Notices by Josh Braun (josh@sciences.social)

To preserve some semblance of sanity, until grading is complete I will be communicating primarily in the form of Buster Keaton GIFs.

@academicchatter

Both @ftripodi and
@beccalew have both done amazing work on this, examining the fluid relationships and information flows between right-wing leaders, influencers, media commentators and their audiences. I hope the journo types on here will look to them right now. 2/8

Adjacent to this discussion is the ongoing extinction of local news media. Without community reporting, fewer and fewer people have an opportunity to know any traditional journalists, which leads to a trust gap that's exacerbated by tone-deaf parachute journalism. 3/8

The death of local news also means the collapse of the farm-team model of promotion in news media, where folks without college degrees or the family finances to take unpaid internships in New York could work their way up by starting as a reporter at their local paper. 4/8

I keep thinking about this post, which says so much incisively in a nutshell. When online conspiracy theories bubble up into right-wing media, the reaction has understandably been alarm, but it also signals a participatory element to right-wing media that's missing in mainstream media outlets. 1/8

https://bsky.app/profile/katestarbird.bsky.social/post/3lacbkptde52q

@communicationscholars

If you’re a communication or media studies scholar migrating to Mastodon, I recommend you check out the #commodon, #mediaStudies, and #academicChatter hashtags, join the @communicationscholars and @academicchatter groups (by following said accounts), and add your name to the directory of comm scholars I administer through the @commodon account. Welcome!

https://joshbraun.umasscreate.net/commodon/

#Introduction #mastodonMigration

So…this has been quite the semester to teach undergraduate Media Criticism.

@academicchatter @communicationscholars

@natematias Also, since you've been so kind as to mention this presentation, I should note that I also published an essay on this topic:

"Normal Accidents in the Digital Age: How Programmatic Advertising Became a Disaster"

Here's the author preprint, but I also have a PDF of the finished essay that I can give out on request to anyone who's interested:

https://umass-my.sharepoint.com/🅱/g/personal/jabraun_umass_edu/EapFDwihCOZAqyoCIUX8JigBgN98pYMH_VvI7ItMF2NL7w?e=ErEXH8&download=1

@commscholar has an excellent essay in the same volume (edited by Matthew P. McAllister and Emily West).

@cyberlyra @natematias @commscholar This is a spot on critique! They're treating harms to the public good as acceptable risks rather than critical issues. I think on another level we're in agreement here, though, in the sense that I'm arguing that we've learned from Perrow and others that there are ways to take these problems seriously if companies were so inclined (or were forced by regulators to do so).

@cyberlyra @natematias @commscholar I agree and I rake them over the coals in my first article on adtech. I think both things can be true at the same time, though, and agree I didn't emphasize this in the video: They _created_ a system with a horrendous risk profile because they focused on profit to the exclusion of harms. There's still plenty of culpability here.

If American regulators wanted to do something really effective here, they'd focus less on banning individual apps and instead actually pass meaningful cross-cutting privacy legislation that also applied to U.S. companies. This is Kokas's argument. As she points out, Facebook would love it if the government would do the dirty work of banning its competition, while leaving its own abusive data practices unchecked. 9/11

Still, the potential for strategic use of American citizens' data by Chinese authorities is there. As Kokas lays out, it's a real possibility and something that could certainly be to China's advantage. 7/11

Meanwhile, the U.S. government has more or less refused to pass effective privacy regulation, seeing the surveillance-capitalism business model of the Silicon Valley as an economic juggernaut that, at least until recently, needed to be encouraged rather than reined in. It was thus American companies, with the support of American regulators, who laid the groundwork of the massive market for personal data China now participates in with apps like TikTok. 8/11

At any rate, as Aynne's book chronicles, a ton of the world's most popular apps and hardware are produced by Chinese companies and/or connect to Chinese servers, where Chinese authorities have authority to access it. 5/11

In fairness, the fact that China has given itself the legal authority to comb through lots of expropriated American data doesn't necessarily mean they're using this authority effectively. We may be imagining a dystopian database drawing from thousands of apps and devices, queried by super spies, but it's just as likely that our stuff gets stored on a morass of different corporate servers that don't talk to each other and that bureaucratic incompetence prevents any effective use of it. 6/11

Other countries may have privacy laws that protect the data of their citizens, but once the apps and devices those citizens are using send their data across the border for storage or processing — to China or elsewhere — those laws no longer apply. 3/11

It should be noted the U.S. takes full advantage of this — the National Security Agency loves that so much of the world's Internet traffic gets routed through the United States and is notorious for the scope and extent of the data it captures on foreigners, to say nothing of U.S. citizens communicating with folks abroad. No doubt lawmakers concerned about China's capture of Americans' data are paranoid in part because they know just how much of this sort of thing we're up to over here. 4/11

Amid all the #TikTok craziness this week, I thought I'd plug Aynne Kokas' book, "Trafficking Data," which is one of the most thoughtful takes I've read on the concerns around — and convoluted politics of —Americans using Chinese apps. It's an indictment of tech industry regulation in both the U.S. and China. 1/11

https://global.oup.com/academic/product/trafficking-data-9780197620502?cc=us&lang=en#

My summary will be an oversimplification — Aynne's the international policy expert, not me. But, essentially, China's laws around national security, its strict domestic controls on free speech, and its approach to managed capitalism give the Chinese government the authority to access pretty much any data they'd like, provided it's housed on, or processed by, Chinese servers. And they're free to peruse the records of Chinese companies. 2/11

Welcome to the #Linux emotional support hotline.

If you have an immense amount of work to do, but have just discovered a new tiling window manager you'd like to try, please press 1.

If you've just lost a day deciding whether to try a new app or further customize the one you're already using, please press 2…

[Add your own favorites.]