Digital Media Studies

“Thinking aesthetic reality with Simondon”. As a philosophical program, this title presupposes three things: first, it presupposes that something called “aesthetic reality” exists and can be distinguished from reality in general; second, it presupposes that this “aesthetic reality” can be thought using the method and notions devised by Simondon; third, and more subtly, that we must think “aesthetic reality” with Simondon, which is to say that aesthetic reality poses a problem for Simondon’s philosophy.

Ορφανίδης, Γ. (2021). Στο: Ε. Κανταρτζή, Γ. Παπαδημητρίου, Χ. Κωσταρής (Επιμ.). Πρακτικά 5ου Πανελλήνιου Συνεδρίου «Εκπαίδευση στον 21ο αιώνα: Ανάπτυξη της κριτικής σκέψης, της δημιουργικότητας και της καινοτομίας» (Τόμος Δ΄) (Αθήνα, 25-27 Σεπτεμβρίου 2020). Αθήνα: ΕΚΕΔΙΣΥ - Υπουργείο Παιδείας και Θρησκευμάτων, 131-136.

http://ekedisyconference.weebly.com.

Digital Cultural Anthropology: An Innovative Educational Practice for Secondary Education.

What role does social media play in the lives of Chinese youths as they adapt to the rapid economic and social changes in modern China? This book examines the social media experiences and practices of young middle class Chinese who moved to Beijing to study and with the hope of work and participation in the possibilities of social and professional life. Through an analysis of their use of WeChat we explore their enthusiasm for self-expression online, their mediated social relations (guanxi) with family, friends, classmates and colleagues and their engagement with questions of online civility. The authors argue that sustaining personal and social relationships in the context of China's modernity, including its soft regulation of internet and social media, demands new norms of positivity and online civility. This is framed by several tensions: between emerging opportunities for freedom of expression and long-standing traditions of social identity and reputation such as face (lian and mianzi); between traditional obligations to parents (xiaoshun) and the desire for personal autonomy; and the pressure to constitute and govern the internet as a space of positive energy and civility in support of national Chinese sovereignty. The social media practices and deliberations of the participants reveal a fascinating amalgam of traditional Chinese culture and philosophy and reflections on tradition and collectivism combined with an embrace of Western-influenced ideas of positive psychology, self-expression, social networks and pragmatic social relations.

This article centers two new media projects that imagine Palestinian decolonization, given the occupation of Palestinian land: news site Al Jazeera English’s 360-degree video tour of al-Aqsa compound in East Jerusalem and Palestinian grassroots organization Udna’s three-dimensional rendering of destroyed village Mi’ar. These digital texts reimagine Palestinian access to land as a community-driven and intergenerational project. In this analysis, access is formulated as a term that invokes the following: new-media analyses of the digital divide (or differential resources for obtaining new media across lines of race, nation, gender, etc.); disability studies’ notions of access as intimately tied to political power and infrastructure; and postcolonial studies’ criticisms of colonial access in tourism and resource extraction of the global South. The article brings together these discursive nodes to formulate an understanding of space that imagines decolonial futurity. This future-oriented political practice works toward a vision of Palestine determined by Palestinians, as opposed to limiting pragmatic wars of maneuver. This inquiry therefore is centrally concerned with the ways activists for Palestine employ immersive digital media to formulate and work toward an attachment to decolonial futurity that is both practical and utopian.

