520 research outputs found
Rethinking Privacy and Freedom of Expression in the Digital Era: An Interview with Mark Andrejevic
Mark Andrejevic, Professor of Media Studies at the Pomona College in Claremont, California, is a distinguished critical theorist exploring issues around surveillance from pop culture to the logic of automated, predictive surveillance practices. In an interview with WPCC issue co-editor Pinelopi Troullinou, Andrejevic responds to pressing questions emanating from the surveillant society looking to shift the conversation to concepts of data holdersâ accountability. He insists on the need to retain awareness of power relations in a data driven society highlighting the emerging challenge, âto provide ways of understanding the long and short term consequences of data driven social sortingâ. Within the context of Snowdenâs revelations and policy responses worldwide he recommends a shift of focus from discourses surrounding âpre-emptionâ to those of âpreventionâ also questioning the notion that citizens might only need to be concerned, âif we are doing something âwrongââ as this is dependent on a utopian notion of the state and commercial processes, âthat have been purged of any forms of discriminationâ. He warns of multiple concerns of misuse of data in a context where âa total surveillance society looks all but inevitableâ. However, the academy may be in a unique position to provide ways of reframing the terms of discussions over privacy and surveillance via the analysis of âthe long and short term consequences of data driven social sorting (and its automation)â and in particular of algorithmic accountability
The Regulatory State in the Information Age
This Article examines the regulatory state through the lens of evolving political economy, arguing that a significant reconstruction is now underway. The ongoing shift from an industrial mode of development to an informational one has created existential challenges for regulatory models and constructs developed in the context of the industrial economy. Contemporary contests over the substance of regulatory mandates and the shape of regulatory institutions are most usefully understood as moves within a larger struggle to chart a new direction for the regulatory state in the era of informational capitalism. A regulatory state optimized for the information economy must develop rubrics for responding to three problems that have confounded existing regulatory regimes: (1) platform power â the power to link facially separate markets and/or to constrain participation in markets by using technical protocols; (2) infoglut â unmanageably voluminous, mediated information flows that create information overload; and (3) systemic threat â nascent, probabilistically-defined harm to be realized at some point in the future. Additionally, it must develop institutions capable of exercising effective oversight of information-era activities. The information-era regulatory models that have begun to emerge are procedurally informal, mediated by networks of professional and technical expertise that define relevant standards, and financialized. Such models, however, also have tended to be both opaque to external observation and highly prone to capture. New institutional forms that might ensure their legal and political accountability have been slow to develop
Navigating the online information maze: should students trust Wikipedia?
Being literate used to be about knowing how to read. In the 21st century it also means knowing how to negotiate through the torrent of information coming at you from all directions. Information Fatigue Syndrome, or 'Infoglut' is a defining issue of modern life. For students particularly, it is getting harder to find useful, quality information
Robotic Speakers and Human Listeners
This article discusses protected First Amendment speech and how this protection should be applied to robotic speech. Robotic speech is that created by automated means, currently âbotsâ but the producers of automated speech are evolving. The article further differentiates between rights of the producers of this speech and listeners or consumers of the speech, and the impact of First Amendment protections on each group
Robotic Speakers and Human Listeners
In their new book, Robotica, Ron Collins and David Skover assert that we protect speech not so much because of its value to speakers but instead because of its affirmative value to listeners. If we assume that the First Amendment is largely, if not entirely, about serving listenersâ interestsâin other words, that itâs listeners all the way downâwhat would a listener-centered approach to robotic speech require? This short symposium essay briefly discusses the complicated and sometimes even dark side of robotic speech from a listener-centered perspective
Making the news interesting: understanding the relationship between familiarity and interest
News feeds are an important element of information encountering, feeding our (new) interests but also leading to a state of information overload. Current solutions often select information similar to the user's interests. However, long-term interest in one topic, and being highly familiar with that topic, does not necessarily imply an actual interest response will occur when more of the same topic is selected. This study explores how important familiarity is in predicting an interest response. In a study with 30 subjects, interest was manipulated by topical familiarity using novel stimuli from a popular news source. This study shows, within this context, familiarity is moderately important for an interest response: familiarity does indeed make the news interesting, but only to a certain extent. The results set a baseline for predicting interest during information encountering, indicating familiarity is important, but not the only influential variable a system should consider when selecting information for users
A Framework for a Priori Evaluation of Multimodal User Interfaces Supporting Cooperation
International audienceIn this short paper we will present our latest research on a new framework being developed for aiding novice designers of highly interactive, cooperative, multimodal systems to make expert decisions in choice of interaction modalities depending on the type of activity and its cooperative nature. Our research is conducted within the field of maritime surveillance the next generation distributed multimodal work support
"Spying for the People": surveillance, democracy and the impasse of cynical reason
This essay examines the Snowden affair as a sort of Rorschach test that traces the contours of what I am calling the impasse of cynical reason. In particular, I contend that the emerging form of algorithmic dataveillance both elicits and actively thwarts theoretical and critical approaches predicated on an a normative, symbolic model of epistemology that this form aspires to supplant. As a result, what such approaches tend to discern in the emerging culture of surveillance are its own epistemological commitmentsâthe very ones comprising the impasse of cynical reason. Breaking out of this impasse will thus require disrupting the deep, hidden complicity of such critique with its ostensible object. I contend that this will require taking seriously the often disingenuous or fallacious arguments on behalf of dataveillance in order to overcome the critical resistance to the quite genuine eventuality they connoteâthat of the decline of cynical reason as the prevailing form of social coordination
Edgework, state power, and hacktivists
Comment on Coleman, Gabriella. 2014. Hacker, hoaxer, whistleblower, spy: The many faces of Anonymous. London and New York: Verso
Facets and Typed Relations as Tools for Reasoning Processes in Information Retrieval
Faceted arrangement of entities and typed relations for representing
different associations between the entities are established tools in knowledge
representation. In this paper, a proposal is being discussed combining both
tools to draw inferences along relational paths. This approach may yield new
benefit for information retrieval processes, especially when modeled for
heterogeneous environments in the Semantic Web. Faceted arrangement can be used
as a se-lection tool for the semantic knowledge modeled within the knowledge
repre-sentation. Typed relations between the entities of different facets can
be used as restrictions for selecting them across the facets
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