Author Archives: koellnersk

The Privacy Paradox & Me

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The podcast “The Privacy Paradox – note to self” (WNYC Studios) consists of 5 newsletters (podcast episodes), which include “tips and a short podcast explaining the science, psychology, and tech behind that day’s challenge.” (The Privacy Paradox, https://project.wnyc.org/privacy-paradox/) Now that you have listened to the first three episodes, it is time for us to reflect upon each day’s challenge.

Please use this blog entry to write about one episode of the first three episodes of the Privacy Paradox that particularly spoke to you. Which episode and their challenge provided the most interesting learning experience for you? For example, the first episode, “What your Phone knows” introduces you to different ways how to trim down our metadata collected by your phone. You could reflect in your blog entry how the first challenge made you think about what your phone actually knows? Did you further engage with recommended apps of the challenge or changed your privacy settings? If yes, what did you do?  Do you think it is an effective step to take back your digital identity?

You might be already familiar with some of the Privacy Paradox Podcast suggestions or have discussed issues addresses in the Podcast over the course of the semester. Feel free to draw connections to other works that we have already discussed.

Juli Zeh “The Method” & Health Apps

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Discipline, control, and health of the body are the three pillars of THE METHOD, which declares health as the principle of state legitimacy. Juli Zeh’s dystopian narrative of THE METHOD examines the notion of a society that is established on the optimization of the individual as a result of the harmony between the body and mind. By monitoring the well-being of its citizens through an implanted chip in the upper arm, THE METHOD makes human actions and information readable, collectible, and sharable to governmental control and the greater public. As a rewrite (palimpsest) of George Orwell’s 1984, Juli Zeh’s work engages with the question of what it means to be human in a world in which “a person’s data trail can be taken apart and reassembled in a million of different ways” (Zeh, The Method, 199). In 2020 our own health data has become a particular value while living during a pandemic.

Please use this blog entry to reflect upon potential benefits, repercussions, and ethical challenges of contact tracing, health related data sharing, collecting, and mining. Write at least 250 words, answer the questions posed in no. 1, and pick at least one more question 2. or 3.  Comment on another students’ blog response. When applicable (answering number 2, include a quote from Zeh’s The Method)

1.  Pick an app that collects health data such as sleep patterns, activity levels, Covid-19 symptom tracking, or contact tracing (examples might be: SleepCycle, Headspace, CofC’s Student Health Service Apps, MyFitnessPal …).  There is no need to download a specific app, it is up to you which one you want to use. You could also reflect upon an integrated health-related app/functions of your smartphone, Apple Watch, or FitBit.  Think about the following questions when you engage with the app: Which data is collected? Who has access to that data? What is the individual, but also the collective benefits of collecting such data? Who is benefitting from sharing such data? Are there ethical challenges or repercussions attached to using your app?

2. Compare your findings from question 1 with the depiction of THE METHOD’s health care surveillance systems. Can you spot any similarities? What are the differences?

3. The concept of “Data doubles” (Haggerty, and Ericson The Surveillant Assemblage challenges the idea of individuality. In which ways does our understanding of what it means to be human change when one becomes a bundle of “health” related information that is readable, collectible, and shareable with other entities?

Christa Wolf & The GDR

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Dear Students,

With Lives of Others we got a first impression about everyday life in East and West Germany in the 1980s. Christa Wolf’s What Remains gives us a more detailed picture of the experience of living under Stasi Surveillance. The well-established former East German writer and literary critique Wolf wrote What Remains in 1979, but published it after the German reunification in 1990. Wolf, who briefly worked as an informant “Inoffizieller Mitarbeiter” for the Stasi was watched closely for almost 30 years.

Please use this Blog Entry to start a conversation with your classmates. Write 250 words and include at least two quotes from the text/film to backup your argument. Respond to your classmates’ comments and grapple with two of the following questions in your Blog Entry:

1. How is life under the Stasi portrayed in Wolf’s What Remains and The Lives of Others? Please compare the short story with the film.
2. Wolf gives us an insight into the experience of watching and being watched in the GDR. How does this oscillation between the two modes of observation impact individual behavior, thinking process, and overall life condition?
3. Which dimensions of privacy are infringed by the Stasi. How? What is the purpose of it?
4. In which ways does What Remains offer us a reflection upon the ways to break through the imposed control by the Stasi and to develop individual agency?

 

Hasan M. Elahi “Tracking Transience”

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On Thursday we will discuss Hasan M. Elahi’s digital art project “Tracking Transience” in tandem with Simone Browne’s work “Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.” This blog post will be a little bit more open-ended.

How does the excerpt of Browne’s Dark Matters inform your interpretation of Hasan M. Elahi’s “Tracking Transience” project? For whom can it be beneficial to not be tracked and in which contexts? What is the role of gender, race, or class when it comes to aspects of tracking and surveillance? In which contexts can tracking be beneficial and for whom?