https://www.amazon.com/Google-Archipelago-Digital-Gulag-Speech/dp/1943003262/

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Google Archipelago: The Digital Gulag and the Simulation of Freedom begins with familiar cultural politics as points of entry to the book’s theme regarding the reach, penetration, and soon the ubiquity of the digital world. In a book about enormous sea changes brought about by digital technology, Google Archipelago begins and ends with the political, in particular with the objectives of the Big Digital conglomerates as global corporate monopoly capitalists or would-be monopolies.
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Google Archipelago argues that Big Digital technologies and their principals represent not only economic powerhouses but also new forms of governmental power. The technologies of Big Digital not only amplify, extend, and lend precision to the powers of the state, they may represent elements of a new corporate state power.
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In contrast to academics who study digital media and bemoan such supposed horrors as “digital exploitation,” in Google Archipelago, Michael Rectenwald argues that the real danger posed by Big Digital is not “digital capitalism” as such, but leftist totalitarianism, a political outlook shared by academic leftists, who thus cannot recognize it in their object of study. Thus, while imagining that they are radical critics of Big Digital, academic digital media scholars (whom Rectenwald terms “the digitalistas”) actually serve as ideological smokescreens that obscure its real character.
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Two chapters interrupt the book’s genre as non-fiction prose. Part historical science fiction and part memoir, these chapters render the story of a Soviet Gu­lag survivor and defector, and the author’s earlier digital self. Google Archipelago intentionally blurs the lines between argument and story, fact and artifact, the real and the imaginary.This is necessary, Rectenwald argues, because one cannot pretend to describe the Google Archipelago as if from without, as something apart from experience. In any case, soon one will no longer “go on the Internet.” The Internet and cyberspace will be everywhere, while humans and other agents will be digital artifacts within it.
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The Google Archipelago represents the coextension of digitization and physical social space, the conversion of social space and its inhabitants into digital artifacts, and the potential to control populations to degrees unimagined by the likes of Stalin and Mao.

This chapter analyzes the selfie from interdisciplinary perspectives, focusing on the selfie as branding tool. I draw upon conceptions of the selfie as commodity form and aesthetic practice to analyze the selfie as a complex and provocative visual element in contemporary branding. The selfie’s incessant focus on identity mirrors the corporate embrace of identity as a core branding component. Further, as selfies generally appear within branded social media platforms, the logic of branding pulses through them, as they serve to draw attention to websites, capture data, and create clickstreams. Considering how brands appropriate, deploy, and promote selfies provides insight into the flows between high and low forms of visual culture, in particular, into how photography– and self-portraiture – interacts with, supports, and enhances corporate strategy, and how visual trends articulate certain assumptions about consumer culture and social media. I argue that digital self-portraiture cannot be understood without reference to branding and strategic communication.

Here we invite you to explore the published papers in the proceedings from the  #IFM2021 Virtual Conference. These published proceedings draw from the various and impressive contributions to the III Interactive Film and Media Conference in August 2021. They are organized into five sections according to the themes. In the first two sections, the papers concentrate on social engagement. The first set of papers focuses on confinement and pandemic in the time of COVID-19. The second involves interactive responses to social issues such as migration, indigenous, refugees, and the environment. Sections three and four foreground debates about the levels of interactivity experienced in films and games. In the third set of papers, the authors focus on the medium’s capacities to involve the player or the user in interactivity, while papers comprising the fourth set question the process of immersion and explore levels of interactivity more fully. Finally, in the fifth and final section, the papers focus on the environment of digital art and media, challenging our understanding of what is an “art” and what is “human” in a digital world.

The tradition of faculty psychology is brought to bear on contemporary online discourses purveying the sense of a "meaning crisis" in western consciousness. Taking the social media outreach and scholarly research of psychology professors Jordan Peterson and John Vervaeke as some of the most influential commentary on what Vervaeke has popularly labeled the "meaning crisis," this paper offers the media scholarship of Marshall McLuhan and the psychological theory of Magda Arnold as more compelling sources both for defining the so-called "meaning crisis" and for addressing it. Explicating Arnold's retrieval of Thomas Aquinas' discussion of the "cogitative sense" in her psychology of the emotions, this paper uses Arnold's work to shed light on McLuhan's theory of media environments in order to contextualize the "meaning crisis" in relation to the psychic attitudes correlative to electric and digital technologies.

