At CHI (and not at CHI)

I’m really excited that I’ll have two papers being presented this week at CHI.

The first is a study exploring both the prevalence of, and motivations for, not using Facebook.

Baumer, E.P.S., Adams, P., Khovanskya, V., Liao, T., Smith, M.E., Sosik, V.S., Williams, K. (2013). Limiting, Leaving, and (re)Lapsing: A Survey of Facebook Non-use Practices and Experiences. in ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). (Paris, France).

The second represents a portion of an honors thesis I supervised.

Khovanskaya, V., Baumer, E.P.S., Cosley, D., Voida, S., and Gay, G.K. (2013). “Everybody Knows What You’re Doing”: A Critical Design Approach to Personal Informatics. in ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). (Paris, France).

While you’ll find my papers in Paris this week, you won’t find me. For personal reasons, I decided not to attend CHI this year, so both of these will be presented by my fantastic co-authors. For those who are interested, I’ve written a short blurb about this decision, which was difficult to say the least.

I’d still love to hear from anyone who’s interested in chatting about either of these papers–feel free to drop me a note.

Limiting, Leaving, and (re)Lapsing: A Survey of Facebook Non-use Practices and Experiences

Status

Eric P. S. Baumer, Phil Adams, Vera Khovanskya, Tony Liao, Madeline E. Smith, Victoria Schwanda Sosik, Kaiton Williams. (2013). Limiting, Leaving, and (re)Lapsing: A Survey of Facebook Non-use Practices and Experiences. in ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI). (Paris, France). [20% acceptance rate]

Abstract

Despite the abundance of research on social networking sites, relatively little research has studied those who choose not to use such sites. This paper presents results from a questionnaire of over 400 Internet users, focusing specifically on Facebook and those users who have left the service. Results show the lack of a clear, binary distinction between use and non-use, that various practices enable diverse ways and degrees of engagement with and disengagement from Facebook. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals numerous complex and interrelated motivations and justifications, both for leaving and for maintaining some type of connection. These motivations include: privacy, data misuse, productivity, banality, addiction, and external pressures. These results not only contribute to our understanding of online sociality by examining this under-explored area, but they also build on previous work to help advance how we conceptually account for the sociological processes of non-use.

ACM | pdf

Data

A full description of the questionnaire instrument and anonymized response data can be found here.