DC Flashcards
Is privacy a recent concept? Give examples.
Yes. Dating back about 150 years.
ex. Houses used to only have one big room and reading was only done out loud.
Window glass created division between the public and private spheres.
Key Social Media platforms:
- Photosharing
- Chatrooms
- Video sharing
- Widgets
- Message Boards
- Blogging
- Social Networking
- Podcasts
- Subscription
Privacy is reveled through:
Social networking sites, Browser searches, Cookies, Emails, Geolocation, Tagging, etc.
Social media signaled the birth of what new cooperative and collaborative models?
Communication, Communities, Collaboration, Outsourced Tools
What are Dale Carnegie’s recommendations for dealing with people online?
- Calm yourself before communicating with someone else
- Bury your anger and thoughts of negativity - it can diminish you
- Be more mindful of your own words, be a positive influence instead of putting them down
- Make your messages meaningful - use if as a source to inspire people
- People need to know when to hold their tongue
What are Social Media?
Social Media are the online platforms that foster virtual communities for collaborative practices and the sharing of information.
Or
And online platforms that foster virtual communities for collaborative practices and the sharing of information.
What are some other names for Social Media?
Online Networking, User Generated Culture, User Generated Content, Web 2.0, Vernacular Media
What are the 7 Rules for Online Etiquette?
- Context is everything
- Double check before you hit “send”
- Take the high road (but don’t boast about it)
- Grammar rules
- Keep a secret
- Don’t hide
- Don’t say something online that you wouldn’t say to someone’s face
What are the 7 Social Media Sins?
- Gluttony
- Sloth (Replay to messages, social media is a conversation)
- Greed (Treat your community like people not numbers)
- Wrath (What happens on the internet stays on the internet FOREVER)
- Lust (Make sure you have a plan that is not solely based on likes, get your priorities straight)
- Envy
- Pride
What are the attributes of Web 1.0?
- Users as Consumers
- Emails
- Websites - to read
- Mostly image and text as opposed to video
- Link pages
What are the attributes of Web 2.0?
- User as a contributor
- Personalizable media
- Personal blogs
- Collaborative wikis
- Social spaces
- Audio and video
- Networks
- Two-way collaborative environment
- Replaced publishing with experimentation
What brought about the concept of public and private sphere?
The printed book.
What happens when we know we are being watched?
Our behaviour changes dramatically, human shame is a powerful motivator.
What is “life casting”?
People living in public, everything they do is filmed and out there to see.
-Can also be done through selfies, if you post picture of what you eat.
What is “Survellience Control”?
“All-encompassing use of computer surveillance technology in modern society for total social control” - Gary Marx
What is “Wiki”?
It’s Hawaiian for quick. A collaborative Web site comprising the perpetual collective work of many authors. A wiki allows anyone to edit, delete or modify content that has been placed on the Website.
The term wiki refers to either the Wed site or the software used to create the site.
What is the death of privacy?
Once you can access everything, it also means others can access what you have too.
What is crowd-sourcing?
The practice of obtaining information or input into a task or project by enlisting the services of a large number of people, either paid or unpaid, typically via the Internet.
What is social bookmarking?
When someone bookmarks websites and these bookmarks are shared with others who might make use of them. They can tag the websites with different words so people can find them easier.
What is surveillance?
Any collecting or processing of personal data - for the purpose of influencing or managing the people who’s data is being collected.
What is the death of privacy?
Once you can access everything, it also means others can access what you have too.
What is the mission of the Utah Data Center?
Mission: To intercept, decipher, analyse, and store vast amounts of the world’s communications from satellites and underground and undersea cables of international, foreign, and domestic networks.
What is User Generated Content (Vernacular Media, Peer Production)?
Production of content by the general public rather than by experts or professionals in the field.
What object acts as a membrane between the public and private spheres?
The window. Glass isolates the senses.
When there were no windows to close, the community was invited to listen; it was an enclosed sensory space with its glass barriers that created a need for silence and privacy.
Why can media be damaging to children when they are trying to find themselves?