Sexual violence in Nigeria remains a major issue affecting women's lives today. Feminist resistance to the patriarchal structures that uphold systemic patterns of abuse, vary, both in form and in influence. In recent years, Twitter has emerged as a crucial site where feminist activists have collectively organised and taken action. This paper aims to locate Nigerian feminist activism within a digital space that has engendered narrative and collective counter narrative(s). Drawing from sociological theory underpinning how Twitter is utilised by Nigerian Twitter feminists, I will examine the ways in which the concepts of hashtags and affective publics have enabled unique forms of political mobilisation and organising of digital and physical protests against sexual violence.  Focusing on two key contemporary Nigerian feminist movements #arewametoo and #churchtoo, this paper seeks to also highlight the specific ways Nigerian feminists successfully resist a culture of silence regarding sexual violence and stand in solidarity with Nigerian women telling their stories. The first case study, #arewametoo was created by Khadijat in response to a Northern Nigerian woman’s tweet about experiencing abuse by her partner. Hours after Khadijat’s tweet, women in the North of Nigeria, also referred to as Arewa, were sharing their stories on Twitter and using the hashtag #arewametoo. A few months later, the #arewametoo rally took place in eight states to domesticate the Violence Against Persons Prohibition Act (VAPP). The second case study #churchtoo created by Tara alongside other Nigerian feminists focuses on how Nigerian Twitter feminists organised protests offline. This protest was motivated by Busola Dakolo’s testimony of being raped by Pastor Fatoyinbo which was released on a popular Nigerian media platform called YNaija on the 28th of June 2019. The protests took place in two  (Commonwealth of Zion Assembly(COZA) church branches in Lagos and Abuja where Nigerian feminists demanded justice for Busola Dakolo. Through an engagement with African feminist epistemologies, this research builds on a rich, yet under-acknowledged body of literature.

I examine the politics and poetics of Stephanie Syjuco’s interstitial interventions–cultural and political challenges produced from a diasporic positioning—in the “Black Market Series” (2005). The “Black Market Series” is a series of digital prints composed of nine images found on the Internet that Syjuco has digitally redacted. In a few of the prints, the uneven contours of the redactions intimate the speed at which Syjuco has erased the objects within the frames, while in others these black redactions have monopolised large areas that leave only the human figures visible. When exhibited the digital prints are displayed alongside asymmetrically-shaped black sculptural objects that Syjuco calls ‘blobjects.”

Syjuco’s artwork offers an opportunity to explore Filipino bodies within spaces and moments of capitalist production, distribution, and consumption from a Filipino diasporic and artistic vantage point, which is also guided by a feminist imperative. Syjuco’s work speaks to the political possibilities of an aesthetics shaped by and from the interstices.

