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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 …