Mirror - Vol. 26, No. 07 - November 02, 2000

The Mirror (sometimes called the Fairfield Mirror) is the official student newspaper of Fairfield University, and is published weekly during the academic year (September - May). It runs from 1977 - the present; current issues are available online.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/archives-mirror/1531/thumbnail.jp

Data Scraping as a Cause of Action: Limiting Use of the CFAA and Trespass in Online Copying Cases

In recent years, online platforms have used claims such as the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (“CFAA”) and trespass to curb data scraping, or copying of web content accomplished using robots or web crawlers. However, as the term “data scraping” implies, the content typically copied is data or information that is not protected by intellectual property law, and the means by which the copying occurs is not considered to be hacking. Trespass and the CFAA are both concerned with authorization, but in data scraping cases, these torts are used in such a way that implies that real property norms exist on the Internet, a misleading and harmful analogy. To correct this imbalance, the CFAA must be interpreted in its native context, that of computers, computer networks, and the Internet, and given contextual meaning. Alternatively, the CFAA should be amended. Because data scraping is fundamentally copying, copyright offers the correct means for litigating data scraping cases. This Note additionally offers proposals for creating enforceable terms of service online and for strengthening copyright to make it applicable to user-based online platforms

Second-Person Surveillance: Politics of User Implication in Digital Documentaries

This dissertation analyzes digital documentaries that utilize second-person address and roleplay to make users feel implicated in contemporary refugee crises, mass incarceration in the U.S., and state and corporate surveillances. Digital documentaries are seemingly more interactive and participatory than linear film and video documentary as they are comprised of a variety of auditory, visual, and written media, utilize networked technologies, and turn the documentary audience into a documentary user. I draw on scholarship from documentary, game, new media, and surveillance studies to analyze how second-person address in digital documentaries is configured through user positioning and direct address within the works themselves, in how organizations and creators frame their productions, and in how users and players respond in reviews, discussion forums, and Let’s Plays. I build on Michael Rothberg’s theorization of the implicated subject to explore how these digital documentaries bring the user into complicated relationality with national and international crises. Visually and experientially implying that users bear responsibility to the subjects and subject matter, these works can, on the one hand, replicate modes of liberal empathy for suffering, distant “others” and, on the other, simulate one’s own surveillant modes of observation or behavior to mirror it back to users and open up one’s offline thoughts and actions as a site of critique. This dissertation charts how second-person address shapes and limits the political potentialities of documentary projects and connects them to a lineage of direct address from educational and propaganda films, museum exhibits, and serious games. By centralizing the user’s individual experience, the interventions that second-person digital documentaries can make into social discourse change from public, institution-based education to more privatized forms of sentimental education geared toward personal edification and self-realization. Unless tied to larger initiatives or movements, I argue that digital documentaries reaffirm a neoliberal politics of individual self-regulation and governance instead of public education or collective, social intervention. Chapter one focuses on 360-degree virtual reality (VR) documentaries that utilize the feeling of presence to position users as if among refugees and as witnesses to refugee experiences in camps outside of Europe and various dwellings in European cities. My analysis of Clouds Over Sidra (Gabo Arora and Chris Milk 2015) and The Displaced (Imraan Ismail and Ben C. Solomon 2015) shows how these VR documentaries utilize observational realism to make believable and immersive their representations of already empathetic refugees. The empathetic refugee is often young, vulnerable, depoliticized and dehistoricized and is a well-known trope in other forms of humanitarian media that continues into VR documentaries. Forced to Flee (Zahra Rasool 2017), I am Rohingya (Zahra Rasool 2017), So Leben Flüchtlinge in Berlin (Berliner Morgenpost 2017), and Limbo: A Virtual Experience of Waiting for Asylum (Shehani Fernando 2017) disrupt easy immersions into realistic-looking VR experiences of stereotyped representations and user identifications and, instead, can reflect back the user’s political inaction and surveillant modes of looking. Chapter two analyzes web- and social media messenger-based documentaries that position users as outsiders to U.S. mass incarceration. Users are noir-style co-investigators into the crime of the prison-industrial complex in Fremont County, Colorado in Prison Valley: The Prison Industry (David Dufresne and Philippe Brault 2009) and co-riders on a bus transporting prison inmates’ loved ones for visitations to correctional facilities in Upstate New York in A Temporary Contact (Nirit Peled and Sara Kolster 2017). Both projects construct an experience of carceral constraint for users to reinscribe seeming “outside” places, people, and experiences as within the continuation of the racialized and classed politics of state control through mass incarceration. These projects utilize interfaces that create a tension between replicating an exploitative hierarchy between non-incarcerated users and those subject to mass incarceration while also de-immersing users in these experiences to mirror back the user’s supposed distance from this mode of state regulation. Chapter three investigates a type of digital game I term dataveillance simulation games, which position users as surveillance agents in ambiguously dystopian nation-states and force users to use their own critical thinking and judgment to construct the criminality of state-sanctioned surveillance targets. Project Perfect Citizen (Bad Cop Studios 2016), Orwell: Keeping an Eye on You (Osmotic Studios 2016), and Papers, Please (Lucas Pope 2013) all create a dual empathy: players empathize with bureaucratic surveillance agents while empathizing with surveillance targets whose emails, text messages, documents, and social media profiles reveal them to be “normal” people. I argue that while these games show criminality to be a construct, they also utilize a racialized fear of the loss of one’s individual privacy to make players feel like they too could be surveillance targets. Chapter four examines personalized digital documentaries that turn users and their data into the subject matter. Do Not Track (Brett Gaylor 2015), A Week with Wanda (Joe Derry Hall 2019), Stealing Ur Feelings (Noah Levenson 2019), Alfred Premium (Joël Ronez, Pierre Corbinais, and Émilie F. Grenier 2019), How They Watch You (Nick Briz 2021), and Fairly Intelligent™ (A.M. Darke 2021) track, monitor, and confront users with their own online behavior to reflect back a corporate surveillance that collects, analyzes, and exploits user data for profit. These digital documentaries utilize emotional fear- and humor-based appeals to persuade users that these technologies are controlling them, shaping their desires and needs, and dehumanizing them through algorithmic surveillance

