A gathering of flowers
Interior view of the Central Social Insurance Institution showing men working in mobile work stations used to access the card catalog drawers, Prague, Czechoslovakia. Part of a 2009 exhibition, “Speed Limits.”
READING IN MY TABS
- COVID-19 and the pandemic of ableist media.
- "Facing a world that seems to get worse by the hour, an urgent climate emergency that is certain to dismantle our global supply chains in a way that makes Covid-19 look quaint, and a new understanding of how to live at a slower pace, we have to ask: Does following our personal and narrowly defined ambition, at the cost of all other skills and possibly our own health, make much sense anymore?" It’s time to replace ambition with adaptation.
- Related to the above: “Ultimately, we have no way of judging whether we’re living through Collapse or Renewal. Future generations will decide that out for us. The only thing that matters is the part we play. We can choose which strand of that rope we belong to. We can add to its grand weave, in the way we treat other people, in the leaders we vote for, in the daily work we do, in the decisions we make about where to put our energy, and in the words that come out of our mouths.” A few more related: But the greatest of this is love, and like every other topic, discard the jargons!
- “Most of the technological narratives of the pandemic assume, to a greater or lesser extent, that the people experiencing the pandemic are all using digital technologies. Whether the topic is working from home, or doom-scrolling, or navigating misinformation on social media, or attending classes from home, or scheduling a vaccination appointment, or using a contact tracing app, or getting test results from a COVID test — there has been an assumption that everyone has access to these digital tools and that everyone has a basic level of comfort using these tools (as will be noted later on, these assumptions are problematic)." Technological lessons from the pandemic.
- One of the most troubling features of the digital revolution is that some people pay to subject themselves to surveillance that others are forced to endure and would, if anything, pay to be free of. Ah rich people, how oblivious.
- And when prison tech comes home...
- French designer Anaëlle Beignon recently graduated from the Interaction Design department of Malmö University. In this excerpt from her master thesis, Beignon shows how obsolescence is not just an internal quality of a device, but a dimension that emerges from the relation between such device and the broader sociotechnical ecosystem.
- Why are hyperlinks blue?
- What happens to a national cuisine when that nation no longer technically exists e.g. Yugoslavia?
- TIL florilegium – a compilation of excerpts from other writings taken mostly from religion, philosophy, and sometimes classical texts. The word florilegium literally means a gathering of flowers — flos (flowers) and legere (to gather). Basically, keeping a commonplace book.
- Sis we can definitely relate
- "I've been taught bloodstones can cure a snakebite, can stop the bleeding —most people forgot this when the war ended. The war ended, depending on which war you mean: those we started, before those, millennia ago and onward, those which started me, which I lost and won — these ever-blooming wounds [...]"
RESOURCES AND TOOLKITS
- Covid-19 Memorial Malaysia is a dedicated website to remember and honour our beloved family and friends who lost their battles against Covid-19 in Malaysia. They are currently accepting submissions.
- Cyberfeminism Index – an in-progress online collection of resources for techno-critical works from 1990–2020, gathered and facilitated by designer Mindy Seu.
- Bellingcat, the Netherlands-based investigative journalism website that specialises in fact-checking and open-source intelligence, produced this toolkit which includes satellite and mapping services, tools for verifying photos and videos, websites to archive web pages, and much more.
- Lara Hogan made her book Demystifying Public Speaking available online for free. Perfect for someone like me who had the most ridiculous fear of speaking in front of people.
STATUS BOARD
- Reading: The Critical Methodologies Collective’s The Politics and Ethics of Representation in Qualitative Research: Addressing Moments of Discomfort. It is made open access so be sure to download it if you are a researcher and interested, as you should, in addressing discomfort and struggles in research like representations, consent, and the practice of the care in the process.
- Listening: Having Lido Pimienta’s Nada on loop.
- Watching: Netflix's The Broken Hearts Gallery is really cute?? And both Dacre Montgomery and Phillipa Soo are too???
- Food and Drink: I went out to get a chocolate sundae today! On a Sunday!
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