Archive (Page 2 of 3)

Forbidden Research Welcome and Introduction: Cory Doctorow

At that moment when every­body is sud­den­ly car­ing about this stuff, that’s the moment at which nihilism can be avert­ed. It’s the moment in which nihilism must be avert­ed if you’re going to make a change. Peak indif­fer­ence is the moment when you stop con­vinc­ing peo­ple to care about an issue, and start con­vinc­ing them to do some­thing about it.

The Conversation #15 — Cameron Whitten

Any time that you lessen lev­els of dis­par­i­ty you’re going to have more progress. And you can’t look at it as an own indi­vid­ual term. Progress in your own life, progress in tech­nol­o­gy. But I believe that you have to look at progress through the con­nec­tion of every­thing. That’s what sus­tain­abil­i­ty is real­ly about. It’s about the rela­tion­ship of our econ­o­my, of social jus­tice, the qual­i­ty of life of peo­ple, and then the last part is the environment.

An Xiao Mina at Biased Data

When we think about net­work graphs and we talk about how the net­work effects that make up an impor­tant part of how social move­ments and how infor­ma­tion is dis­trib­uted online, there’s this assump­tion in those visu­al­iza­tions that every node in that net­work is equal. But very often, and you can slice data in many dif­fer­ent way, the lan­guages that we speak actu­al­ly lim­it the net­works that we have access to and that we’re inter­act­ing with. 

Marika Cifor at Biased Data

What I’m argu­ing pri­mar­i­ly today is that focus­ing on ped­a­gogy is a key aspect of social jus­tice work, and that teach­ing crit­i­cal data lit­er­a­cy along with oth­er dig­i­tal lit­er­a­cy skills is a key part of what we need to do.

Biased Data Panel Q&A

We’re los­ing our abil­i­ty to for­get the things that should be for­got­ten. Wait until you try to run for Senate or Congress, some of you in this room, and some pic­tures or text roll up.

Meme Warriors and Media Viruses: Theorizing the Persuasive Political Power of the Web

[The] per­sua­sion mod­el advanced by Rushkoff and Lasn is par­tic­u­lar­ly use­ful for think­ing crit­i­cal­ly through a vari­ety of recent politically-oriented web phe­nom­e­na like pro­file pic­ture chang­ing cam­paigns, polit­i­cal viral videos, hash­tag activism and the like. 

Lulz Will Find a Way: How Meme Culture is Empowering civic Engagement in the Socialist Republic of Vietnam

Among oth­er things [The Cute Cat Theory] sug­gests that ordi­nary online tools and plat­forms, the kind that peo­ple com­mon­ly use to share innocu­ous con­tent such as cute pic­tures of cats make it pos­si­ble for non-activist users to cre­ate and dis­sem­i­nate activist con­tent online.

Strange Bedfellows: Digital Humanities, Internet Art, and the Weird Internet

I’m here at MITH today, and I want­ed to talk a lit­tle bit about dig­i­tal human­i­ties from my posi­tion as an inter­est­ed out­sider. I’ve always kept a fin­ger in acad­e­mia, at first through game stud­ies and peo­ple study­ing video games, and more recent­ly through elec­tron­ic lit­er­a­ture and those fields. I’m not going to go into a what is it?” debate because I know every­one who’s in dig­i­tal human­i­ties is very tired of those, but we know when we see it, right?

Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Chthulucene: Staying with the Trouble

I’m going to pro­pose to us that the Cthulucene might be a way to col­lect up the ques­tions for nam­ing the epoch, for nam­ing what is hap­pen­ing in the airs, waters, and places, in the rocks, and oceans, and atmos­pheres. Perhaps need­ing both the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene, but per­haps offer­ing some­thing else, some­thing just maybe more livable.

Privacy, cen­sor­ship, and secu­ri­ty in the Middle East

So I got curi­ous, and I asked myself what is the Iranian Internet, and who is the Iranian user? I was pissed off enough, like I said, to take a step or to feel the urge to do some­thing. To feel the urge of mak­ing some­thing. And the thing that I real­ly want­ed to bring across was that cen­sor­ship is hap­pen­ing in a dif­fer­ent coun­try, where it’s being used to bring across infor­ma­tion, to make voic­es heard.