Dear Cyborgology Readers, we want you to write for us!! In our first ever thematic CFP, we invite guest posts about Cameras and Justice. This theme is broad in scope and we encourage you to put your own spin on it.

If you have an idea, pitch us. If you have a full post, send it our way. We will be taking submissions on this theme until mid June.

Posts are generally between 500-1500 words. Authors should write in a clear and accessible style (think upper-level undergraduate or well read non-academic). We welcome traditional text based essays, image based essays, and art pieces.

To get the brain juices flowing, here are a few pieces on Cameras and Justice from the Cyborgology team:

Cameras on Cops Isn’t the Same as Cops on Camera

ACLU Mobile Justice App: Channeling Citizen Voices

Sousveillance and Justice: A Panopticon in the Crowds

Surveillance from the Clouds to the Fog

Other riffs on this theme could include children’s privacy, tourism, unsolicited dick pics, structural oppression aided by the rhetoric of authenticity, and much, much more.

For submissions, questions, and proposals, email co-editors David Banks (david.adam.banks@gmail.com) and Jenny Davis (jdavis11474@gmail.com) using the subject line “Cameras and Justice.”

Remember that Cyborgology (for better or worse) is an all volunteer effort and we cannot pay for writing.

Headline Pic: Source

There has been a lot of talk about magic lately in critical, cultural and technological spaces; what it does, who it is for, and who are the ones to control or enact it. As a way of unpacking a few elements of this thinking, this essay follows on from the conversations that Tobias Revell and I, and a whole host of great participants had at Haunted Machines, a conference as part of FutureEverything 2015 which examined the proliferation of magical narratives in technology. With our speakers we discussed where these stories and mythologies reveal our anxieties around technology, who are the ones casting the spells, and where – if possible – these narratives can be applied in useful ways.

As an ex-literature student, I’m quite interested in ghost stories as analogy, because they can reveal, or be an interesting way of exploring, these anxieties; where the voices in the static are coming from, where the pipes are creaking, and what they tell us about what our technology is doing or can potentially do to us.

I’m going to use a load of slightly ham-fisted contemporary narratives to signpost the anxieties that come out of two personal and increasingly algorithmically mediated spaces: the social network and in the home. Where does the role of narrative in magic, the supernatural, and the unknown allow us to get a better grasp of technology’s power over us?  Where are the uncertain terrains of our technologies creating the capacity for hauntings, and where can techniques used to imagine future scenarios better equip us for the ghosts to come? When we think of a haunting, we think of the unseen forces acting upon our domestic space, and when considering technology, a reappropriation of Clarke’s third law that Tobias Revell summoned with his work on Haunted Machines can apply– Any sufficiently advanced hacking is indistinguishable from a haunting. But where else are we haunted? more...

What does it mean to have access to the internet? It’s an apparently simple question that gets complicated when we consider the wide variety of ways people access the web and products from the web. Indeed, the question is wrapped up in recent debates about zero rating, net neutrality, “the next billion” and numerous initiatives designed to bring people from the developing world online.

At Theorizing the Web this year, I presented research that combined my fieldwork and personal observations in developing world internet contexts like rural northern Uganda, urban China and rural Philippines with emergent research and journalism on the use of sneakernets–the physical transfer of data using devices like USB sticks or Bluetooth-enabled mobile phones–in places like Mali, North Korea and Cuba. These latter formed the basis for my talk and a recent paper in The New Inquiry, in which I draw from Jan Chipchase’s writing on binary thinking about connectivity and how this ultimately overlooks the vast diversity of ways that people do access the web and its products. more...

At the beginning of this month, the ACLU in California released a free mobile app that monitors police violence. The app, called Mobile Justice CA, preserves users’ footage of police encounters.  Available on both Apple and Android devices, the user pushes a large “Record” button to document their own and others’ interactions with police. The content automatically transmits to the ACLU servers. The point is to preserve recorded content even if police destroy the recording device and/or delete the video. For instance, the ACLU would have maintained documentation of police detaining residents in an LA neighborhood, even after an officer smashed the cellphone of a witness recording the events.

The ACLU treats transmissions through the app as legal communications and protects the anonymity of the sender. Legal action is only taken upon the sender’s request, but the ACLU maintains the rights to the footage, meaning they can distribute it to media outlets as evidence of injustice. Branches of the ACLU in in New York, New Jersey, Oregon, and Missouri have released similar apps.

These apps are significant in their reflection of an increasingly central mode of activism: Sousveillance. They are also reflective of the structural embeddedness of the sousveilling citizen. more...

Science, to borrow a phrase from Steven Shapin, is a social process that is “produced by people with bodies, situated in time, space, culture, and society, and struggling for credibility and authority.” This simple fact is difficult to remember in the face of intricate computer generated images and declarative statements in credible publications. Science may produce some of the most accurate and useful descriptions of the world but that does not make it an unmediated window onto reality.

Facebook’s latest published study, claiming that personal choice is more to blame for filter bubbles than their own algorithm, is a stark reminder that science is a deeply human enterprise. Not only does the study contain significant methodological problems, its conclusions run counter to their actual findings. Criticisms of the study and media accounts of the study have already been expertly executed by Zeynep Tufecki, Nathan Jurgenson, and Christian Sandvig and I won’t repeat them. Instead I’d like to do a quick review of what the social sciences know about the practice of science, how the institutions of science behave, and how they both intersect with social power, class, race, and gender. After reviewing the literature we might also be able to ask how the study of science could have improved Facebook’s research. more...

