Author: Brenna

a row of brightly coloured cacti
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Digital Detox #8: Moving Forward with an Ethic of Care

We’re at the end, my Digital Detox friends. (Well, almost: we have two round-up posts coming on Monday, and if you’re on the TRU campus I hope we’ll see you at the closing face-to-face session on February 7th — you can register by clicking here.) If you’ve read all eight of my missives — thank…

flowering cactus with pink blooms
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Digital Detox #7: Radical Openness

Sunshine is the best disinfectant. Sure, it’s an aphorism, but it’s a good’un.  I mean, it’s not always true. Don’t clean your kitchen with sunlight; soap is, in fact, also an excellent disinfectant. Probably better if you’ve just handled raw chicken. But when we talk about sunshine as a disinfectant, we’re talking about a belief…

three succulents in pink pots
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Digital Detox #5: Questions to Ask Before Giving Up

I’m borrowing the title from a marvellous poem — linked again in context down below — by Kaitlyn Boulding. It’s wonderful to share with students at difficult moments in the semester. To peel back the lid of the sardine can, what we’ve been engaging in this month, so far as we have been talking primarily…

Photo by Ev on Unsplash
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Digital Detox #4: A Case Study of Suck

A subtitle of sorts: Contract Cheating and Equity, Data, and Algorithms. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about contract cheating and a lot about what contract cheating tells us about the problems endemic to our relationship to technology. I’ve chosen this as a focus not only because it is a massive growth-area of…

Photo by Alex Holyoake on Unsplash
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Digital Detox #3: Algorithms and Exclusion

Today’s topic is a particularly heavy one, because I’m going to ask you to wrestle with the idea of what social exclusion looks like in the context of technology, and how many modes of exclusion are baked in to the technology we use, especially through the mechanism of algorithms. You probably have some idea of…

Small succulent on white-washed table.
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Digital Detox #2: Ethics and Data Privacy

Okay, it’s time to roll up our sleeves for the big guns: ethics and data. It’s probably not a surprising piece of information for me to share with you that much of what you engage with online — from Google to Facebook and back again — is mining your data, using analytics to tailor advertising…