With a title obviously alluding to Gilbert Simondon's famous 1958 book Du mode d'existence des objets techniques (only recently translated in English) this exceptionally original and superbly masterful treatise by Yuk Hui provides a thorough and in-depth philosophical analysis of the existence of digital technical objects, which had already appeared in the time Simondon wrote his book of course but were not explicitly investigated by him, one of the reasons probably being that they were anything but ubiquitous at the time. Hui, living in a time awash with digital objects that literally pervade the most intimate aspects of our lives now, is actually the first one to conduct such an investigation. Although there is evidently no shortage today of philosophical studies of digital media, as noted in the introduction, their focus is almost exclusively on the digital and informational aspects of these media, never on their nature or way of being as objects or things, i.e., on their objectivity or thinghood. It is this 'ontological' and that is to say most specifically philosophical approach that is pursued in this book, and in a constant dialogue, that is, with the whole of the philosophical tradition from Aristotle via Duns Scotus, Thomas, Descartes, Hume, Kant, Hegel and Husserl to Heidegger and Simondon, who are Hui's most important informants and interlocutors in this book and who also inspire its 'political agenda' (5). Even more so, the book directly relates this philosophical analysis to the computational or engineering approaches of digital objects within the computer sciences, engaging in both philosophical and technical debates with computer scientists such as Brian Cantwell Smith, Tim Berners-Lee, David Alan Grier and Alan Turing. In passing, it provides clear introductions in the thoughts of Husserl, Heidegger and Simondon. And although the general backdrop and 'spirit' of the book leans heavily towards 'continental philosophy', it also features discussions with key analytic thinkers such as Wittgenstein, Quine and Putnam. On top of that, it is also informed at times by insights from the social sciences and the humanities. A digital object for Hui is anything that appears on a digital screen or forms part of a computer program and is composed of data and metadata regulated by structures or schemes (1), e.g. a document file containing personal data of a user or an HTML webpage. They are new kinds of industrially produced technical objects utterly familiar to everyone yet still unthought by both philosophy and computer science. Hui's goal in this book is to develop an understanding of the digital object, i.e., its object-nature, by reciprocally examining both the philosophical tradition's theories of natural and technical objects and the so-called ontology theories from computer science. Most basically, he aims to understand digital objects in terms of relations, thereby employing a notion of relation inspired first of all by Bachelard but more specifically adapted from Simondon as well as from Heidegger, who is explicitly interpreted by Hui as a philosopher of relations, in stark contrast to the object-oriented reading of Heidegger by Graham Harman, to whom he briefly positions himself. Bachelard and Simondon also provide him with his basic methodology, which is that of the so-called orders of magnitude, which means an approach of objects from different physical, technical or operational levels (from that of electrons and bits via coding languages and data to whole digital networks) pursued through different instruments. The spectrum of orders of magnitude chosen in this study is that of data, since data form the intermediary between the level of pure computation and that of human experience (32). The ultimate

This dissertation proposes a postcritical mode of reading called “hyperobject reading” in response to the problem of Anthropocene scale variance, in which the same phenomena manifest differently at different scales. Previous attempted responses inevitably engaged in trade-offs between scales. By attuning to hyperobjects in the text and tracing their contours, hyperobject reading accounts for the multiple scales affected by a hyperobject.
Chapter 1 details the contexts and procedure of hyperobject reading, highlighting in particular the contexts of the Anthropocene, a modified object-oriented ontology, the postcritical turn, and the branch of narratology called rhetorical poetics. Chapter 2, the first of three case studies, reads Joshua Ferris’s novel The Unnamed (2010) in attunement with the disability-hyperobject. In response to the insufficiencies of the medical, social, and relational models of disability, I propose the dialectical model to account for the equilibrial niche at the nexus of body, mind, and physical and social ecologies. Chapter 3 reads Tao Lin’s Taipei (2013) in attunement with the digital-hyperobject. To properly outline the effects of digital logic on analogue lived experience, I redefine the concept of the meme and propose a new type of object called the affective object in order to explore the sub-conceptual scale of thought and the perspectival line between life and death. Chapter 4 reads Ben Lerner’s 10:04 (2014) in attunement with the narrative-hyperobject. By locating the protagonist within the novel’s metafictional and autofictional narrative ecology, I sketch a new means of conceptualizing the social and countering the narrative-hyperobject of neoliberalism with another narrative-hyperobject, one constituted by Whitmanian serialization and retrospective shifts. The final chapter approaches hyperobjects conceptually through Stanisław Lem’s Solaris (1961). Solaris, a planet/alien hyperobject, evinces the five defining aspects of a hyperobject: viscosity, nonlocality, temporal undulation, phasing, and interobjectivity. In turn, the three main characters of the novel respectively embody the three main responses to a hyperobject: neutralization, anthropocentrism, and attunement. I hope that reading textual hyperobjects can suggest ways to attune to extratextual hyperobjects in the Anthropocene.

