Carmen Maria

I want to understand how researchers and designers describe the changing human experience in a world shaped by AI, especially through small, intentional, or “cozy” digital spaces.

Hookup culture, which has been percolating for about a hundred years, has collided with dating apps, which have acted like a wayward meteor on the now dinosaur-like rituals of courtship.

“We are in uncharted territory” when it comes to Tinder et al., says Justin Garcia, a research scientist at Indiana University’s Kinsey Institute for Research in Sex, Gender, and Reproduction. “There have been two major transitions” in heterosexual mating “in the last four million years,” he says. “The first was around 10,000 to 15,000 years ago,... See more

DePIN uses cryptocurrency rewards to incentivize participation in physical infrastructure networks, enabling them to be built from the “ground up” rather than the top down

Popular media often characterize youths’ use of social media as overwhelmingly negative, reporting that teens engage in reckless, unsafe behaviors with little thought to their online privacy or safety. Typically, these popular media accounts are based on adults’ prescriptive views of youths’ attitudes and behaviors.