Mobile games are becoming a vital medium for social interaction, offering a platform that transcends geographical boundaries. An increasing number of visually impaired individuals are engaging in mobile gaming to connect, collaborate, compete, and build friendships. In China, visually impaired communities face significant social challenges in offline settings, making mobile games a crucial avenue for socialization. However, the design of mobile games and their mapping to real-world environments significantly shape their social gaming experiences. This study explores how visually impaired players in China navigate socialization and integrate into gaming communities. Through interviews with 30 visually impaired players, we found that while mobile games fulfill many of their social needs, technological barriers and insufficient accessibility features, and internal community divisions present significant challenges to their participation. This research sheds light on their social experiences and offers insights for designing more inclusive and accessible mobile games.
Positive social interactions can occur in groups of many shapes and sizes, spanning from small and private to large and open. However, social media tends to binarize our experiences into either isolated small groups or into large public squares. In this paper, we introduce Burst, a social media design that allows users to share and curate content between many spaces of varied size and composition. Users initially post content to small trusted groups, who can then burst that content, routing it to the groups that would be the best audience. We instantiate this approach into a mobile phone application, and demonstrate through a ten-day field study (N=36) that Burst enabled a participatory curation culture. With this work, we aim to articulate potential new design directions for social media sharing.
Human social networks are inherently multiplex, comprising overlapping layers of relationships. Different layers may have distinct structural properties and interpersonal dynamics, but also may interact to form complex interdependent pathways for social contagion. This poses a fundamental problem in understanding behavioral diffusion and in devising effective network-based interventions. Here, we introduce a new conceptualization of how much each network layer contributes to critical contagion pathways and quantify it using a novel metric, network torque. We exploit data regarding sociocentric maps of 110 rural Honduran communities using a battery of 11 name generators and an experiment involving an exogenous intervention. Using a novel statistical framework, we assess the extent to which specific network layers alter global connectivity and support the spread of three experimentally introduced health practices. The results show that specific relationship types - such as close friendships - particularly enable non-overlapping diffusion pathways, amplifying behavioral change at the village level. For instance, non-redundant pathways enabled by closest friends can increase the adoption of correct knowledge about feeding newborns inappropriate chupones and enhance attitudes regarding fathers' involvement in postpartum care. Non-overlapping multiplex social ties are relevant to social contagion and social coherence in traditionally organized social systems.
Social physics is the application of ideas, concepts and tools from physics to study social phenomena. In this article, we present a mechanical theory underlying a mathematical treatment of social physics. We explore the possibility of using fundamental concepts like position, motion, inertia, and interaction, to effectively regard social phenomena analogously to particles interacting with each other in physics. From these concepts, along with heuristics of social change, we investigate the notions of free motion, motion under the influence of a net deterministic, as well as stochastic force. To test these ideas we model partisan preferences in the United States according to the outcomes of presidential elections.
For å bygge opp og utvikle den norske oljeindustrien gjennom 1970-årene, var Norge helt avhengig av petroleumsdykkere. Dykkerne utførte grensesprengende arbeid på oppdrag for petroleumsindustrien ute i havet og ved bygging av store betonginstallasjoner i norske fjorder. I 1967 slo norske myndigheter fast at dykkevirksomheten skulle foregå under regulerte former og at dykkernes sikkerhet og helbred skulle ivaretas. Myndighetene satte krav om at dykkeoperasjoner skulle godkjennes av myndighetene før de kunne igangsettes. I praksis skjedde ikke dette. Dykkere forteller at alt var tillatt og opp til selskapene. Petroleumsdykkere jobbet på stadig større dybder ut fra industriens behov. Det ble eksperimentert med dykketabeller og gassblandinger ble tilpasset og prøvd ut. Store arbeidsanstrengelser ble utført på lange arbeidsøkter, langt vekk fra myndighetenes kontroll. Ute i havet levde gjerne dykkerne tett på hverandre over lengre perioder og som regel hadde de arbeidskontrakter av kortere varighet. Det var ikke kultur for å si fra om ugreie forhold, noe som ble sett på som svakhet, og veien var kort til å bli avskiltet som dykker. I dette arbeidsmiljøet utviklet det seg et unikt og tett arbeidskollektiv som var preget av kameratskap og omsorg i arbeidssituasjonen. Uten at arbeidskulturen framsto som myk, var det å ta vare på seg selv og arbeidskollegaen helt nødvendig og det beste sikkerhetskortet da myndighetene sviktet med å gi dykkerne et tilstrekkelig arbeidsvern.
