@inproceedings{03aa5c4315ee417c916fe17d47e040f7,
title = "How people form folk theories of social media feeds and what it means for how we study self-presentation",
abstract = "Self-presentation is a process that is significantly complicated by the rise of algorithmic social media feeds, which obscure information about one's audience and environment. User understandings of these systems, and therefore user ability to adapt to them, are limited, and have recently been explored through the lens of folk theories. To date, little is understood of how these theories are formed, and how they tie to the self-presentation process in social media. This paper presents an exploratory look at the folk theory formation process and the interplay between folk theories and self-presentation via a 28-participant interview study. Results suggest that people draw from diverse sources of information when forming folk theories, and that folk theories are more complex, multifaceted and malleable than previously assumed. This highlights the need to integrate folk theories into both social media systems and theories of self-presentation.",
keywords = "Algorithm awareness, Algorithmic curation, Algorithms, Folk theories, Grounded theory, Social feeds, Social media, Theory formation, User understandings",
author = "Devito, {Michael A.} and Jeremy Birnholtz and Hancock, {Jeffery T.} and Megan French and Sunny Liu",
note = "Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 Association for Computing Machinery. Copyright: Copyright 2020 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.; 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, CHI 2018 ; Conference date: 21-04-2018 Through 26-04-2018",
year = "2018",
month = apr,
day = "20",
doi = "10.1145/3173574.3173694",
language = "English (US)",
series = "Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems - Proceedings",
publisher = "Association for Computing Machinery",
booktitle = "CHI 2018 - Extended Abstracts of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems",
}