In Alan Kay's metaphor, the problem with bootstrapping in Douglas Engelbart's Augmentation Research Center was that while "Engelbart, for better or for worse, was trying to make a violin," "most people don't want to learn the violin." User-friendliness, not coevolutionary learning, became the norm in the design of human-computer interfaces. Thierry Bardini, Bootstrapping: Douglas Engelbart, Coevolution, and the Origins of Personal Computing. (p. 215.) (Emphasis mine.)

By "augmenting human intellect" we mean increasing the capability of a man to approach a complex problem situation, to gain comprehension to suit his particular needs, and to derive solutions to problems.

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What counts as “authentic” decolonization in 2020?

The ones who keep doing the work continue to protest the patriarchy and to produce knowledge on the subject. The rest is all noise. We can complain about the noise, but we must not let it distract us from the real mission at hand

It must be reiterated that universities and academics themselves are extremely influential. Universities and the instructors they employ remain in charge of shaping entire generations and are in the big business of mind management.

Literacy is usually defined as the ability to read and write, or the ability to use language to read, write, listen, and speak.

Combine brown sugar, cinnamon, and instant clear jel in a small bowl. Use a rubber spatula or whisk to combine the ingredients and make sure there aren’t any pockets of instant clear jel hiding in the bowl—like regular corn starch, instant clear jel is a fine powder, and if it’s not dispersed with other granulated or powdered ingredients, it can clump when activated. Add a couple tablespoons of water and use the rubber spatula to stir. The mixture should be thick but spreadable. If it's too thick, adjust the consistency by adding a few drops of water at a time.

STEM now is used as a brand name to describe the integration of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics in educational curricula.

There is no such thing as “illiterate”, there are just certain things in life that people are more or less literate about.

Literacy is the ability to be able to be aware and cognizant of the task you are doing or the situation you are in. Being literate is the ability to critically analyze texts and interpret them to have meaning.

When teachers deliberately plan such adaptations to facilitate students' learning and execute these adaptations during their lessons we call it differentiated instruction

Such ideas imply that teachers proactively modify curricula, teaching methods, resources, learning activities, or requirements for student products to better meet students' learning needs

While OpenAI has released its algorithms to the public in the past, it has opted to keep GPT-3 locked away.

“The future of wearables is in the awkward adolescent stage. I have a feeling we’ll be here for awhile,” wrote Ian O’Byrne, an assistant professor at the University of New Haven. “At some point, a product will come out that ‘just makes sense.’”

lexicon

. Language is explained as a socially and culturally constructed system of communication.

Emotional distress causes increased heart rate, muscle tensing, faster breathing, and inability to focus on other subjects.

Educators are now administering the Turing test in reverse: What are questions that only humans can answer well? What kinds of thinking does writing make possible for us? 

GPT-3 threatens to “[undermine] the kind of writing intensive course that had served as the backbone of [his] teaching for two decades.” “I was less worried about whether GPT-3 is genuinely intelligent,” Symons writes, “and more worried about whether the development of these tools would make us less intelligent.” 

Interpersonal competence is the ability to motivate, enable, and facilitate collaborative and participatory sustainability research and problem solving.

Strategic competence is the ability to collectively design and implement interventions, transitions, and transformative governance strategies toward sustainability.

Normative competence is the ability to collectively map, specify, apply, reconcile, and negotiate sustainability values, principles, goals, and targets.

Anticipatory competence is the ability to collectively analyze, evaluate, and craft rich “pictures” of the future related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks.

Systems-thinking competence is the ability to collectively analyze complex systems across different domains (society, environment, economy, etc.) and across different scales (local to global), thereby considering cascading effects, inertia, feedback loops and other systemic features related to sustainability issues and sustainability problem-solving frameworks.

definition of competence as a functionally linked complex of knowledge, skills, and attitudes that enable successful task performance and problem solving

Tackle wicked problems using a systems-thinking approach that considers the political roles, interests, and perspectives of stakeholders. 2. Collaborate effectively with stakeholders and team members with diverse backgrounds, life experiences, and ways of knowing. 3. Communicate scientific research and ideas to diverse audiences and through different modalities. 4. Meet ethical, collegial, and professional expectations and standards in collaborative research and other professional endeavors. 5. Articulate a sense of purpose and develop competencies, skills, and habits that prepare them for life-long learning about and engaging with wicked problems.

