Category: Beyond the Academy

Finding a ‘Home’ Online

Jasmine McNealy September 23, 2016

An oft-repeated mantra in scholarship on privacy is that you have the greatest expectation of privacy inside of your home, and the least expectation of privacy in public. What this means is that you can legitimately assume what happens inside your home will stay in your home (to use a phrasing usually connected with visits to Las Vegas). But if people can view or hear an event or occurrence, whether you are having an argument on your cellphone or you trip, fall, and people can see it without technological assistance, you cannot reasonably believe that what happened will remain ‘private.’ This perspective permeates law and how cases involving privacy and the use of personal information are resolved. But in an era in which many people live their lives online where some much is publicly accessible, what does the concept of home mean and how should it influence how we view privacy? (read more...)

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The Five Scientist Pledge: Who are the scientists in your neighborhood?

Todd Hanson September 7, 2016

Three weeks ago, on August 15 and the eve of Australia’s annual National Science Week, Australia’s Chief Scientist issued a challenge: by the end of that week he wanted everyone to know the names of at least five living Australian scientists. This did not mean just Nobel laureates or the historically famous, but five living Australian university professors, corporate researchers, or postgraduates—anyone professionally involved in scientific R&D. The Australians were challenged to get to know the scientists living among them, to learn who were the scientists living in their neighborhoods. Growing up in Wisconsin, the only bona-fide scientist I ever met as a child was an aging astronomer who had been recruited from nocturnal life to conduct visitor tours of Yerkes Observatory. Pale and phlegmatic, he was deeply passionate about celestial studies and our meeting would be influential in furthering my interest in astronomy. Strangely, I would not meet any more of these curious geniuses until college, where they then populating the various departments of biology, chemistry, geology, physics and the like. For my children, the story has been profoundly different. (read more...)

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Pokémon GO and the visibility of digital infrastructure

Evan Conaway July 26, 2016

This blog post is about the popular augmented reality game, Pokémon GO. If you are unfamiliar and/or want a brief overview of it and its cultural history, this is a useful resource. As a virtual world anthropologist and a Pokémon nerd, I have become immersed in Pokémon GO. As the game continues to gain traction and I wander around meeting strangers and friends who are also playing the game, I have taken note of numerous issues of anthropological concern, like new forms of social interaction and the re-mapping and flattening of cityscapes. Colleagues and I have even speculated about whether Pokémon GO is a virtual world—by which I mean a computer-simulated, persistent, and shared environment online—and, if it is such a world, how it represents one that is visible even to non-players. Participating in and observing the Pokémon GO phenomenon, I’ve found that players have been confronted by another recurring topic related to visibility: the visibility of game servers. I recently attended a large gathering of about 1000 Pokémon GO players in downtown Riverside, CA. We all walked around together, yet apart, huddled among small groups of friends with phones in hand, capturing virtual pets. Servers are the typically invisible and distant machines that allow such an event to happen. They connect people to the game world and to one another by receiving and returning signals to and from our mobile devices. They are an integral part of the ecology of media that enables the shared experience of being in a virtual space overlaid upon the actual world—and, curiously, players have a vague understanding of this. Pokémon GO servers have become very visible. If you ask any Pokémon GO player, servers are to blame for some of the greatest downfalls of the game, like faulty connections, glitches, outages, and lag. Developers have repeatedly mentioned servers as the root of many issues with the game, and, as a result, many players continue to point fingers at servers. So why have servers, things we can’t see or even explain, become the targets of so much anger and frustration? How can we characterize the very visible role servers play in the social worlds of Pokémon GO? (read more...)

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The Problem of Expecting Privacy on Social Media

Jasmine McNealy July 19, 2016

In May of this year, Danish researchers released a data set containing the profile information of 70,000 OkCupid users. OkCupid is a free online dating site to which, as you would expect, users post information in hopes of making a connection. The researchers collected this data by scraping the site, or using code that captures the information available. The data set included usernames, locations, and the answers to the personal questions related to user dating, sexuality, and sexual preferences. In other words, the researchers published personal information that the dating site users would expect to remain, at least theoretically, among the other members of the dating site, and could also be used to discover the users’ real names. But should OkCupid users, and the denizens of social media in general, expect what they post online to not be made “public”? In my last blog post, I briefly pondered the normalization of doxxing and what that means for privacy online. My question, for the most part, was whether courts would see how common doxxing has become as an indication that it is not as highly offensive to a reasonable person as necessary for a judgment of invasion of privacy. In that post I focused on doxxing by individuals, and sometimes the media. It’s important to note, however, that researchers have begun to participate in the same kind of behavior with little to no remorse. Which leads to what I think is the overarching question of what expectation of privacy people can have in information that they place on social media or connected sites like newspaper comment forums or review sites like Yelp. (read more...)

