Nothing but corn @djyousef-blog - Tumblr Blog

Panopticon

A form of surveillance structure that enables seeing without being seen, while others imagine themselves as being seen without being able to know if someone is actually seeing them or not. The imagined gaze makes us behave and conform to societal laws and norms.

Black Mirror’s season 3 episode, Nosedive, brings up the idea of what a panopticon could look like in a near future. Each individual in this futuristic society is rated through devices (possible smartphones) by everyone in their surrounding, both IRL and on social media.

The main character Lacie is seen practicing her smile each morning to maintain and increase her rating score. Thus the viewer is to understand that every aspect of their life is judged and has a direct effect on on their rating score. Anyone can at any moment watch and judge Lacie, which makes her follow societal norms and rules without anyone actually looking or caring, because of that possibility of judgement.

In one scene we see not only Lacie, but every other person, interact with their devices, with the possibility of them rating each other based on their behavior and appearance. There is no escape from this surveillance because every single person is within that rating system.

In one scene we see Ches, a coworker of Lacie, not being able to get in to the office building because of his low rating score. Thus not following social norms and playing along with unspoken the rating system has direct and sever affects on one’s personal life.

As the episode ends with Lacie in prison, where she’s stripped from her device and “smart” eye contacts (that let’s you see others’ ratings) she and the other inmate are finding themselves physically restricted, yet socially free(er). Gone are the pleasantries but also all the fakeness. Since they’ve broken free from the panopticon of the rating system there is a sense of not only pain, but joy in being able to say whatever they want to each other without repercussion. The ending gives us an idea what a life outside that panopticon may look like, even when you’re literally in a prison.

#genderraceandvisualmedia

Before today, people on Tinder only had two options for their gender: male and female. Three years after Tinder CEO Sean Rad told me the company wanted to be..

Social network services adding more than just female and male to profile formations on the Internet is a welcomed trend for many gender non-confirming people, yet there are some severe limits to the changes SNS sites are focusing on. Tinder recently added the function for users to define their gender outside of the binary of male/female yet its users still find itself having to organize the function of the app based on said binary. After inputting what gender identity one has, the user still needs to answer if they’re to be included in searches for men or women, which is quite the awkward function considering so many people can’t be neatly tucked in to either of those categories.

Nor does this change get to the root of the problem of SNS re-establishing spaces around the idea of a gender binary. That the app defaults to either male or female, is based upon data from Facebook (which is another SNS based on binary gender formations despite having similar gender diversity functions) means that these gender identities are to be privileged over others.

Bivens writes about how this has can be understood on the case of Facebook. “The conditions for binary existence are easily produced while any meaningful non-binary existence is severed, even though the capacity to move beyond the binary has always been a programmatic possibility.” (Bivens: 15). It’s not to say that these types of platforms are technologically limited to go beyond a gender binary.

It’s rather that the people operating these platforms are as limited by societal norms as the rest of society, and thus the technology they use will be an effect of that. To open up the possibilities of the structures of these sites need to start within the company behind the platform. The possibilities of these changes are only as expansive as the possibilities within these people.

It’s also worth noting that while these platforms show themselves willing to change certain features of their services to better accommodate for its LGBTQ user base, they spend little to no resources on lowering or limiting the amount of harassment these LGBTQ users may face. To assume that the problems within a SNS community can be resolved simply by tweaking features and writing a neat code is to completely misunderstand the root of these problems. Transgender users discomfort within certain SNS platforms is more than just the limits within the service, but also the limits within the community, and the limitations of the team moderating the community.

@femfinity

#dismantlegender

Internet surveillance

Our understanding of technological accessibility needs to be positioned in a larger framework of our understanding and community understanding of internet surveillance. How we understand and address this surveillance is not inherently different from the surveillance we’ve seen in the rest of our society nor throughout history. Yet it is in some ways different. What we do online has a higher life-rate than physical, offline records. Internet surveillance has also proved to take in more information about our daily lives. Who do we interact with, what do we engage with, who are we and what are we more or less affected by can all be recorded at a higher rate online. It is of essence that we take more time to discuss this as a serious matter considering how sensitive that information can be in the wrong hands.

The war on terrorism has proven how dangerous surveillance in the present can be, allowing violence and limits on certain individuals without question from the public. But we can also see what the worst results may be. The dutch government’s well-documented system of its citizens ultimately led to a higher rate of Jewish citizens to be murdered by Nazi Germany during the holocaust. The infrastructure that permits the surveillance of targeted minorities needs to be scrutinized more indepth and we need to adapt tools that disables data on the web from enabling violence against these minorities.

@femfinity

#dismantlegender

This piece is also published on medium.com In mid 2016, we confront another ethical crisis related to personal data, social media, the public internet, and social research. This time, it’s a relea…

The SelfieCity project raised a lot of ethical questions within me. Nowhere did the researches mention if or how they got permission to use people’s selfies in their study, nor did they ever discuss what the ethical issues with these type of studies may be. A lot of studies around Internet trends and data rarely think about its ethical responsibilities, often doing things they would rarely do if the study took place offline. The OKCupid data study which did nothing to anonymous data, making people’s information free for anyone to look at and connect to individuals is a perfect example of how bad it can get. None of the participants in the study knew they were in it, nor did they give their consent. A lot of people, who may not be open about their sexuality, found their information completely out in the public where family, friends and employers could find it. That can have real and sever effects on the participants, which is upsetting in the least. Researchers and institutions working on mapping and studying subjects on the Internet need to take a better look at how they can make their studies ethically sound and to truly think about what power and effect they have on their study subjects.