Socialism. Communism. Anarchism, Economic history and conditions
K. V. Yupatova, O. A. Malafeyev, V. S. Lipatnikov
et al.
The study discusses the main features which affect the IT companies valuation on the example of social networks. The relevance of the chosen topic is due to the fact that people live in the information age now, and information technologies surround us everywhere. Because of this, social networks have become very popular. They assist people to communicate with each other despite of the time and distance. Social networks are also companies that operate in order to generate income therefore their owners need to know how promising and profitable their business is. The social networks differ from traditional companies in this case the purpose of the research is determining the features of social networks that affect the accuracy and adequacy of the results of company valuation. The paper reviews the definitions of information technology, social networks, history, types of social networks, distinguishing features based on domestic and foreign literature. There are analyzed methods of assessing the value of Internet companies, their characteristics and methods of application. There is the six social networks evaluation was assessed in the practical part of the study: Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Snapchat, Sina Weibo and Vkontakte on the basis of the literature studied and the methods for evaluating the Internet companies which recommended in it, including the method of discounting the cash flow of the company as part of the income approach and the multiplier method as part of a comparative approach. Based on the analysis, the features that affect the social networks valuation are identified.
En este trabajo se realiza una cartografía de la producción intelectual marxista (tanto la producida dentro y fuera de las organizaciones políticas, como dentro y fuera del mundo académico) en la Argentina, en el período comprendido entre el retorno de la democracia, en 1983, y 2020.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
En este artículo se describe y analiza, desde la mirada de delegados gremiales de fábricas con prácticas del sindicalismo de base (PepsiCo, Praxair y Frigorífico Rioplatense) de la zona norte del conurbano bonaerense, el impacto en las relaciones laborales que tuvo la llegada al gobierno de Mauricio Macri y la alianza Cambiemos, las políticas desarrolladas por las patronales y las respuestas de las y los trabajadores organizados en esos lugares de trabajo.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Zexun Chen, Sean Kelty, Brooke Foucault Welles
et al.
Social structures influence a variety of human behaviors including mobility patterns, but the extent to which one individual's movements can predict another's remains an open question. Further, latent information about an individual's mobility can be present in the mobility patterns of both social and non-social ties, a distinction that has not yet been addressed. Here we develop a "colocation" network to distinguish the mobility patterns of an ego's social ties from those of non-social colocators, individuals not socially connected to the ego but who nevertheless arrive at a location at the same time as the ego. We apply entropy and predictability measures to analyse and bound the predictive information of an individual's mobility pattern and the flow of that information from their top social ties and from their non-social colocators. While social ties generically provide more information than non-social colocators, we find that significant information is present in the aggregation of non-social colocators: 3-7 colocators can provide as much predictive information as the top social tie, and colocators can replace up to 85% of the predictive information about an ego, compared with social ties that can replace up to 94% of the ego's predictability. The presence of predictive information among non-social colocators raises privacy concerns: given the increasing availability of real-time mobility traces from smartphones, individuals sharing data may be providing actionable information not just about their own movements but the movements of others whose data are absent, both known and unknown individuals.
Anna Bleakley, Daniel Rough, Justin Edwards
et al.
Video conferencing systems have long facilitated work-related conversations among remote teams. However, social distancing due to the COVID-19 pandemic has forced colleagues to use video conferencing platforms to additionally fulfil social needs. Social talk, or informal talk, is an important workplace practice that is used to build and maintain bonds in everyday interactions among colleagues. Currently, there is a limited understanding of how video conferencing facilitates multiparty social interactions among colleagues. In our paper, we examine social talk practices during the COVID-19 pandemic among remote colleagues through semi-structured interviews. We uncovered three key themes in our interviews, discussing 1) the changing purposes and opportunities afforded by using video conferencing for social talk with colleagues, 2) how the nature of existing relationships and status of colleagues influences social conversations and 3) the challenges and changing conversational norms around politeness and etiquette when using video conferencing to hold social conversations. We discuss these results in relation to the impact that video conferencing tools have on remote social talk between colleagues and outline design and best practice considerations for multiparty videoconferencing social talk in the workplace.