An emergent behavior or emergent property can appear when a number of simple entities (agents) operate in an environment, forming more complex behaviors as a collective.

The survey was conducted using surveymonkey.comand primary data were downloaded by DSRA. Thestatistical analyses, including a principal componentsanalysis, were done with SPSS.

What benefits do teachers attribute to theirparticipation in mobile laboratory programs? Do teachers perceive that the mobile laboratoryexperience has an impact on student learning,student attitudes, and student behaviors? If so, whatis the impact?

acquiring true control groups and she indicated that much ofthe feedback tended to be anecdotal and somewhat irregula

However, mobile laboratory programs aredesigned to do much more than provide equipment andsupplies. The value added by these programs stems fromaccess to engaging, substantive, and thought-provokinginquiry experiences for students and teachers. These includea range of laboratory experiences that involve studentscarrying out carefully specified procedures to verifyestablished scientific knowledge as well as experiences thatengage students in formulating questions, designinginvestigations, and creating and revising explanatory models[3]. Most mobile laboratory experiences for students rangefrom one to four days of laboratory-based activities thatsupplement required curricula. The flexibility of the mobilelaboratory format allows teachers to customize the time anddepth of the experience to the needs of their students andschool schedule. For example, some teachers opt to haveseveral classes work on the mobile laboratory duringregularly scheduled class periods for four or five days whileother teachers choose an in house field trip format thatallows the students to work on an investigation for the entireschool day. Mobile laboratory programs provideappropriately configured space, state-of-the-art equipment,and pedagogically-rich curricular materials, as well asprofessional staff who work with classroom teachers tocreate meaningful science explorations. The combination offacilities, staff, supplies, and materials enable mobilelaboratories to deliver outstanding laboratory learningexperiences for students and unique professionaldevelopment opportunities for teachers.

These“vehicles” may pique the curiosity of students andmotivate them to continue their study of science in highschool and beyond. As such, mobile science laboratoriesmay contribute to increasing the number of studentswho become science-literate citizens and members of thescience workforce

Survey results show that students who have an inter-est in science at an early age are more likely to graduatefrom an engineering or science program. Muller et alshowed that most students make their decision regardingtheir future career major before the age of fourteen (Mulleret al., 2013). The current job market for STEM graduates isa motivating factor (Hossain & Robinson, 2012), however,a personal interest in STEM subject matter and peer influ

Understand that they need the other side, and admit their basic ignorance. But that’s always been the beginning of wisdom, no matter what technological era we happen to inhabit.

natural-language processing is going to force engineers and humanists together. They are going to need each other despite everything. Computer scientists will require basic, systematic education in general humanism: The philosophy of language, sociology, history, and ethics are not amusing questions of theoretical speculation anymore. They will be essential in determining the ethical and creative use of chatbots, to take only an obvious example.

Contemporary academia engages, more or less permanently, in self-critique on any and every front it can imagine. In a tech-centered world, language matters, voice and style matter, the study of eloquence matters, history matters, ethical systems matter. But the situation requires humanists to explain why they matter, not constantly undermine their own intellectual foundations. The humanities promise students a journey to an irrelevant, self-consuming future; then they wonder why their enrollments are collapsing. Is it any surprise that nearly half of humanities graduates regret their choice of major?

The extraordinary ignorance on questions of society and history displayed by the men and women reshaping society and history has been the defining feature of the social-media era.

Emergent abilities are not present in small models but can be observed in large models.

Houston, we have a Capability Overhang problem: Because language models have a large capability surface, these cases of emergent capabilities are an indicator that we have a ‘capabilities overhang’ – today’s models are far more capable than we think, and our techniques available for exploring the models are very juvenile. We only know about these cases of emergence because people built benchmark datasets and tested models on them. What about all the capabilities we don’t know about because we haven’t thought to test for them? There are rich questions here about the science of evaluating the capabilities (and safety issues) of contemporary models. 

As the metaphor suggests, though, the prospect of a capability overhang isn’t necessarily good news. As well as hidden and emerging capabilities, there are hidden and emerging threats. And these dangers, like our new skills, are almost too numerous to name.

