Gifting Technologies Ethnographic Studies of End-users and Social Media Sharing

Sammanfattning: This thesis explores what dimensions that can be used to describe and compare the sociotechnical practice of content contribution in online sharing networks. Data was collected through online ethnographical methods, focusing on end-users in three large media sharing networks. The method includes forum message elicitation, online interviews, and application use and observation. Gift-giving was used as an applied theoretical framework and the data was analyzed by theory-informed thematic analysis. The results of the analysis recount four interrelated themes: what kind of content is given; to whom is it given; how is it given; and why is it given? The five papers in this thesis covers the four themes accordingly: Paper I presents the research area and proposes some initial gifting dimensions that are developed over the following papers. Paper II proposes a model for identifying conflicts of interest that arise for end-users when considering different types of potential receivers. Paper III presents five analytical dimensions for representing how online content is given. The dimensions are: direction (private-public); identification (anonymous-identified); initiative (active-passive); incentive (voluntary-enforced); and limitation (open-restricted). Paper IV investigates photosharing practices and reveals how social metadata, attached to media objects, are included in sharing practices. The final paper further explores how end-users draw on social metadata to communicate bonding intentions when gifting media content. A general methodological contribution is the utilization of sociotechnical conflicts as units of analysis. These conflicts prove helpful in predicting, postulating and researching end-user innovation and conflict coordination. It is suggested that the conflicts also provide potent ways for interaction design and systems development to take end-user concerns and intentions on board.