When the Google Memo came out, I wrote about issues in how computing is gendered. I wanted to explore that topic further, so I wrote this interactive, longer version of that text. You can click on the link below to explore how your preconceptions compare to history. https://jonne.arjoranta.fi/gendered-computing/
At the end of last year, a group of researchers thought that they had a great idea for solving a common problem in social media research. I usually try to avoid calling out specific researchers when I discuss problems in research. I’m making an exception here, because it’s hard to discuss this topic without going into the details. This is not an invitation to harass these individuals. They made a mistake, and have hopefully learnt from it. Mistaken research gets published all the time. That’s why we make more of it. ...
Last year me and Johannes Koski published our study on a series of fascinating and confusing events. In 2017, the artist trio Shia LaBeouf, Nastja Säde Rönkkö and Luke Turner created the installation #ALONETOGETHER. The three artists spent a month in separate cabins somewhere in Lapland, isolated from everything else. In the modern art museum Kiasma, there was a small cabin people could go into. There were cameras in the cabin that relayed everything that happened back to the artists. The artists were also filmed by cameras, but they could only communicate with the audience by typing, with the text slowly appearing underneath their images. They could not see or hear each other. ...
Content warnings have become a common feature on the internet. This is my attempt at trying to think them through. I usually write about topics that I’m more or less knowledgeable about, but this time, I will make an exception. I don’t have a lot of previous knowledge or particularly strong opinions about content warnings or trigger warnings, but I’ll use this post to try and make sense of them.1 What prompted this text was an exchange I recently had on Mastodon where a user had a strong stance on the issue. They might not be wrong, but I’m not sure they are right either – I’ll get back to it a bit later. ...
Mastodon is a decentralized Twitter alternative growing fast. What is driving its growth? [trigger warning: sex work, sexualization of children] Mastodon is only one player among the many that work using the open OStatus or the newer ActivityPub standard. Among those, however, it’s the most popular and growing pretty quickly, with over one million accounts in less than two years. That’s nowhere near Twitter’s numbers, but pretty impressive for a free software developed by one person. ...
Facebook assumes we have only one identity, but that’s never been true. Social media has to allow for multiple selves. One of the reasons Facebook has been such a problematic platform is because it forces its users into something social scientists have called context collapse. Context collapse has been built into how Facebook works right from start, apparently because Mark Zuckerberg has some weird ideas about how people’s social relations work and has been forcing those weird ideas on everyone that uses Facebook. ...