There’s a concept in AI that I’m particularly fond of that I think helps explain what’s happening. It’s called “capability overhang” and refers to the hidden capacities of AI: skills and aptitudes latent within systems that researchers haven’t even begun to investigate yet. You might have heard before that AI models are “black boxes” — that they’re so huge and complex that we don’t fully understand how they operate or come to specific conclusions. This is broadly true and is what creates this overhang.

Which is why I wonder if this may be the end of using writing as a benchmark for aptitude and intelligence.

Perhaps there are reasons for optimism, if you push all this aside. Maybe every student is now immediately launched into that third category: The rudiments of writing will be considered a given, and every student will have direct access to the finer aspects of the enterprise. Whatever is inimitable within them can be made conspicuous, freed from the troublesome mechanics of comma splices, subject-verb disagreement, and dangling modifiers.

I’ve also long held, for those who are interested in writing, that you need to learn the basic rules of good writing before you can start breaking them—that, like Picasso, you have to learn how to reliably fulfill an audience’s expectations before you get to start putting eyeballs in people’s ears and things.

“What We Mean When We Talk About Freedom of Speech” is based on the research of Sky Croeser, Professor of Internet Studies at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

Activists within this movement, as well as academics writing about online harassment, have tended to ground their discussions of the problem with reference to free speech discourse. However, this language, with its grounding in the Western liberal tradition, comes with considerable limitations. I argue here that an intersectional approach requires us to explore a much more radical rethinking of the political traditions in which we ground responses to online harassment.

The subjectivity of moderation decisions across the social web poses tremendous and complicated problems—which is precisely why journalists and academics have paid close attention to it for more than a decade

The trolling is paramount. When former Facebook CSO and Stanford Internet Observatory leader Alex Stamos asked whether Musk would consider implementing his detailed plan for “a trustworthy, neutral platform for political conversations around the world,” Musk responded, “You operate a propaganda platform.” Musk doesn’t appear to want to substantively engage on policy issues: He wants to be aggrieved.

Twitter has, like its fellow social media platforms, been working for years to make the process of moderation efficient and systematic enough to function at scale. Not just so the platform isn’t overrun with bots and spam, but in order to comply with legal frameworks like FTC orders and the GDPR.

How much time do you spend each day thinking?I don’t mean thinking about what you’ll have for lunch or what you’ll wear for tonight’s date, I mean thinking thinking. About ethics, politics, whether or not God exists. I mean big thinking.

Twitter has never been able to deal with the fact its users both hate using it and also hate each other.

The most typical way users encounter trending content is when a massively viral tweet — or subtweets about that tweet or the discourse it created — enters their feed. Then it’s up to them to figure out what kind of account posted the tweet, what kind of accounts are sharing the tweet, and what accounts are saying about the tweet.

The most successful, I’d argue, is Reddit

my best guess is it’s the moderation

“Deliberate ignorance” is — spoiler alert! — the phrase academics use to mean “the conscious choice to ignore information even when the costs of obtaining it are negligible.” (Avoiding spoilers is a kind of deliberate ignorance, you see.)

Given all that madness, the need for critical thinking is obvious. But so is the need for critical ignorance — the skill, tuned over time, of knowing what not to spend your attention currency on. It’s great to be able to find the needle in the haystack — but it’s also important to limit the time spent in hay triage along the way.

While we are still a while away from a Google Translate equivalent for animal languages that can decode the nuances of intra-species communication, technology, especially machine learning, is keeping this hope alive. The ability to understand animal languages could open up a realm of possibilities, potentially shaping conservation efforts, determining our future relationship with other species, and even offering insights into the evolution of human language itself. 

The scientific community is, thus, increasingly using technological tools including drones, recorders, robots and AI to study the calls of a range of species, from chickens and rodents, to cats and lemurs.

“Digital technologies, so often associated with our alienation from nature, are offering us an opportunity to listen to nonhumans in powerful ways, reviving our connection to the natural world,”

Researchers are using drones, AI, and digital recorders to create a “zoological version of Google Translate.”

Frisch referred to honeybee dances as a “magic well”: The more he studied them, the more complex they turned out to be. Every species, Frisch argued, has its own magic well. Humans have verbal language. Whales have echolocation, which endows them with the ability to visualize their entire environment via sound. Honeybees have spatial, embodied language: We now recognize some of the subtle differences in their body movements and vibrations, which include waggling, knocking, stridulating, stroking, jerking, grasping, piping, trembling and antennation, to name just a few. 