They may think that they need to be perfect like people in the media.
Why did the computer screen erode the gap between the public and private sphere?
It is both public and private, you can see in and people can see “out at you”, two way mirror.
According to the film “Generation Like”:
What is the currency of this generation?
Likes, follows, friends and retweets
According to the film “Generation Like”:
How does the currency of “likes” turn into actual currency?
You raise the value of a company when you like their content.
Give examples of how a company might use social media to promote their brand.
They have promos where “your selfie could be featured in this” or “this celebrity might call or tweet you”
According to the film “Generation Like”:
What does it mean to have a “controlled rush fire”?
Companies put out content (ex. for movies) on a day by day, hour by hour sheldule
True or False:
There is a place counting your “clicks” and “likes”.
True. There is a “man behind the curtain”, though companies want people to think things are posted “by magic” or “organically”.
In the film “Generation Like”:
What does the company “the Audience” do?
A company that runs the social media of celebrities, actors, etc to help them express themselves properly and the way they want
What are some of the ways that data is collected or tracked?
Things that you “like”, the friends that you have, Google, Websites, (Basically everything online).
What are some of the way we use photos?
- To express ourselves
- To get attention
- Personal empowerment (selfies give control to the person taking the picture)
- Blackmail (taking screenshots)
- To show moments in one’s life
In what way is the camera “aggressive”?
- Surveillance
- People that take pictures of celebrities
- Request pictures of couple to prove relationship
What are some types of “disciplinary photography”?
- Mugshots
- Driver’s licence
- Health Card
- Red Light Camera
Why does keeping your data private result in suspicions of criminal activity?
If you are a good person you should have nothing to hide so if you don’t share everything maybe you are suspicious. Using encryption or using cash so people can’t have their cards tracked.
Why do companies photograph license plates and keep track of thermostat data and test scores?
-To see who hasn’t paid off their car loan
-Nest - google has the right to the CO2 levels in the house, can tell how many people are home and when
-Keep people in line
If people don’t know if they are being watched, they will assume they are being watched and will behave
What is “the gaze”?
Relies on the perspective of someone else. How a group see another group of people.
ex. 1. The patriarchal gaze, looking at things through the eyes of society
2. About power
3. Objectification
What is Bentham’s panopticon? How does it work?
How did French theorist Foucault translate it as a concept that speaks for modern society?
a. Circular jail with a central guard tower with darkened windows
b. Prisoners don’t know when or if they are being watched so they are forced to conform
c. Foucault wrote about a circular prison where guards would sit in the middle being able to see all the cells, but the prisoners would not be able to see each other - the prisoners would never know whether they were being watched or not - and that this knowledge would keep them disciplined
d. Foucault agrees that the above is like modern society, that the government watches us, and we don’t commit crimes for fear of being caught
Therefore, We have become the prisoner
What is “dataveillance”?
Monitoring data that is accessed, creating data based on what a person does online.
What is “sousveillance”?
Undercover surveillance - cameras in glasses or phones.
What is “coveillance”?
Peer-to-peer surveillance - stalking someone on Facebook
What is “cryptoicon”?
We don’t know all the ways we are being watched or profiled, we just know we are - we do not regulate our behaviour under the surveillance, we simply do not care
What are data doubles?
“The data gathered about us by our devices becomes an artifact that is separate from us and can be viewed at a distance. At the same time, it represents us, or a part of our lives”
What were some of Aldous Huxley’s fears?
-No one would want to read books
-Those who would give us so much that we would be reduced to passivity and egotism
-Truth would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance
-That we would become a trivial culture
* IN SHORT: WHAT WE LOVE WILL RUIN US
Social media has pushed us towards Huxley’s views.
What were some of George Orwell’s fears?
- Those who would ban books
- Those who would deprive us of information
- Truth would be concealed from us
- That we would become a captive culture
- IN SHORT: WHAT WE HATE WILL RUIN US
What is “neoliberalism”?
Essentially about making trade between nations easier. The freer movement of good, resources and enterprises to maximize profits and efficiency.
