Media@McGill will be hosting The Participatory Condition, an International Colloquium, which will be held in Montreal at the Musée d’art contemporain (MAC) on November 15 and 16, 2013. The Colloquium’s main objective is to assess the role of media in the development of a principle whose expansion has become so large as to become the condition of our contemporaneity.
Fundacion Via Libre is an Argentinian digital rights group that advocates for more user awareness of internet surveillance and policy. To build this awareness the group not only conducts activist projects and attend events, but they also work with legislative bodies to reflect the growing technology and protect users.
Spent is an online in-browser game designed by ad agency McKinney as part of a partnership with Urban Ministries of Durham, NC, calling attention to the problem of poverty and educate people about homelessness. In the game, players are challenged to live on $1000 over a month, often having to decide between essentials and utilize outside options in order to survive.
Sojo Studios, a new entertainment company, made plenty of headlines this week with its first social game, WeTopia. The studio is gaining plenty of attention with news of its $8 million arsenal, a roster of partnerships with non-profits like Save the Children, Children’s Health Fund and buildOn, consumer brand advertisers, and Ellen DeGeneres as one its business investors and partners.
Restore the Fourth is a privacy movement started in the summer of 2013, in reaction to Edward Snowden's revealing of the National Security Administration's extensive spying on American and foreign citizens. The movement seeks to uphold the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution, which protects American citizens against unfounded search and seizure of their property or identity.
From Konami Digital Entertainment (makers of Dance Dance Revolution, Castlevania, and other hits) comes a significant expansion of their long-running support of the World Food Programme’s gaming initiatives. The result is the re-emergence of Food Force, one of the most successful early games for change titles.
During the Steubenville, Ohio rape case in 2012, members of Anonymous uncovered and promised to release names of unindicted participants in the rape of a teenager by high school athletes.
There’s a fine line between offensive and hilarious, and Arizona lawmakers aim to make that boundary legally protected. If House Bill 2549 passes, online harassment could become a criminal offense – but some hacktivists are there to help you rejoice.
On January 18, 2012, numerous website across the internet called for an internet blackout in protest of SOPA and PIPA. SOPA, or the Stop Online Piracy Act, and PIPA, the Protect IP Act, were a series of bills promoted by Hollywood in the US Congress that would have created a “blacklist” of censored websites.
The Guardian
By Tania Branigan
In the opaque world of Chinese censorship, a few red lines shine through the murk. One of the clearest is: no gossip about top political leaders, their families or internal party affairs.
Located within Boston’s historic (brick) core, and using the history of Boston as example, this kinetic, site-specific, public art installation is a humorous commentary on our use and trust of the internet for learning.
"Dark Side of the Prism" is a Firefox Add-on that provides a soundtrack for our surveilled internet meanderings.
The public recently learned that the US National Security Agency's on-going internet surveillance program, Prism, collects data from users of major websites.
From New 24By SAPAHanoi - When riot police broke up a recent protest over a forced
eviction, Vietnam's bloggers were ready - hidden in nearby trees, they
documented the entire incident and quickly posted videos and photos
online.Their shaky images spread like wildfire on Facebook, in a
sign of growing online defiance in Vietnam, in the face of efforts by
Games for Change is a community of game designers, activists, artists and individuals focused on creating and using digital games for purposes of social change. Games for Change is a large and loose community, but it has a major nonprofit organization at its center, who organizes the majority of the meetups and work of the movement.
ScareMail is a web browser extension that makes email “scary” in order to disrupt NSA surveillance. Extending Google’s Gmail, the work adds to every new email’s signature an algorithmically generated narrative containing a collection of probable NSA search terms. This “story” acts as a trap for NSA programs like PRISM and XKeyscore, forcing them to look at nonsense.
A couple of weeks ago, a group of activists working with Rainforest Action Network’s Energy and Finance campaign hit the streets of San Francisco to bring a little truth about Bank of America’s misdeeds to its customers—not in the lobbies of the bank’s local branches, but at its ATMs throughout the city.
Oakland Wiki (oaklandwiki.org) is a free website about Oakland that anyone can edit. It's a wiki that can house any kind of information about Oakland, from historic figures to native plants to City Council meeting notes to your favorite leafy walk.
"A few months ago artists John Peña, Jon Rubin, and Dawn Weleski opened Conflict Kitchen, a take-out restaurant that only serves cuisine from countries that the United States is in conflict with. Nowadays the Iranian food is served at the counter. More precisely, the kubideh, a dish made of grilled ground meat in freshly baked barbari bread with onion, mint, and basil.