Suddenly, it becomes the responsibility of everyone with an email address to opt out, over and over;
The truth behind this, that even opting out makes us targets for more spam, calls into question why we opt in in the first place. Same with Facebook and its nefarious terms & agreements- we sign up for our data to be mined and sold so we can be targeted for ads. At what point would the trade-off be too high a cost that we decide to opt out completely, or never to opt in in the first place?
But spam begins to make sense only when we get specific and separate out the different types, motives, actors, and groups.
This reminds me of Jeong's definition of harassment in Internet of Garbage, pointing out the trickiness of definitional multiplicity.
on the subreddit r/th eredpill
Particularly after reading Massanari's article, this baffles me. You rely on moderation, but consider who would volunteer to moderate a white supremacist, misogynistic subreddit? How do we stop spaces like this from existing with the potential to harm others when the argument against it is based in subjective senses of morality?
pickup artists
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The irony of this mentality being wielded by men who solicit such pictures- I can't speak for this guy in general, but it seems to be a common thread
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Rape culture's pervasive "asking for it" mentality
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The impossibility presented in performing womanhood: aspire to be desirable, but be ready for backlash for doing just that. Also speaks to the fact that her supporters quote her "beauty" when lamenting her death- what of people who are not conventionally attractive? What if she'd been plus size, or had acne? The dangerously precarious experience of existing as a woman.
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I know it comes from a place of pathos, but I can't help but see such attempts as an emotional last stand, to risk the ridicule in the hope of finding support, community, understanding, love, acceptance.
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This seems like it dilutes the intention and impact of the format. Not to say that schools can't utilize meaningful cultural moments and have students complete relevant assignments, but it feel like it could potentially trivialize the messages being relayed or this avenue for expression.
It’s simple, it’s effective, and it censors no one
Couldn't we also say that it protects no one?
full-blown judiciary system complete with elected officials and prisons to enforce those rules
Laughing at the idea of logging on to a digital space as a reprieve from daily life only to have jury duty.
o participate, therefore, in this disembodied enactment of life’s most body-centered activity is to risk the realization that when it comes to sex, perhaps the body in question is not the physical one at all, but its psychic double, the body-like self-representation we carry around in our heads -- and that whether we present that body to another as a meat puppet or a word puppet is not nearly as significant a distinction as one might have thought.
Don't really have commentary on this, I just find this idea interesting and worth considering further. It speaks to any instance in which we're willing to put our selves out there and be perceived. It speaks to the danger of violence that we thought we left behind when entering digital spaces.
made of nothing more substantial than digital code
Are occurrences on digital rather than physical planes to be ignored? Do they not have impact? Should they be exempt of repercussion?
All of which means that it was a kind of database especially designed to give users the vivid impression of moving through a physical space that in reality exists only as words filed away on a hard drive
While the beginning was a bit confusing for me, wondering what the format of LambdaMOO would look like on a user level, I appreciate that we don't receive this information until this moment. It allowed me to engage with the space and incident in a way I imagine the users did, suspending my disbelief and experiencing it before understanding the textual nature of engagement. I'm seeing that as a function of the text, working to bring the reader in to experience it first and then giving the "frame" sort of context that the details of the multi-user dimension. (Not talking about authorial intent, because maybe people were more familiar with LambdaMOO when it was published- just from where I stand now)
For example, how many of you haverecently received an e-mail from “a Nigerian Frind” (sic)or a Russian ladylooking for a relationship?
There ARE some new ones that are getting people-- someone I know that teaches at a school thought the principal had emailed him needing gift cards, and he bought them, assuming they were for the faculty meeting the next day. He got scammed out of $300 because he thought his boss was reaching out for help coordinating a raffle. I think these solicitations are threatening because we assume we know what spam looks like until it takes a different form and dupes us.
Like when people post their venmo and soundcloud under their tweets that go viral, when Tik Tok stars move to LA to get jobs with Buzzfeed. Online performance is not just for the sake of being seen, it's monetized and translated into capitalistic gain. This isn't the case for EVERYONE, but let's be real. If you went viral and got offered money to sponsor a product or be part of an ad campaign, you'd probably do it.
I appreciate the way she conveys the barrage of information and feeling the internet enacts upon us (which is completely of our own making in our engagement with it), and the impossibility of feeling it all.
The fallacy of conflating opinion with action. "Raising awareness" versus taking concrete steps. What does it look like when the internet is used as a galvanizing force for tangible change?
While this is exciting to consider in regard to the relationship between literacy and technology, there's an insidiously performative element to the social aspects of the internet. I'm specifically thinking of the impact MySpace and "the top 8" had on my middle school social dynamics. We weren't logging on to play games on Disney.com anymore, we were ranking how much we liked each other publicly, and trying to convey exactly who we wanted to be through songs that played, color schemes, and user names.
This shift from sporadic solitary internet engagement to constant interaction is interesting to me- how digital spaces were once a retreat or a place we'd visit and now are a necessary means of existing.
C r i t i c a l p o l i t i c a l e c o n o m y o ffe r s p o s s i b i l i t i e s f o r u n d e r-standing Blackness online, but its focus on oppression and resistance lingers on labor, the state, and the public sphere, leaving cultural aspects behind.
Appropriation, and even colonization, of culture, not just erasure.
all identities are racial identities; the digital is a mediator of embodiment and identity, not an escape from it.
This sentence along with the lines that follow remind me of the point made in class about prejudice and bias being coded into the programs we engage with and the technology we utilize. There's no escaping our identities or the prejudice, racism, and stereotyping of the material world online, because all of that is reflected in our technology. Those things must be confronted and dismantled online as well, from the behavior online down to its coding
“Anonymity” and “freedom of speech” have become bad words, the catchphrases of an old guard that refuses to open its eyes to a crisis for the internet.
I think also about how "freedom of speech" is used in an attempt to legitimize hate speech, as an excuse to uphold antiquated, harmful beliefs.
a consistent pattern is that the harassment ramps up the more you talk about it. And so the worst of what they receive remains hidden from the public eye.
Creates a paradox- do you address it for the integrity of standing against injustice, or ignore it so it'll go away? Also, pretty sure ignoring it wouldn't necessarily negate it, only fail to exacerbate it. Impossibility.
s “spam” once was, it merely means an undesirable message. We are in the early days of understanding “harassment” as a subcategory of garbage. Just like spam used to be a catchall for many different kinds of garbage, harassment, too, has become a catchall. But if we are to fight it, the definition must be improved.
I wonder if this is possible- often times, once a term is co-opted in a mainstream/colloquial way, its meaning becomes something mangled and different (I kind of relate this to the phenomenon of cancel culture). Is it possible for us to improve a definition that is already accepted to mean something different?