Formally:
“The policies and processes whereby a relative handful of private interests are permitted to control as much as possible of social life in order to maximize personal profit”
-Robert McChesney
What is “Globalization”?
A process of interaction and integration among people, companies, and governments of different nations
What is “Neoliberalism Theory”?
A largely unregulated capitalist system not only embodies the ideal of free individual choice but also achieves optimum economic performance with respect to efficiency, economic growth, technical progress, and distributional justice
What is “liberalism”?
Freedom of the individual
Does staying offline keep you from having your data tracked?
No. Loyalty cards are tracked as well as credit cards.
What are some definitions of culture?
- A symbolic form of communication.
- The systems of knowledge shared by a relatively large group of people.
- Is learned behaviour.
What is the “Top Down Model” of Culture? Who was the person behind it?
Matthew Arnold.
Culture as the exclusive preserve of the educated elite: cultured people, fine art, food, money/power. A culture of privilege.
What is the “Bottom Up Model” of culture? Who was the person behind it?
Raymond Williams.
Culture coming from the people. Culture as a form of democratic expression. Culture having 2 senses: 1. A whole way of life and 2. arts and learning. Widely distributed forms such as pop music, leisure activities, etc.
What was Stuart Hall’s view of culture?
Representation. To faithfully carry the identity of an area or group (ex. people representing their sports teams).
What are some major issues in cultural studies?
- Identity and difference
- Representations
- Spaces ad places
- High culture/popular culture
- Subjects, bodies, selves
- Consumption
How has social media transformed the idea of the bottom-up model for culture?
Social media comes from the people and from the platforms that make them. The technology has transformed the culture.
What is the flaneur?
An urban wanderer who transforms his surroundings through looking. He is a consumer of images as opposed to objects. Both a wandering outsider and a part of the crowd.
How are terrorist attacks different than war?
They don’t just kill people, they strike fear over the media.
What is “Guerrilla Marketing”?
Unconventional and low-cost marketing techniques aimed at obtaining maximum exposure for a product. (product placement)
What are “assemblages”?
A multiplicity of heterogeneous objects (tech + flesh) under the control of the state that work together. Desire holds them together.
Any part of a Rhizome’s root can sprout out of the ground, how is this analogous to the networked surveillance assemblages?
Any part of the system can be used to spy or gather data.
How does consumerism undercut the visual power of panopticon?
We are all subjects and spies within the market.
How does mobile phone tracking work?
Tracks phones on the move by linking the signal strengths to nearby antennas.
What is “social sorting”?
Sorting of the population into different categories.
What is “unintentional control”?
Intention to manage efficient and rapid flows of people, goods, and information.
What is “data meshing”?
Boundaries that enhance personal control of information disappear. All types of personal information combined to give a complete picture of an individual.
What is open source software?
Software with a source code that anyone can inspect, modify, and enhance,
Four freedoms of software:
The right to: 1. Use the software 2. Distribute the software 3. Modify the software 4. Redistribute derivative versions (These freedoms have been lost in Web 2.0)
What are “zines”?
A collection of photocopies of self-published work, not going through a company to publish. Not short for magazine, comes from fanzine.
True or False:
Introducing a new technology enhances participation and democracy.
False.
The idea that the adoption of technology causes behavioural changes and social effects, regardless of context, is false.
What did the term “Web 2.0” begin as?
A marketing ploy to differentiate a new crop of tech companies from failed dot.coms
Who created the World Wide Web?
Tim Berners-Lee
What is “folksonomy”?
The practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content.
What does it means to say that “Digital Text is Different”?
Digital text is different, movable, more flexible. We can have links and move things around. Users organize data with tags.
What is “Indymedia”?
People using the media to advocate human rights abuses.
What are the 4 elements of internet culture?
- Techno-mercratic culture
- The hacker
- Visual commons culture
- Entrepreneurial culture
How does Mark Zuckerburg feel about privacy?
He doesn’t believe in it.
Facebook will never care about privacy.
What are the social media illusions?
