College of Information Studies

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From Oversharing to Sharenting: How Experts Govern Parents and Their Social Media Use
(2021) Kumar, Priya; Vitak, Jessica; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
A newborn swaddled in a parent’s arms. A kindergartner posing on the first day of school. Such images, commonly found in family photo collections, now regularly appear on social media. At the same time, public discourse asks if—or sometimes asserts that—posting images online might put children’s privacy, dignity, and autonomy at risk. Prior research has documented the pressure, scrutiny, and judgment that parents, especially mothers, endure. It seems that parents’ use of social media is yet another cause for concern. How did this happen? This dissertation examines how power, manifesting as expertise, works through three fields of discourse to govern parents’ social media conduct. Grounding this project in post-structuralist epistemology, I study this question using the analytical technique of governmentality, which is a means of tracing how authorities intervene in the lives of individuals. First, I illustrate how a specific site of social media expertise, the once-popular blog STFU, Parents, constructs the problem of “oversharing” as a form of inappropriate social media use. Second, I explain, how news media expertise constructs the problem of “sharenting,” a portmanteau of the words “share” and “parenting,” as a form of risk to children. Third, I discern how academic expertise obliges parents to govern their own social media conduct by appealing to their subjectivity. In each field of discourse, I observe how expertise frames parents’ social media conduct as a matter of individual responsibility, even though much of what happens to information online lies outside individual control. I use this analysis to suggest future directions for research on social media and privacy that goes beyond the gendered public/private boundary and engages with the world as a site of entangled relations rather than individual entities.
Strengthening Children’s Privacy Literacy through Contextual Integrity
(Cogitatio, 2020-11-10) Kumar, Priya C.; Subramaniam, Mega; Vitak, Jessica; Clegg, Tamara L.; Chetty, Marshini
Researchers and policymakers advocate teaching children about digital privacy, but privacy literacy has not been theorized for children. Drawing on interviews with 30 families, including 40 children, we analyze children’s perspectives on password management in three contexts—family life, friendship, and education—and develop a new approach to privacy literacy grounded in Nissenbaum’s contextual integrity framework. Contextual integrity equates privacy with appropriate flows of information, and we show how children’s perceptions of the appropriateness of disclosing a password varied across contexts. We explain why privacy literacy should focus on norms rather than rules and discuss how adults can use learning moments to strengthen children’s privacy literacy. We argue that equipping children to make privacy-related decisions serves them better than instructing them to follow privacy-related rules.
ENABLING GEOGRAPHICALLY DISTRIBUTED, INTERGENERATIONAL, CO-OPERATIVE DESIGN
(2012) Walsh, Gregory; Druin, Allison; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)
As more children's technologies are designed to be used with a global audience, new technologies need to be created to include more children's voices in the design process. However, working with those who that are geographically distributed as design partners is difficult because existing technologies do not support this process, do not enable distributed design, or are not child-friendly. In this dissertation, I take a research-through-design approach to develop an online environment that enables geographically distributed, intergenerational co-operative design. I began my research with participant-observations of in-person, co-located intergeneration co-operative design sessions that used Cooperative Inquiry techniques at the University of Maryland. I then analyzed those observations, determined a framework that occurs during in-person design sessions and developed a prototype online design environment based on that scaffolding. With the initial prototype deployed to a geographic distributed, intergenerational co-design team, I employed Cooperative Inquiry to design new children's technologies with children. I iteratively developed the prototype environment over eight weeks to better support geographically distributed co-design. Adults and children participated in these design sessions and there was no significant difference between the children and adults in the number of design sessions in which they chose to participate. After the design research on the prototype was complete, I interviewed the child participants who were in the online intergenerational design team to better understand their experiences. During the interviews, I found that the child participants had strong expectations of social interaction within the online design environment and were frustrated by the lack of seeing other participants online at the same time. In order to alleviate this problem, five of the participants involved their families in some way in the design process and created small, remote intergenerational design teams to compensate for the perceived shortcomings of the online environment. I compared Online Kidsteam with in-person Kidsteam to evaluate if the online environment was successful in supporting geographically-distributed, intergeneration co-design. I found that although it was not the same in terms of the social aspects of in-person Kidsteam, it was successful in its ability to include more people in the design process.

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