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Animal Sex Work

Jeannette Vaught June 15, 2016

Crouched beneath a stallion’s hot undercarriage, bearing the weight of a two-foot long sterile tube on my shoulder as the horse thrusts into it, I vocally encouraged him to ejaculate along with a team of human handlers dedicated to the business of equine sperm. “Come on, boy,” we all chirp, “don’t stop now!” This particular kind of human-assisted animal sex is repeated all spring and summer long at equine breeding facilities across the globe. The proliferation of Artificial Insemination (AI) techniques and technologies over the past two decades has revolutionized the equine breeding shed, making it possible to produce offspring from two horses with no physical, or even geographical, proximity. As recently as fifteen years ago, performance horse breeders imported actual horses from Europe, Russia, or South America to improve the American strains of particular breeds. Now it is possible to breed American mares to international stallions without either party leaving home. New industries and technologies have been created to collect, package, freeze, and transport equine semen; state, federal, and international laws govern the movement of semen across political borders; and a whole branch of equine veterinary medicine concerned with reproduction—theriogenology—has swelled to accommodate the growing need for professionals to supervise encounters like the one I described above. (read more...)

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The Hulk, Doxxing, and Changing Standards of Privacy

Jasmine McNealy May 17, 2016

By now you’ve probably heard the verdict in the Bollea v. Gawker case, the formal name of the lawsuit that Hulk Hogan (Terry Bollea being his legal name) filed against the online news site Gawker. The jury awarded the Hulkster with $140 million in damages for invasion of privacy after Gawker posted a one-minute segment of a sex tape featuring the wrestler with the wife of his best friend Bubba the Love Sponge. If you got a chance to watch the trial, or a least read about what was happening, you’d know that it was very entertaining, particularly for a media/info/tech law nerd such as myself. You should also know that Hulk has unfinished business with Gawker, having recently (as of May 3, 2016) filed another lawsuit against the media organization and others claiming emotional distress. Bollea v. Gawker, as humorous as it was, is perhaps not as important as (read more...)

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Populist Outsiders in the U.S Presidential Election

Maria Vidart-Delgado April 22, 2016

Editor’s note: This post was written prior to the New York state primary on Tuesday, April 19, in which Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump both won majorities. Against all pundits’ bets, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders each stand a chance of winning their parties’ nominations. Writing in disbelief, media analysts and scholars have attempted to explain the allure of both candidates to the disenchanted masses. Some write about the widening gap between the wealthy and the poor, and the increasing disconnect between party elites and their constituents to explain the rise of political outsiders; others write about racial backlash against President Obama. And still others write about how years of merciless and cynical political manipulation within the parties has polarized political discourse in the U.S. “Populism!” analysts decry, Peron-style banana republic populism, has taken over U.S. electoral politics. But where should we draw the line between populism and campaigning for a presidential election more generally? Many scholars in anthropology and media studies (especially those from the so-called “banana republics”) have pointed out that populism is a slippery analytical category that can mean many things, and that lends itself to many ideological projects (Mazzoleni, Stewart, and Horsfield 2003). For example, Ernesto Laclau (2005) sharply observes that populism is a rationale, a way of crafting public discourse based on a “us versus them” logic built upon a “chain of equivalences.” What Laclau means is that populist discourse ties together disparate social claims under a single message, and through this, the populist leader crafts a public identity that resonates with many types of social and political groups that have very different kinds of grievances. In this process, the leader embodies an aggregate version of “the people” based on the lowest common denominator, like national belonging. (read more...)

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The Three-Minute Thesis in Science

Todd Hanson April 19, 2016

In the world of business they call it the “elevator pitch”: a short, pithy speech that summarizes the unique aspects of a product or service to interest a potential customer or client. So named because it ideally lasts no longer than the span of an average elevator ride—which the management guru Tom Peters once considered to be two minutes—the purpose of the elevator pitch is to capture and hold someone’s attention in order to sell an idea quickly. Under Peters and others, the elevator pitch became a requisite part of 20th century business. In the world of science, where verbosity is a practiced, even revered, art, the need to capture and hold someone’s attention in order to quickly sell an idea has never seemed quite as necessary. Yet when taxpayer money is increasingly used to fund research, taxpayers generally expect scientists to communicate briefly the findings of that research in understandable terms. In this expectation, the ability to discuss one’s research succinctly in everyday language can be as equally artful. Enter the Three-Minute Thesis. (read more...)

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