Fun drinking game for the next 9-12 months: take a shot every time a news article uses the phrase "Section 230" or "chilling effect on free speech" -- that way you'll be in the hospital with liver poisoning instead of having to keep up with all the TikTok news and court challenges
@Gargron: "I believe governments should not rely on 3rd party platforms to connect with their constituents."
100% yes. There is no reason that a massive organization/institution such as the checks notes United States government should not set up their own nodes on the Fediverse instead of relying on Meta/X/<insert any tech company here>
In an effort to make the web less of the corporatized and platformized hellscape that it has been in other places, I want to make social media mundane again. Let's share banal things and put them out into the world
In that sprit, I have discovered why my eye has been itchy all morning:
Had a student email me after having missed several classes, and offered to send their medical records if I needed "proof" of them being absent. I had to assure them that I absolutely did not need to see those and that it was unreasonable that their other instructors have wanted it
Dear peoplr who require students to share those kinds of private information as part of an attendance policy or anything similar: stop doing cop shit
I've been gradually working on small updates to my Birdwatch Archive project (https://birdwatcharchive.org) as I've been doing my own research and realizing "oh hey I actually need feature X or Y now"
The site is still super ugly and clunky, but working for the most part. And hopefully will help support ongoing #twitter#research
There is now a basic interface to search notes by a specified Tweet ID
I was spurred into action by Musk's recent tweet about "Cis" and "Cisgender" being considered slurs on Twitter - and I was wondering how Birdwatch/Community Notes users were responding to that provocation.
Because #twitter publishes their data publicly, I'm merely aggregating and reformatting it so that anybody (not just Twitter users in the Birdwatch program) can view them more easily.
If people wander around wearing the iGoggles (which is what I'm calling them) the same way that they just wander around wearing airpods - so you never know for sure where they're paying attention or if you can be seen/heard - I may become physically violent
(and yes, there's tech to let them hear you and you to "see" their eyes but that's all still way too black mirror-y)
I'm a PhD candidate in Media and Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. I'm studying Internet culture and am interested in how individual people relate to corporations, governments, etc. through various types of technology.
My dissertation is about how individual people are constructed as "Users" on the internet.
@bpettis Hmm. I'd be interested to hear what you learn. As somebody who worked in tech, and especially in support, the word "User" always came naturally as shorthand for "People who use our stuff" - something broader that encompasses so much more than just "customer". It was only MUCH later in life that I heard people object to the term because they read it in the same way as how some people call drug addicts "users".
So it'd be useful to know how widely these understandings are spread, and how "user" affects our relationships with the people who use our work, and especially whether I need to change how I communicate about these things.