DL 314

Brands to Be Refined

I hope you took the time to express gratitude this week. You are appreciated.

This week I posted the following:

🔖 Key Takeaways

📚 This Week’s Highlights

Kalle Hallden offers a walkthrough of online privacy and anonymity.
Why this matters: Understanding privacy levels empowers users to navigate the internet safely and confidently.

A look at the life of Twitch streamer Tyler Steinkamp and the pressures of constant content creation.

Ten hours a day, streamers are broadcasting lives of obsession and wealth for an unforgiving crowd. This post shares a day in the life of Tyler Steinkamp. At 26, Tyler is a millionaire and one of the Internet’s most popular streamers. For 50 hours a week, he broadcasts himself playing video games from his cramped living room in his 900-person Missouri hometown to 4.6 million followers, watching from around the world.

As his online world has grown, his real one has shrunk dramatically. The article describes how no one besides his girlfriend and family had visited his house in several years. The piece also suggests that "Tyler has millions of fans but no friends." I don't entirely agree with this assessment, but we need to better understand the pressure on these individuals. There's no sense of privacy for content creators, no semblance of a sustainable career. You're a gig worker for a media empire, expected to produce content with no sick days, retirement funds, or union power.

Twitch officials acknowledge that some streamers suffer from burnout and harassment. Young Creators Are Burning Out and Breaking Down.
Why this matters: Highlights the mental health challenges and isolation many creators face in the gig economy.

Why do our technological innovations feel repetitive, and what does this say about our societal structures?

Sun-Ha Hong suggests that the problem isn't just that our tech 'innovations' are repetitive, but that they fossilize and retrench the associated social relations. We're cutting off time and space for any other kind of future. The promise of automation also provides crucial cover for outsourcing, underpaying, and otherwise externalizing real costs.

Hong explores this a bit more in this article in the International Journal of Communication.
Why this matters: Critiques the stagnation in our visions of the future and calls for reimagining the role of technology in fostering equity.

I've been digging back into my notes on digital identity, badges, and distributed ledger systems over the last couple of weeks. As part of this, I've been thinking about centralized and decentralized identity systems and portfolios.

This annotated bibliography is a great resource that can quickly bring you up to speed on the emerging research on Digital IDs. It asks the question, How do digital IDs mediate the relationship between a datafied state and its citizens?

This has simultaneous social and moral implications. Social, because interacting with citizens through digital IDs requires work, organization, and the discipline of infrastructuring data into their everyday lives. Moral, because using digital IDs as a means to resolve questions of access and inclusion in state services inevitably raises practical and normative questions of fairness, accountability, and justice.

Why this matters: Raises critical questions about fairness, accountability, and justice in digital identity systems.

Black Oxygen Organics became a sudden hit in the fringe world of alternative medicines and supplements, where even dirt can go for $110 a bag. Black Oxygen Organics, or “BOO” for short, is difficult to classify. It was marketed as fulvic acid, a compound derived from decayed plants, that was dug up from an Ontario peat bog. The website of the Canadian company that sold it billed it as “the end product and smallest particle of the decomposition of ancient, organic matter.”

By the end of the summer, online ads for BOO had made their way to millions of people within the internet subcultures that embrace fringe supplements, including the mixed martial arts community, anti-vaccine and Covid-denier groups, and finally more general alternative health and fake cure spaces.

This is a weird story about an MLM (Multilevel Marketing) but it’s also online subcultures and the power of woo during a pandemic, and how the Internet can both build and destroy.

Why this matters: Demonstrates the internet’s dual power to amplify pseudoscience and debunk it.

One of my favorite activities in my classes includes having students think about the soundtrack of their lives and share this with the group. This post examines the Spotify Wrapped, or look back at the songs and artists you've listened to the most over the last year. It has me thinking a lot more about what and how we value this view of our identity.

Part of this is an indication that we like being told who we are so we can tell it to other people. The following paragraph also contains a lot of points for thought.

While tracking music data doesn’t seem too murky at first glance, the use of artificial intelligence has been proven to discriminate. Reports have shown how artificial intelligence can be encoded with bias and perpetuate racism. When coupled with video technology or security software, algorithms have also played an integral role in bolstering surveillance capitalism. There have even been reports indicating how the platform’s feature is inaccurate and nefariously marketed. Still, Spotify Wrapped goes viral. Our collective enamoration with this recap reveals the extent to which algorithms have become integrated into the way we conceive of ourselves in digital consumer culture: as brands to be refined.

Why this matters: Encourages reflection on how we internalize algorithm-driven insights as part of our self-concept.

🛠️ DO: Take Control of Your Digital Footprint

Watch How to Remove Your Personal Data From the Internet for actionable steps to limit online exposure and data misuse.

🌟 Closing Reflection

“I will not let anyone walk through my mind with dirty feet.”
— Mahatma Gandhi

Reflect and Engage

Thank you for reading Digitally Literate. Stay tuned for more insights and discussions. Connect with me at hello@digitallyliterate.net or explore Newsletter Index for all past issues.