rosa mikeal martey

research.

current projects.
at the moment i'm branching out to a little health communication in collaboration with rajiv rimal of johns hopkins university. we're running a study on information-seeking patterns and effects among college students looking for websites on std's.

i'm also working with several graduate students on gender differences in information-seeking, and on the influence of websites' visual characteristics in the search process.

managing gender in online spaces.
for my dissertation, i examined the relationship between perceptions of gender and online job seeking in order to understand how identity can both be affected by and affect the information-seeking process. i interviewed twenty women looking for jobs and performed a laboratory search exercise with ninety women using monster.com to understand how notions of gender intersect with the self, the internet, and jobs to influence job-seeking outcomes. several conference papers have presented parts of this work.

publications based on this work include a chapter for the upcoming web search: interdisciplinary perspectives, edited by amanda spink and michael zimmer, a lecture on identity and job seeking for the csu diversity conference in fall 2006, and other papers in development.

dissertation abstract.
As internet technologies increasingly pervade Americans’ daily lives, scholars, businesspeople, and educators point to their importance in work, school, and home. Concerns about disparities in physical access to these technologies have ceded space to concerns about disparities in other kinds of access, including cognitive, cultural, social, and educational. Concerns about gender differences in access give rise to the question, What is the relationship between gender and different contexts of information-seeking on the internet? Laboratory search exercises with 90 women internet users and twenty interviews provide insight into gender differences in one of the most wide-spread uses of this technology: looking for a job. The search exercises and interviews suggest that women’s abilities to employ flexible performance of gender roles can improve job search outcomes.

social norms in online gaming.
with jennifer stromer-galley i investigate norms of social conduct on the massively-multiplayer online game, the sims online. our primary research question is: what are the norms in this online environment? specifically, how are players praised and punished? how and when do players use text and when do players use avatars to praise and punish other players?

an article on the subject is coming in the journal games & culture, and a theoretical paper in review.

other work from this research focuses on gender implications of this online game structure and culture, published in 2006 as a chapter in digital media: transformations in human communication, edited by paul messaris and lee humphries.

customization, segmentation and knowledge: implications for internet research.
i examine theories about differences in knowledge and media use and their relationship to new media development in order to ask, what kind of impact might wide-spread internet use have on what people in society know? linking these questions with considerations of access to the internet and the digital divide, i suggest that knowledge gap effects are an important place in which to examine the trends of both corporate presence on the internet and its highly customizable nature as the number of users grows.

i suggest that the ways that audiences and media producers construct content categories means that they have very different narratives and tap into different expectations and gratifications. i hypothesize these differences contribute in different ways to the types, amounts, and uses of information audiences pay attention to and remember.

the emergence of complexity for users of the internet.
the internet can be described as a highly complex space, functioning as both a tool and a practice. i conducted four interviews with Internet users in order to identify several concrete reasons that the internet is seen as complex: the lack of central authority; a structure that allows for astoundingly varied uses, activities, and ideas; notions of limitless possibilities; and dynamic, process-driven characteristics.

an understanding of internet history, technology, and the words of the four users i spoke with begin to provide some clues as to how “walkers” through this space have a wide freedom to use the strategic and fixed institutions in whatever combinations they can invent. we are all, however, ultimately enmeshed within the structures that have already emerged from the walks that came before us.