Masters of Media

The suspension of Instagram Kids and the exploitation of data

On the 27th of September, the head of Instagram, Adam Mosseri announced on the Instagram blog that the project by the name of Instagram Kids (a version of Instagram that was designed to be safe for tweens) had been paused, yet he stated that “building ‘Instagram Kids’ is still in their minds the right thing to do.” (Mosseri). This break has...

By on 10/04/21 Comments Off

Has Facebook brought “The Truman Show” to the 21st century?

If we were to re-watch the 1998 movie “The Truman Show”, we would find many similarities with the world we live in today. Perhaps the most significant one is profiling people/users, surveilling them and collecting their data for various...

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Mobility for all, data for all?

Dockless bike sharing companies like to brand themselves as providing convenient, accessible and affordable mobility service to the public, but they rarely mention the importance of data collection in their business. In his book The Data Revolution, Kitchin (2014,...

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Big Brother is -still- watching you

Big data is everywhere. This term has been widely discussed on television studio sets, during political debates, on lunch tables, online conversations. But what exactly constitutes big data, why is it “subjective”, and why does it pose an ethical...

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The HTTP Cookie Monster: Internet Privacy Concerns and Social Awareness of Data Protection

In their article titled, “A Reality Check(list) for Digital Methods”, Venturini et al. present the compelling argument that the collection, analysis, and exchange of “Big Data” has become increasingly prevalent within media environments, consequently altering the nature of online spaces (Venturini,...

By Maria Vittoria Ravaioli on 10/03/21 Comments Off

FAKE ACCOUNTS ON DIGITAL PLATFORMS MAY RUIN YOUR RESEARCH. THIS IS HOW.

INTRODUCTION Using data from digital platforms to produce knowledge is booming in academic circles (Boyd & Crawford, 2012). It is an advantage afforded by the internet and various media on it. However, with the opportunity comes risks. One of...

By Issaka Adams on 10/03/21 Comments Off

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 Comments Off

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 Comments Off

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 Comments Off

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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“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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