Well now, after doing our little twitter discussion last week I just could keep myself away from the little cyan birdie, so I’ve decided to compose a twitter essay to express my thoughts on Digital Redlining. The article in question, Digital Redlining, Access, and Privacy, is written by Chris Gilliard and Hugh Culik and discusses a concept called Digital Redlining, which essentially blocks users from accessing certain information based on predetermined rules and regulation. If a student were to research a certain topic that these rules and regulations deem ‘inappropriate’ the user will not be given access to the site, or in the instance of scholarly Journal databases, will not be shown all the results. Herein lies the issue, if a student is paying a institution for access to all of these sites they are doing so with the impression that they will have infinite access to whatever they need. To them, a lack of results means the information they are looking for does not exist. The authors mention three instances in which students attempt to research topics they find interesting, only to find virtually no information on the topic, dissuading them from pursuing said topic any further. The information was there, they just didn’t have access to it. In post secondary education, self-discovery, self- inquiry and self driven education is extremely important in helping someone learn and taking away or denying that innate curiosity that we all have is very dangerous indeed.
As I said earlier, the little cyan birdie and I became close friends over the course of the past week and I saw it fitting to express my thoughts through a twitter essay. The original plan was to make a stop motion film to honor my all time favorite movie Nightmare Before Christmas (tis the season afterall), but gravity decided to break my camera instead, so the stop motion will have to wait. One thing that inspired me to tackle this article in particular was something that occurred last week during our twitter conversation. I made a tweet which mentioned the video game ‘Runescape’ and found myself assaulted with ads for the game. Whether it was twitter accounts associated with the game or ads for the game on the side, they were there and they were in full force. It was convenient then that the article in question discussed not only what we have access too, but what our information is used for. It was…difficult to keep my thoughts limited to 280-characters per tweet, and even at 17 tweets in total I still found myself limited by the medium. The learning curve here was trying to figure out how to really condense my thoughts without losing the meaning of the article. That said, I found incorporating images and gifs to be a fun little side activity which in my opinion really elevated the twitter essay as a whole, as they add a sense of emotion and feeling to each individual tweet, something which you cannot emulate in any academic paper. Take a look at my twitter essay below and tell me what you think!
1. Recently, the Digital Tech classes took to twitter to engage in some friendly banter and meme filled discourse. I made a joke about Runescape in one of my tweets and instantly found myself bombarded by Runescape ads. pic.twitter.com/mV0cDnOzOJ
— Mr. Netherlands (@HollaUwindsor) October 29, 2018
The Article: https://www.commonsense.org/education/privacy/blog/digital-redlining-access-privacy