“Miraculous worlds may reveal themselves to a patient observer where the casual passerby sees nothing at all.” — Karl von Frisch

Human verbal language is largely based on the noises we make with our vocal cords and mouths, the expressions we make with our faces, and the way we hold and move our bodies. In contrast, bee language is mostly spatial and vibrational. Its syntax is based on something very different from human language: the type, frequency, angle and amplitude of vibrations made by the bees’ bodies, including their abdomens and wings, as they move through space. 

I am not afraid of Charlie because he writes extreme, offensive things online. I am afraid of him because I recognize so many of his proclivities in regular people—the shifting eyes, the formless references and mental absence. If you spend all of your time consuming internet culture, you are consuming stories and myths and personalities that only exist online. To curate your online presence is to give up a piece of your physical self, to live in a simulated universe of your own creation. 

But to ignore the internet, he said, is to give up on making an impact in your own time. Cultural cycles move so fast online that being unplugged for a few years will render anyone culturally defunct, functionally a separate species from the digitally engaged. The internet is a superhighway. Step off and you might be safer, but you will also be quickly left behind.

When you meet extremely online people, you would expect them to at least talk. The best internet personalities come off as sharp and funny online and possess a natural digital fluency that conveys a degree of social skill. Even if they are not necessarily normal, you might expect that the strongest posters would be anti-social geniuses—brilliant minds trapped in tortured bodies, released onto the timeline. But in person, they stare straight ahead, pull out their phones, and show you their sharp, funny comments from the internet, then find a way to end the conversation quickly if you don’t have enough mutual followers.

The innovation of Milady was reminding people that you can technically say anything you want online, if you just embrace that none of it matters. There is nothing physically stopping any of us from logging onto Twitter right now and typing pages and pages of literally anything. We decided to make the internet boring. We decided to care. You could inscribe yourself on every wall on the internet and no one can tell you “no.” 

Internet people, or people whose entire identities are wrapped up in their online presence, represent a new direction of culture. You don’t have to live in or know about the real world to be important. You can loop around and around in a tiny online world with its own values and characters, and that is enough.

Everyone knows someone who has lost a piece of themselves to the internet. They latch onto a digital community and start to think it’s the whole world. 

But there are hundreds of online communities with their own rules, their own norms, their own Charlies—extremely online people buzzing behind the screen.

I work hard to not be online. But I am always drawn back to internet culture because it moves so much faster than real life. In the best moments, people are so much more honest on the internet; a meme can capture a feeling it would take hundreds of words to explain. Being online is the surest way to feel relevant, even if you lose yourself in the process.

Engagement in Leonardo’s “third space” framework is supported by White people developing a nuanced understanding of their racialized selves. Helms (1984, 1990, 1995) offers a practical frame for this work in her model of White racial identity development. Helms’s framework describes six “statuses” of development in which White people may find themselves at any given time:1.Contact: Obliviousness to own racial identity2.Disintegration: First acknowledgment of White identity3.Reintegration: Idealizes Whites/denigrates (people of Color)4.Pseudo-independence: Intellectualized acceptance of own and others’ race5.Immersion/emersion: Honest appraisal of racism and significance of White identity6.Autonomy: Internalizes a multi-cultural identity with non-racist White identity as its core

When you focus on how successful you appear to others, status anxiety can occur. Your fear of not being valued by society may sadly lead to harmful long-term decisions being made.

It is possible to replace irrational status-seeking behaviors with healthier alternatives in which the value is found in the act itself rather than by the aimless collection of status symbols

When you grow up you tend to get told the world is the way it is and you’re life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family, have fun, save a little money. That’s a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you.

Culture jamming is the practice of disrupting the mundane nature of everyday life and the status quo with surprising, often comical or satirical acts or artworks.

culture jamming

carnival is something people create and generate for themselves

Capitalism offers us the industrial ready-made, but the carnivalesque we build with our own hands. While we wait for the millennium to come, best to remember that the path of puritanical seriousness is the path of defeat, better to put upon thine head the jester’s hat and the mottled pants of the Lord of Misrule and to try and turn the world upside down again.

Despite the pandemic, the authoritarianism, and the war, there is room for hope at this moment. But what the carnivalesque finally offers isn’t seriousness, but joy. Joy is a revolutionary act.