Résumé :
Chris Marker est l’un des premiers à avoir ouvert son œuvre aux images électroniques, aux images synthétisées, puis aux images numériques. Si Lettre de Sibérie et La jetée, en dévoilant la machinerie propre à l’image cinématographique, examinent les possibilités du montage, avec Sans soleil et Level Five, ou encore avec Immemory et les expériences au sein de Second Life, la mémoire visuelle du numérique devient de plus en plus consubstantielle à l’œuvre de Marker. Le « cinéma élargi » de Marker construit une réflexion, aussi bien artistique que philosophique, sur le statut des images, sur leur valeur de vérité et d’être, sur leur nature médiale et médiatique, ainsi que sur leur portée économique, éthique et politique. Une telle perspective m’apparaît comme un point de départ décisif pour interroger l’opposition entre analogique et numérique, trop souvent réduite à une alternative axiologique entre un paradigme « authentique » et un univers – électronique-numérique – où quelque chose propre à l’image – son aura ? – semble irrémédiablement perdu.


Abstract :
Chris Marker had been one of the first directors to open his cinema to electronic and digital images and mean his art as an exploration of such ‘sunless’ images. If Letters from Siberia and La jetée aimed at examining the nature of memory and cinematic image, unveiling its structure and machinery, it is with Sunless, Level Five, and especially with Immemory and the recent experiences of Second Life, that digital memory becomes more and more consubstantial with visual memory in his work. Marker’s questioning of the ontological status of images, of their mediality and immateriality, of their ethic and political significance, concerns some of the most actual issues about our present experience of virtual images. Current debates often address the difference between the analogic and digital regime as an alternative between a paradigm of likeness and authenticity, which is opposed to the numeric sphere – understood as unindexical –, within which something of the image – its aura? – seems to be lost.

This article traces the publication history of the canonical woman of color feminist anthology This Bridge Called My Back through its official and unofficial editions as it has migrated from licensed paper to PDF format. The digital edition that circulated on the social blogging platform Tumblr.com and other informal social networks constitutes a new and important form of versioning that reaches different audiences and opens up new pedagogical opportunities. Though separated by decades, Tumblr and This Bridge both represent vernacular pedagogy networks that value open access and have operated in opposition to hierarchically controlled content distribution and educational systems. Both analog and digital forms of open-access woman of color pedagogy promote the free circulation of knowledge and call attention to the literary and social labor of networked marginalized readers and writers who produce it, at once urging new considerations of academic labor and modeling alternatives to neoliberal university systems.

In Benin, the media breakthrough has led to a proliferation in the use of these means of communication by new actors including churches. As a new development in the media landscape, the emergence of these churches is concretized with the appearance of media celebrities. Emerging from the evangelical movement, these celebrities are against any form of moral permissiveness and a so-called modernity said to be forbidden by God. This article is about the person of Pastor Elvis Dagba. Following a descriptive approach, this study analyzes the opportunities this man of faith can get through media such as radio, television or YouTube.

This article engages with the history of television and television studies in South Asia to reflect on how "media" can be re-imagined as an object of analysis and critique. Questioning the analytic primacy accorded to film, we develop the concept of televisual drag and argue that bringing television to the fore can reveal different temporalities, modalities, and logics for the evolution of South Asian screen media, both in their past forms and current constitution. We critically engage with recent studies-of Indian women filmmakers, Pakistani comic shows and YouTube videos, and small-town video circulation in India-to illuminate the currents of televisual drag at work in contemporary media scholarship. We conclude by reflecting how how televisual drag might be a critical method for drawing insights from media histories, practices, and environments that do not or will not follow an easily comprehensible path toward a seemingly inevitable digital horizon.

This hybrid art-theory article discusses "Indeterminate Hikes," a smartphone app and performance created by ecoarttech, my interdisciplinary eco-art and theory collaborative. The work was originally conceived for a Whitney Museum of American Art exhibition and subsequently performed on the High Line in NYC and the M.I.T. Media Lab, among other places. My essay theorizes the ways in which "Indeterminate Hikes" contributes to discussions of new media art, environmental thought, and performance art, including its relationship to Fluxus "happenings." Excerpts from this text have been presented at the M.I.T. Media Lab, University of North Texas, Indiana University, and--forthcoming in 2012--at the annual College Art Association conference in Los Angeles.

