Quantified Self (QS) is a group that coordinates a global set of in-person meetings for sharing personal experiences and experiments with self-tracking behaviors, moods, and activities. Through participation in U.S.-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) theory of heterarchy we argue that the social and technical platforms supporting sharing within the QS community allow for multiple, sometimes conflicting, sets of community and commercial values. Community cohesion benefits from ambiguity over which values set is most important to QS members. Ambiguity is promoted by sharing practices through at least two means, the narrative structure of members' presentations, and what counts as tracking. By encouraging members to adhere to a three-question outline, the community ensures multiple values are always present. Thus it becomes a question of which values this sharing community emphasizes, not which values sets members present, at any given time. By leaving the tools and methods of tracking open-from sophisticated wearables and data analysis to pen-and-paper and storytelling-the community creates space for and embraces selftrackers with a broad spectrum of technological proficiency and interest. QS as a group capitalizes on circulation of knowledge valued somewhat ambiguously to sustain and grow the community, both encouraging and supporting the commercialization of self-tracking technologies while keeping technology developer interests from overwhelming communitybuilding interests. This, we argue, has implications for researchers hoping to understand online communities and the "sharing economy" more generally.
Authenticity, generally regarded as coherence between one's inner self and outward behavior, is associated with myriad social values (e.g., integrity) and beneficial outcomes, such as psychological well-being. Scholarship suggests, however, that behaving authentically online is complicated by self-presentation norms that make it difficult to present a complex self as well as encourage sharing positive emotions and facets of self and discourage sharing difficult emotions. In this paper, we position authenticity as a self-presentation norm and identify the sociomaterial factors that contribute to the learning, enactment, and enforcement of authenticity on the short-video sharing platform TikTok. We draw on interviews with 15 U.S. TikTok users to argue that normative authenticity and understanding of TikTok as a "fun" platform are mutually constitutive in supporting a "just be you" attitude on TikTok that in turn normalizes expressions of both positive and difficult emotions and experiences. We consider the social context of TikTok and use an affordance lens to identify anonymity, of oneself and one's audience; association between content and the "For You" landing page; and video modality of TikTok as factors informing authenticity as a self-presentation norm. We argue that these factors similarly contribute to TikTok's viability as a space for social support exchange and address the utility of the comments section as a site for both supportive communication and norm judgment and enforcement. We conclude by considering the limitations of authenticity as social norm and present implications for designing online spaces for social support and connection.CCS Concepts: • Human-centered computing → Collaborative and social computing; Empirical studies in collaborative and social computing
The Internet and social media afford opportunities for relational maintenance, but most scholarship has focused on relational maintenance in high-trust environments. This study explores relational maintenance online and offline in a distrustful society. In distrustful societies, trust is situated within one's particularized kin network, and friendships have strategic significance and are characterized by norms of reciprocity. In distrustful societies, relational maintenance behaviors are different from trustful societies and take on greater significance. This preliminary study, based on informant interviews in Azerbaijan, examines both offline relational maintenance and the affordances of social networking sites (SNSs) for relational maintenance in such an environment. SNSs do provide for some relational maintenance behaviors through supplementing offline behaviors at a low cost and give some additional benefits like status display, yet SNSs do not replace traditional relational maintenance behaviors in Azerbaijan.
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