to instead read this for something new: Amy X. Zhang, Michael S. Bernstein, David R. Karger, and Mark S. Ackerman. 2024. Form-From: A Design Space of Social Media Systems. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 8, CSCW1, Article 167 (April 2024), 47 pages.
  • In this reading, Jim Hollan and Scott Stornetta point out that, when we connect with others remotely, the focus is all too often on recreating a sense of “being there.” But is this the wrong question to ask? Instead of replicating physical presence, should we instead focus on going “beyond being there” — designing virtual environments that lean into, rather than attempt to erase, the features of interacting online? Though this paper was written in 1992, today’s pandemic-era world serves only to reaffirm the relevance of Hollan and Stornetta’s message. Indeed, this foundational reading sets the stage for how to think about social computing systems throughout our course. How many of Hollan and Stornetta’s ideas have appeared in contemporary social computing systems? In what ways have their predictions proven true, and in what ways might they be surprised? As you consider your final project in this course, how might you design systems that go “beyond being there?”
• Optional readings (no responses for these):
  • Grudin, Jonathan. 1994. Groupware and Social Dynamics: Eight Challenges for Developers. Communications of the ACM, 37(1), pp. 92-105.
  • Olsen, Gary M. and Judith S. Olsen. 2000. “Distance Matters.” Human-Computer Interaction 15:139-178.
  • Bjorn et al. 2014. “Does Distance Still Matter? Revisiting the CSCW Fundamentals on Distributed Collaboration.” Proceedings of the ACM: CSCW 21(5):27.
  • Hinds, Pamela J. and Diane E, Bailey. 2003. “Out of Sight, Out of Sync: Understanding Conflict in Distributed Teams.” Organization Science 14(6):615-632.

Week 6

• Surowiecki, J. (2005). The Wisdom of Crowds: Why the many are smarter than the few and how collective wisdom shapes business, economies, societies and nations little. New York: Doubleday. (Chapter 1).
• In this chapter, James Surowiecki makes the case for crowds as surprisingly wise, when they are scaffolded correctly. What do you feel are the situations where this can be applied in practice, but it's not today?
• Optional readings (no responses for these):
  • Benkler, Yochai. "Coase's Penguin, or, Linux and ‘The Nature of the Firm.’" Yale Law Journal (2002): 369-446.
  • Allen, Jennifer, et al. "Scaling up fact-checking using the wisdom of crowds." Science advances 7.36 (2021): eabf4393.
  • Little, Greg, et al. "Turkit: human computation algorithms on mechanical turk." Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 2010.
  • Bernstein, Michael S., et al. "Soylent: a word processor with a crowd inside." Proceedings of the 23nd annual ACM symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 2010.
  • Shaw, Aaron, and Benjamin M. Hill. "Laboratories Of Oligarchy? How The Iron Law Extends To Peer Production." Journal Of Communication 64.2 (2014): 215-238.
  • Benkler, Yochai, Aaron Shaw, And Benjamin Mako Hill. "Peer Production: A Form Of Collective Intelligence." Handbook Of Collective Intelligence 175 (2015).

Week 7

Assignment 3 and Project Milestone are both going on this week, so all readings are optional. There is no reading response due.

Section time will be used for exam prep and post-milestone check-ins.

• Optional readings (no responses for these):
• Chapter 1 from: Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, content moderation, and the hidden decisions that shape social media. Yale University Press, 2018.
• In the introductory chapter to this book, Tarleton Gillespie lays out the design and normative challenges of content moderation in social media. Have there been content moderation approaches that you've experienced in the past that felt particularly effective or ineffective?
• Pay attention to the content warning: “The Trauma Floor: the Secret Lives of Facebook moderators in America,” by Casey Newton. The Verge, published online Feb. 25, 2019.
• Alternate reading for those minding the content warning: “Inside the making of Facebook’s Supreme Court,” by Kate Klonick. The New Yorker, published February 12, 2021.
• Hochschild, Arlie Russell. 1983 [2003]. The Managed Heart. Chapter 1, “Exploring the Managed Heart.” (pp. 132-151). Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.
• Halevy, Alon, Christian Canton-Ferrer, Hao Ma, Umut Ozertem, Patrick Pantel, Marzieh Saeidi, Fabrizio Silvestri, and Ves Stoyanov. 2020. “Preserving Integrity in Online Social Networks.” ArXiv. Facebook AI.
• Lynch, Kimery S. 2020. “Fans as Transcultural Gatekeepers: The Hierarchy of BTS’ Anglophone Reddit Fandom and the Digital East- West Media Flow.”
• Pennycock, Gordon, Adam Bear, Evan T. Collins, and David G. Rand. 2019. “The Implied Truth Effect: Attaching Warnings to a Subset of Fake News Headlines Increases Perceived Accuracy of Headlines Without Warnings.” Management Science.
• Pennycock, Gordon, Ziv Epstein, Mohsen Moselh, Antonio A. Arechar, Dean Eckles, and David G. Rand. 2021. “Shifting attention to accuracy can reduce misinformation online.” Nature. Vol 592.

Week 8

Exam week, no sections or reading responses.

Week 9

• Reeves, Byron, and Clifford Nass. The media equation: How people treat computers, television, and new media like real people. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge university press, 1996. Chapter 2.
• Only Chapter 2 is on Canvas, but feel free to get this book and read more -- it’s great! How do Reeves and Nass's arguments hold up to you today? Do you buy their proposed mechanism, that we engage social reactions to nonsocial artifacts like computers automatically and without reflection?
• Optional readings (no responses for these):
• Gordon, Mitchell L., et al. "Jury learning: Integrating dissenting voices into machine learning models." Proceedings of the 2022 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2022.
• Zhang, Amy X., Grant Hugh, and Michael S. Bernstein. "PolicyKit: Building Governance in Online Communities." Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology. 2020.