This reveals the actual problem, however: Right now, websites like Twitter exist in the public consciousness in a kind of superposition—Schrödinger’s public square. On the one hand, they are platforms with outsized power over and influence—serving as forums for discussion and debate, the dissemination of news (real and fake), and the hotbed of our culture.

The real question isn’t whether platforms like Twitter and Facebook are public squares (because they aren’t), but whether they should be. Should everyone have a right to access these platforms and speak through them the way we all have a right to stand on a soap box downtown and speak through a megaphone? It’s a more complicated ask than we realize—certainly more complicated than those (including Elon Musk himself) who seem to think merely declaring Twitter a public square is sufficient.

This tweet, along with the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s Twitter account, has caused a whirlwind of discussion and debate on the platform—the same arguments about free speech and social media as the “digital public square” that seem to go nowhere, regardless of how often we try. And part of the reason they go nowhere is because the situation is both more simple and more complicated than many of us want to recognize.

“The damage commercial social media has done to politics, relationships and the fabric of society needs undoing.

As users begin migrating to the noncommercial fediverse, they need to reconsider their expectations for social media — and bring them in line with what we expect from other arenas of social life. We need to learn how to become more like engaged democratic citizens in the life of our networks.

We encourage researchers and practitioners to think beyond the narrow scope offered by the idea of generations, adopt a more critical perspective on our science and practice, and learn from the mistakes of the past.

We figured that judgments must be built on comparisons: to say that something is bad is really to say that it’s worse than something else. The thing you compare it to is just whatever pops into your head, even if it doesn’t exist, or can’t exist. Basically, if you can easily imagine something being better, then it must not be very good.

Our kids have lost so much—family members, connections to friends and teachers, emotional well-being, and for many, financial stability at home. And, of course, they’ve lost some of their academic progress. The pressure to measure—and remediate—this “learning loss” is intense; many advocates for educational equity are rightly focused on getting students back on track. But I am concerned about how this growing narrative of loss will affect our students, emotionally and academically. Research shows a direct connection between a student’s mindset and academic success.

“Our kids have lost so much—family members, connections to friends and teachers, emotional well-being, and for many, financial stability at home,” the article begins, sifting through a now-familiar inventory of devastation, before turning to a problem of a different order. “And of course, they’ve lost some of their academic progress.”

As one expert reminded, “Bereavement is the No. 1 predictor of poor school outcomes.

Analysts have labelled this as “learning loss,” and many have blamed school closures and remote instruction in the course of the past two years as the culprit. Essentially, schools serving largely Black and Latino populations were more likely to turn to remote teaching.

These labor actions underscored the frustrations of teachers, who have had to navigate not only the pandemic but also political harangues about their curricula, as well as insufficient pay and other long-standing issues tied to their actual work as educators. Teachers were already leaving the profession, but stress induced by the pandemic accelerated the pace.

“In literacy education, particularly for developing writers, instructors are looking for the level of desirable difficulty, or the point at which you are working yourself just as hard so that you don’t break but you also improve,” Laffin told Motherboard. “Finding the right, appropriate level of desirable difficulty level of instruction makes their capacity to write grow. So if you are doing compensation techniques that go beyond finding that level of desirable difficulty and instructing at that place, then you’re not helping them grow as a writer.”

If you want to read a poorly researched fluff piece about Sam Bankman-Fried, feel free to go to the New York Times (PDF). If you want to understand what happened at Alameda Research and how Sam Bankman-Fried (SBF), Sam Trabucco, and Caroline Ellison incinerated over $20 billion dollars of fund profits and FTX user deposits, read this article. (And follow me on Twitter at @0xfbifemboy!)

Hidden below all of this is the normalization of surveillance that consistently targets marginalized communities. The difference between a smartwatch and an ankle monitor is, in many ways, a matter of context: Who wears one for purported betterment, and who wears one because they are having state power enacted against them?

The conveniences promised by Amazon’s suite of products may seem divorced from this context; I am here to tell you that they’re not. These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits.

Video Game Narrative: The Different Types and How-to Start Writing

Game Design Document Outline

When writing a story you must take all key elements into account in order to produce a story that will flow for the reader. Stories can be broken down into five key elements; the characters, the setting, the plot, the conflict and the resolution. Finding a prompt for what to write a story about can be very difficult. To help, the following link provides an activity to come up with some story ideas!

