Looks Like New

With all of the headlines about scandals and issues within technology companies and social media platforms, one may ask how we got where we are today. Is it possible for things to get better?

As we witness company leaders and engineers retroactively addressing issues, is there a way for forward thinking to happen within the industry? Dr. Casey Fiesler explores these questions and more.

You have likely heard of or used FitBit, Apple Smartwatches, GoPros or other devices we affix to our bodies each day.

Despite the rapid development of wearable technologies in the last few decades, this conversation explores how they might not be as new as they might seem.

Dr. James Gilmore explains the benefits, costs, and potential future implications of wearable technology in an increasingly digital, virtual world.

How did the Global South once inscribe its battle for liberation into media archives and how does accessing and viewing this material change through time, location and context? What lessons can the mediated image learn in counteracting the digital divide today?

This month we are discussing archival footage documenting the Non-Aligned Movement, through images of African and Asian liberation and revolutionary leaders that defined the era of decolonization with Dr Mila Turajlić, award winning filmmaker and archival artist, working on the intersection of personal and national memories. With host Darija Medic.

After years of shedding reporters and newsrooms, Colorado is home to a new experiment in sustainable journalism. In early May, the National Trust for Local News announced it was acquiring Colorado Community Media, a network of 24 newspapers in the Denver Metro area, via the Colorado News Conservancy, a new public benefit corporation. The Colorado News Conservancy is to be majority owned by the  journalist-owned, online-only Colorado Sun. The deal was financed through impact investment funding from FJC, the Gates Family Foundation, the Colorado Trust, and the American Journalism Project, in a first-of-its kind model.

What does this mean for people who rely on Colorado Community Media? How will this relationship change the news ecosystem in Colorado, and what consequences could it have for local media nationally? We will hear from leading people behind this deal, Melissa Milios Davis (Gates Family Foundation), Lillian Ruiz (National Trust for Local News), and Larry Ryckman (Colorado Sun), about how it works and what they hope it will produce.

As the US federal government considers once-in-a-generation investments in infrastructure, is it possible to also enable a new commitment to a democratic economy? Sara Horowitz is the founder of the Freelancers Union and author of the new book Mutualism, which presents a powerful vision for “building the next economy from the ground up. In this conversation, we explore strategies for bringing the mutualist tradition of unions, cooperatives, and community ownership from the margins into the center of economic policy-making.

This conversation was co-sponsored by the Media Enterprise Design Lab at the University of Colorado Boulder and Zebras Unite.

In the last year, many of us have relied on the Internet even more than before. As we process life’s individual and collective trauma, do we turn to digital spaces for support and healing? If so, why? This month, we had a conversation with Dr. Samira Rajabi who unpacked her personal experiences and research on this topic. Dr. Rajabi is an Instructor in Media Studies and Director of Technology Influenced Practice at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Most of us use the Internet each day with our smartphones and devices. But too rarely do we consider how our connections are possible. How does the Internet work? What environmental toll does the Internet have? Our guest this month, Hunter Vaughan, discusses his background and work with asking these questions and current efforts to help lessen the environmental impact of the Internet. Vaughan is a scholar-in-residence in Media Studies at the University of Colorado Boulder.

A lot of us are thinking about the legacies of racism these days, and about a media ecosystem that seems to hinder any hope of progress. But too rarely do we think about race and media together. Who gets to be the heroes of the digital age? Whose bodies become a kind of media?

Our guest this month, Armond Towns, has been developing a “Black media philosophy” that confronts media cultures saturated in whiteness. He is a professor of Rhetoric and Communication Studies at the University of Richmond. With host Bailey Troutman.

Free and open-source software is a kind of miracle. It’s community-created technology, a commons that anyone can contribute to and use. But those communities are not always the utopias they’re made out to be. Many have been havens for exclusionary cultures, and their tools have been used to perpetrate human-rights abuses.

Coraline Ada Ehmke is a software developer working to change that. She created the Contributor Covenant, a widely adopted code of conduct for open-source projects. Now she is leading the Ethical Source Movement, which enables projects prevent their tools from being used for purposes they oppose.

The stakes for moderation and governance in online communities are getting higher and higher. Harms can be very serious, from election manipulation to sexual abuse.

But for the most part, platforms rely on only very blunt tools for addressing these harms—the digital equivalents of censoring and exiling.

But can we do better than simply imagining we can make harm go away?

Niloufar Salehi (UC Berkeley) and Amy Hasinoff (CU Denver) have been exploring how to bring practices of restorative justice into online communities. This discussion is part of the Metagovernance Seminar (metagov.org).