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Digital Detox #5: Questions to Ask Before Giving Up
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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…

Digital Detox #4: A Case Study of Suck
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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…

Digital Detox #3: Algorithms and Exclusion
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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…

Digital Detox #2: Ethics and Data Privacy
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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…