This dissertation examines the way that demands for more control over the collection, processing, and sharing of personal data are being managed by both government and industry leaders with strategies that appear to comply with regulations, but that fail to do so. These are “by-design” strategies used by individuals to unilaterally manage their data with automated tools. I take a multimethod approach that combines autoethnography, reverse engineering techniques, and data analysis to assess the implementation of by-design services implemented by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram in compliance with current European Union regulations for access and portability. I also employ archival research, discourse analysis, interviews, and participant observation. I argue that self-led, by-design approaches do not answer the demands for more control over personal data. The regulatory and technical resources put in place for individuals to control their data are not effective because they turn over decisions about execution to an industry with no interest in sharing that data or being regulated. If policymakers continue to pursue by-design approaches, they will need to learn how to test the techniques, and the execution of the techniques, provided by industry. They will need to assess the impact on data that is made available. So that results can be evaluated, by-design tools like the ones I assessed must be accompanied by clear and detailed details about design choices and procedures. In this vein, I offer directions for critical scrutiny, including standards and measuring the impact of APIs. I conclude that self-managed, by-design approaches are not the source of the problem. But they are a symptom of the need for critical scrutiny over the execution of tools like the ones offered by Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. Ultimately, I found that portability and access are legally and technically fraught. However, despite the shortcomings of by-design approaches, personal data can be more effectively regulated in Europe than in the United States as the result of current regulations.

Mobile devices and online services allow capturing an unprecedented amount of information about human behavior. In this dissertation, I use these new types of data to understand how the built environment affects social life and businesses in cities. In Chapter 1, I provide the first causal evidence that the provision of urban parks promotes opportunities for racially and ethnically diverse encounters. Utilizing a novel dataset featuring individual GPS tracking data for more than 60 thousand Twitter users in the New York metro area, I introduce a measure of racial diversity that captures one's level of exposure to diverse others in places visited daily. My empirical strategy relies on using the variation in the timing of park construction works across the city (that temporarily limit the capacity of said parks) to identify the impact of the effectively accessible parkland area on the individual exposure to racial diversity. My results show that for White and Black/African American residents additional 10 acres of parks within a 5 km radius from home increase individual chances of encounters with the members of other groups by 1 p.p. The effect is sizable: for reference, transitioning from the current state to the random mixing scenario would require a 9 p.p increase in diversity for an average Black or African American individual and a 3.5 p.p increase for an average White person. I also provide evidence to suggest that park accessibility affects the diversity of White and Black residents differently: for parks located closer to home, the effect appears to be more pronounced for Whites than Blacks. Chapter 2, written jointly with Dmitry Sedov, investigates the role of sports facilities in generating consumption spillovers for the local businesses. The construction of sports facilities, which can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, is often subsidized by public sources. In many cases, subsidies are allocated on the premise that sports venues benefit the local economy by bringing new customers to nearby businesses. We pin down the size and the spatial distribution of such spillovers using daily foot traffic data from mobile phones covering major sports league facilities and the surrounding commercial establishments. By employing the fixed effects and the IV estimation strategies, we show that the spillover benefits are heterogeneous across sports and business sectors. We find that 100 baseball stadium visits generate roughly 29 visits to nearby food & accommodation businesses and about 6 visits to local retail establishments. While the estimates for football stadiums are comparable, basketball & hockey arenas do not appear to generate significant spillovers for the surrounding businesses. Using our spillover estimates, we also compute an upper bound on the additional local spending induced by each sample arena. The median value of the additional spending turns out to be substantially smaller than the corresponding median subsidy to sports facilities in our sample. In Chapter 3, I examine the contribution of parks to social ties between neighborhoods in New York City. Although the role of public spaces in facilitating social interactions in cities has been widely discussed by social scientists and urban design scholars, data sets from online social networks present unexplored opportunities to quantify this link on a larger scale. I use data on friendship links between Facebook users across New York City zip codes to show that two neighborhoods with a higher density of green spaces between them are more likely to have stronger social ties. In particular, when controlling for demographic differences and zip-code level fixed effects, I find that a 1 p.p. increase in the percentage of land allocated to parks between two given zip codes is associated with a 1.2% higher chance of online social connection between their residents. Comparing the effects of park density for different types of parks, I further document that the presence of community parks, flagship parks, and playgrounds are all significant predictors of higher social connectedness between zip codes. Notably, the largest estimated effect is for playgrounds, indicating a 33% higher probability of connection per 1 p.p. increase in density.

