Despite the abundance of research on social networking sites, relatively little research has studied those who choose not to use such sites. This paper presents results from a questionnaire of over 400 Internet users, focusing specifically on Facebook and those users who have left the service. Results show the lack of a clear, binary distinction between use and non-use, that various practices enable diverse ways and degrees of engagement with and disengagement from Facebook. Furthermore, qualitative analysis reveals numerous complex and interrelated motivations and justifications, both for leaving and for maintaining some type of connection. These motivations include: privacy, data misuse, productivity, banality, addiction, and external pressures. These results not only contribute to our understanding of online sociality by examining this under-explored area, but they also build on previous work to help advance how we conceptually account for the sociological processes of non-use.

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This essay presents a multi-year autoethnographic perspective on the use of personal fitness and self-tracking technologies to lose weight. In doing so, it examines the rich and contradictory relationships with ourselves and our world that are generated around these systems, and argues that the efforts to gain control and understanding of one's self through them need not be read as a capitulation to rationalizing forces, or the embrace of utopian ideals, but as an ongoing negotiation of the boundaries and meanings of self within an anxious alliance of knowledge, bodies, devices, and data. I discuss how my widening inquiry into these tools and practices took me from a solitary practice and into a community of fellow travellers, and from the pursuit of a single body goal into a continually renewing project of personal possibility.

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This paper examines the role of technoscientific speculation in large-scale development projects in postcolonial spaces, building on recent work in STS, design research, and postcolonial studies in and beyond CSCW. We analyze two historical cases of technology-infused development projects in the Canadian province of Newfoundland and Labrador and in Jamaica. We find that speculation in these contexts remixes the constructive stance toward speculation typical for normative technoscience with the critical, contesting orientation of speculative design. Conflicts between these stances are resolved by leveraging fantasy for pragmatic ends, grounding audacious fictions in imported realities, unmooring from conventional understandings of linear technological progress, and using even conservative futures to trouble colonial conventions.