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Zeynep Tufekci |
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Zeynep Tufekci |
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About Me |
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I'm an assistant professor at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. I've completed my Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin. I am fascinated by how technology and society co-evolve. I’m currently looking into the social and cultural impacts of social computing. I’m particularly interested in community dynamics, surveillance and privacy, and the transformation of characteristics of human sociality as it becomes increasingly mediated by technology. My dissertation focused on on the digital divide and gender, race and social class. I’m also interested in the emerging cluster of new approaches to social data analysis — many people refer to these as complex systems methods. I think these methods hold great promise for tackling many core sociological questions. I think that agent-based modeling, network analysis and statistical methods used in the natural sciences to tackle systems with large number of interacting parts (i.e. statistical mechanics) could offer a lot to the social sciences. In general, I’m interested in sociality in general and how technology fits into it all. I think that, as people, we like to imagine ourselves as a solitary lion hunting in the tall grass, or a lone cowboy riding into the sunset. In reality, we are deeply social creatures. Ironically, the combination of our sociality and our intelligence means that our best is better than anything else out there in the natural world, and our worst is unimaginably worse. I have always been curious about questions of harm from intended consequences of technological developments, rather than just unintended consequences. For example, I wonder about how the rapid pace at which voice-recognition, natural langage processing and diagnostic systems are being developed is going to impact the structure of the labor market. I think we have seen just the tip of the iceberg in that realm, in terms of social consequences. I have lived in many places around the world, including Europe, U.S. and Turkey. I do cherish the outlook one gets from moving from place to place so much, especially as a kid, even if it is not the easiest thing in the world. Probably because of that experience, I’ve always been very interested in how and why people live and think the way they do. I always feel awed by how similar people are all over the world, and yet so different. I used to be a computer programmer (writing code mostly in C), and even have an undergraduate degree on the topic from Turkey. But I stopped being a programmer many years ago and decided that I’d rather study the social side of technology. (My apologies, thus, for the atrocious design of this web page. I used MS Publisher because I wanted to get my own page up up quickly after I noticed that there is someone else out there with my exact name). It’s kind of funny that I took so long to put up a proper web page, being an ex-programmer and all. There is a saying in Turkish that goes “a candle is darkest right around it,” meaning that sometimes people are not useful for themselves and those closest to them for the very thing that is their specialty. Anyway, I just looked at the code this program generates, and ugh. Just ugh.) |
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Zeynep Tufekci, Ph.D. zeynep at umbc dot edu |
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To contact me: |