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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Digital Refuse: Canadian Garbage, Commercial Content Moderation And The Global Circulation Of Social Media’S Waste, Sarah T. Roberts Jan 2016

Digital Refuse: Canadian Garbage, Commercial Content Moderation And The Global Circulation Of Social Media’S Waste, Sarah T. Roberts

Media Studies Publications

The story of a rogue Canadian garbage barge attempting to offload illegal garbage in the Philippines opens this article on techno-trash, in order to underline both the relationships between countries of the Global North with countries of the Global South in matters of waste, as well as to reframe discussions of techno-trash as one fundamentally tied to material things. The definition of techno-trash is then expanded, to cover digital detritus created through an entirely digital set of practices I term “Commercial Content Moderation.” The attempt to offload mounds of e-waste and the similar ways in which a great deal of …


Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers' Dirty Work, Sarah T. Roberts Jan 2016

Commercial Content Moderation: Digital Laborers' Dirty Work, Sarah T. Roberts

Media Studies Publications

In this chapter from the forthcoming Intersectional Internet: Race, Sex, Class and Culture Online (Noble and Tynes, Eds., 2016), I introduce both the concept of commercial content moderation (CCM) work and workers, as well as the ways in which this unseen work affects how users experience the Internet of social media and user-generated content (UGC). I tie it to issues of race and gender by describing specific cases of viral videos that transgressed norms and by providing examples from my interviews with CCM workers. The interventions of CCM workers on behalf of the platforms for which they labor directly contradict …


Through Google-Colored Glass(Es): Design, Emotion, Class, And Wearables As Commodity And Control, Safiya Umoja Noble, Sarah T. Roberts Jan 2016

Through Google-Colored Glass(Es): Design, Emotion, Class, And Wearables As Commodity And Control, Safiya Umoja Noble, Sarah T. Roberts

Media Studies Publications

This chapter discusses the implications of wearable technologies like Google Glass that function as a tool for occupying, commodifying, and profiting from the bio- logical, psychological, and emotional data of its wearers and those who fall within its gaze. We argue that Google Glass privileges an imaginary of unbridled exploration and intrusion into the physical and emotional space of others. Glass’s recognizable esthetic and outward-facing camera has elicited intense emotional response, partic- ularly when “exploration” has taken place in areas of San Francisco occupied by residents who were finding themselves priced out or evicted from their homes to make way …


In/Visibility, Sarah T. Roberts Jan 2016

In/Visibility, Sarah T. Roberts

Media Studies Publications

In online life there is a normative supposition that the information- and image-rich environment of the web and other platforms should provide unfettered access to the circulation of all types of content. Less attention is paid to what is not seen, to the invisible—be it actual content that is rescinded, altered or removed, or the opaque decision-making processes that maintain its flow. In/visibility online is central to the intertwined functions/mechanisms of user experience and platform control, further operationalized under globalized, technologically driven capitalism. A digital labour phenomenon that is both responsible for it and relies upon it: is …


Display-Through-Foregrounding By Photojournalists As Self-Reflexivity In Photojournalism: Two Case Studies Of Accidental Peace Photojournalism, Saumava Mitra Jan 2016

Display-Through-Foregrounding By Photojournalists As Self-Reflexivity In Photojournalism: Two Case Studies Of Accidental Peace Photojournalism, Saumava Mitra

FIMS Publications

This article explores media self-reflexivity as understood within Peace Journalism (PJ) in the case of photojournalists and photojournalism. Carrying forward the discussion started by Allan (2011) for research into ‘peace photography’ to be extended to ‘tacit, unspoken rules’ underlying photojournalistic images, the article shows, through two examples of mainstream news images, how photojournalists can and may break from diktats of ‘news values’ to advertently or inadvertently critique the myths of the very practice they function within. Such self-reflexive, synecdochic images which display media’s own role in covering conflict are examples from which PJ can take lessons for a new visual …


Heroes For The Helpless: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Canadian National Print Media’S Coverage Of The Food Insecurity Crisis In Nunavut, Bradley Hiebert, Elaine Power Jan 2016

Heroes For The Helpless: A Critical Discourse Analysis Of Canadian National Print Media’S Coverage Of The Food Insecurity Crisis In Nunavut, Bradley Hiebert, Elaine Power

FIMS Publications

In northern Canada, the Inuit’s transition from a culturally traditional to a Western diet has been accompanied by chronic poverty and provoked high levels of food insecurity, resulting in numerous negative health outcomes. This study examines national coverage of Nunavut food insecurity as presented in two of Canada’s most widely read newspapers: The Globe and Mail (GM) and the National Post (NP). A critical discourse analysis (CDA) was employed to analyze 24 articles, 19 from GM and 5 from NP. Analysis suggests national print media propagates the Inuit’s position as The Other by selectively reporting on social issues such as …


Epic And Genre: Beyond The Boundaries Of Media, Luke Arnott Jan 2016

Epic And Genre: Beyond The Boundaries Of Media, Luke Arnott

FIMS Publications

Noting the resurgence of popular and academic interest in epics across disparate media, this essay proposes a theory of the epic genre that transcends particular media and cultures. It seeks to reconcile discussions of the epic in Aristotle, G.W.F. Hegel, Georg Lukács, Mikhail Bakhtin, Erich Auerbach, and Northrop Frye, arguing that traditional definitions of epic narrative are instead subsets of a greater generic structure. The epic is, following Gregory Nagy and Franco Moretti, among others, a literary “super-genre” that encompasses as many other kinds of narrative as possible. The essay explains how epic narrative, disembedded from earlier oral poetry, is …