DUE: 4/18
- Read two out of four of these: Sarah Kessler – Think You can Live Offline Without Being Tracked?, Joanne McNeil – The Dream Must Be Continuous, Kate Losse – The Male Gazed, Julian Dibbell – A Rape in Cyberspace.
- Create a new HTML page to hold your second weekly response, and link to it from your index page. Write two good questions for discussion, reflecting on the themes of the articles.
RESPONSE
Think You Can Live Offline Without Being Tracked? Here's What It Takes
In this article, Sarah Kessler goes into great detail on how surveillance-savvy citizens avoid various methods of surveillance, including using old license plates, paying with pre-paid gift cards, and zapping RFID tags with microwaves and camera flashes. Although I did not know about all the surveillance methods mentioned in the article(I actually barely knew about any of them), I wasn't bothered by the fact that this data collection was happening to me, too. If anything, data collection has made my life easier. I can see how busy a restaurant is in live time just by googling the name. I know whether to take Wilshire or the 10 and save a half hour of my life because Waze is constantly checking for traffic. I find new favorite songs because Spotify can see what I listen to and recommend something similar. The question I kept asking myself as I read through this article is, "why does this matter?" Perhaps if you are being stalked or are in witness protection you may need to take extreme measures, but why would the average American citizen feel the urge to go to such extreme lengths to go off the grid? Maybe it's because I have never been in a situation where I have needed to be undetected, but why is data collection only talked about as something to fear and not something that can also improve our lives on a daily basis?
The Male Gazed
In The Male Gazed, Kate Losse writes about how social media and technology can be sexist and lead women to fall into gender roles (and can even be very dangerous for them). She writes of how the companies themselves are problematic because a majority of the higher-ups are white males and how the users of these social media sites can perpetuate stereotypical and harmful actions against women. She brings up many examples of violations of privacy and blatant sexism, but does not speak much about a solution to these problems. How can we eliminate this cyber male gaze? What actions do these tech companies have to take and what do we as users have to do to achieve equality in cyberspace?