03.12.2010 MusiQ Paper accepted to CSCW’11

I’ll press Play, but I won’t listen: Profile Work in a Music-focused Social Network Service, a full paper by Suvi Silfverberg, Lassi A. Liikkanen and Airi Lampinen was accepted to CSCW 2011 conference taking place in March 19–23, 2011, Hangzhou, China.

The paper describes how young users of a social networking service work hard and even change their music listening behavior to appear favorably in social media. The study was carried out as a part of Academy of Finland research project Musiquitous by University of Helsinki graduate student Suvi Silfverberg. Full paper will appear at http://musiq.fi before the conference.

ABSTRACT
We offer the concept of profile work to illustrate the effort people invest in their public profiles in social network services (SNSs). In our explorative study, we investigated profile work in Last.fm, an SNS that automatically publishes music listening information. We found that, instead of simply not publishing things they might rather keep private, users tend to change their music listening behavior in order to control their self-presentation. Four dimensions of profile work were identified, including detailed mechanisms to regulate one’s profile. We suggest ways to support users’ profile work in the context of automated sharing of behavior information.