Author Archives: sparkling_bears47

So, I came across this article on Reddit and it really made me think. The story is that a retired social worker, Phyllis Smith, adopted a young girl, Katie, who had been passed around foster homes. Phyllis’ son, Mark, and his wife Terri are more or less Katie’s foster parents. The thought-provoking aspect of the article is that Katie is white and Phyllis, Mark and Terri are black. Throughout the article, you hear of people coming up to Katie and asking if she’s ok, following her and her foster parents around, and other examples of negative and prejudiced attention.

A lot of points are raised in the article about the covert racism that still exists throughout the country. The article mentions Obama and how many Americans believe that they’ve taken a huge step in putting racism behind them, but there still are a lot of underlying prejudices in the nation, one of which is assuming the worst of a older black man watching over a young white girl. On a personal level, I know that seeing something similar would cause me to do a double take, at the very least. I like to think that I’ve worked a lot to fight against societal prejudices, but this article made me realize that there’s still a lot to do on an individual and national level.

I know this doesn’t quite fall under the heading of Digital Media Studies, but I really encourage everyone to read through this article. How would you react?

I think this was mentioned and it just slipped my mind, but how are we finding the readings for the next week? Are we supposed to pull together things? And if so, could someone post what the two topics are again? Memes and activism, I think, but there was a bit more to it than just that. Thanks!

An interesting little video about the history of the internet that I found on reddit. I know we talked about this in one of our beginning labs (DARPA, etc), but I enjoyed seeing it drawn out. Just thought I’d post it here:

link

I haven’t been as good as I should have been this week about posting on the blog, so I’m going to attempt to make up for that over this weekend by making a couple of posts. The first thing is an interesting art piece that attempts to simulate “the banality of physical existence.” I think it’s an interesting piece and the author of the work has some cool ideas that he gets into on the site (you can find them after you’ve gone through the simulator once). Also, keep in mind that this was created in 1997. How have things changed since then? And how would someone attempting to make a similar piece go about critiquing the banality of physical existence verses virtual life? Food for thought.

here’s the link.

On a slightly side note, I wanted to post a link to the problems the site wikileaks is having. Wikileaks is a site that posts and exhibits leaked information about corporations, governments and various other institutions. Recently, they came upon Australia’s secret list of sites that are blacklisted. Not only are there things like child pornography, which the law is ostensibly for, but the Wikileaks site itself, fringe religions, gambling sites, and euthanasia activists, among others.

I don’t have anywhere in particular that I’m going with this, but it’s an interesting example of censorship on the internet from governments that we tend to view as Western, liberal and free. Here’s the link to read more.