Abstract: Social platforms change every day, sometimes every minute, and they don't explain themselves very well – yet we still must figure out how to use them to achieve our goals. We adapt through a process of folk theorization, substituting informal knowledge for the technical information we are denied and using that knowledge for decision making. However, platforms keep changing, and our folk theories need to change with them. Moreover, we need a way to better investigate and adjust to platform changes on an ongoing basis, pointing us to the need for a truly extensible algorithmic literacy. This need is especially urgent for marginalized people such as sexual and gender minorities, who heavily rely on these platforms for community support, medical information, and identity development while also facing substantially heightened risks of online harassment and abuse.

In this talk, DeVito will present a framework for studying and classifying adaptive folk theorization that accounts for users’ emergent, emotionally valanced relationships with platforms. She will illustrate how this framework points towards a new standard and path forward for algorithmic literacy via examples from her work with everyday LGBTQ+ users in the context of self-presentation and stigmatized identity. Finally, DeVito will illustrate how this kind of algorithmic literacy through folk theorization can enable strategic decision making via examples from new work with transfeminine TikTok creators in the context of strategic visibility and targeted harassment.

Bio: Dr. Michael Ann DeVito is a postdoctoral Computing Innovation Fellow in the Department of Information Science at the University of Colorado Boulder. She is a qualitative researcher who studies how users and communities understand and adapt to the challenges of everyday, casual human/AI collaboration. This includes work on folk understandings of algorithms, as well as work as a member-researcher on how queer and trans communities adapt to social platforms. Dr. DeVito earned a PhD in Media, Technology, and Society from Northwestern University. She frequently publishes in and organizes for ACM conferences such as CSCW and CHI.