Looks Like New

Democracy seems to be in crisis around the world. Aspiring dictators are on the rise in many countries, and the flows of information are under the control of often-unaccountable tech companies. Could democracy be on its way out? This month, we hear from one of the most celebrated scholars of politics and media working today, Zizi Papacharissi. Her latest book, After Democracy, draws from interviews with 100 people around the world to explore the state of democracy and whether it has a future.

These days it seems like cryptocurrencies and blockchains are mostly enabling abuses: speculative bubbles, malware attacks, and money laundering for rogue states. But could the same technology also hold powerful governments and corporations accountable?

Jonathan Dotan directs the Starling Lab at Stanford University and USC, which uses emerging cryptographic technology to document human rights abuses, from the Holocaust to the current war in Ukraine. Dotan explains how his lab leverages tools usually associated with money and finance to preempt misinformation in the fog of war.

When we think about social media platforms and online interactions, it might seem like we are merely experiencing feeds of information that are curated for us by algorithms. The scale by which companies like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram now operate can make us question whether these information sharing spaces are public at all. What would it look like for platforms to look more like other kinds of public spaces in our lives?

This month on Looks Like New, we have a conversation with Eli Pariser, whose career has involved building several influential online platforms, pushing into the status quo by rethinking our online spaces by reflecting on human engagement in other kinds of public spaces—libraries, parks, and the democratic process.

Competitive entertainment has always been an essential part of human culture. Traditionally, sports have been the preferred form of competition, however, in a modern age of mass globalization through connection, a new form of entertainment has taken the stage: esports.

With online communities of millions spread across the world, esports has been rapidly expanding and encourages a volatile competitive environment. With a great familiarity with traditional sports, it’s easy to wonder, “just how real are esports?” We speak with Jake Kelton from XLNC whose work in media production centers around esports.

News headlines have been full of debates about Critical Race Theory (CRT), books and topics being banned in schools, and calls to remove statues of colonizers around the world. More recently, universities and governments have done work in land acknowledgements or renaming places locally under the banner of “decolonizing.” But what does decolonizing really mean, and what does it ask of our society? We speak with Dr. Nabil Echchaibi from CU Boulder whose work and life center around this topic

If you’ve noticed your social media platforms and web searches are giving you personalized results or advertisements, you might be curious about how or why this happens. This is the work of algorithms—the programming that computers use to take raw data and do something with it.

While algorithms might be used as a type of buzzword, knowing what they are and how they function can be really useful. In this episode, we have a conversation with Jessie J. Smith, a researcher whose work with algorithms spans from topics of literacy to fairness.

What happens when algorithms are unfair, and can they ever truly be fair?

When we design the future, we rely on history, whether we like it or not. In December 2021, the MEDLab and the United Nations Internet Governance Forum launched a virtual art exhibition called “Excavations: Governance Archaeology for the Future of the Internet.”

This online exhibition is an interdisciplinary, artistic experience interrogating narratives of the past and working through future possibilities for the Internet. We had a conversation with MEDLab’s Darija Medić and Nathan Schneider to learn more about this work.

Twitter is a social media platform that has played a significant role in everything from politics, news, to social justice organizing. How do marginalized communities use this platform? What drives people to use the platform to find and build community through Black Twitter.

What is Black Twitter?

This month, we had a conversation with Shamika Klassen, a Ph.D. candidate and researcher at the University of Colorado Boulder, whose recently published research reveals some powerful findings.

News from the Arab world tends to come to us in the United States in the form of dramatic spectacle that oversimplifies complex situations. Lebanon is no exception—most recently, the site of a deadly explosion and a political crisis.

What are we missing when we see only images of spectacle? This month we hear from Marwan Kraidy, the dean of Northwestern University’s campus in Doha, Qatar, who helps us think past the headlines to understand what is really going on in his native country.

Long before our present day audio boom, public broadcasting in the United States flourished. Radio, a powerful way to connect people, underwent many transformations and federal regulatory shifts that impacted what it became.

Where did public media come from? We explore these origins in the early 1900s with Dr. Josh Shepperd, assistant professor of Media Studies at the University of Colorado, Boulder.