29 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
29 lines
3.6 KiB
Plaintext
Activism
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wears the badge 'mosquito press' as a badge of honour. To be full of buzz and annoying under dictatorship, never able to be exterminated, is something to be applauded.
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The case of #LoSHA (List of Sexual Harassers in Academia) is an example of a kind of graffiti-inspired strategy of publishing that has a longer history in feminism.
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activists similarly inscribed a public place with their accusations, for all to see, for the public to deal with.
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What are innovative ways to counter these movements on a transnational level?
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A lot of activists are hold-overs from the 70s (baby boomers trying to understand what’s happening online).
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Don’t stick to fingertip activism but go to conventions and meet-ups.
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but that counter-meming can be a powerful means of the Left, too.
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Understanding the archive as activism, Padmini Ray Murray's called for decentralized servers hosting DIY archives as a way of providing a counterpoint to massive archiving projects by the likes of, for example, Google. Giving the example of Google Arts & Culture's project "Women in India: Unheard Stories", Ray Murray stressed that all the material Google has received from many Indian cultural institution merely serves as a corpus to train their machines. One way to tell this is through its interface, which is cryptic at best. According to Ray Murray, the relationship between interface and knowledge production is a very important one: the ones in charge of the archive determine how the subject is represented. Ray Murray is therefore critical of the ability of profit-led corporations to truly forward the interests of the represented subjects. Such an archive must be challenged. The taxonomies and categories of the Internet, as a consequence of the Enlightenment project, must be exploded: "As scholars, as thinkers, as makers it is also on us, I think, to jam the archive, and to make the ways that the digital archive thinks about how the world is represented, how history will be read, or how history will be understood."
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The workshop is in response to an urgent need to raise awareness to digital discrimination arising from voice technology developments. This is illustrated in a speech_recognition_interview between Amy and, as it turns out, all of us, collectively reading out lines from a script. It doesn’t go well for Amy; she is rejected due to data drawn from not just what she said, but also how she said it. Her fate is sealed by low percentages of the things that matter, such as confident delivery and use of predetermined key words.
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We are invited to record ourselves reading from them in groups, either obscuring or emphasizing elements. Most adopt tactics of sabotage and subterfuge, such as broken syllables, speaking continuously, using languages other than English, etcetera. Some aim for clarity; text to speech, exploiting acoustics or carefully pronouncing certain words.
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It’s easy to laugh at the mess made of what comes so naturally to us; language. But there are more serious implications, as we see in a screening of a video of academic Halcyon Lawrence, who maintains that homophony is engrained, and confronting accent bias is a crucial part of ensuring access to technology. The hallmark of algorithmic natural language applications is invisibility, relying on a participant’s lack of awareness of the process. However, invisibility is also a result of these applications, in their ability to discriminate between the contents of the bags of words they employ, and so hide differences; discarding what is considered to be indistinct.
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How do we protest
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1980s/1990s zinemaking as anti-mainstream, countercultural publishing
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