Masters of Media

“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...

By on 10/03/21 0

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...

By on 10/03/21 0

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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Feminist Tools for Feminist Research

In the margins stand other softwares, approaches, and visions to resist mainstream and extractivist technologies that stand in the back-end of even the most feminist methods. Adopting these tools is itself an act of resistance. In the hegemony stand...

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What are the odds of a full acceptance of the Big Data powered xG model in modern football?

Big Data in world football is on the rise. A plethora of clubs use data analysis to optimize their performance. The question is whether this kind of data driven approach doesn’t drown out other kinds of research. Are there...

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Afghanistan: a mine of big data?

Everything seems to be about (big) data these days, and, as much as there are numerous advantages, we must look at it critically, evaluating their menaces. This subject will be approached raising concern on what is happening with the...

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Shrek, Bots, and Whistleblowing: Dismantling the Texas Right to Life Whistleblower website in an Age of Dataveillance

On September 1, 2021 Texas introduced a highly restrictive abortion ban called the Texas Heartbeat Act. It is the first of its kind to rely solely on enforcement by private individuals through civil lawsuits. In anticipation of the law...

By Gabrielle K. Aguilar on 10/02/21 0

Solving crimes using search engines

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TikTok: The Ticking Clock on Fast Fashion

The video-sharing platform, TikTok, is contributing to the acceleration of fast fashion through its affordances. The platform is driven by visual media, the platform accommodates video content with the approach of attention economies. This is evident in TikTok’s technological...

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Infrastructuring Vision: An Examination of Automatic Alt Text on Facebook

In this commentary, I apply Susan Leigh Star and Geoffrey C. Bowker's concept of infrastructure to Facebook's automatic alt text tool. I discuss the tool in terms of its relational quality, the interplay between foreground and background, and the...

By Natalie Kerby on 10/02/21 0

Telegram groups as Online Alterity: Empowering or Disempowering?

Over the recent years, there have been many debates on freedom of expression and user privacy online. While moderation on social media platforms seems to be increasing every year, messaging app Telegram chooses a different path, saying they are...

By on 10/01/21 0

The future in the eye of the beholder?: Facebook’s Ray-Ban Stories and their claim on our data

Since Baudrillard made his famous notion about a ‘hyperreality’ in his book ‘Simulacra and Simulation’ (1981), many people have been inspired by his differentiating views on reality. Big Tech companies are since their foundations influenced by the concept of...

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Search engine, knowledge, and COVID-19

It is not so surprising anymore to know that the globally used search engine Google is ineffective and unreliable in many aspects, despite the fact that it is still one of the main sources of information nowadays. After all,...

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Dealing with two pandemics. Why is ‘infodemic’ a threat?

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, people are choosing social media as a source of news explaining the current situation of the global spread of the virus that would ease their anxiety (Gruzd et al. 2021,...

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Can Strava be said to produce ‘objective truth’ from ‘raw data’?

In this commentary I tie main points from the introductory chapter, written by Gitelman and Jackson, of the book “Raw Data is an Oxymoron” (Gitelman), with data produced by the application Strava as an object of self-quantification to critique...

By Martin Trans on 10/01/21 0

As users, to what extent do we have rights over our privacy on Facebook?

Privacy, a concept which we are all so familiar with but also very deprived of. When speaking about Facebook in the context of privacy, many are aware of the abuse of information sharing, however, can there be an advantage...

By on 09/30/21 0

Disruptive CGI and Digital Aesthetics: Counter-culture, Counter-corporate, and Corporeal Examinations in Experimental Digital Art

Abstract This paper contributes a digital-aesthetics approach to relevant new media discourse topics concerning the market, power and control, and identity formation by way of discussing the phenomenon of computer-generated imagery (CGI). Specifically, I will examine experimental digital artists...

By Megan Phipps on 09/02/21 0

Abstract Digital Spatial (Infra)structures: Shaping Possibilities of Migrant Movement Through Data Collection Methods, Audiovisual Surveillance, and Structural Mapping

Keywords – digital immigration methods ■ refugee ■ migrants ■ asylum ■ data collection ■ spatial surveillance ■ architectures of displacement ■ mapping technologies ■ Automated (Spatial) Learning Systems Introduction: Abstract Digital Space as Reductive Space: Data Collection of...

By Megan Phipps on 09/02/21 0

Is Evgeny Morozov’s The Syllabus the real Google antidote?

In the autumn of 2019, technology critic and writer Evgeny Morozov launched the online information-service “The Syllabus”: a curated expert guide to the digital public sphere, containing a constantly updated selection of books, academic articles, podcasts and videos on...

By Sara Getz on 12/08/20 0