Tamara Shepherd

Histories of Hating

This roundtable discussion presents a dialogue between digital culture scholars on the seemingly increased presence of hating and hate speech online. Revolving primarily around the recent #GamerGate campaign of intensely misogynistic discourse aimed at women in video games, the discussion suggests that the current moment for hate online needs to be situated historically. From the perspective of intersecting cultural histories of hate speech, discrimination, and networked communication, we interrogate the ontological specificity of online hating before going on to explore potential responses to the harmful consequences of hateful speech. Finally, a research agenda for furthering the historical understandings of contemporary online hating is suggested in order to address the urgent need for scholarly interventions into the exclusionary cultures of networked media.

Doing well by doing good? Normative tensions underlying Twitter’s corporate social responsibility ethos:

This article examines the rhetoric of Twitter.com in order to gain insight into the company’s normative self-understanding, or ethos. From a business ethics perspective, we analyze Twitter’s ethos in relation to debates around democratic communication and corporate social responsibility (CSR). Partly thanks to its CSR strategy, Twitter has acquired the critical mass of users necessary to successfully establish a robust and financially viable social network. Despite its success, however, we argue that Twitter does not sufficiently address three ethical implications of its strategy: (1) from an ethical perspective, Twitter mainly seems to employ an ‘instrumental CSR’ ethos that fails to properly recognize the moral rights, responsibilities, and strategic challenges of corporate actors with regard to their stakeholders; (2) this issue becomes all the more pressing because online social networks to a certain extent have taken on the role of quasi-governmental bodies today, regulating what their users can and cannot do, thus raising questions of accountability and legitimacy; and (3) in Twitter’s case, this leads to normative tension between the sites rhetoric, which is centered around civic motives, and the way its Terms of Service and licensing policies seem to favor its commercial stakeholders over its noncommercial ones.

When passion isn’t enough: gender, affect and credibility in digital games design:

Recent controversies around identity and diversity in digital games culture indicate the heightened affective terrain for participants within this creative industry. While work in digital games production has been characterized as a form of passionate, affective labour, this article examines its specificities as a constraining and enabling force. Affect, particularly passion, serves to render forms of game development oriented towards professionalization and support of the existing industry norms as credible and legitimate, while relegating other types of participation, including that by women and other marginalized creators, to subordinate positions within hierarchies of production. Using the example of a women-in-games initiative in Montreal as a case study, we indicate how linkages between affect and competencies, specifically creativity and technical abilities, perpetuate a long-standing delegitimization of women’s work in digital game design.

Mapped, Measured, and Mined: The Social Graph and Colonial Visuality

This manifesto argues that the social graph and its associated contemporary surveillance economies might be situated within a longstanding colonial tradition of harnessing visuality for control and profit.

Book review: Information politics: Liberation and exploitation in the digital society

that are pooled and configurable. The occasional slippages in Pax Technica between cloud storage, big data and the IoT are representative of the ways that these technologies are part of a broader set of capitalist ambitions within the mainstream tech industry, but this conflation is important in that it buys into a vision of these technologies as predetermined and inextricably linked. Although these technological phenomena are connected, they are not interchangeable, nor will be the entities and policies governing them. A second note about how the IoT is framed has to do with where and when these devices are deployed. Examples of the IoT are frequently centered on homes and devices of the privileged, where tech companies promise convenience and efficiency through invisible connectivity of devices that monitor and communicate on behalf of the consumer. But this kind of inter-connectedness is already familiar to people who tend not to be depicted in ads or tech review blog posts about near-future technological advancements. As Sadowski and Pasquale (2015) have noted, associations between the IoT and mundane devices like refrigerators obscure the social justice implications of these same infrastructures when deployed on a city (or nation) wide scale. And as Eubanks (2011, 2014) has documented, poor people experience the inter-connectedness of the state in monitoring rent, child-care, housing, work and food consumption. When we leave these relationships to technology, surveillance and democratic participation out of our conceptualization of the IoT, we do so in the service of some stakeholders (large tech companies) and at the expense of others (the poor and disenfranchised). It isn’t then a matter of whether or when the IoT will come (because in fact, it is already here) but which assemblages will be gathered under that name and which will be excluded, and how to understand connections between them. Although I am arguing against the frustrating tendency to discuss the IoT as if it’s about to arrive and not already here, I agree with Howard that it is still possible to shape the politics of these socio-technical infrastructures. Indeed, from a social justice perspective, a collective insistence on conversations about the IoT is necessary for ensuring against the further erosion of individual privacy, as well as supporting democratic participation. Perhaps the most admirable thing about Pax Technica is that Howard offers the tools for a much broader group of people to participate in the conversation of what the IoT can and should be in our democratic public.