THE WEAPONIZATION OF THE INTERNET: In this paper I argue that a critical revision of the last 30 years of internet governance provides novel insights into the mechanics of a process often discussed as internet fragmentation.

Elon Musk’s dangerous view of democracy

What separates a great manager from a mediocre one? According to Catalyst’s global report, GettingReal About Inclusive Leadership, building an inclusive team culture is key.

The word “emergency” dates back to the Latin word emergentia, which means “to bring to light.”

will be portable and interchangeable between these worlds, rather like the characters in Wreck-it Raph could pass between games.

understanding mental models of learning will make it easier to think about learning problems.

Meme wars are culture wars, the authors write — “accelerated and intensified because of the infrastructure and incentives of the internet, which trades outrage and extremity as currency, rewards speed and scale, and flatten the experience of the world into a never-ending scroll of images and words.”

And here’s the other thing: if they can manage to fight on, survive and thrive despite all that, I’m pretty sure you can deal with some ugliness in your timeline.

The problem when the asset is people is that people are intensely complicated, and trying to regulate how people behave is historically a miserable experience, especially when that authority is vested in a single powerful individual.

The essential truth of every social network is that the product is content moderation, and everyone hates the people who decide how content moderation works.

Technology like this, which lets you “talk” to people who’ve died, has been a mainstay of science fiction for decades. It’s an idea that’s been peddled by charlatans and spiritualists for centuries. But now it’s becoming a reality—and an increasingly accessible one, thanks to advances in AI and voice technology. 

I do think, however, that we need to consider the pattern Citton and Crary have, each in their own way, identified. I would describe the pattern this way: We inhabit a techno-social environment manufactured to fracture our attention. The interests served by this environment in turn pathologize the resultant inattention. These same interests devise and enforce new techniques to discipline the inattentive subject.

a problem whose centrality was directly related to the emergence of a social, urban, psychic, and industrial field increasingly saturated with sensory input. Inattention, especially within the context of new forms of large-scale industrialized production, began to be treated as a danger and a serious problem, even though it was the very modernized arrangements of labour that produced inattention.

Bradbury’s book is about an imposed and willful alienation from the world effected by media technologies. One scene in particular speaks directly to the question of attention. In it, the protagonist is trying desperately to commit to memory a passage of a book he must shortly surrender to the authorities. But his efforts are undone by an incessant advertising jingle blaring over the loudspeaker on the train he is riding. I think of this scene whenever I’m pumping gas and the screen on the pump starts up with a series of 20 second video ads.

The first is a 1961 short story written by the American author, Kurt Vonnegut. “Harrison Bergeron” is set in a dystopian future where equality is enforced by totalitarian means. The physically gifted, for example, were burdened with weights so as to neutralize their natural advantages. The advantages of the intellectually gifted were neutralized by other means.

is the study of how a society uses its scarce resources. And information is not scarce—especially on the Net, where it is not only abundant, but overflowing. We are drowning in information, yet constantly increasing our generation of it. So a key question arises: Is there something else that flows through cyberspace, something that is scarce and desirable? There is. No one would put anything on the Internet without the hope of obtaining some. It's called attention. And the economy of attention—not information—is the natural economy of cyberspace.

Our algorithmic self may or may not be faithful to how we see ourselves, but it has just as many dimensions and secrets. Whether we generate data deliberately or not, more information makes this shadow figure more economically valuable

NAAL defines literacy as both task-based and skills-based

According to the FDA, it’s not Salmonella you have to worry about, but E. coli (because of animal poop):

A hashtag will not stop Gamergate. Conversations like these, en masse, over time, will. The dehumanizing effects of the Internet are not helping anyone here, but they can be overcome with time and patience. Everyone has the potential to change and exercise empathy, though it will usually end up happening on their own terms. “This really IS a hate movement fueled by nutters. How did I get dragged into this?!” said one reconsidered Gamergater in a post on the NeoGAF forum (a post that, predictably, is being called out as a fake by the rest of the Gamergate community). “We can’t start enacting change when the people who actually could start making these changes happen want nothing to do with us.” Funny, the same could be said of both sides.

But the backlash has only made her point for her: Gaming has a problem. And as this interview demonstrates, gamers like Sarkeesian are determined to solve it.