This dissertation examines the forms of media that are most productive for the formation of social and political movements at their earliest stages. The problem it confronts is a contemporary one: the dominant forms of social media on the internet do not allow for the slow and focused deliberation this is demanded for radical ideas that are attempting to undermine a status quo to begin to take root. Movements rise and fall very quickly, following the metabolism of sites like Facebook and Twitter, without having the long-term impact they seek. By first looking historically at a series of pre-digital case studies – starting with letters before the scientific revolution and moving through petitions, small newspapers, samizdat and all the way to zines in the 1990s – aspects of more effective incubatory media will present themselves. Each chapter in this first half of the book zeroes in on the affordances of these particular forms of communication that made them so useful. After having looked at pre-digital communication, the dissertation will then turn to contemporary case studies and the challenges posed by social media for activists of all stripes looking to incubate their ideas on these platforms. Starting with the Arab Spring in Egypt, which offers a cautionary tale of a movement overtaken by the social media metabolism and moving through the 2010s toward Black Lives Matter, there is a progression of awareness about what tools the internet can provide for communication and which prove most productive for offering sustainability to a movement. The conclusion is one gained from the juxtaposition of the historical and the contemporary, which builds to an awareness of what affordances are required for a radical idea to avoid burning out.

It is not uncommon for graphic scenes of violence and death to infiltrate our timelinesfrom retweets, reposts, and shares. I often question how much control do we really have over the images that enter our feed? In what ways are we affected and influenced by these images? How do we relate to these images and video clips that are played and replayed before us? In what ways are these images evoking or are related to past scenes of racist violence? In what ways are these racially violent moments captured in photos and videos and shared online speaking to a Black consciousness? This project comparatively researches and examines the relationship between past modes and methods of Black trauma curation in the past, to contemporary modes of dissemination on social media in order to argue that contemporary uses of spaces such as Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter serve as an extension of previous scrapbooking methods. By comparing The Emmet Till Generation and their curation of trauma via scrapbooks which were used to galvanize social movements, and impact organizing efforts of the youth, The Trayvon Generation today uses social media in a similar fashion; to bear witness, to organize, and to curate digital memorials for the dead. Witnessing is further extended and complicated on digital platforms, providing an abundance of visual evidence that has proven to be vital in leading tp prosecutions and arrests of violent state officials, and perpetrators of extrajudicial violence. These live or recorded moments of witnessing are used not only as evidence, but to inform the public. However, we have always known that it’s always happening somewhere, even if we aren’t around to witness it. With that said, what are the effects of having the duty, and the responsibility to bear witness? Paying particular attention to Black youth, this project examines their presence and usage of social media spaces. By analyzing young Black people’s use of social media platforms in relation to Darnella Frazier’s strategic use Facebook, this project examines how Black youth and witnessing is currently driving a cultural shift in entertainment media that highlights witnessing death as a significant milestone for Black youth that marks the transition between childhood and adulthood. It is also impacting entertainment media that is not marketed towards Black people, further highlighting Black witnessing of racialized violence at the intersection of technology as both a contemporary and future issue through its inclusion in contemporary media.Witnessing for Black people is framed as being both necessary and traumatic. This project concludes with an in depth examination of speculative media to reveal the implications of both the present and the future intersections of race relations, state violence and technology. Through analyses of interviews, image circulation and dissemination, magazine articles, social media platforms, visual and speculative media, this dissertation works to address and attempts to answer the aforementioned questions.