Michael Zimmer.org

I few years ago I presented a paper at the “Countours of Privacy: Social, Psychological and Normative Perspectives” conference in Ottawa, sponsored by Members of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada research group and their “On the Identity Trail: Understanding the Importance and Impact of Anonymity and Authentication in a Networked Society” research project.

I’m thrilled to announce that, after a peer review process and the hard work of David Matheson, a collection of papers from this conference has been published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in an edited volume, “Contours of Privacy”.

I’m delighted to announce the launch of a new book series I am co-editing with Laura DeNardis, Ph.D, the Executive Director of the Yale Information Society Project:
Information Society Series: An Interdisciplinary Series on Technology, Law, and Society
Series Editors, Laura DeNardis and Michael Zimmer
MIT Press
The Information Society Series will address the social, legal, and policy implications of the Internet and new information technologies and will especially feature works from the growing global ranks of interdisciplinary scholars in information schools; communications departments; science, technology, and society programs; and programs in law, technology, …

I’ve written a lot here about the need for companies to engage in value-conscious design of their products and services. This, admittedly, is no simple task. Ever since spending a few weeks thinking about this topic a few years ago, my colleague Noëmi Manders-Huits and I have been organizing our thoughts on the pragmatic challenges of bringing ethics and values into the design & boardrooms.
The result of our efforts has just been published in a special issue of the International Review of Information Ethics focusing on the convergence between business …

Consumer attention to privacy is seemingly on the rise. We witnessed renewed concern about the tracking of user behavior online, medical privacy as Web-based storage solutions are being proposed, the tracking and selling of television viewing patterns, the merging of vast databases of user activity owned by Google and Doubleclick, and much, much more.
The open question in much of this privacy advocacy is what do consumers actually know about possible threats to their privacy, how much do they care, and how do they act on any concerns that arise?
To help …

I am pleased to announce the (open) publication of a special issue of First Monday on “Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0.”
This special issue was born from a panel I organized at AoIR, and features amazing contributions from Trebor Scholz, Matthew Allen, Kylie Jarrett, Søren Mørk Petersen, myself, Anders Albrechtslund, and David Silver.
My thanks to everyone who helped make this special issue a reality.
First Monday
Volume 13, Number 3 – 3 March 2008
Special issue: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
edited by Michael Zimmer
Preface: Critical Perspectives on Web 2.0
by Michael Zimmer
Market Ideology and …

I’m pleased to announce that Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives has, after 2 years in the making, been published in the Information Science and Knowledge Management series by Springer.
Co-edited with Amanda Spink, Web Search is a collection of chapters approaching Web search engines from philosophical, cultural, critical, legal, economic, historical, political, and information scientific perspectives.
The official description from Springer:
Web search engines are not just indispensable tools for finding and accessing information online, but have become a defining component of the human condition and can be conceptualized as a complex behavior embedded …

In many of my recent presentations on privacy and information policy, I’ve drawn on differences in the legal and regulatory frameworks applied to the flows of personal information in the United States compared to the European Union. In short, the EU takes a paternalist approach to data protection policy, aiming to preserve a fundamental human right of its citizens through preemptive governmental action (see, for example, the EU Directive on Data Protection), while the governance of privacy in the US typically emerges only after some particular informational harm has occurred, …

I just completed (late) a chapter contribution for the forthcoming International Handbook of Internet Research. My task was to write a review of search engine research, combined with directions for future work. While the lit review in my dissertation provided a useful starting point, I decided to expand the scope a bit, and came up with a robust collection of research spanning multiple disciplines and methodologies. I ended up suggesting a new field (sub-field? meta-field?) of “Web search studies”:
While still in its infancy compared to the knowledge tools that preceded …

I recently had the pleasure of attending an excellent workshop on “privacy advocacy” hosted by the Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley. The goal was to get privacy advocates in the room with academics who work on privacy in order to encourage “cross-pollination” and – from my perspective – help illuminate the kind of scholarship that would benefit advocacy most. (The workshop was “off the record” so I don’t want to blog about too many of the details without explicit permission from the various participants)
I helped lead a discussion …

I am pleased to announce that selected papers from the “Identity and Identification in a Networked World” graduate student symposium held at New York University in September have been published in a special issue of First Monday. Here are titles and abstracts:
Identity and Identification in a Networked World
by Tim Schneider and Michael Zimmer
Summary of events and acknowledgments.
Friends, Friendsters, and Top 8: Writing community into being on social network sites
by danah boyd
“Are you my friend? Yes or no?” This question, while fundamentally odd, is a key component of social network …

PSU information science scholar Jim Jansen was guest editor for a special issue of the Bulletin for the American Society for Information Science and Technology on the practice of paid search.
Jim was kind enough to ask me for a contribution on the ethical implications of paid search. My brief contribution, “The Value Implications of the Practice of Paid Search,” warns of the potential value implications of the practice of paid inclusion and paid placement of sites within search engine results, focusing on three interrelated values of moral and ethical …