Nintendo’s Offensive, Tragic, and Totally Legal Erasure of ROM Sites
Nintendo sees emulation only through the lens of IP, sadly. What about preservation, access, or pedagogy?
The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump
A great critique of that awful earnest bromide “Teach the controversy” from Michiko Kakutani
Maps as Media – Fall 2018
As usual, @shannonmattern’s new course on maps as media looks awesome. Gorgeous design, but even better, wonderful pedagogy.
Horror Blackademics: The Get Out (2017) Syllabus
Some great resources here for teaching the intersectionality of “Get Out”
Why Reddit’s face-swapping celebrity porn craze is a harbinger of dystopia
There are a lot of deep fake articles out there, but I think this is the one I’ll use in Intro to Digital Studies this year.
Microsoft’s Undersea Data Center
You can easily apply Holt and Vonderau’s critique of the discourse around data centers in “Where the Internet Lives” to Microsoft’s discourse about its undersea data center.
PYMK: A Controversial Facebook Feature’s 10-Year History
Facebook’s People You May Know “mines information users don’t have control over to make connections they may not want it to make.”
Watch an Art Work About the Dark Web, on the Dark Web | The New Yorker
Dark Content is a video series on the dark web about people who perform commercial content moderation on the open web.
xkcd: Free Speech
Every once in a while it’s worth resurfacing this xkcd explainer of free speech.
Who are QAnon supporters? The QAnon subreddit, analyzed with data. – Vox
Excellent digital forensics work on QAnon. Surprise! Most QAnon posters also post on videogames and Men’s Rights.
What HBR Gets Wrong About Algorithms and Bias · fast.ai
“algorithms can often exacerbate underlying societal problems”
The consequences of framing digital humanities tools as easy to use | hc:20283 | Humanities CORE
Paige Morgan’s engagement with Tsing’s theory of nonscalability is worth including in my DIG 401 (Hacking, Remixing, and Design) class.
How journalists should not cover an online conspiracy theory | Opinion | The Guardian
Another great piece by Whitney Phillips, one of the best thinkers about toxic media. A critique of they way the news has covered QAnon conspiracists.
This is why Alex Jones has been able to get away with exploiting social media – The Washington Post
Worth including on my DIG 101 syllabus, where I will have a whole section on conspiracies.
Unintended Consequences to Google Context Cards on Conspiracy Videos?
A good look at how affordances of platforms could enable a kind of crackpot hermeneutics.
Yelp, The Red Hen, And How All Tech Platforms Are Now Pawns In The Culture War
A _Buzzfeed_ piece on the way fringe political groups hijack social media platforms.
The Oxygen of Amplification | Data & Society
Fantastic report from Data & Society on the ways the media inadvertently amplifies the messaging of hate groups