- Illusion of privacy
- Illusion of security
- Illusion of safety
(Everything that composes the spectacle is illusory)
What is “digital sharecropping”?
Farming on the land of social media, doing labour for free and giving money to corporations that run the platforms.
How is Google making us stupid?
Not retaining as much information because we can just look things up. No deep thinking because it is all there. We now live in culture of distraction.
What is “culture jamming”?
Activism that uses the media as a tool to show media manipulation - critiques the media using the media’s own tools.
What is “net neutrality”?
About everyone having the same amount of access to online content. The idea that the government regulation should ensure that the Internet stay an open platform, one where service providers cannot slow down or block certain Web sites to stifle competition or charge others a fee to speed up their traffic.
What is “upstreaming”?
Someone modifying a source code and asking the original creator to approve the change and make the changes to the original code.
What is “open culture”?
Having information out there for everyone to access
What is “Digital Feudalism”?
Tech giants at the top, the upcoming stars under that, then us at the bottom posting our information and the giants harvesting our information.
What’s the problem with the term “Sharing Economy”?
Sharing referred to something selfless.
Ex. If you drive for Uber you are sharing your car and your profits.
What is Black Twitter?
The African-American culture and community’s content. Allows people to align themselves racially without having to identify as black.
What does Feminista Jones call Twitter the “Underground Railroad of Activism”?
Safety in numbers and people are less distinguishable to pluck out.
(Underground railroad was a network for Black people to get to out of the south, to Canada, a network of safe houses)
What are the 3 levels of connection in Black Twitter?
- Personal community in the material world
- Thematic notes and conversations on particular topics
- Connection - a meta level with conversations about social media networks and how they’re linked
What is the “Me Too” campaign?
It made rape culture visible as people shared their sexual assault stories on social media with the hashtag #MeToo. People are keeping the conversation going. Not a solution, using the hashtag will made you not feel alone but it will not protect you from another assault.
Why are hashtags being referred to as “the new protest signs”?
Powerful because they put a name to something and they are a form of advertising or self-marketing. It allows people who are not physically part of the protest to get involved. Hashtags trend in a way that branding does not.
What is “clicktivism”?
Sharing content that you may care about.
What is “hashtag activism”?
Takes the power from social media and moves it to real world protests or vise versa.
True or False:
Social media is credited with being powerful enough to bring down governments.
True.
Ex. In January 2011, Twitter was shut down in Iran and the internet was shut down in Egypt due to a huge backlash that ultimately brought down the government.
New media are key at enabling:
- Cyber activism
- Civic engagement
- Promoting other acts of guerrilla journalism
Who is Edward Snowden?
He leaked the fact that the National Security Agency (NSA) uses a program called PRISM, which allows them to extract the details of customer activites - including “audio and video chats, photographs, e-mails, documents” and other materials from computers at Microsoft, Google, Apple and other Internet companies.
What is the “California Ideology”?
A set of widely held beliefs that increasing the adoption of computer technologies brings positive social consequences, that the technology industry is where the best and brightest thrive.
Hacking is …
…a philosophy and a diverse, varied global subculture of programming enthusiasts devoted to openness and transparency.
What are “e-zines”?
Online magazines positioned as alternatives to mainstream media. They were written by people during their day jobs (ex. dot.com workers) and expressed opinions not found in magazines or TV shows.
When the World Wide Web emerged, zines could no include pictures, audio and graphics and these were deemed “webzines” to distinguish them from their text-only counterparts.
Why are sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn described as addictive?
Everyone is addicted to validations and human connections.
The human need to connect is a far more powerful use of the Web than for something like buying a book online.
What is the key to media in the 21st century?
Those who have the most knowledge of audience behaviour, not who produces the most popular content.
What is the “amateur paradise”?
A place where people are able to participate in cultural production for the pleasure of it, without asking permission first. Social media have enabled a new paradigm of collaboration. To be an amateur is to do something for the love of it.
Which band was said to be a ripoff band because they took melodies and lyrics from other people’s songs?
Led Zeppelin
What are the basic elements of creativity?
