Minitrack on Critical and Ethical Studies of Digital and Social Media

This minitrack hosts the best emerging scholarship from sociology, anthropology, communication, information studies, and science & technology studies addressing the most pressing critical and ethical concerns around DSM. Papers interrogate how DSM support existing power structures or realign power for marginalized groups, and illuminate the ethical issues in doing research with and on DSM. Papers explore new ways of thinking about information exchange in communities and societies, in periods of rapid sociotechnical change. The challenge for our field is, at the same time, to move analytically closer to the technology to divine the assumptions that animate it, and step back to recognize how DSM technologies and institutions exert influence over public participation, culture, and knowledge.