Building off of our dismal discussion from last week’s class, our readings by Robert Gehl and Preston C. Russett addressed some of the side-effects of our continuing corrosion of privacy. Gehl’s The Archive and the Processor: The Internal Logic of Web 2.0 outlined the cost of the instantaneous connectivity afforded to us via sites like Twitter and…
In 7th grade, our English teacher read us a chapter from an anthology of science fiction stories entitled 2041: Twelve Stories About the Future. In the chapter, entitled “Lose Now, Pay Later,” two kids, Deb and Trinja, stumble upon a shop at their local mall that distributes a popular new dessert, called swoodie. While the…
In light of the Edward Snowden events that erupted this past summer, the discussion on privacy and Web 2.0 cannot be timelier. I think most people were aware on some level that they were being micro-targeted, that is, advertising companies were building an aggregated picture of a person based on his or her digital footprints…
In the modern era, the idea of censorship is a fairly universal notion. This practice did not begin with the digital age or even with film and cinema, but long before these inventions. In fact, since the debut of acting and theatre, audiences were limited in terms what they could and could not see. Actors…
Perhaps I’m missing the whole point of Raiford Guins’ argument in Edited Clean Version but are there perhaps instances when control might be desirable? On a macro level, I understand his concern that control, through blocking, filtering, sanitizing and other forms, is now “exercised indiscriminately, ubiquitously” (5). Guins cites a personal example of how his…
In his book Edited Clean Version, author Raiford Guins discusses the nature of control culture and the technologies used to enforce such ideologies. Similar to the construction of hyperlink pathways that shrouds pre-determined connections under the illusion of control, information superhighways create the perception of control. As Guins notes, “Control is enabled through the control…
Needless to say, peer-to-peer sharing has come a long way since the days of Napster and Limewire. The recent ubiquity of programs like BitTorrent and sites such as the Pirate Bay now rival major proponents of Web 2.0 like Facebook or Twitter. According to scholar Jonas Andersson, since its debut in 2003, the Pirate Bay…
An internet troll; a person on the internet who seeks to instigate arguments online by posting and commenting with the intention of provoking emotional and controversial reactions. The term trolling has subsequently been developed to describe these actions of online harassment, instigation and form of bullying. Trolls often provoke controversy and are extremely disruptive. They…
In the conclusion of their article on hacktivism and #wikileaks on Twitter, the authors Lindgren and Lundström write, “The fact that many people have a declining interest in traditional formal politics should not necessarily be interpreted as an indicator that there is an actual lack of political orientation or action in society at large…In today’s…
Last semester, I took an experimental English class with Professor Ben Lobpries that explored the genre of 9/11 literature and how such texts channel the values of a post-9/11 America. One of the books we read, Falling Man by Don DeLillo, follows the life of Keith Neudecker, a survivor of the terrorist attacks. In the…
WIIH Fellows: New Media, New Knowledge 