The most crucial thing people forget about social media, all technologies, is that certain people with certain politics, insecurities, and financial interests structure them. On an abstract level, yeah, we may all know that these sites are shaped, designed, and controlled by specific humans. But so much of the rhetoric around code, “big” data, and data science research continues to promote a fallacy that the way sites operate is almost natural, that they are simply giving users what they want, which then downplays their own interests and role and responsibility in structuring what happens. The greatest success of “big” data so far has been for those with that data to sell their interests as neutral.

Today, Facebook researchers released a report in Science on the flow of ideological news content on their site. “Exposure to ideologically diverse news and opinion on Facebook” by Eytan Bakshy, Solomon Messing, and Lada Adamic (all Facebook researchers) enters into the debate around whether social media in general, and Facebook in particular, locks users into a so-called “filter bubble”, seeing only what one wants and is predisposed to agree with and limiting exposure to outside and conflicting voices, information, and opinions. And just like Facebook’s director of news recently ignored the company’s journalistic role shaping our news ecosystem, Facebook’s researchers make this paper about minimizing their role in structuring what a user sees and posts. I’ve just read the study, but I already had some thoughts about this bigger ideological push since the journalism event as it relates to my bigger project describing contemporary data science as a sort of neo-positivism. I’d like to put some of my thoughts connecting it all here.

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Okay, so. Apple’s iOS8 Health app is an issue, at least potentially.

To recap, it’s an issue in significant part – and for the purposes of this – in terms of its effect on people who experience disordered eating and/or obsessive-compulsive behaviors and thoughts. Health trackers in general have the potential to do this, and in fact to be quite harmful. This is primarily because health trackers are highly quantitative in nature and extremely oriented toward the monitoring of details, and obsessive-compulsive tracking is one of the primary symptoms of an eating disorder – and the Health app is a focal point for this kind of monitoring. Though it allows for the entry of data, its primary purpose is to allow better curation of data from other health apps, but it still exists. In fact, it not only exists, but it can’t be removed. It can be hidden, but you – the user – still know it’s there. It will be difficult to ignore even if it can’t be seen. It gnaws. Trust me, things like that do.

Technology has reached to a point where literally everything we do can be done or assisted with wearable gadgets or computers. Smartwatches have become a common thing to health and sports enthusiasts. If you are interested and looking for smartwatches, try reading about it on spotthewatch.com, they have one of the best detailed reviews out there.

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The quantified self (QS) movement advertises itself as a way for individuals interested in tracking their daily lives to use sensors and computing technology to monitor their activities, whether those activities involve biological processes or social actions, to better understand the their habits and improve upon them. The tracking and use of personal data through proprietary sensing and software platforms is generally accepted as part of the benign “datification” of everyday life. These services span almost every activity, from making grocery shopping more efficient (Grocery IQ) to monitoring levels of physical activity (Fitbit). Many authors have made insightful criticisms and observations about the contemporary datification landscape as a system. Notably, Frank Pasquale, in The Black Box Society, writes about the increase of commercialization and the sale of users’ data, their “digital reputation,” in the opaque world of the data-as-insight industrial complex. This is a valuable systemic critique, yet I am more interested in the personal effects of self-quantification. I argue that the use of self-monitoring and tracking technologies can create anxiety around the data capturing process. Tracking technologies create an ordering of people and experiences that discourages moments which are not easily quantified. more...

A few editorial cartoons offering a counterpoint perspective to the cultural sentiments and media portrayals that denounce the Baltimore “riots” as politically unproductive, ethically unjustifiable hooliganism have achieved viral status.  One particularly prominent cartoon illustrates alternative histories in which once denied freedoms and equities were achieved without systemically disruptive uprisings (see image above).  In one panel an 18^th century Haitian slave cordially informs a French Imperialist that he and his fellow slaves would rather be free.  The receptive overseer responding in an equally kind fashion decides to abolish the system of slavery that legitimizes his very authority.  In another panel an 18^th century French revolutionary asks King Louis XVI to abdicate his power as well as dissolve the monarchy to make way for democratic rule and, like in the previous example, history is comically rewritten to suggest that the powers that be were enthusiastically and progressively responsive to such a request.  more...

Like many people, I spent my morning entranced by the protests following Freddie Gray’s death. The latest in a string of highly publicized incidents of unarmed black men killed by police, Gray’s death has brought protestors to a boiling point. The streets of Baltimore are on fire. Schools are closed. The National Guard has been called. As I told my students, this is what social change looks like.

For a long while I stared intently at my Twitter feed. The content was unique to this protest, but the form of the Twitter feed looked entirely familiar: the calls for peace, calls for racial justice, racist slurs, police condemnation, images from the ground, and links to (ohmigosh so many) “think” pieces scrolled by. Then, I wondered, how does ‘rioting’ look through an anonymous platform driven by upvotes?  So I went to Yik Yak and peeked at Baltimore, MD. Here is what I found: more...