research-article

Do Birds of a Feather Watch Each Other?: Homophily and Social Surveillance in Location Based Social Networks

Authors:

Stephen B. WickerAuthors Info & Claims

CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

Pages 1010 - 1020

https://doi.org/10.1145/2675133.2675179

Published: 28 February 2015 Publication History

Abstract

Location sharing applications (LSA) have proliferated in recent years. Current research principally focuses on egocentric privacy issues and design but has historically not explored the impact of surveillance on location sharing behavior. In this paper, we examine homophily in friendship and surveillance networks for 65 foursquare users. Our results indicate that location surveillance networks are strongly homophilous along the lines of race and gender while friendship networks are weakly homophilous on income. Qualitatively, an analysis of comments and interviews provides support for a discourse around location surveillance, which is mainly social, collaborative, positive and participatory. We relate these findings with prior literature on surveillance, self-presentation and homophily and situate this study in existing HCI/CSCW scholarship.

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Index Terms

Do Birds of a Feather Watch Each Other?: Homophily and Social Surveillance in Location Based Social Networks
1. Human-centered computing

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cover image ACM Conferences

CSCW '15: Proceedings of the 18th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing

February 2015

1956 pages

ISBN:9781450329224

DOI:10.1145/2675133

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Cornell University, USA
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Drexel University, USA
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Sheffield Hallam University, UK
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University of Washington, USA

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Published: 28 February 2015

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CSCW '15 Paper Acceptance Rate 161 of 575 submissions, 28%;

Overall Acceptance Rate 2,235 of 8,521 submissions, 26%

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https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3613904.3641918
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