Criticism of South Korean MP’s red dress stirs sexism debate (The Guardian, 6 August 2020; and one year on)
Déjà vu, déjà entendu [14]
Reply
Déjà vu, déjà entendu [13]
[차이나리포트] ‘알고리즘의 新포로’ 중국 라이더의 피땀 눈물 (아주경제, 25 May 2021)
Injury data shows Amazon jobs are more dangerous than Walmart and UPS (VICE, 1 June 2021)
Déjà vu, déjà entendu [12]
When is a sausage just a sausage? Controversial ads fuel S.Korea’s sexism debate (Reuters, 28 May 2021; see also 분노한 남자들, SisaIN Vol.467, 22 August 2016)
Young, male and anti-feminist – The Gen Z boys who hate women (Hannah Ewens, Vice, 28 May 2021)
On bodilessness [2]
HE edition.
- ‘Hologram’ lecturers to teach students at Imperial College London (BBC, November 2018)
- Robots replace Japanese students at graduation amid coronavirus (Reuters, April 2020)
- Dead man teaching (The Chronicle of Higher Education, January 2021)
Grey matters (pun intended) [2]
Ethics of studying illegal behaviour
- One hundred dollars and a dead man: Ethical decision making in ethnographic fieldwork (Vanderstaay, 2005)
- All in the name of research (Matthews, 2014)
- The gendered affordances of Craigslist “new-in-town girls wanted” ads (Schwartz & Neff, 2019)
- Consider also: How to avoid writing up the research in a way that would serve as a how-to manual for copycats
- See also: What’s in a (pseudo)name? Ethical conundrums for the principles of anonymisation in social media research (Gerrard, 2020)
- A guide to being an ethical online investigator (Basu, 2021) — The Capitol riot has inspired a new army of amateur sleuths who want to help identify protesters. How can you, an average person, be an ethical digital activist?
Ethics of researching on leaked data
- The OKCupid dataset: A very large public dataset of dating site users (crossposted 11 May 2016)
- Media discourses surrounding ‘non-ideal’ victims: The case of the Ashley Madison data breach (Cross, Parker & Sansom, 2018)
- Every deleted Parler post, many with users’ location data, has been archived (Cameron, 2021)
- See also: Using a fitness app taught me the scary truth about why privacy settings are a feminist issue (Spinks, 2017)
- See also: Fitness tracking app Strava gives away location of secret US army bases (Hern, 2018)
I don’t have a SoundCloud but …
Donald Trump has now been permanently suspended from Twitter and indefinitely banned from Facebook and Instagram, among other platforms, leading to a cacophony of public comments on free speech, digitally facilitated fascism, and the roles and responsibilities of social media companies in democratic governance. Many scholars in my field appear to be particularly frustrated, as they have been studying and voicing caution about these implications for years.
Well, perhaps not to that extent, but I have written a few papers around these subjects myself, and I thought I’d highlight one in particular, in a sort of here-is-my-SoundCloud way. In 2017, my colleague Alison and I identified four directions of travel with regard to to free speech in the digital era.
- Weaponisation of beliefs, opinions, and “alternative facts”
- Content sharing as a speech act
- Privatisation of censorship
- Deliberate ambiguity, voluntary invisibility, and self-censorship as a strategic repertoire
Same vibes
Trust me, I’m a doctor. [2]
Yes, this post is about that WSJ op-ed. Since its publication about 30 hours ago, it has kept turning up in my Twitter timeline, like a bad penny. I must have seen it at least 100 times. I guess this tells me a lot about the skewed composition of my social media bubbles. Anyway, I enjoy self-deprecating jokes, and I even have a collection of ‘not-a-real-doctor’ routines, but this piece grates on me on many levels.
If Dr Biden and Professor Cato have to put up with this kind of 어그로, what chance do I have? And what about those 70+ female students in my class who have just embarked on their journey to become a Doctor of Philosophy?
I don’t think I have met a Joseph Epstein myself (yet), but I have noticed something along the way. Those who have told me that they are not precious about their titles are all men and those who have suggested that I should put mine explicitly in my email signature and PowerPoint slides are all women. A tiny sample obviously, but no exception so far. Once I have realised this pattern, I find myself thinking about it regularly.
The baggage I carry
Today I have learnt from Twitter wisdom that if you go to hell, they will read your master’s dissertation out to you. I would probably die again.
I essentially said in mine (2000) that personalised advertising could be a good thing. I can’t disown my past, but that’s the baggage I carry.