The BG News August 19, 2005

The BGSU campus student newspaper August 19, 2005. Volume 96 - Issue 1https://scholarworks.bgsu.edu/bg-news/8458/thumbnail.jp

Mirror - Vol. 32, No. 28 - May 03, 2007

The Mirror (sometimes called the Fairfield Mirror) is the official student newspaper of Fairfield University, and is published weekly during the academic year (September - May). It runs from 1977 - the present; current issues are available online.https://digitalcommons.fairfield.edu/archives-mirror/1704/thumbnail.jp

Through the keyhole: Ethnographic analysis of cyber violence in Egypt

Internet has long existed in Egypt, however sudden scholarly interest came after the 2011 revolution. The global scholarly body tended to couple internet accessibility to the so-called Arab-spring, without studying the other forms and politics of internet as an evolution, and almost none have delved in the dungeons of Cyber violence in the MENA Region, needless to say in Egypt. It focuses mainly on individual-to-individual perpetration of violence, how, when and why people variably define unsolicited intervention with their data as violence , and how, when and why, they choose other notions to define such incident(s). By doing so, it opens up questions about notions such as surveillance, privacy, kinship, control and care, sovereignty, legibility, legitimacy, marginalization and rights. The structure is seen as a vertical gradient, each chapter is a dominant colour that seeps into the one the follows. While cyber violence is visualized as a circular gradient that floods into the center, while having nodes of colours around the edges that signify the prominent hue of the violence perpetuation and the effects of other nodes on its hue. While this thesis is premised primarily on the Castellian view of the network society, various other scholars constitute the rest of the pillars of this thesis to engage more with notions of the state, the social, capital, violence, technology. From Weber, Deleuze, Das, Tilly, Arendt, and Fanon, to Haraway, Bernal, Spivak, Latour and McLuhan, these theories try to give justice to the multitude of entanglements produced by the 9 interlocutors whose stories are extremely rich and telling. From Family, to friends, to work managers, to intimate partners, to totally anonymous persons; the perpetration of violence varying in justifications between care and control, have illustrated the Chimeras that our cyber selves are. Through engaging and living the ups and downs with my interlocutors, I have come to realize the complexities that violence studies involve, beside those that Internet analysis have, through interviews, side talks, countless private messages, and cyber security measures, I have also understood the levels upon which social-scientists deal with their data, as well as themselves in the data, and how interlocutors and the social handle them

The Conventions of Noir Thriller in Harlan Coben’s The Stranger (A Structuralist Study)

This research aims to identify the general conventions of noir thriller in Harlan Coben’s The Stranger and the conventions of point of view used in the novel. In order to prove and give information to the readers about how the conventions are employed in the novel, structuralism approach is used to answer the objectives of this research. This research is a descriptive qualitative study. The subject of this research is a novel entitled The Stranger written by Harlan Coben. The data were some sentences and discourses related to the conventions of noir thriller found in the novel. To gain the credibility of the analysis, the researcher used triangulation method. There are two results of the research. The first result shows the general conventions of noir thriller in the novel; those are first, having a flawed protagonist in which the significance is shown through two focuses. Those are the kind of flaw and the impact of the flaw on the protagonist and other characters in the story. The second convention is focusing on the character’s conflicts shown through a particular character who has complex problems caused by his inner conflicts and the conflict with other characters. The third convention is employing the suspense-based plot which is supported by these plot devices: mystery, dilemma, cliff-hanger, and surprised ending. The fourth convention is revealing the critique of socio-political milieu which is shown through these two categories: the critique of hypocrisy and cynicism. The last convention is using the subjective point of view which is further explained through the second finding of this research. The second finding shows the conventions of point of view used in the novel in relation to obtain the subjectivity. It is found that the novel obtains subjectivity by using the third person limited and third person objective point of view