Socialism is back, and with it comes a renewed interest in Marx’s critique of capitalism. After the 2008 financial crash, international book sales of Capital exploded for the first time in decades. In a world of rising income inequality, right-wing nationalisms, and global climate change, people are looking to the father of modern socialism for answers. This book has been written to help those returning to Marx get answers to their pressing questions about the nature of wealth, ecological crisis, gender inequality, colonialism, migration, and the possibility of socialism. This book also offers readers a new perspective on several major ideas in Marx’s work. It argues that Marx, contrary to conventional wisdom, did not think history was deterministic or that reality could be reduced to classical materialism. Marx was not an anthropocentric humanist, nor did he have a labor theory of value. The unique contribution of this book is that it begins with Marx’s earliest and most neglected book on ancient naturalism in order to show its lasting methodological effect on his “process materialism,” defined by the primacy of motion. This “kinetic Marxism” offers a new way to reread Capital that bears directly on a number of contemporary issues. This also makes Marx in Motion the first book to offer a new materialist reading of Marx. The result is a fresh new view on the important theories of primitive accumulation, metabolism, value, fetishism, dialectics, and the possibility of a kinetic communism for the twenty-first century.
Este texto recorre los elementos fundamentales de la Teoría de la Reproducción Social en tanto apuesta por un feminismo marxista contemporáneo. Comienza por la definición de qué es la reproducción social bajo el capitalismo y se adentra luego en los debates sobre las relaciones entre producción y reproducción, cuál es el rol que juega la familia, cómo pensar la sexualidad y los derechos reproductivos y cómo pueden ser leídos los procesos de desposesión neoliberal en clave de la reproducción social. Estos tópicos están desarrollados en diálogo con otras tradiciones de la teoría feminista como el materialismo francés, la interseccionalidad, la apuesta por “los comunes” y el autonomismo.
1789-, Labor in politics. Political activity of the working class
Bertrand Jayles, Clément Sire, Ralf H. J. M Kurvers
The recent developments of social networks and recommender systems have dramatically increased the amount of social information shared in human communities, challenging the human ability to process it. As a result, sharing aggregated forms of social information is becoming increasingly popular. However, it is unknown whether sharing aggregated information improves people's judgments more than sharing the full available information. Here, we compare the performance of groups in estimation tasks when social information is fully shared versus when it is first averaged and then shared. We find that improvements in estimation accuracy are comparable in both cases. However, our results reveal important differences in subjects' behaviour: (i) subjects follow the social information more when receiving an average than when receiving all estimates, and this effect increases with the number of estimates underlying the average; (ii) subjects follow the social information more when it is higher than their personal estimate than when it is lower. This effect is stronger when receiving all estimates than when receiving an average. We introduce a model that sheds light on these effects, and confirms their importance for explaining improvements in estimation accuracy in all treatments.
Social network data are relational data recorded among a group of actors, interacting in different contexts. Often, the same set of actors can be characterized by multiple social relations, captured by a multidimensional network. A common situation is that of colleagues working in the same institution, whose social interactions can be defined on professional and personal levels. In addition, individuals in a network tend to interact more frequently with similar others, naturally creating communities. Latent space models for network data are useful to recover clustering of the actors, as they allow to represent similarities between them by their positions and relative distances in an interpretable low dimensional social space. We propose the infinite latent position cluster model for multidimensional network data, which enables model-based clustering of actors interacting across multiple social dimensions. The model is based on a Bayesian nonparametric framework, that allows to perform automatic inference on the clustering allocations, the number of clusters, and the latent social space. The method is tested on simulated data experiments, and it is employed to investigate the presence of communities in two multidimensional networks recording relationships of different types among colleagues.
Kelly Mack, Danielle Bragg, Meredith Ringel Morris
et al.
Social media platforms support the sharing of written text, video, and audio. All of these formats may be inaccessible to people who are deaf or hard of hearing (DHH), particularly those who primarily communicate via sign language, people who we call Deaf signers. We study how Deaf signers engage with social platforms, focusing on how they share content and the barriers they face. We employ a mixed-methods approach involving seven in-depth interviews and a survey of a larger population (n = 60). We find that Deaf signers share the most in written English, despite their desire to share in sign language. We further identify key areas of difficulty in consuming content (e.g., lack of captions for spoken content in videos) and producing content (e.g., captioning signed videos, signing into a phone camera) on social media platforms. Our results both provide novel insights into social media use by Deaf signers and reinforce prior findings on DHH communication more generally, while revealing potential ways to make social media platforms more accessible to Deaf signers.