The psychological costs of the attention economy are often considered through the binary of harmful design and healthy use, with digital well-being chiefly characterised as a matter of personal responsibility. This article adopts an interdisciplinary approach to highlight the empirical, ideological, and political limits of embedding this individualised perspective in computational discourses and designs of digital well-being measurement. We will reveal well-being to be a culturally specific and environmentally conditioned concept and will problematize user engagement as a universal proxy for well-being. Instead, the contributing factors of user well-being will be located in environing social, cultural, and political conditions far beyond the control of individual users alone. In doing so, we hope to reinvigorate the issue of digital well-being measurement as a nexus point of political concern, through which multiple disciplines can study experiences of digital ill as symptomatic of wider social inequalities and (capitalist) relations of power.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501857
Mentorship and other social and relational support have been vital to poverty alleviation and transformative change. It is crucial to understand the underlying factors in the success of mentoring models and subsequent programs to support them. Thus, we conducted a mixed methods study consisting of longitudinal surveys of community participants and semi-structured interviews with 28 community members, eight mentors, and two coaches participating in a community-based mentorship program. Drawing from community-based participatory research in partnership with a non-profit located in a Midwestern United States (U.S.) city, we unpack how the program supported self-sufficiency and economic mobility among adults experiencing financial hardships. Through an infrastructural lens, we attend to individuals' infrastructuring work in social support, flexibility, and trust to support a ``village'' model of community-based mentorship. Our results show how the village model differs from traditional mentorship models that assume dyadic, one-to-one, often didactic, and hierarchical relationships (e.g., expert and prot\'eg\'e, adult and child) and are used primarily in the workplace and educational settings. The village mentorship model advocates for less hierarchical and more balanced relationships in non-institutional settings and flexible communication and technological needs. We discuss new research opportunities and design strategies for rethinking technology-mediated mentorship to support poverty-stricken adults in the U.S.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3501949
With increased public scrutiny of policing and growing calls for community-based violence prevention, street outreach programs that hire residents to mediate conflicts in their neighborhoods are gaining support. To understand how street outreach workers (SOWs) use information and communication technologies (ICTs) and how they envision future ICTs that better support their work, we interviewed 25 SOWs across three organizations. Results suggest that SOWs leverage ICTs to: 1) identify and mediate conflict; 2) support collaboration and teamwork; and 3) invoke community connections and trust. SOWs posit that new ICTs could provide a seamless infrastructure for communication among SOWs and between community members, assist with training to sharpen conflict negotiation skills, and provide insight on effective conflict mediation strategies.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502122
While the presence of religious content is rapidly increasing over digital media, the HCI literature on digital media production has remained mostly limited by its focus on secular contents and analyses. Hence, the production, politics, and impact of such religious videos from the Global South have remained understudied in HCI. In this paper, we shed light on this topic through our nine-month-long ethnographic study on the production, sharing, and consumption of Islamic sermon videos (locally known as \textit{Waz}) in Bangladesh. We report how faith, informal learning, local collaboration, creativity, and care play crucial roles in creating Islamic sermon videos and their proliferation online. We discuss how the sermon videos create a religious counterpublic in Bangladesh. We further discuss how such faith-based media production makes important lessons pertinent to the national grassroots politics in the Global South, politics of social media platforms, and HCI4D scholarship.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3502006
The challenge of designing against child sexual abuse becomes more complicated in conservative societies where talking aboutsex is tabooed. Our mix-method study, comprised of an online survey, five FGDs, and 20 semi-structured interviews in Bangladesh,investigates the common nature, location, and time of the abuse, post-incident support, and possible combating strategies. Besidesrevealing important facts, our findings highlight the need of decentering the design from the victims (children and/or guardians)to the community. Hence, building on the theory of transformative justice, we prototyped and evaluated‘ShishuShurokkha’– anonline tool that involves the whole community by allowing anonymous bystander reporting, visualizing case-maps, connecting withlegal, medical, and social support, and raising awareness. The evaluation ofShishuShurokkhashows the promise for such a communalapproach toward combating child sexual abuse, and highlights the needs for sincere involvement of the government, NGOs, the legal,educational, and religious services in this.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3491102.3517543