Paper:
Dimond, J. P., Dye, M., Larose, D., & Bruckman, A. S. (2013). Hollaback!: The Role of Storytelling Online in a Social Movement Organization. In Proceedings of the 2013 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (pp. 477–490). New York, NY, USA: ACM.
Discussion Leader: Lee Lisle
Summary:
Various forms of social media have been able to assist social mobilization movements with events such as the Arab Spring to rating system for Mechanical Turk employers with Turkopticon. In particular, these platforms have allowed for people to find and help other people facing similar struggles or harassments. Hollaback is an organization that brings together victims of street harassment to share their stories and promote awareness. The main platform for their organization is a website, but they have further used mobile technologies to enhance their reach.
After some discussion on various background topics, the authors discussed their semi-structured interviews with 13 users of the platform. Each interview lasted between 30 and 90 minutes and asked users to recount the story they shared on Hollaback, along with their motivations and feelings after they shared their story. The authors then analyzed the interviews using grounded theory to find how people using the platform are affected by the presence and use of the platform. They then continue on to evaluate how sharing stories can help other “genres” of communities.
Reflections:
I found this paper to be a fairly interesting take on how storytelling can assist with the creation of online communities. In particular, I found their sections on previous works to be the best part of the paper, since it was so rich in providing context for the rest of their paper.
I also found it interesting that the authors brought up “slacktivism” in the paper. While they never used the term again, the authors presented details (with quotes!) on how the work of Hollaback (and storytelling communities in general) was not slacktivism despite the relatively low requirements on users. To be more specific (and to not diminish the role of these users), the people in the community don’t need to put in extreme time commitments or go to any joint location in order to “rally” or perform more traditional forms of activism. In addition, the users seemed to be allowed to be as anonymous as they desire to be in their stories, which can lower the requirements and make them feel more at ease.
I also thought the “Researcher Self Disclosure and Reflexivity” section was an interesting addition that I had not considered before this paper. Understanding one’s own bias and discussing it is something I haven’t seen in many papers. However, I do question if this practice can reduce bias, both from the reader and the author. In this spirit, I will also disclose that I am a fan of storytelling and grounded theory and was before I read (and volunteered to lead discussion on) this paper.
One issue I had with the paper was that over half of the participants were students, while the issue at hand had no specific relation to students. Furthermore, while I recognize that this issue is not a U.S. specific issue, having less than 10% of participants be from other countries seemed like an odd choice for the interviews. The authors did not establish that the culture of the UK is not sufficiently distinct from US culture, and this should have been one of the selection criteria for participants.
Questions:
- Do you think that this form of storytelling is “slacktivism?”
- Beyond the two examples in this paper, what are other forms of Frame transformation and extension in social movements?
- Does the shift from the researcher being a “friendly outsider” to an active participant change the way people should respond to this paper? Furthermore, how does the self-disclosure section impact this?
- In the discussion I raised issues with 2 different selection criteria for participants. What do you think are appropriate selection criteria for interviewing participants for this kind of study?
- Last class we discussed the pros and cons of anonymity, and it appears in this paper as well. How would you compare and contrast the ways anonymity helps with this paper and the 4chan paper?
