Masters of Media

The Academic Value of Bottom-up Knowledge Produced by Marginalized Groups: The Relevance of Instagram Infographics for Ethical Terminology Frameworks

Rosemary Clark-Parson and Jessa Lingel explain that when studying online alterity, it is important to critically reflect on the power politics behind the terminology researchers use to describe the groups they study. Instagram infographics a relevant source for researchers...

By Chloë Arkenbout on 10/03/21 0

Visual vernaculars, Brad Troemel and the Instagram Infographic Industrial Complex

Brad Troemel and the Instagram Infographic Industrial Complex Brad Troemel is an American artist whose work belongs to the ‘post-internet art’ movement. Concerned with the implications of digital culture, Troemel has been reappropriating digital practices within pop culture to...

By Marta Ceccarelli on 10/03/21 0

Nisam Tražila: How Facebook Affordances reinforce Marginalization

Twitter and Facebook are credited with providing the infrastructure for a new wave of DIY activism. Rosemary Clark-Parson and Jessa Lingel highlight the power dynamics involved in researching these marginalized groups and movements in ‘Margins as Methods, Margins as...

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Cut the Cookie: Dark Patterns in BIG DATA

Cookies, introduced as a promise of choice, developed into an institutional nuisance one encounters daily. Formerly an attempt to provide Europeans with a consent infrastructure for or against participation in Big Data practices turned into an exercise in ethical...

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Data collection and privacy leak in China during the Covid-19

Measures of data collection and management taken by China during the Covid-19 have caused a lot of controversies. At the beginning of the epidemic, people from Wuhan were asked to register personal information on excels when traveling to other...

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‘Margins as Methods’- TikTok as a tool to implement its users into research

When doing research, the issue of ethics has gained more and more recognition in the academic field over the past years. In their text “Margins as Methods, Margins as Ethics: A Feminist Framework for Studying Online Alterity”, Clark-Parsons and...

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Infrastructure the E-waste

I attempted to establish a link between infrastructure and problematic e-waste to tour and document its contemporary impact. On the one hand, e-waste contributes to the growing inequality of the ecological and economic environment worldwide. On the other...

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Reflections on the application of big data: Is big data omnipotent? Do not superstitious about big data!

IBM defines big data as a term applied to data sets whose size or type is beyond the ability of traditional relational database to capture, manage and process the data with low latency and characteristics of big data include...

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Virtual Reality and the future of Big Data

Abstract As we sift through endless amounts of big data from social media, a new form of media is creeping up on us: virtual reality (VR). One of the biggest players in the industry is Oculus, who is owned...

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Ethically Researching Marginalized Groups: Applying Margins-as-Methods to Anti-Vaccination Groups

This is a commentary on “Margins as Methods, Margins as Ethics: A Feminist Framework for Studying Online Alterity” (Clark-Parsons and Lingel 2020), which examines the possibility of their suggested margins-as-methods approach to anti-vaccination groups online. This study’s aim is...

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The Questionable Ethics of r/HermanCainAward

The subreddit documenting COVID deaths, r/HermanCainAward, has recently garnered some criticism for celebrating the deaths and misfortune of COVID skeptics, instead of being a platform that documents the dangers of misinformation. Judging the subreddit through the lens of academical...

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Big data behind China’s “Health Code” system

As a common application of digital epidemic prevention, China's "Health Code" system has played an important role in epidemic prevention and control and has become one of the highlights of China's digital epidemic response to the COVID -19 outbreak....

By Kristen Zheng on 10/03/21 0

Is “the U.S.A most racist town” racist? (Or is it the Visual Media that wants you to think so?)

Abstract One of the functions of New Visual Media is rendering representation of places through online imageries. These images establish and reinforce audiences’ awareness alongside the perception of a particular location without requiring physicalinteraction with spaces. However, from a critical...

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Searching vs. Browsing on YouTube

Abstract: In Stephen Ramsay’s essay entitled “The Hermeneutics of Screwing Around; or What You Do with a Million Books” he expounds on the difference between searching and browsing when completing research while simultaneously arguing that browsing-only research can eventually...

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Running for Research

Contextualizing Research Based on Strava Metro Data In December 2020, the exercise tracking service Strava released their annual data report, confirming in numbers that the COVID-19 pandemic had changed people’s workout habits. Forced to spend more time at home,...

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Inside the Black Box: Built-in Bias of Policing Risk Assessment Tools

Introduction From the COVID-19 pandemic to the murder of George Floyd, 2020 is a year that will go down in history. George Floyd’s death fueled protests all around the world and calls for governments, especially in the United States,...

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“Hey Siri, are you sharing my private data”: A commentary on the impact virtual personal assistants have on surveillance capitalism and user information consumption

For a digitally immersed society driven by technological developments and innovations, personal voice-controlled virtual assistants such as Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, or Apple Siri have become a crucial component to task completion, user interaction, and information consumption. Virtual personal...

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Tracking the Stars: Co-star and the Creation of the Digital Celestial

Ayoub Samadi Introduction A centuries old practice clad in contemporary systems of information processing. For millenia, astrology has been engulfed in the depths of time and rationality and has not only until recently began to regain the reverence it...

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Hiding Behind a Choice: The New Digital Divide the ‘Find My’ App Shows Us

In the age of data capitalism in which our sensitive information is of economic value, it is important to critically examine Big Data and the practices that are used to collect it. In their work ‘Critical Questions for Big...

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The Greedy Algorithm: An investigation into Facebook’s mismanagement of Big Data

In 2018, Facebook was issued a lawsuit by the developers of a now-defunct organisation called Six4Three. In this, they stated that Facebook had grossly mistreated access to users’ private data, while also collecting huge amounts of information on their...

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Reclaiming Space: How Young Indigenous People are re-writing the Narrative on TikTok

TikTok is trending as no other app is at the moment. Whether you are on Facebook or Instagram, you’re very likely to come across TikTok’s annoying, but catchy videos. What happens however if we combine catchy and thought-provoking content?...

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Covid-19 Vaccine Fake News: Google as Co-Producer to Knowledge Production

Abstract Fake news and misinformation regarding Covid-19 vaccines is able to be spread and believed through Google’s positive relevance feedback loops as the average user sees Google as a neutral source for information. Google therefore becomes a co-producer to...

By Jessica Blom on 10/03/21 0

Choose a book by Amazon

Following the digital technology development, people’s personal life already tied up with social media companies. These companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon intruded every aspect of people’ whole life. Even how to read and find a book also depends...

By Linxin Liu on 10/03/21 0

Screwing around and the value of alternative knowledge platforms  

Through the lens of Stephen Ramsay’s concept of “screwing around”, this commentary looks at the value of alternative knowledge platforms such as Are.na as a tool to counteract the linear and restrictive roads a search engine can lead a...

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