The next session at AoIR 2018 starts with Daniel Trottier’s paper on on digital vigilantism. He begins with the story of a video of an elderly woman in the Netherlands who was captured on in-store CCTV pocketing a lost wallet; that video went viral and the woman subsequently took her own life. In such cases, clearly, digital vigilantism against misbehaviour can be amplified well beyond the severity of the original offence, and can produce lasting effects on the initial culprits’ (but potentially also the accusers’) personal standing and reputation, as well as their mental and physical wellbeing. Further, because of …
The final speaker in this AoIR 2018 session is Elena Gapova, whose focus is on the Belarusian Wikipedia. Nations emerged at a particular historical moment, supported in part by a growth in print journalism, and subsequent changes to global communication structures, including the Internet, were at first seen as a as undermining nation states; yet more recent developments – including Wikipedia itself – have also been understood as tools for nation-building and nation-reinforcing.
This has been especially obvious in the case of the 16 post-Soviet nations, each of which have had to reposition themselves as independent, distinct nations separate …
The next speaker at AoIR 2018 is Mariëlle Wijermars. She continues our focus on the recent Russian election, and shifts our attention to banned presidential candidate Alexey Navalny and the role of YouTube in his campaign and related political activism.
Russians have used a range of platforms for political activism in recent years, including (in roughly chronological order) LiveJournal, VKontakte, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and Telegram; this is also driven in part by the rapid expansion in Internet regulation in the wake of some of the earlier protest movements. Russia enforced a ‘bloggers’ …
It’s the first day proper of AoIR 2018, and I’m starting with a panel on politics on the Russian Internet; the first speaker is Galina Miazhevich, whose focus is on the presidential campaign of celebrity candidate Ksenia Sobchak, who ran against Vladimir Putin in the March 2018 election and was exposed to a considerable amount of trolling and mockery.
Sobchak, then aged 36, is one of the most influential women in Russia; her father was mayor of Russia and well-connected to the Putin regime, and there are rumours that Sobchak is Putin’s goddaughter. She is a Russian socialite (‘Russia’s …
Well, we’re finally here: AoIR 2018 in Montréal has begun. We start with the keynote by Jason Lewis, who addresses the continuing rise of white supremacy in recent years. He begins by referencing the novel Riding the Trail of Tears, which discusses a retracing of the removal of the Cherokee from their traditional lands through virtual technology, and the possibility of Indigeneity in a digital earth.
But such a perspective clashes with white supremacy, which is well established in societal power structures even without further action to entrench it more deeply. Jason compares this with the multi-layer hardware and …