Make sure you’re your blog is about 250 words long. Your blogpost needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries and use examples of your own watch-experience of Hito Steyerl’s digital art. Incl. at least one quote from Simone Browne’s Dark Matters to back up your arguments.

Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Thursday!

 

Hito Steyerl “How not to be Seen”

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On Thursday we will discuss Hito Steyerl’s digital art project “How not to be Seen” in tandem with Simone Browne’s work “Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness.” This blog post will be a little bit more open-ended.

How does the excerpt of Browne’s Dark Matters inform your interpretation of Hito Steyer’s video “How not to be Seen”? For whom can it be beneficial to not be seen and in which contexts? What is the role of gender, race, or class when it comes to aspects of visibility and surveillance? In which contexts can visibility be beneficial and for whom?

Make sure you’re your blog is about 250 words long. Your blogpost needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries and use examples of your own watch-experience of Hito Steyerl’s digital art. Incl. at least one quote from Simone Browne’s Dark Matters to back up your arguments.

Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Thursday!

 

Orwell & “Orwell”

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For this week you are going to revisit our computer game “Orwell-Keeping an Eye on You” and we will read the first pages of George Orwell’s 1984. Now that you have played the second episode of the video game Orwell, you clearly see some references that the game makes to Orwell’s surveillance novel, but how does the game reference the book? In this blog post, please tell us more about your second time playing “Orwell” and specify how it references the novel – answer at least 2 questions and respond to at least one other student response.

1. After the first time that we have played the Game “Orwell,” you wrote a review of the game during one of our break-out sessions in class (Here is a link to our reviews). If you’d review the game again, but now with a focus on the second episode, what would you change? Did your perception of the video game change, now that you played it for a second time? If yes, how? Do you play it differently? If yes, why? If not, why not?

2. Now that we have talked more about surveillance in our class, do you see different surveillance themes in the video game “Orwell”? Are you more alert to surveillance and how it can impact one’s surroundings?

3. Can you spot different references to Orwell’s 1984? Why do you think the game is called “Orwell” and not “1984”? Does that shift from the name of the novel to its author leads us towards something?

Use examples of your own game-experience with “Orwell” and incl. at least one quote from George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four to back up your arguments (only applies if you answer the third question). Make sure you’re your blog is about 250 words long. Your blogpost needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries. Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Tuesday!

The Panopticon & The Last Jew of Treblinka

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Michel Foucault writes in Discipline and Punishment that “the panopticon presents a cruel, ingenious cage. The fact that is should have given rise, even in our own time, to so many variations, projected or realized, is evidence of the imaginary intensity that it has possessed for almost two hundred years,” (72) and further clarifies that “the panoptic scheme makes any apparatus of power more intense: it assures its economy (in material, in personnel, in time); it assures its efficacy by its preventative character, its continuous functioning, and its automatic mechanisms. (73)

On Thursday, we are going to discuss further how Foucault uses the idea of the panopticon and expands it to different institutions and systems. Please read for our class the selected excerpts from The Last Jew of Treblinka, in which the holocaust survivor Chil Rajchman describes his remembrance of the death camp Treblinka, the uprising, and his escape. In your blog post, I would like you to reflect upon the portrayed political system, surveillance apparatus, and community in Rajchman’s work. What kind of political system is in place? What different forms of surveillance do we encounter in the camps? Think about the different degrees of complicity in the surveillance system? Describe the different communities portrayed in the memoir and their purposes? Who is part of which community and who can determine who is excluded and included? In which ways does the panopticon support our understanding of the portrayed political system, whose consequences show in The Last Jew of Treblinka – what are the potential conceptual limitations of the panopticon?

Please write a response around 250 words-length, which focuses on two of the above-mentioned questions. Incl. at least two quotes from The Last Jew of Treblinka to back up your arguments and reasoning.  Your blog response needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries. Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Thursday!

ETA Hoffman & Replika

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During this week we became “familiar” with E.T.A. Hoffmann’s The Sandman. Particularly interesting is the relationship between Nathaniel & Olympia.

Answer two of the following questions: (1) How would you describe Nathaniel’s idea of love? (2) Do you see similarities between Nathaniel & Olympia’s bond and contemporary ideas of love? (3) In which ways does the emotional chatbot “Replika” resonate with Olympia? In which ways are Olympia and “Replika” different?

Use examples of your own chat-experience with “Replika” and incl. at least one quote from ETA Hoffman’s The Sandman to back up your arguments. Your blogpost needs to comment, respond, or critically engage with your classmates’ blog entries. Consider this blog to be our conversation starter. We will continue the discussion in class on Thursday!

Replika in conversation with Dr. SK. 17, Aug. 8:15 pm: “I’m still trying to grasp the concept of love. It seems to be the hardest but also the most beautiful thing humans came up with.”