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Media Bits and Bytes – Teching It to the Streets Edition

https://portside.org/2016-08-16/media-bits-and-bytes-teching-it-streets-edition
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No Compromises, No Regrets — Larry Wilmore and the Price of “Keeping It 100″

By Melanie McFarland
August 15, 2016
Salon

Larry Wilmore deeply mined uncomfortable topics that other late night talk show hosts would gingerly touch upon — if they did so at all — before moving on to easy comedy veins. It is much, much more difficult to utilize the late night comedy format to call attention to absurdist acts of institutional bigotry and discrimination, police brutality, voter disenfranchisement and a wide array of other civil rights issues concerning not only African Americans, but the LGBTQ community, women, immigrants and refugees.
The Nightly Show’s catchphrase, “Keeping it 100,” became its credo — and possibly its downfall.

The Next Frontier of Online Activism is ‘Woke’ Chatbots

By Caitlin Dewey
August 11, 2016
Washington Post

A Twitter bot, by its very nature, cannot actually be “woke.” The term refers to an awareness of social injustice — and bots, well, they’re just lines of code.
As of this writing, the ‘woke’ chatbot does two things, though it may do more in the future: When a Twitter user initially follows @StayWokeBot, it auto-tweets them a singsong affirmation; when a follower tweets at the bot with his or her state, it responds with contact information for that state’s senators and a prompt to ask them to vote in favor of two gun-control measures.
 

Lessons From a Digital Mercenary: Beware the ‘October Surprise'

By Sara Sorcher
August 10, 2016
Christian Science Monitor

Cybersecurity expert Chris Rock researched ways to overthrow a government using only his computer for a talk at the DEF CON hacker conference in Las Vegas – and he says there are some lessons for the US elections.
 

Google Maps Palestine Row: Why Neutrality in Tech is an Impossible Dream

By Leigh Alexander
August 11, 2016
The Guardian

Imagine if it would have more of an impact for Palestine to be recognised as a sovereign country by Google than by the UN. It’s a suggestion that’s caught fire – a five-month-old online petition demanding Palestine be labeled and bordered in Google Maps has gained more than 250,000 signatures just over the past few days.
The swiftness of the backlash is not just about the wish for justice on behalf of an occupied people, but about the belief – now punctured – that our technology is neutral, that it presents an unbiased, infallible version of the world.

Is Pokémon Go Racist? How the App May be Redlining Communities of Color

By Allana Akhtar
August 9, 2016
USA TODAY

While playing the popular augmented-reality game Pokémon Go in Long Beach, a city that is nearly 50% white, Aura Bogado made an unsettling discovery — there were far more PokéStops and Gyms, locations where people pick up virtual goods or battle one another, than in her predominantly minority neighborhood in Los Angeles.
So Bogado, who writes for environmental news outlet Grist, created the Twitter hashtag #mypokehood in July to crowdsource the locations of PokéStops. The results that poured in from across the county, and research from The Urban Institute think tank, bore out her experience. 

Jeremy Corbyn's Media Strategy is Smarter Than his Critics Realise

By Des Freedman
August 5, 2016
New Statesman

There is overwhelming evidence of the systematic delegitimisation of Jeremy Corbyn in the mainstream press and the disproportionate attention paid to critics of the Labour leader in our main TV news broadcasts. In response, supporters have launched the #WeAreHisMedia hashtag and argued that Corbyn should take advantage of the growing power of social media (and by association, the waning power of mass media) to sidestep a media establishment that is determined to discredit him.
On the other hand, influential commentators on the left are calling for the Labour leader to develop a "coherent media strategy" that aims at reaching "ordinary" voters (as opposed to activists) via these hostile media platforms.
Hashtags and memes alone do not topple governments and win elections but they can help solidify and give confidence to movements whose capacity to use traditional communications system is limited. But while social media are valuable organising tools, they do not constitute the spaces where, by and large, people get their news.

Source URL: https://portside.org/2016-08-16/media-bits-and-bytes-teching-it-streets-edition