Copy. Transform. Combine.
In what ways does Facebook filter our lives?
- There is only some things that are socially acceptable to post.
- When someone posts something you disagree with, you might not want to comment.
- We put an ideal version of our lives on social media
In terms of Facebook, what is “emotional cognition”?
If someone puts out happy content, we are more likely to put out happy content. We become infected by the emotion of the content.
What are “filter bubbles”?
When you engage with certain kinds of content or share the same kinds of content, that is what you will see on your own feed.
Google caters your results to what you are more interested in, where you are, what you are browsing on. (Google is different for each person)
True or False:
Original creations cannot compete with the price of copies.
True.
This is why copyright is important - gave creators a window where they could profit from their own ideas before it was released to the public domain.
What makes digital copies different than physical copies?
The absence of an original.
There is no material difference, each copy is exactly the same.
According to Astra Taylor, what is the “paradox of value”?
The fact that digital abundance diminishes the value of works.
Intellectual property functions though Platonic concepts in three ways:
Copyright = the material object fixed in a medium
Trademark = a method of inscription that denotes ownership
Patent Law = the recipe for making it
Who are the two groups that make money off the media?
Capitalists who sell access to content and the people who curate the content.
What was the first photocopying machine?
Xerox
According to Jurgen Habermas, what is the public sphere?
In the ideal public sphere, citizens behave as a public body when they confer in an unrestricted manner.
However, Habermas fails to understand how groups use communication media to organize and educate and thereby expand the field of democratic politics. His approach was centered mainly in face-to-face interactions. He excludes working class, people of colour, and women.
What does the company “Creative Commons” do?
Helps people with copyrighted content to share and allow some of the rights of their work to be let go and allow others to use it.
What is the dominant mode of creative production of the 21st century?
Remixing
What are the three forms of remixing defined by Eduardo Navas?
- Extended remix: create longer, more danceable versions of instrumental sections of songs
- Selective remix: adds and/or subtracts material
- Reflexive remix: Creates a unique and original work from pre-existing parts
(According to Navas, it is this conversation with its past form that makes a work a true remix)
What are the six kinds of remixes?
- Sampling
- Mashups
- Remakes, adaptations, and/or intertexts
- Capture, streamed content and/or visualization
- Archiving/Searching
- Hacks
What is a remix?
An alternative version of a work of art, made from an original version. A remix preserves the original intact in a recognizable form.
Who coined the term “Surveillance society” and what does it mean?
Gary Marx.
All-encompassing use of computer surveillance technology in modern society for total social control.
What are biometrics? Give examples.
Biometrics are the identification of physical or behavioural traits.
- Fingerprints
- Face/Iris Recognition
- DNA
Who coined the term “Global Village” and what does it mean?
Marshal McLuhan.
The metaphoric shrinking of the world into a village through the use of telecommunications and the instantaneous movement of information. He said the outcome of this was terrorism.
In what ways do filters defamiliarize us from the everyday?
Things on the web are catered to what you look at , so if you are not interested in news, you won’t see news.
The explore page on Instagram is catered to what you enjoy. Some people have Instagrams with a certain “theme” and they will not post photos outside the theme.
People spend alot of time editing photos as opposed to posting natural ones.
How does the social media site “We <3 It” combat bullying?
It is a site where people can only post pictures and “like”. You cannot comment. Place for people who have been bullied to share their stories and to come together with positive thoughts.
What were Shirley Cards? What was their side effect?
Film was calibrated to a lady named Shirley who was a white woman, her photo was the baseline for photographs.
It was difficult to photograph both white people and people of colour at the same time, the contrast would not come out. For people of colour, only their teeth and the whites of their eyes would come out.
What is “obfuscation”? How can it act as a filter?
“The act of making something obscure, unclear, or unintelligible.”
Ex. Anonymous chat rooms, filter for your identity
What is a “VPN”? What do they do?
Virtual Private Network.
Protect you online so people outside cannot access your information or see what you are doing. Let you situation your location as somewhere else, gives you an IP address from a different part of the world.