@femfinity

#e-thics dismantlegender

Images as vehicle of martyrdom on the Internet

The syrian civil war and the refugee crisis is as much an effect of politics within the middle east as it is an effect of politics in the west. The way in which we in the west have reacted to the civil war and the people who’ve died cause of it says a lot about who we are and how we view Syria. One stark example is the trend of images of dead children going viral to alert us of the violence taking place in that space. That we need an image of a dead child shoved in to our face to care about the people there is a testament to our apathy towards their reality. That we spread these images without thinking how their families may be affected by it is says something too. That we focus on children is one thing I find particularly important. There’s an attraction to sharing these images, children are the perfect vessel to portray a story of innocence. It fits a narrative of children as victims and adults within the same space being culprits, evil individuals who are only out to further an agenda. It’s a cop out. Why investigate why so many young adults leave their home countries to join ISIS, why so many individuals in Syria and nearby regions take up arms to fight when you can create a story of good/innocent/passive vs. evil/culprit/active, where the west worlds involvement is erased. Our grotesque and morbid attraction to these pictures is a testament to our inhumanity towards non-western individuals and those that choose to align with them.

@femfinity

#syrian civil war #dismantlegender

Feminine sexuality on-/offline

The discourse around sexting among girls and young women is largely centered on the idea that it’s a new phenomenon and that these women are more exposed online. However, that assumption can be debunked quiet easily. Predator behaviour, personal sexual images and videos being exposed to the public without the consent of the women in them and similar gender targeted harassment predates the Internet and to some extent still happen outside the domains of the Internet.

What’s happened is that these new technologies have been attractive as a platform for these types of harassments. While they take new forms, spread faster and attract more attention, like the infamous revenge porn sites, they aren’t inherently new.

@digitalfem @femfinity

#dismantlegender

UPDATE: July 27 -- Hours after this blog was published, national security blogger Michael Best, who uploaded Turkish citizens' perso...

Wikileaks has been seen as a force of good in many people’s eyes. But things have started to shift in recent years. When Wikileaks published Turkish citizen’s private information that made me appreciate conventional media. Wikileaks rarely filters the information they publish, in the name of free speech. But publishing sensitive information for the sake of free speech is a flawed thinking. Doing something simply because you can is pointless in best case and actively harmful in many cases, such as this. Some information is not public because it’s actively protecting minorities. And when that information risks being brought in to light there needs to be someone asking “is the information being public worth the consequences?”. Journalists do tend to ask these questions in their work and many serious, prestigious media outlets do take that question serious. Hacktivists aren’t put under the same type of scrutiny, which is both their strength and weakness. But if Wikileaks wants to be respected in the political field they need to think about if they have anything to learn from journalists.

@digitalfem @femfinity

#dismantlegender

A look inside one of the most bizarrely contentious groups on Facbook.

This weeks text about the social imaginary reminded me about a community I used to moderate. Cool Freaks’ Wikipedia Club is a facebook group with the purpose of posting cool/freaky wikipedia articles. What makes this facebook group stick out is its hard moderation. Post anything racist/sexist/queerphobic/ableistic? Banned. Joke about trigger warnings? Banned. Consistently post articles without trigger/content warn? Banned.

For some, like me, this hard moderation is part of the social imaginary. Without that our community culture would deteriorate in to the same kind of culture the rest of the Internet has, where white, heterocis men can offend and mock whomever they want without any repercussion.

What often gets ignored however is what happens when people make their social imaginary in to a reality. The obstacle isn’t always in the digital infrastructure, but in the people who weren’t a part of the social imaginary. They both find the imagined repulsive but none the less feel left out if the space isn’t primarily catering to them. The linked article is one of many examples of this phenomenon.

@digitalfem

#dismantlegender

Positioning men as the saviors of oppressed women isn’t productive, and devalues the work that feminists have been doing for decades.

#heforshe started as a movement organized by an organization within UN, with Emma Watson as the spoke-person of the movement. Inadvertedly Watson also became the face of privilege within the feminist movement. Being white and wealthy, spearheading a movement that was lacking any radical thought while being embraced whole heartedly by the public sphere and the media, made things clear to a lot of femininsts who have been activists for many years.

Having a white face to promote a movement, and having that movement lack any accountability towards the privilege that certain individuals and groups embody, does wonders in gaining approval in the eyes of the law makers and medias. But what makes it attractive is also the very thing that makes it hallow and toothless; lacking a diverse range of women and non-men who are victims of patriarchy.

@digitalfem

#dismantlegender

Researchers find software repository GitHub approved code written by women at a higher rate than code written by men, but only if the gender was not disclosed

Reading Judy Wajcman’s technofeminism reminded me of this article I read a couple of months ago. GitHub is one of many Internet projects that are both innovative and in a proof of how gendered the Internet can be at times. Since it’s a technological platform the gender bias is skewed towards the male, where every non-gendered user is per default a man. Not only that, but comes from an assumption that the code produced by a woman is less worthy of attention.

Studies like these show exactly how this gender bias manifests and also what kind of consequences they can have. Being brought up during a post-feminist era I’ve heard plenty of time that gender equality is here, women just need to grab it. But studies like these prove once again exactly what the technological industry and the people in it think of women in technology.

@digitalfem

#dismantlegender

Trending Blogs

Recently Viewed Blogs

Nothing but corn