Week 1 – ‘A Domain of One’s Own’
A Domain of One’s Own: (A Domain of One’s Own | WIRED, no date)
- The idea of selling the service of creating web servers or blogs is interesting to me. This career path did not and could not exist, to the extent that it does today, 10 years ago. Career opportunities are constantly created by the web.
- A site like UMW Blogs puts everyone on an equal playing field. The power that technology has to transform the accessibility of education is evident to me in this article. It makes me think of young Iranian women, for example, and how we can give them the tools to empower themselves through education, online.
- The internet was originally a space for community, interaction, and learning.
- Temporary cyberinfrastructure seems to serve academic institutions over students. The cloud creates a sense of independence in an academic environment and gives students tools to take responsibility for our own learning. In my opinion, this independence needs to be instilled in us from a young age to be effective. However, the Irish education system is a complete contradiction of this, encouraging rote learning and passive thinking.
- Having an online space of your own can be very personally beneficial. A domain of one’s one sets people up for continued lifelong learning and provides an interesting commonplace for ideas, thoughts, and reflections.
- Could personal domains lead to informal academic plagiarism due to their widely accessible nature?
Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own Matters (For the Future of Knowledge): (Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge), 2017)
- Gives us ownership over our data and digital presence.
- Encourages intentional internet use that helps us to develop ourselves as students and as people.
- Students should be encouraged to think about the educational platforms they interact with, e.g. Why was Google Classroom most commonly used for online learning during Covid, and why weren’t students involved in the conversation to decide which platform would be most beneficial for them and their education?
- Personal domains vs for-profit online sites are comparable to small, local businesses vs large corporations (the garden vs the stream).
Week 2 – ‘Mark Marino Article’
- It is evident from this article (Marino, 2019) that the way we teach digital writing practices must evolve constantly to reflect the development of the platforms we use.
- Is there more or less online discourse today than there has been previously, or just do we simply interact with each other differently?
- The transition from periodic posts, reminiscent of letter writing, to much less personal, endless threads, points to shortening attention spans and increased interest in short form digital content in modern society.
- The style of this article represents this, including lots of links, videos, and images to break up the writing.
- Although I do think this is a sustainable and stimulating way of reading, I also agree with Marino’s point about the possible unsustainability of separating our digital writing between multiple for-profit apps. Relying on these few companies can mean that we lose some ownership over our writing and are subjected to the often-temporary nature of online platforms.
Week 3 – ‘The Internet’s Own Boy’
Learning about the extent to which the web was founded based on revolutionary political ideas surprised me when watching this film (The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz | full movie (2014), 2014). A comment that struck me particularly was that if Tim Berners-Lee was focused on profit at the beginning of his career, then the world wide web would not exist at all today. The internet and world wide web were founded based on radical, pro-social ideas about supporting curiosity, learning and problem solving across the world. Open access to information is extremely necessary to maintain these original purposes of the web.
Aaron Swartz was not only a talented computer programmer but continues to be an inspiring political figure in society today. His fight for civil liberties online only reinforced the idea that the internet is dictated, surveilled and controlled by the governing class. This virtual control has tangible consequences for open access to information. One example of this control is the price and exclusivity of academic publishing today. Reclaiming public information on the web has the power to change the world. Learning about this revolutionary power has changed my perspective on the web significantly from something I am a passive user of to something I can take ownership of in order to work to protect the common good.
Week 4 – ‘Principles Within a Contract for the Web’
In my opinion, respecting a person’s human dignity online is synonymous with respecting their right to privacy and personal data. Both principle 5 and principle 8 (Homepage – Contract for the Web, no date) point to the importance of having autonomy over what personal information you share online. A person’s privacy or anonymity online should not be disturbed by corporations tracking their movements or collecting their data to use for targeted advertising. As well as this, respecting civil discourse online means that people must not disclose others’ personal information to communities on the internet. Protecting people’s right to human dignity and privacy online plays an important role in making the internet a safe space in which people are treated with empathy and respect.
Week 5 – ‘Should all Archives be Open Access?’
The cultural significance of archived material is no longer fixed or static when it is made public. When we have control over how we interact with and present historical information, we completely alter the original meaning of the material. Our retroactive intervention is shaped by our current perspectives and biases. Rev argues (Eve et al., 2020) that archiving should not be about ‘improving’ or editing materials, but rather about preservation of the original text. We can reimagine historical documents in modern context, however, according to Rev, we should not alter the documents themselves.