What are some reasons to start deleting some Facebook friends?
Its bad for your brain - hard to maintain more than 150 real-life friendships at once, called “Dunbar’s Number”.
You are sacrificing your best relationships - lack deeper connections with no face-to-face time.
Privacy.
Cleans up your newsfeed - get information you are really interested in.
People can be annoying.
According to Astra Taylor, why is there no such things as a “structureless group”?
In most groups there is a hierarchy. Even in the internet, there is page rank. Based on ad words, people who paid, bigger the site, how many people linked to it.
What is Chris Anderson’s “Long Tail” Economy?
Creativity is being lost.
Everyone in the “long tail” might have good ideas. The bulk of the money will stay in the “head no matter what you do. The “head” includes web monopolies.
(Remember the graph from Lecture 12)
Astra Taylor says the facts don’t fit the theory of the long tail: charts are still topped, box offices smashed, sales records broken.
What are some of the implications of search engines and databases promoting efficiency over diversity?
When you search for something, you will get articles with all the same content, maybe even the same option. You will not get the same results as someone else because of filter bubbles.
What is #gamergate?
A hashtag about harassment and sexism in the gaming industry.
Women started a hashtag to rally around feminism in the gaming industry.
Some men argue that women are taking away what is theirs.
Hashtag started out as an attack again Zoe Quinn, a female game developer.
What are some things that happen to women in the gaming industry?
- They get their opinions shut down
- They get asked about themselves as opposed to their games
- They are afraid to talk about their relatives in case they will be used against them
- When women speak out about sexist some video games are, they feel as though they might be hurt of killed
Who is Anita Sarkeesian?
She makes videos the portrayal of women in the media, especially in video games.
She got harassed on the internet , and her wiki page was altered. However, she was not silenced - people helped her raise money for her “Trops vs. Women” video series.
What are some commonalities of how women are portrayed in video games?
- Walking animations of women are like a runway walk of a hip sway
- Women in games wear high heels a lot of the time
- Cut scenes rest on women’s butt or boobs
- The camera pans over a women’s body showing us where a male would be looking
When we agree to the Terms and Conditions, what are we agreeing to?
- The use of personal data
- The terms can be changed at anytime
- The sharing of information with 3rd parties
Why does the government monitor internet/phone traffic as well as social networks?
Looking for trends and transactions to figure out if people are going to engage in a terrorist act. Facebook has replaced almost every other CIA monitoring program because people were willing to publicize much of their personal information.
What is “mimetic desire”?
Someone signals a desire for a particular thing and now you discover that you want that thing.
Four kinds of information spread on Facebook:
- Information operations: actions taken by government to distort domestic of foreign political sentiment
- False news: news articles designed to arouse passions while purporting to factual, and containing intentional misstatements
- False Amplifiers: co-ordinated activity by inauthentic accounts designed to manipulate political discussion
- Disinformation: deliberately false, inaccurate or manipulated information/content spread intentionally
What are Facebook’s 2 priorities according to John Lanchester?
Growth and Monetization
What is Gresham’s Law and how does it help the spread of “fake news”?
It is a monetary principle stating that “bad money drives out good”. Fake news spreads faster than real news. People don’t want to hear real news because it is unpleasant and fake news seems to speak to your needs and wishes.
How are we hooked on Social Media by design?
Tech companies exploit vulnerabilities to keep people hooked; manipulating; when people get likes for their posts, the notification arrives at a time when you are most vulnerable, or in need or approval, or
are bored.
What are the 4 psychological principles that motivate people?
- Sequencing: If you want to do something, break it into small steps.
- Appropriate challenges: find a balance between being overwhelming and being boring.
- Status: interactions enhance or diminish our standings
- Achievements: we are most likely to participate in activities in which meaningful achievements are recognized
What is one of the most addictive design features in modern technology?
The pull to refresh mechanism.
You never know what you are going to get, the “slot machine effect”.
What are the 3 elements of Positive Design?
Design for:
- Virtue
- Pleasure
- Personal Significance
Copyright was designed to…
Protect publishers
