Happening @ Michigan https://events.umich.edu/list/rss RSS Feed for Happening @ Michigan Events at the University of Michigan. Communication and Media Speaker Series (February 7, 2019 4:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/56313 56313-13878512@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, February 7, 2019 4:00pm
Location: North Quad
Organized By: Communication and Media

Dr. Meredith D. Clark is a former newspaper journalist whose research focuses on the intersections of race, media, and power. Her award-winning dissertation on Black Twitter landed her on The Root 100, the news website's list of the most influential African Americans in the country, in 2015. She's a regular contributor to Poynter.org's diversity column, and her research has been published in Journalism & Mass Communication Educator, the Journal of Social Media in Society, and New Media & Society.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 06 Feb 2019 09:51:45 -0500 2019-02-07T16:00:00-05:00 2019-02-07T17:30:00-05:00 North Quad Communication and Media Lecture / Discussion North Quad
CRITICAL x DESIGN: Less Metrics, More Rando: (Net) Art as Software Research (March 27, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/62310 62310-15346470@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Wednesday, March 27, 2019 12:00pm
Location: North Quad
Organized By: School of Information

How are numbers on Facebook changing what we "like" and who we "friend"? Why does a bit of nonsense sent via email scare both your mom and the NSA? What makes someone mad when they learn Google can't see where they stand? From net art to robotics to supercuts to e-lit, Ben Grosser will discuss several artworks that illustrate his methods for investigating the culture of software.

About the speaker:
Artist Ben Grosser creates interactive experiences, machines, and systems that examine the cultural, social, and political implications of software. Recent exhibition venues include Eyebeam in New York, Arebyte in London, Museum Kesselhaus in Berlin, Museu das Comunicações in Lisbon, and Galerie Charlot in Paris. His works have been featured in The New Yorker, Wired, The Atlantic, The Guardian, The Washington Post, El País, Libération, Süddeutsche Zeitung, and Der Spiegel. The Chicago Tribune called him the “unrivaled king of ominous gibberish.” Slate referred to his work as “creative civil disobedience in the digital age.”

Grosser’s recognitions include First Prize in VIDA 16, and the Expanded Media Award for Network Culture from Stuttgarter Filmwinter. His writing about the cultural effects of technology has been published in journals such as Computational Culture, Media-N, and Big Data and Society. Grosser is an assistant professor of new media at the School of Art + Design, co-founder of the Critical Technology Studies Lab at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, and an affiliate faculty member with the Unit for Criticism and the School of Information Sciences, all at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

https://bengrosser.com

The CRITICAL x DESIGN series is generously supported by the School of Information; the Center for Political Studies at the Institute for Social Research; and the Science, Technology & Society program and the Department of Communication Studies in the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts.

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Lecture / Discussion Tue, 19 Mar 2019 15:34:45 -0400 2019-03-27T12:00:00-04:00 2019-03-27T13:00:00-04:00 North Quad School of Information Lecture / Discussion Ben Grosser
Ethics and Politics of AI: Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media (April 25, 2019 12:00pm) https://events.umich.edu/event/62338 62338-15353051@events.umich.edu Event Begins: Thursday, April 25, 2019 12:00pm
Location: North Quad
Organized By: School of Information

Content moderation can serve as a prism for examining what platforms are, and how they subtly torque public life. Our understanding of platforms too blithely accepted the terms in which they were sold and celebrated - open, impartial, connective, progressive, transformative - skewing our study of social behavior that happens on them, stunting our examination of their societal impact.

Content moderation doesn’t fit this celebratory vision. As such, it has often been treated as peripheral to what they do—a custodial task, like sweeping up, occasional and invisible. What if moderation is in fact central to what platforms do? Moderation is an enormous part of the work of running a platform, in terms of people, time, and cost. The work of policing all this caustic content and abuse haunts platforms, and profoundly shapes how they work.

Today, social media platforms are being scrutinized in the press; specific controversies, each a tiny crisis of trust, have gelled into a more profound interrogation of their responsibilities to users and society. What are the implications of the emerging demand that platforms serve not as conduits or arbiters, but as custodians? This is uncharted territory for the platforms, a very different notion of how they should earn the trust of their users and stand accountable to civil society.

About the Speaker:

Tarleton Gillespie is a principal researcher at Microsoft Research New England, and an affiliated associate professor in the Department of Communication and Department of Information Science at Cornell University. His new book, Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions that Shape Social Media (Yale University Press) was published in June 2018. He is also the author of Wired Shut: Copyright and the Shape of Digital Culture (MIT Press, 2007), the co-editor of Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society (MIT, 2014), and the co-founder of the blog Culture Digitally.

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Lecture / Discussion Wed, 20 Mar 2019 10:16:08 -0400 2019-04-25T12:00:00-04:00 2019-04-25T13:00:00-04:00 North Quad School of Information Lecture / Discussion Tarleton Gillespie