Kyle Kopta DTC 206

Technology Can Address Digital Accessibility -- to an Extent - Mark Lieberman Area 1:     This week’s reading explores the relationship between evolving technologies and how they may be used to alleviate digital accessibility issues (with students in particular). As pressures to adhere to accessibility guidelines increase, institutions have begun to implement or research online services to bridge this gap. Of course, there is no simple solution to this issue, and this has revealed itself through the shortcomings of certain technologies and their campaigns. Furthermore, these technologies excel in identifying problem in a binary way, but fail to fully tackle the nuances of the broad range of accessibility issues. Area 2:    After this week's reading and the exercise on website accessibility we did in class, it seems like services are quick to point out the shortcomings of accessibility, but ignore or outsource the solutions; the idea of univers...

The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed  - Adrian Chen Area 1:    In her article  The Laborers Who Keep Dick Pics and Beheadings Out of Your Facebook Feed , Adrian Chen recounts the experiences of those who work in the field of content moderation for social media websites. In order to maintain the mainstream appeal and customer base of their social media services, companies are now required to hire workers to manually review content for their platform. In an effort to reduce costs in this process, the majority of this work is increasingly being outsourced to the Philippines; not only is it cheaper to hire someone there, but a vast amount of this work is also being done in the Philippines because they have close cultural ties to the United States and their ideas of what might be offensive. Often, the constant exposure to the explicit material associated with these jobs can result in struggles with mental health and sympto...

Where the Cloud Rises from the Sea - Ingrid Burrington Area 1:    In this week's reading, Ingrid Burrington tells the story of a small coastal town in California that happens to host one of the sites in which a submarine fiber optic cable delivers internet access to the rest of the U.S. As irony would have it, this town has very few internet broadband connections due to being a rural area and lacking a potential return investment. In her article, Burrington goes on to explore the culture of this town and its history as it relates to the ISP industry and being generally connected through internet connection.       Area 2:    As I got further into this reading, I was amazed at how similar the situation of this town was to where I grew up in terms of the inner workings and politics of broadband connection. When I was a student at Hermiston High School, I had an internship with the school district's IT department, and I learned a lot a...

  The Digital Cultureshift: Moving from Scale to Power to Achieve Racial Justice Area 1:    As the supposed democratization of political and social outreach continues to grow with the access to mobile technology and social media, why is it that we have not seen a tremendous progress in the status quo when it comes to institutional racism? This transcript from the keynote The Digital CultureSHIFT: Moving from Scale to Power to Achieve Racial Justice explores that question through a myriad of avenues and issues including: the sensationalist nature of news broadcasts, diversity in news media, net neutrality, the surveillance state, and the power of the individual story. While digital technologies are a great tool in theory for the awareness of racial injustices, the way they are structured, and their surrounding context, can make it difficult.       Area 2:    The discussion of how social media is structured to perpetuate the su...