Rev also discusses the line between public and private data in this article. Having respect for personal, sensitive data is an important part of open access archiving. Are we entitled to the personal data of victims of war for example, simply for the sake of research? Where is the line between having unrestricted access to archival material, and protecting the private data of real people who may face real consequences due to the fact that their personal information is public?
Finally, open access archives can lend themselves to the misuse of data. When it comes to open access archives, researchers have no control over how their data is used or manipulated, and the future trajectory of their data is unknown. This fact means that alternative, perhaps fabricated interpretations of information are accessible to the public. This can lead to the spread of misinformation.
Week 6 – ‘Bernie Krauss’
This video (This Is What Extinction Sounds Like, 2016) is very interesting to me in terms of displaying what data collection can look like beyond the bounds of words and numbers. Krausse uses his archive of recordings to log and present the effects of climate change in an impactful, unique manner.
The recordings of the natural soundscapes are valuable sources of information. Preserving the sounds of creatures in their natural habitats and comparing them to the silence of today’s natural world is an effective way to highlight the dwindling of animal populations over time, across the world. Although this method has the potential for subjectivity (I can see how some would criticise the lack of scientific practice), the results, in my opinion, are quite powerful.
Week 11 – ‘Artificial Intelligence’
Artificial Intelligence is computer software that is built on statistics, language patterns and mimicry of the human mind (Tarnoff, 2023). AI will never have the same kind of intelligence that a human being has, because human intelligence exists not only in the mind but in the whole person. Large language models such as ChatGPT can not generate meaningful, original writing and AI can not act as a substitute for our therapists or judges, because computers do not have values or new ideas. LLMs simply act as mindless parrots of natural language patterns and ChatGPT in specific, relies on data that overrepresents white men, leading to bias and the erasure of minority groups from generated material. Computers can perform tasks that require logic or calculation, but not moral judgement. They only know what they are taught, and what they are taught is not always objective or accurate.
Our inclination as humans to attribute understanding, empathy and other human characteristics to artificial intelligence software could have dangerous implications for the future of human-computer interaction. Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum calls this a ‘transference’ of feelings and linguist Emily Bender describes it as our inability to stop imagining a mind behind chatbots and LLMs (Weil, 2023). I agree with both Weizenbaum and Bender that we should be selective about what we use AI tools for. AI is not innately deserving of credibility. Rather than developing new projects at a rapid pace, I believe that we need to allow ourselves time to consider the true nature of artificial intelligence and build an intentional relationship with it. AI can be a powerful learning tool, but should not be viewed as superior to, or as an evolution of human intelligence.
Bibliography:
A Domain of One’s Own | WIRED (no date). Available at: https://www.wired.com/insights/2012/07/a-domain-of-ones-own/ (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
Eve, M.P. et al. (2020) ‘16 Accessing the Past, or Should Archives Provide Open Access?’, in Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access. Reassembling Scholarly Communications: Histories, Infrastructures, and Global Politics of Open Access, MIT Press, pp. 229–247. Available at: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/9255857 (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
Homepage – Contract for the Web (no date) Contract for the Web – Everyone has a role to play to ensure the web serves humanity. Available at: https://contractfortheweb.org/ (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
Marino, M.C. (2019) ‘Teaching Writing in the Post-Blogging Era’, Medium, 23 August. Available at: https://markcmarino.medium.com/teaching-writing-in-the-post-blogging-era-ab7848247e33 (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
Tarnoff, B. (2023) ‘Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI’, The Guardian, 25 July. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/jul/25/joseph-weizenbaum-inventor-eliza-chatbot-turned-against-artificial-intelligence-ai (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz | full movie (2014) (2014). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vz06QO3UkQ (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
This Is What Extinction Sounds Like (2016). Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KnpsMG0PWRY (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
Weil, E. (2023) You Are Not a Parrot, Intelligencer. Available at: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
Why ‘A Domain of One’s Own’ Matters (For the Future of Knowledge) (2017) Hack Education. Available at: http://hackeducation.com/2017/04/04/domains (Accessed: 11 December 2023).