It is tremendously disheartening to suspect that the treatment of women online is getting worse, not better. We've had decades of experience dealing with those who use the Internet with the intent to cause mental or physical distress or harm. We really haven't leveled up? As individuals, communities and corporate entities, do we still lack the will, despite seeing the fruits of apathy and averted eyes?

I know this entry will probably draw contempt from people in the Gamer Gate movement. Something to scorn, something to rile them up against me and everything I’ve ever made. Especially, and most hurtfully, to mock my vulnerability. I just have one thing to say to you who do that: I’m genuinely sorry you are so angry. 

I have allowed a handful of anonymous people censor me. They have forced me, out of fear, into seeing myself a potential victim. 

The closest thing that any of these officially unofficial forums can agree on is that GamerGate is anti-progressiveism – a push back against the Social Justice Warriors that have been “infiltrating” gaming and somehow controlling it through means that nobody can quite explain except through dark inferences of “influence” or “coercion”.

In this video series, Feminist Frequency will explore five common and recurring stereotypes of female characters in video games

Technology Is Neither Good nor Bad

Queers in Love at the End of the World

Twine was created by a web developer named Chris Klimas in 2009. While in graduate school at the University of Baltimore’s Interaction Design and Information Architecture program, Klimas began writing what he calls “hypertext fiction”—playing with interactivity and narrative outside a game. In order to make life easier for himself, he invented a set of tools that turned source code into interactive HTML. He showed them around to some friends, but no one seemed particularly interested, mostly because they were heavy on programming language and hard to comprehend.

Resources for Making Games

Keynote sessions will be recorded for posting on the Web site.

queers in love at the end of the world is a hypertext game built on the Twine platform in which the player experiences fleeting intimacy in a ten-second narrative. In the upper left of the browser window, a timer counting down the seconds prompts the reader to move quickly, advancing the narrative by clicking highlighted action words with little time to deliberate or savor the moments chosen before "Everything is wiped away.

dys4ia and a lot of the games loosely grouped with it were all made on Twine, a programming language for making hypertext games that was created in 2009 by Chris Klimas and intended for writers looking to experiment with literature. Skeptics argue that these creations are too simplistic and linear to be considered “games.”

She introduces a phenomenon she calls the "double bind for men" (232). Her explanation makes use of the more documented female double bind which is created by sexual object/prey stereotypes of women, and reduces women to choosing between being considered either a "virgin" or a "whore." In Serano's male double bind, the options are between "nice guy" and "asshole."

The main characteristic that differentiates the geek from his slacker counterpart is that geeks can “sell out” and become students, nine-to-five workers, filmmakers, and/or cultural tastemakers because they never truly resist the system in the first place. Geeks are good workers and social conformists who respond to social marginalization by working harder and becoming creative.

Thus, the geek foregrounds his/her put-upon status in order to artfully and self-deceivingly demonstrate how s/he is not empowered, and thus not part of the problematic and enfranchised identity of the tourist who oppresses the vagabond out of self-interest.

Williams' model helps us see how racial marking becomes desirable to white geeks: if suffering equals virtue and moral superiority, then the virtue of a marked identity type (black, female, gay, disabled) can be reduced to how much one suffers for it. Here is also the key to why our analysis reads geeks primarily as straight white men. The anxieties of the straight white male geek's identity are transformed into the authenticating devices that paradoxically make him a moral hero in a postmodern world in which an unmarked and untroubled straight white male hero would normally be out of place.

"simulated ethnicity," our term for how geeks read their sub-cultural identity as a sign of markedness or as a put-upon status equivalent to the markedness of a marginalized identity such as that of a person of color.

As geekdom moves from the cultural fringes into the mainstream, it becomes increasingly difficult for the figure of the geek to maintain the outsider victim status that made him such a sympathetic figure in the first place. Confronted with his cultural centrality and white, masculine privilege—geeks are most frequently represented as white males—the geek seeks a simulated victimhood and even simulated ethnicity in order to justify his existence as a protagonist in a world where an unmarked straight white male protagonist is increasingly passé.

