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Keywords: Online

  • MEDIA

    Christchurch Call vs cybernaut sovereignty

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 20 May 2019

    The troubling feature of this move is that governments are urging online companies to become vigilant gatekeepers and policing agents of internet material. In doing so, an undue degree of importance is placed on the devil of technology rather than the weakness of humanity.

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  • MEDIA

    Sense and censorship in social media crackdown

    • Binoy Kampmark
    • 03 April 2019
    5 Comments

    The thrust of the Morrison government's changes is one of heavy handed and forced deferral, outsourcing government policing by vesting it in social media platforms. Israel's Cyber Unit, by way of contrast, has been seeking the same object via more subtle means, collaborating with Facebook and YouTube to remove errant posts and content.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    What we can learn from the Covington incident

    • Chris Middleton
    • 04 February 2019

    Because this story is in the political arena, it seems vicious comments from celebrities, politicians, and countless others are made with impunity. And we wonder why young people can be so cruel online and why it is so hard to educate them that words matter; that words hurt. Then, as they say, the story got complicated.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    The casual service industry is broken

    • Devana Senanayake
    • 14 December 2018
    8 Comments

    David Leyonhjelm recently thanked men from South Asian backgrounds for delivering his pizza, groceries and online purchases; for rolling up their sleeves for jobs others refused. This gesture is seriously problematic. The casual service industry is broken and exploitative and needs to be carefully regulated and constantly audited.

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  • MEDIA

    Mindfulness in an age of Twitter noise

    • Emily van der Nagel
    • 21 September 2018
    5 Comments

    Instead of following platform prompts to connect more, or logging out entirely, it could be time to get mindful of our audience and develop ways to nourish the online relationships we enjoy. After all, intimacy is still important in the age of the high follower count.

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  • MEDIA

    A free-for-all in the virtual town hall

    • Sheila Ngoc Pham
    • 19 September 2018

    Humans are inherently social creatures with a need to converse, yet we live in isolation and mental distress in greater numbers than ever before. Does the ready desire for argumentation online that some thrive on come from wanting to feel, well, something — anger, certainly — rather than passively watching the world whir by?

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  • MEDIA

    Miquela Sousa and the rise of fake influencers

    • Claire Hubble
    • 10 July 2018
    4 Comments

    On the face of it, Miquela is the same as any other ‘influencer’. But behind her normcore sunglasses, Miquela is dead. Orchestrating her content is Brud, an LA-based tech startup masterminded by Sara DeCou and Trevor McDefries. The more interesting question is not who Miquela is, but why she matters. Because Miquela holds up a mirror to how we construct our own online personas.

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  • ECONOMICS

    The language of exploitation in the online labour market

    • Daniel Nicholson
    • 24 April 2017
    3 Comments

    When you are in the business of exploiting people, language matters. A recently leaked document from Deliveroo is geared to emphasising that the people who deliver food for Deliveroo are and should remain independent contractors, not employees. In 2016, a Unions NSW report into the employment practices of gig-economy company AirTasker categorised the online labour market as 'unregulated Taylorism within a Dickensian marketplace where workers compete for bite-sized fragments of labour'.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Alternative facts in the Centrelink debacle

    • Kasy Chambers
    • 03 February 2017
    12 Comments

    Centrelink's new policy of automated online debt collection has been subject to conflicting reports. The Minister and the department head are sticking to the assertion that everything is working fine. Yet there is another version of the truth, seen in the growing list of people talking publicly about the distress caused to them by being falsely tageted. One difficulty with the process is that the adversarial manner that it set up is unlikely to allow Centrelink to learn from the cases it reviews.

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  • ARTS AND CULTURE

    Forestalling disgrace amid a welfare nightmare

    • Tim Kroenert
    • 23 November 2016
    5 Comments

    The welfare system Daniel experiences is a bureaucratic nightmare, populated by condescending Health Care Professionals, shadowy and calculating Decision Makers, managers who loom over their clients like stern parents, and caseworkers who stifle any human compassion for their desperate supplicants. He is grilled by a welfare officer about every aspect of his health except the only relevant one, his heart. Later, he runs afoul of the agency's 'online by default' processes. Daniel has never used a computer in his life.

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  • INTERNATIONAL

    An ode to speechless Bob Dylan

    • Philip Harvey
    • 04 November 2016
    10 Comments

    Initial silence from Dylan after the announcement of his Nobel Prize led one of the Scandinavian officials to complain he was being 'impolite and arrogant'. This prompted even more vitriolic opinion online on all sides, from fans, litterateurs, Dylanologists, and other armchair grenadiers. Just as things were getting completely tangled up in blue Dylan himself broke the silence to explain that news of the award had left him speechless. We shouldn't be surprised. Speechless is a normal state for a poet.

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  • AUSTRALIA

    Census scepticism as privacy comes under threat

    • Kate Galloway
    • 01 August 2016
    18 Comments

    Government wishes to capitalise on our data using new data mining technologies. The ABS uses the language of efficiency and public interest in justifying the changes. It even implies that the new online census is environmentally friendly. It may well be that collecting and retaining our names along with our personal information is efficient, but that does not address the foundation question of whether we as citizens retain the privacy that constitutes us as members of a liberal democratic society.

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