Alexander Cho - Default Publicness: Queer Youth of Color, Social Media, and Being Outed by the Machine

Abstract: Based on over five years of online and offline immersive ethnographic fieldwork, this talk explains why US queer youth of color regard Facebook as a dangerous space and why they prefer other social media such as Tumblr to express intimate feelings and articulate a collective politics that challenges white supremacy and heteronormativity. This fieldwork reveals that it is not unusual for queer youth of color to experience drastically negative consequences, including being disowned by one's family, because of a design bias toward "default publicness" that shapes user experience and algorithmic automation on social media such as Facebook. This talk identifies four design decisions that create "default publicness" on social media platforms, viewing these decisions through queer, feminist, and critical race theories that have argued that the "public" is never neutral terrain. Ultimately, it understands these design decisions as imperatives of "platform capitalism," which extracts robust and verifiable user data for monetization and monopoly rent, structuring these online spaces accordingly.

Alexander Cho is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Digital Media and Learning Hub at the University of California Humanities Research Institute, a Lecturer in the Department of Informatics at UC Irvine, and an affiliate of NYU's Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. He is a media anthropologist and design researcher who studies how people use digital and social media with a focus on issues of race, gender, and sexuality. His writing has appeared in New Media & Society, GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Networked Affect (MIT Press), Inequity in the Technopolis (University of Texas Press), and is forthcoming in Connected Learning: New Directions for Design, Research, and Practice (NYU Press), A Networked Self: Love (Routledge), and The Digital Edge (NYU Press). He is currently managing a major funded research project at UC Irvine that examines the inaugural roll-out of the first region-wide competitive high school Esports league in the US in as well as co-editing a multi-vocal academic/popular collection of writing about Tumblr and drafting a monograph about queer youth, affect, and social media ecosystems.