In this chapter we draw from recent ethnographic and archival research in Indonesia to explore how digital activists in that country translate or 'modulate' (Kelty 2008) key digital issues – which are sometimes highly technical and abstract – to reach diverse publics, often with remarkable success. We argue that Indonesia's digital activists have developed an effective pedagogical folksonomy in which three particular digital personas stand out, namely victims (korban), volunteers (relawan) and voices (suara) of the digital age. Each of these complexly mediated personas is endowed with unique attributes and located within a specific corner of Indonesia's digital activism space, and each is integral to efforts to educate diverse publics about the digital issues at stake. These three 'digital keywords' (Peters 2016) may seem both familiar and mundane, but we suggest that the work of personification that they enable has significant consequences for the framing of ongoing civil society struggles in post-Suharto Indonesia. We conclude that whether a certain individual or group is labelled a digital 'victim', 'voice' or 'volunteer' makes a difference to the evolution and eventual outcome of a given techno-political contention.

El presente artículo examina el estado de la digitalización del turismo latinoamericano. Su objetivo consiste en poner de relieve dos orientaciones fundamentales de la transformación digital del sector turístico en los países de América Latina. En una serie de países latinoamericanos se está formando la base para la digitalización, se desarrollan de manera estable las tecnologías informativas y de comunicación. La dirección socio-humanitaria de digitalización del turismo está orientada a los efectos socio psicológicos y cultural-humanitarios de los cambios que tienen lugar. En el Internet se está formando una cultura comunicativa singular de comunicación con su idioma, con papeles específicos, relaciones personales y con hábitos de comunicación especiales. En el artículo se destaca que, para el arraigo de los resultados de la digitalización y para la propagación de sus efectos positivos es indispensable, sobre todo, eliminar la desigualdad digital entre los países de la región, así como al interior de cada uno de los países. Palabras clave: turismo latinoamericano, digitalización del turismo, orientación tecnológica, desigualdad digital, multiculturalismo digital

Au cours de l’année 2013 ont été organisées les premières activités scientifiques du Groupe permanent de Recherche qui a pris le nom de « Vivre par(mi) les écrans », fondé et dirigé par Mauro Carbone.  Évidemment l’inspiration à la source de la fondation de ce Groupe naissait à son tour des recherches que M. Carbone avait développées précédemment en Italie et en France à partir d’une longue et originale réflexion axée sur la pensée de Maurice Merleau-Ponty et tout particulièrement sur les thèmes de la visibilité, des mutations historiques à l’œuvre dans « les rapports de l’homme et de l’Être » (L’œil et l’esprit), ainsi que sur la manière dont ces mutations interrogent la philosophie.
L’exigence de développer de manière autonome et critique une telle réflexion en la mettant à l’épreuve des mutations historiques, culturelles et technologiques du nouveau siècle (de l’événement du 11 septembre 2001 aux développements de la révolution numérique) ne pouvait que trouver dans le thème de nos rapports aux écrans à différentes époques, et dans les questions concernant les conséquences de ces rapports pour notre être-au-monde, un champ d’investigation particulièrement approprié et fertile, à partager avec des élèves et d’autres chercheurs qui avaient déjà commencé à l’explorer à ses côtés. Les recherches qui se sont développées au cours de ces années ont construit une proposition innovante de réflexion théorique pluridisciplinaire qui a désormais une place internationalement reconnaissable et reconnue dans le champ des études sur les expériences écraniques et, plus généralement, sur les mutations que notre être-au-monde vit à l’ère numérique.
Le présent Colloque vise à solliciter une réflexion collective mettant en dialogue les recherches du Groupe et de son fondateur avec les problématiques les plus récentes qui traversent un tel champ d’études et qui investissent le passé – et même l’« archi-passé » – des écrans ainsi que leur « avenir », pour faire écho au titre du dernier livre collectif édité en 2020 par le Groupe de Recherche : un avenir qui est en train de se dessiner entre les conséquences de la crise sanitaire et celles de la crise climatique, les exigences de l’écologie des médias et la perspective du « métavers ».
DIRECTS STREAMING PRÉVUS Ici les détails :
https://shoutout.wix.com/so/19O1Bq7LD?languageTag=fr&cid=f0addf11-3569-4fed-a1e0-19fee1f05b95#/main

