It's a very odd feeling, having played a role in Web 1, 2, & 3, to be mentoring students who only know of those moments via third-party scholarship.
Much of that scholarship is very good. But it's all coalesced around received wisdom & fixed narratives, and those tend to leave out a lot of important details.
I'm always torn about whether and how much to use my own memory/experience of the events to add nuance, or to just let the official story be the official story.
University teachers suspended, employees sacked: in #israelPalestine, the authorities punish the slightest expression of support for Palestine on social media. In the course of a week, at least 170 people have been arrested for their online activities. https://www.972mag.com/israel-gaza-war-political-persecution/
More than 50 scholars of communication and #journalism from top universities have signed a letter calling on NYT to address questions about a major investigative report that described a “pattern of gender-based violence” in Oct. 7 Hamas attacks on Israel
"The letter follows months of criticism raised by outside critics as well as some NYT staffers about the credibility of its sourcing and the editorial process for the story"
Listened to The Daily yesterday, which featured Cade Metz's reporting that OpenAI and its competitors have scraped the entire English-language Internet as input for their LLMs and it's almost as if it should be a limit problem from a @stevenstrogatz's book. What happens to the sum of copyright infringement penalties as the number of infractions approaches infinity?
Call for papers about "AI and Resilience" for a special issue of Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence. This is an interdisciplinary call for a range of perspectives. Critical, humanistic, cultural, historical perspectives are all welcome => https://www.frontiersin.org/research-topics/62761/ai-and-resilience
"This article places noise and sound at the center of an inquiry into the environmental impact of military occupations... noise as a source of harm was both obvious to civilians in militarized zones and illegible as such to military and government officials"
Complaining about the noise the US #military makes on the #California coast reminded me of this article about, in essence, sonic occupation
This National Academies workshop on "Evolving Technological, Legal and Social Solutions to Counter Disinformation in Social Media" starts today at noon (US EDT) and will be streamed to the Web. I'll be participating and will present in a panel tomorrow on changing the incentive structures around the propagation of disinformation.
We had to sign Very Official Copyright releases on our multimedia materials, so I drew my own images to avoid any accidental infringement. Please enjoy my terrible artwork.
OIL BEACH is officially out today!! New 📙 by me about the recent history, present, & future of Los Angeles, global capitalism, wildlife conservation, & energy. Gonna thank a few folks in this 🧵, first up is @UChicagoPress & my simply wonderful editor there @josephcalamia
I had a really fun conversation with @jesse and the hosts of KPCW's "Cool Science Radio" about our forthcoming book "The Secret Life of Data" from @themitpress. Check it out here:
Pleased to be taking part in this National Academies workshop on April 10–11th, organized by Joan Donovan and Saul Perlmutter: "Evolving Technological, Legal, and Social Solutions to Counter Disinformation in Social Media"
Deadline extended to 3 April! Submit to our pre-conference at the 2024 ECREA conference in Ljubljana. Together, we want to dive into victimhood identities and their mediated negotiations in the past, present, and future. More information here: https://affectemotionandmedia.wordpress.com/events/#Commodon#mediastudies
The East Asia Center and Miller Center at U of Virginia are hiring a Global China Post-doctoral Research Associate.
This position is open to applicants from a range of backgrounds including global studies, history, media studies, politics, science and technology studies, and sociology. Language proficiency in Chinese is preferred.
Latest #FOSSAcademic post: Researching the fediverse from the perspective of individual or instances. In which I draw on an article Christina Dunbar-Hester to talk about researchers' perspectives on the #fediverse, including my own.
“Mass #propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in #cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.”
― Hannah Arendt, "The Origins of Totalitarianism" #quotes#mediaStudies#commOdon#truth#agnotology#history
Perhaps of special interest to fediversal citizens, my book Hacking Diversity 🌈🕸️ ; Biella Coleman's Coding Freedom; @gleemie 's Chasing Innovation; @tltaylor's Watch Me Play can all be had for around $8 each. There are also, um, lotsa non-tech titles!