Data Driven Societies: Code Is…Professors Gaze & Gieseking

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Convincing the Public / Publics Convincing Themselves (Recap)

0. Identify an issue 1. Research question 2. Theoretical approach 3. Literature review 4. Methods 5. Analysis 6. Discussion 7. Conclusion

Publics & Counterpublics (Recap)

✦ Publics - real and imagined communities in which ideas and media are exchanged, and which dictate political, cultural, and economic norms

✦ Counterpublics - alternate publics that allow for resistance to dominant cultural, political, or economic norms

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Determining our Publicness (Recap)

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How Social Media Changed Publicness (Recap)

✦ Scalability ✦ Shifted what is public and private ✦ Redefined the audience ✦ Context collapse ✦ Access to being heard and seen ✦ Persistence ✦ Replicability ✦ Searchability (Baym & boyd 2012)

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Code is Law

Google

Code is… Law

✦ As cyberspace arose, many originally theorized internet as ideal libertarian society !

✦ Then: growth in malware, shifts in privacy, issues in data security, and questioning government control of data !

✦ Now as governments cannot gather the data they need due to privacy restrictions, they gather data from corporations who work through the market. !

How do we regulate code?

Code is… Law

✦ Lessig recommends using code — both the codes that shape society and computer code — to define law.

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✦ Code is a rule for converting a piece of information into another form or representation (one sign into another sign), especially for the purposes of secrecy

✦ Code is computer program instructions !

“Code is never found; it is only ever made, and only ever made by us.” (Lessig 2006, 6)

On the path we have chosen, we will remake what cyberspace was. … What values should be built into the space [a.k.a. cyberspace] to

encourage what forms of life? -Lessig (2006, 5, 6)

Next Class: Mar. 5✦ Today: code is… !

✦ Blog post: due Wednesday on your graphs (see email) !

✦ Readings: Yau (Ch. 4, you read this by now) — NOTE CHANGE with syllabus updates forthcoming !

✦ Next class / lab: ✦ The Life of Code continues! ✦ mapping your Twitter data