type

Survey
Critical Review

method

Quantitative and Qualitative Inquiry 

period

2015-2018

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Online social networks have made sharing photos and other digital content a common activity. Recently, a range of novel online services and connected devices have expanded the set of “things” to share – ranging from new types of digital content like music preferences and workout data to physical things like household items (“sharing economy”). The goal in this project was twofold: (1) to understand emergent peoples’ digital sharing practices beyond traditional social media platforms and instant messaging apps; and (2) to find commonalities and differences between digital and physical sharing in the context of sharing economy.

As the first stage, in collaboration with the Unit of Human-Centered Technology (IHTE) at Tampere University of Technology (Finland), I conducted a large-scale online survey study to understand needs, concerns and preferences of novel content sharing practices in the Web. I collected 200 responses about participants’ experiences with sharing six categories of “things”: music preferences; travel plans; sports activity; digital representation and contextual metadata about real-world items such as rooms and vehicles; virtual items in online games; and dietary preferences. For each category, I systematically described what our participants share and with whom, elicited corresponding privacy concerns, and outlined device usage practices to access novel sharing services.

At the second stage, I have inquired: “How does the sharing of physical artifacts differ from “traditional” sharing practices of photos and status updates?” This work consolidated the existing body of work in the Human-Computer Interaction scholarly area on both sharing personal digital content (e.g., social networking) and personal physical artifacts (e.g., apartment, car sharing), and identified both commonalities and differences between them. I summarized existing research on the diversity of shared content, users’ motivations to share, audience management, privacy & trust issues, and user experience requirements. 

Project in collaboration with Jarno Ojala, Thomas Olsson and Kaisa Väänänen from Tampere University of Technology (Finland), and Jeremías Albano from University of Buenos Aires (Argentina).