This website was used for the Clouds course at the Graduate Center, CUNY during the Fall 2016 semester.

Please see below for an archive of posts written by students during the semester.

I had reached out to Nicole Starosielski at NYU about an excerpt from The Undersea Network that describes her visit to a cable station in the Philippines. I was curious about the stark differences between this part of her narrative and descriptions of other locations like Guam that feature prominently in her book. When she reaches her destination outside of Manila, she notes the visibility of the cable station but describes a place that is almost abandoned or neglected. Nicole Starosielski replied with a list of links to cable stations in the Philippines from the Surfacing digital project related the book. Below are a few of them:

• http://surfacing.in/?place=ballesteros-philippines
• http://www.surfacing.in/?place=currimao
• http://surfacing.in/?place=manila-philippines

And if you can, take a look at her team’s interactive underwater cable network project: http://www.surfacing.in/

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As I was scrolling through my usual feed this morning consisting of ten different platforms with ten similarly guarded accounts, I came across the news that a recent malware exploit, dubbed “gooligan” compromised 1 million Google accounts. The exploit roots your phone (if it is running any flavor of android 4 or 5) and compromises authentication tokens. The process continues by installing unwanted apps to your phone linked to the malware, and rates them to raise the app’s reputation. People (not including myself thankfully because I run the latest OS [Nexus and Pixel users get special treatment]), then flocked to usual safe havens like haveibeenpwned.com or checkpoint.com to see if their details were compromised. If details were compromised, users have to evaluate their situation with a list of questions:

• How many accounts was my Google account linked to?
• Do I use the same information for multiple outlets?
• Why haven’t I changed my password in over two years?
• Did I feed my dog this morning?

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I wanted to reiterate a notion that I brought up in class regarding social networks and online communities. The topic of how susceptible digital media such as social network feeds, advertisements, results to search queries, etc. is frequently discussed as a parallel to the openness and freedom that the Web affords us. By being open to all users, the web and all of its constituent parts are also open to corporate, political, and illicit exploitation. The trade-off has always been the universal access to these forms of media, which effectively places the price to access in compliant, even passive, participation in a highly exploitable format of social and cultural mediation.

I mentioned in class the value of closed networks citing the now-retired What.CD music sharing community. My suggestion is effectively challenging the benefits of “open” access to digital media against the benefits of maintaining social, political, cultural, and all other possible kinds of assemblages in a more controlled format. Because private trackers for music (or any other types of digital media) are not available to any and all persons who happen to stumble upon the site to become members of the community, the capacity for external parties to exploit this platform is severely diminished. However, the way that community operates can be dramatically unchanged from that of freely accessible platforms because, as The Stack and  other readings pointed out, how people exist within this digital spaces is directly shaped by the protocols that enable those spaces to exist.

An inevitable contrast between public and private platforms for sharing and consuming media is the influence that unintended parties may have within those communities. (Here I mean that these parties are considered unintended or unwanted by the community itself, not by the media platforms that directly invites and profits from this participation.) Facebook, for instance, is dealing with the criticisms that its daily feed algorithm allowed fake news stories to influence how the consumers of those stories voted in the presidential election. Facebook, however, profits heavily from the public nature of this service and through the access it grants to explicit corporate entities in the form of advertisements and data-mining. The ease of access to Facebook also ensures that it becomes a dominant figure in social media further increasing its profitability. Not all “unwanted” participation is explicit or conducted with Facebook’s approval; The use of surveillance, scamming, phishing, and bullying are just a few examples of how being a public domain facilitates highly destructive entanglements between the community and those parties who wish to exploit the high degree of congregation and access this community allows.

In summary, perhaps the value that social networks, digital media, and constant connectedness offer to consumers is minuscule in comparison to the value we hold as consumers who are compliant in their own vulnerability. In the case of What.CD, it was the largest music database and music-based community in the world, and it operated illegally and entirely through member donations. It could not be public nor did it need to be.