Culture, Identity, and Inclusion
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Item "Digital Sanctums of Empowerment": Exploring Community and Everyday Resilience Building Tactics in Online Professional Communities for Women(2023-01-03) Sengupta, Subhasree; Tacheva, ZhasminaWork and learning are essential facets of our existence, yet women have and may continue to face multiple restrictions that hinder and impede their professional outcomes. These restrictions are especially pronounced in the technical domains of Information technology and Computer science. This paper explores the power of informal online communities to act as collective shields of care in the context of professional development, especially for women. Using a mixed-methods comparative investigation of 400,268 conversational traces from three professional development communities on Reddit, we report resilience and communal empathy-building tactics, as well as calls for inclusivity and belongingness, which drive the collective identity of these online channels. The long-term goal of this work is to address the way in which such channels can be designed and curated to offer spaces for enrichment, empowerment, and advocacy with a focus on the professional development of women, especially those engaged in technical domains.Item "Hey Beautiful"; Race and Gender on Tinder(2023-01-03) Chwe, Hanyu; Williams, Apryl; Robertson, RonaldDespite the popularity and societal relevance of online dating, an absence of available data has made it difficult to understand how people meet and interact online. The few studies that do exist have largely failed to focus on women of color, despite broad consensus that online dating spaces are particularly toxic and unwelcoming for those users. To study such experiences, we created synthetic Tinder profiles featuring a racially diverse set of female stock photo models to see how they fared in the Tinder ecosystem. Profiles featuring White women received more matches and slightly more messages, but all profiles received similar message content. We discuss the implications of our results and limitations of our approach.Item Introduction to the Minitrack on Culture, Identity, and Inclusion(2023-01-03) Cogburn, Derrick; Levinson, Nanette; Trevisan, FilippoItem Anonymous Expression in an Online Community for Women in China(2023-01-03) Zhou, Zhixuan; Wang, Zixin; Zimmer, FranziskaGender issues faced by women can range from workplace harassment to domestic violence. While publicly disclosing these issues on social media can be hard, some may incline to express themselves anonymously. We approached such an anonymous female community on Chinese social media where discussion on gender issues takes place with a qualitative content analysis. By observing anonymous experiences contributed by female users and made publicly available by an influencer, we identified 20 issues commonly discussed, with cheating-partner, controlling parents and age anxiety taking the lead. By describing the anonymously expressed social challenges faced by women in China, in the context of Chinese cultures and expectations about gender, we aim to motivate more policies and platform designs to accommodate the needs of the affected population.Item Smartphone Addiction and Cultural Dimensions(2023-01-03) Moqbel, Murad; Bartelt, Valerie; Alam, Maliha; Shaik, Abdul Younus; Montoya, Sevilla; Larson, MeganSmartphone addiction is causing severe damage to individuals and societies alike. Previous studies have mainly focused on the effects of smartphone addiction, but they hardly focused on the cultural aspects leading to addiction. This study attempts to fill this void by shedding light on how Hofstede's four cultural dimensions, including 1) individualism-collectivism, 2) masculinity-femininity, 3) power distance, and 4) uncertainty avoidance, affect individuals' smartphone addictive behavior through the lens of attachment and coping theories. We offer suggestions for future research and practical implications based on these findings.Item "I am no number": Humanizing Digital Identities(2023-01-03) Rychwalska, AgnieszkaGrowing interest in decentralized web has brought into focus the need to furnish decentralized digital identities that could uproot the dominant centralized solutions, such as single logins provided by social media platforms. However, these multiple efforts to put the end user in the center of identity management rarely relate to individuals’ psychological needs related to identity enactment and construction, diminishing their chances for widespread adoption. This paper proposes a network formalization of identity theories that incorporates the specifics of identity processes online. From this model, two general, architectural principles for decentralized digital identities are drawn that might guide future work in this area.Item The Impact of Social Movement on Racial Diversification Initiatives: Evidence From the Movie Industry(2023-01-03) Lin, Yu-Wei; Yang, Shiyu; Han, WencuiThe movie industry is facing rising advocacy for racially inclusive casting. However, it remains an open question whether the promised benefits of racial diversification will materialize. Using data from 540 movies nested in 258 sequels released from 2008 to 2021, we find that, on average, increasing the number of racial minority actors in the main cast depresses movie evaluations. More importantly, the negative effect of racial diversification attenuates after Black Lives Matter (#BLM), a new media enabled social movement. Further, incorporating insights from tokenism and discrimination theories, we probe the heterogeneity in the bias mitigation effects of #BLM and find movie type and the core production team’s credentials as important boundary conditions. The present research shows that a social movement that seeks to address racial inequality can, indeed, lead to meaningful changes in public opinions toward racial inclusive initiatives. It also provides perspectives for thinking about the mechanisms underlying such changes.Item Governance in Social Media Platforms of Minority Organizations(2023-01-03) Rahrovani, YasserSocial media platforms can offer a sense of social inclusion and equitable access to information for minority groups, including minority immigrants to Western countries. However, even as they empower minority community-based organizations (CBOs) to assist their members, these platforms can also create conditions for further exclusion and inequity if they are too exclusive (i.e., drift towards segregation) or too inclusive (i.e., drift towards dilution). This paper aims to extend prior platform governance research to understand how to govern minority CBO platforms featuring both minority and non-minority members in a way that maintains a balance between segregation and dilution, the two paradoxical forces of drifting. By adopting a longitudinal, grounded-theory study of three social media platforms in a minority CBO (one segregated, one balanced, and one diluted), I identify three categories of governing practices (ajar gatekeeping, opportunity manipulating, and output harmonizing), which maintain platform balance against segregational or dilutional drifting.