This article examines how uses of 'Asian-ness' as racial presence becomes used discursively and visually to form affective racial counterpublics around #Asians4BlackLives/#Justice4AkaiGurley and #SavePeterLiang/#Justice4Liang. Specifically, I look at how Asian American racial positioning becomes deployed in order to produce feelings of solidarity. Approaching hashtags as both indexical signifiers of solidarity and as an indexing system that archives together an array of media objects, I track media objects across multiple sites in order to examine visual modes of storytelling that affectively mobilize publics and investigate solidarity as discursively mediated, embodied, and affective phenomena. I closely examine how #SavePeterLiang protestors create narratives of victimization in response to the singularity of Liang's racial body and how the #Asians4BlackLives selfie project uses representational visibility to activate affective politics.

As dating and hookup apps for gay men and hetero-identified users
flourish, the slow growth of lesbian-identified apps is continually
framed as a “problem” by developers, investors, and users. We
observe this “problem” to be one of designing lesbian contact, a
problem that materializes as a queer incommensurability at the
intersection of app design, technology startup culture, and
perceptions of lesbian sexuality. While locative media scholarship
foregrounds the social dimensions of space, we consider temporal
orienting devices that design contact among women seeking
women using a case study of the lesbian dating app, Dattch
(rebranded as Her in 2015). Dattch’s development and eventual
reconfiguration into Her exemplifies how lesbian contact is
negotiated through an iterative design process that tries to
manage the pressures of a rapidly moving, capital-driven
“appified” market.

"I am often asked about the digital humanities and how it can update, make relevant, and provide funding for many a beleaguered humanities department. Some faculty at underfunded institutions imagine DH is going to revitalize their discipline — it’s going to magically interest undergraduates, give faculty research funding, and exponentially increase enrollment.
Well, the reality is this: what has until recently been commonly understood as real “Digital Humanities” is already belated and is not going to save humanities departments from ever bigger budget cuts and potential dissolution. If you want to save humanities departments, champion the new wave of digital humanities: one which has humanistic questions at its core."

Sherry Turkle-Seuls ensemble. De plus en plus de technologies de moins en moins de relations humaines Nouha Belaid Émulations-Revue de sciences sociales 2018, « Comptes rendus critiques, En ligne » Article disponible à l'adresse suivante Distribution électronique : Université catholique de Louvain (Belgique) : ojs.uclouvain.be  Cet article est mis à disposition selon les termes de la Licence Creative Commons Attribution, Pas d'Utilisation Commerciale 4.0 International.

Personal data is highly vulnerable to security exploits, spurring moves to lock it down through encryption, to cryptographically ‘cloud’ it. But personal data is also highly valuable to corporations and states, triggering moves to unlock its insights by relocating it in the cloud. We characterise this twinned condition as ‘clouded data’. Clouded data constructs a political and technological notion of privacy that operates through the intersection of corporate power, computational resources and the ability to obfuscate, gain insights from and valorise a dependency between public and private. First, we survey prominent clouded data approaches (blockchain, multiparty computation, differential privacy, and homomorphic encryption), suggesting their particular affordances produce distinctive versions of privacy. Next, we perform two notional code-based experiments using synthetic datasets. In the field of health, we submit a patient’s blood pressure to a notional cloud-based diagnostics s...