If you haven’t seen them yet, the videos are mesmerizing. A content creator with long, straight hair sits at her kitchen table, rapidly stringing together nonsense catchphrases, over and over with the same cheerful expression and tone. “Yes yes yes. Mmm, ice cream so good.

This field guide looks at social media that works on different “logics” than do Facebook, Twitter, or YouTube. It features communities that have tried consciously to use different models than surveillance capitalism and includes the work of collaborators in other countries and subcultures.

LAGOS — Adegunji Kazeem vividly remembers the day his life fell apart. It was December 4, 2019. Kazeem was a final-year student at the University of Lagos and writing his undergraduate thesis, a requirement for graduation.

It’s hard to keep track of all the overlapping technological, environmental, and political crises to worry about in 2023.

It’s hard to keep track of all the overlapping technological, environmental, and political crises to worry about in 2023.

Recently I began realizing that my perception of the world is beginning to change in a peculiar way. There are no longer distinctions between more and less important themes or work; both conceptually and visually, everything is becoming equally (un)important.

Recently I began realizing that my perception of the world is beginning to change in a peculiar way. There are no longer distinctions between more and less important themes or work; both conceptually and visually, everything is becoming equally (un)important.

The TikTok Cultures Research Network held its third virtual event TikTok Methodologies on 19 July 2021 hosted by founding members Associate Professor Crystal Abidin, Professor Patrik Wikström, and Dr D. Bondy Valdovinos Kaye.

The field of digital media research is rapidly expanding to include innovative and exciting TikTok research. As one of the most widely used digital short video platforms around the world, TikTok is a key social arena to study global youth culture, creativity, professionalization, and activism. This event was a critical forum for discussion on TikTok research frameworks and methodologies from emerging voices in the field.

Too much has been lost already. The glue that holds humanity’s knowledge together is coming undone. Sixty years ago the futurist Arthur C. Clarke observed that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.

I just lost a friend. In addition to the immense loss of life to Covid-19, we have lost people in other ways over the past year, when the confluence of quarantine, fear, and US-election frenzy tossed our friends and family at the cliffs of radical beliefs.

The same fascistic tendencies Walter Benjamin saw in the rise of mass media are at play in the NFT "revolution," too.

Search Google Images for ‘counterculture’ and it overwhelmingly returns black-and-white photos of young people all now over 60.

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Who are you, and what are you doing here? You, there in the mirror, there in the lens of your phone: What do you see? In the eyes of us poor moderns, it seems self-evident that a picture can capture who you are.

What happens when design and engineering research results in activism, human rights work, politics, or matters of equity and justice? Engineers and designers are often thought of as “problem-solvers” in mostly technical, practical, and formal senses. But this class explores the equally compelling history of engineering and design projects that raise difficult questions, aid marginalized communities, address urgent social issues, or create new social conditions.We’ll talk to designers, artists, and engineers who work on issues of sustainability, power, health, education, and more. And we’ll run our own experiments in creative design work for the public good. The class includes significant reading, field trip(s) and guest lectures, short experiments, and a culminating project.We want you to witness and be inspired by the exciting, expansive fields of what are variously called social design, engineering for the public good, socially engaged art practices, and many other names. However, we also want you to be well versed in the many, many pitfalls of so-called “activist” work with technology—when it’s under-informed, poorly researched, focused on form and not on substance, it risks not only being ineffective, but can lead to actual harm. We take this risk seriously, so this course will have you mostly listening, learning, listening and learning some more, and, finally proposing—not carrying out fully-fledged projects in one semester. Trust us on this: We can have fun and be at play with ideas while also operating with due diligence as socially-minded engineers and designers. Humility and questions are your trusty companions here, your true north. We want to help you to lay a foundation; you will have many, many future opportunities to build the house.

This seminar course is an introduction to the concepts, questions, and components that encompass interactive media as it relates to creative expression and critical engagement. Students will learn to analyze interactive media’s constituent parts, engage in readings that critically examine both the impact that interactive media and technology have on culture and societies as well as the ways in which social contexts shape the development and application of these technologies, and apply these concepts in a series of creative exercises. The contexts become apparent by examining interactive media and interactivity through the lenses of relevant critical perspectives including politics, economics, ethics, race, gender, psychology, and the environment. Throughout the semester students will learn and apply critical texts to analyze interactive media and build a vocabulary for making sense of our increasingly mediated world. The course thus serves to introduce a conceptual foundation for students to inform and direct their own creative practice by establishing a lexicon of basic operating definitions and reinforcing a culture of makers capable of critical reflection and awareness. Readings, discussions, research, creative exercises and writing constitute the body of this course.

We need to be more disciplined about feeding the trolls. Last year, I wrote a column about the U.S. World Cup team and the unexpected lesson it taught us on its march to world domination: Our greatest weapon is our attention and how we choose to wield it.

Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact. Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent.

Beware splashy corporate gestures when they leave existing power structures intact. Tumbrels are rattling through the streets of the internet. Over the past few years, online-led social movements have deposed gropers, exposed bullies—and, sometimes, ruined the lives of the innocent.

American conspiracy theories are entering a dangerous new phase. If you were an adherent, no one would be able to tell. You would look like any other American. You could be a mother, picking leftovers off your toddler’s plate. You could be the young man in headphones across the street.