"If this was fifteen thousand years ago, by virtue of his size and strength, Kurt would be entitled to his choice of females. ... But our society has undergone a paradigm shift. In the Information Age, Sheldon, you and I are the Alpha males. We shouldn't have to back down." — Leonard (Johnny Galecki) on CBS' The Big Bang Theory

“I think that everything I do tends to root for the underdog. I always felt as a kid that I was under appreciated, invisible or weird, but I've always secretly thought people would one day appreciate what is different about me. I'm always putting that message out there. Eventually, the nerds and the geeks will have their day.” — Judd Apatow, from his imdb.com Biography

Why Are You So Angry? Part 1: A Short History of Anita Sarkeesian

Certainly my first reaction to reading GamerGate griping was “why on earth does this matter to you so much?” But we need to remember that all of these cultural shifts or policies make privilege visible to the privileged: when your unspoken norm is spoken, it loses its assumed, invisible status, and this feels like a threat. That revelation of privilege can hurt, as people with such privilege have not had a lifetime of experience processing the role of difference and inequality, so it can feel like a sudden shock to the system and disruption of your assumptions. You put that sense of shock, threat and hurt into a community defined by a love for a medium foregrounding violent simulations, anonymous smack talk, and demeaning representations of people outside the dominant norm, you get GamerGate.

these gamers are blinded by taste privilege. What do I mean by “taste privilege,” a phrase I’ve not seen referenced elsewhere (but please let me know if you’ve seen similar usage, as this is a concept I’d like to explore more in my research)? There are many different ways to define and conceptualize privilege, but one that makes sense for me (as a person of privilege) is that privilege is the freedom to not notice difference. In most contexts, I’m perfectly able to imagine that my experiences are shared, commonplace norms, rather than defined by my identity in ways that other people would experience differently. There is rarely a consequence for me to assume that other people see the world as I do, sharing the same access, rights, and freedoms. Basically, privilege is the freedom to ignore your own privilege.

How to preserve your private life in the age of social media

Kahne and Bowyer (2017) exposed thousands of young people in California tosome true messages and some false ones, similar to the memes they may see on social media

Many U.S.educators believe that increasing political polarization combine with the hazards ofmisinformation and disinformation in ways that underscore the need for learners to acquire theknowledge and skills required to navigate a changing media landscape (Hamilton et al. 2020a)

In U.S.schools, young people, regardless of their race, ethnicity, or socioeconomic status, live amidenduring patterns of social and economic inequality. Indeed, American public schools arecharacterized by the many significant gaps between communities in the provision of educationand educational enrichment opportunities (Kozol 2012)

This may be partly because political memes invariably flatten political and ethical complexity into binary narratives of good and evil. They are cast as profound moral statements signaling allegiance to the in-group, and so they are meant to attract approval (likes, reshares, and praise) not discussion or objections.

People get strangely protective of memes, and become much more defensive when challenged than if an op-ed they’ve shared is disputed. Longer form communications seem to be open to rigorous but respectful debate in ways that memes are not. It doesn’t appear to matter whether one attempts to debate the content of the meme itself, or the practice of sharing memes—criticizing a meme can feel tantamount to insulting someone’s child.

Most academics who study memes agree that they are poisonous to healthy public discourse (“toxic” is a word that crops up a lot, even in the scholarly literature). One scholar bluntly called them “one of the main vehicles for misinformation,” and they tend to distort reality in several ways. By their very nature, they leave no room for nuance or complexity, and so they are frequently misleading; they tend to lean heavily on scornful condescension and moral sanctimony (usually, the intended takeaway is that anyone who agrees with the point of view being—inaccurately—mocked is an imbecile); they make copious use of ad hominem attacks, straw man fallacies, and motte-and-bailey arguments; they intentionally catastrophize, generalize, personalize, and encourage dichotomous thinking; and they are aggressive and sometimes dehumanizing. They are, in other words, methods of Internet communication that display all the symptoms of a borderline personality type of mental disorder. Of course, it’s possible to construct a meme that is short yet still thoughtful and sophisticated, but these are few and far between.

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognise uncertainty, you recognise that you may be able to influence the outcomes – you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists adopt the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It is the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterwards either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone.

“Vandalism or other negative behavior can happen from time to time on Wikipedia, as is expected with any open, online platform that is available for everyone to contribute to. With that said, this specific type of behavior on Wikipedia is not common,” they added. 

purity culture

Recommendation media is the new standard for content distribution. Here’s why friend graphs can‘t compete in an algorithmic world.