Introduction to symposium on everyday culture participation/music at Onderzoeksconferentie Cultuureducatie en Cultuurparticipatie, LKCA, Utrecht, 23/11/2015.
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Websites placing cookies on your computer to track your browsing behavior. TikTok stores your personal data in China. Are you aware of what products, services, and organisations do with your personal data? It is often not obvious. Our digital lives are becoming more and more prominent. We are now meeting each other virtually for work and leisure, and are spotted and traced without our knowledge, both in physical places (public areas and streets) and in virtual spaces. Technology is developing rapidly and policy makers are not able to keep up, resulting in unknown threats for citizens in modern society. Moreover, technology can lead to inequality and exclusion, as demonstrated in the Dutch childcare benefits scandal. The aim of the Inholland Digital Rights Research Team, co-founded by Professors Wina Smeenk, Ander de Keijzer and Ben Wagner, is to focus their work on the social, economic, cultural, communication, design and technological elements that can lead to a digitally responsible society. This means that we want to be part of the debate and research on how technology in our digital age can contribute to the quality of peoples’ lives: how can people benefit from the digital society and how are they hindered, or even worse, excluded from partaking in our digital society. We do this in our research lines, as well as in the sustainable media lab courses and the data-driven minor.
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US new media artist Ben Grosser and I met at the 2013 Unlike Us #3 Institute of Network Cultures event in Amsterdam where he presented his Demetricator, a free web browser extension that hides all the metrics on Facebook. I have followed his work ever since. We got in contact again in 2019 when he premiered his video art clip Order of Magnitude.[1] The cut-up piece features Mark Zuckerberg’s obsession with growth. Instead of taking the traditional critical approach, Ben Grosser magnifies particular words that return in each and every one of his sentences: more, millions, billions, trillions. Covering the earliest days of Facebook in 2004 up through Zuckerberg’s compelled appearances before the US Congress in 2018, Grosser viewed every one of these recordings and used them to build a supercut drawn from three of Mark’s most favoured words: more, grow, and his every utterance of a metric such as two million or one billion. Inside the exploding galaxy of Facebook there are no limits of growth. After a few minutes the viewer gets exhausted and is ready to swipe the video away, stand up and walk out: the exact opposite response to what we experience when we’re on Facebook, Instagram, or WhatsApp. The emptiness of the guy suffocates. Well done, Ben.
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