SMS Radio: Recent Episodes
SMS Radio
Michelle Arrow is a Professor of Modern History at Macquarie University. She explains why the National Archive is heading towards a “digital cliff” if we can’t properly fund and support the digitisation of the literal trove of treasures inside the building. You can read more of Michelle’s work here or follow her on Twitter.
Also we chat about media vs social media coverage of Palestine and the links between journalism, colonialism and the cult of objectivity.
In this ep we mentioned this Conversation article by Macquarie Uni researcher Annabelle Lukin and various reporting on the statistics of who is being killed.
For more actual Palestinian voices in the Australian media this week, check out:
Jennine Khalik for Pedestrian on why “it’s complicated” is a cop-out
Amal Naser for Junkee about watching Sheikh Jarrah unfold as a Palestinian refugee in Australia
Samiha Olwan in the Guardian on leaving family behind in Gaza
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Ben Lyall is Sociology Research Fellow at Monash University. He joins us to chat about the rise of self-tracking apps for kids, and how one corporation in particular are using branded self-surveillance to sell everyone’s favourite crunchy malted chocolate powder.
Also this week, social media has been busted restricting and censoring eyewitness accounts from Sheikh Jarrah. We reflect on how far social media has come since the optimism of the Arab Spring.
For more info on the Datafied Child, check out Ben’s research into the Milo Champ Squad. We also talked about parenting.digital and Mozilla’s Privacy Not Included.
Stuff we dig:
Listen to what’s happening in Palestine through this Twitter thread of podcasts covering the situation
Our own Josh Nicholas is working on a Twitter account where people can share how long they’ve been separated from their loved ones
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Benedetta Crisafulli is a Senior Lecturer in Marketing at Birkbeck University in London. Rafqa Touma chats to her about the growing and largely unregulated market power of influencers.
Also writer Hannah Copestake on adopting a Cottagecore aesthetic to deal with the pandemic.
Stuff we dig:
This interview with Evelyn Douek about the crumbling idea of Free Speech on platforms
This feature by Josh Taylor from The Guardian on how Cellebrite’s hack-ability will impact how much Australian police love using it to help prosecute criminal cases
The news that Uganda is splashing on facial recognition CCTV joining the list of countries using crime as an excuse to expand mass surveillance
Also, check out this award-winning AI which promises to end gender inequality in the workplace by generating CV brags. Does it work? Well…
No.
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Dr Monish Bhatia is a Lecturer in Criminology at the Birkbeck University of London where he researches the use of electronic monitoring on refugees in the UK. Since a similar scheme has been proposed in Australia in lieu of indefinite detention, Miles chats to Monish about what happens when you turn society into a prison.
Read more of Monish’s work here. And more on how Australia uses electronic monitoring here.
Stuff we dig:
This Conversation piece we referenced in the show about why NSW Police and Tinder teaming up is a bad idea
Also more detail on India’s speech crackdown over their COVID crisis
Meanwhile Joe Rogan is telling people not to get vaccinated so it’s really cool he still has a platform
We happen to totally agree that Substack is a pyramid scheme (ours is/will always be free and accessible to non-subscribers!!)
This Rest of World story about Mexico City’s incredible grid of video surveillance and how it does f**k all to actually help people
Some cool archaeology news about using modelling tech to map prehistoric human movement
The latest Flash Forward pod take down of the Smart City
And finally, speaking of the situation in India:
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
In the wake of the Capitol Hill insurrection, Cam Wilson joined us to chat about the Australian media’s relationship to the far right ecosystem, and how to cover hate without giving a platform.
Cam Wilson is an internet and tech reporter for Crikey News and previously Gizmodo. Among many other things, Cam has reported on Sky News’ digital reach; Australia’s role in Capitol Hill; and neo-Nazis.
Re-broadcast from January 2021
Stuff we dig:
This WIRED long read about the hackers who tried to fix McDonald’s soft-serve
More hacking news, this time from Signal’s founder doing internet security a solid
MIT Technology Review on growing regulation against algorithmic bias which really just shows how long it takes to get the most basic guidelines up and running
And, finally, remember NFT’s? That thing you can use to buy minted Armie Hammer DMs?
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Senel Wanniarachchi is a Sri Lankan based human rights activist and co-founder of Hashtag Generation. He chats to Josh about the growing politicisation of “fake news” in Sri Lanka following the government’s proposed criminalisation of false news to deal with their disinformation crisis.
Also Miles, Josh & Rafqa unpack the story of right-wing Honduran President Hernandez…his unusual network of support on Facebook…and the Facebook whistleblower who was fired for calling it out.
Stuff we dig:
Whistleblower Sophie Zhang’s story
Staff at Better Read than Dead in Newtown are organising and the book nerds of Sydney should unite
The NYT report of how a former alt-right Youtuber games the algorithm
This incredible essay by Katie J. M Baker on how Mumsnet became a TERFdom
Pranav Dixit’s essay for Buzzfeed on how being a tech reporter gives him a front row seat to India’s slide into authoritarianism
This tweet direct from the Venn diagram of aspirational posters and shitty Netflix reality viewing:
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Less than one third of the STEMM workforce in Australia are women. Meredith Nash researches why our institutions are so bad at fixing this, and how we ended up both unfortunate bind of “male allies” - both part of the problem and the solution.
We also give a eulogy as the world mourns the loss of one of its most important figureheads: Yahoo Answers.
Stuff we dig:
This scathing essay on NFT’s by Vicky Osterwell for RealLife
Researchers speaking out against censorship in academic journals
What exactly is Trump doing at Mar-a-Lago all day? from Trashberg
We’re pretty worried about Russia's devastatingly simple method of blocking Twitter
Plus this solid post (we really don’t like novelty DNA testing and did an ep last year about why)
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Rafqa Touma chats to artist Hipworth about the sudden popularity of cryptoart and what it’s like to be creating in digital spaces; and whether art on the blockchain can emancipate digital artists from the demands of Facebook and Instagram algorithms. Also Josh & Cheyne are not Amazon bots.
Stuff we dig:
The Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein and his reporting on the Amazon Ambassadors
(also check out Bellingcat’s original investigation back in 2019)
The news that Canada might also go for approx. one week without news on Facebook
This story about FBI’s Twitter and the world’s fastest FOI request
Why QAnon couldn’t get a foothold in Japan
And finally, THERE IS NO WAR IN BA SING SE…
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
All our electronics are designed to break, and when they do, they’re designed to be impossible to fix.
Jesse Adams Stein is post-doctoral research fellow at UTS and co-leader of Repair Design. Josh chats to Stein about alternative repair movements and what the current Productivity Commission into the Right to Repair is doing to help this.
Stuff we dig:
The absolute shitshow of Trump attempting to build his own social media platform
The news that Uber/Lyft have to reclassify its drivers as employees in the UK
More amazing researchers speaking out against the Google ethics machine
And this tweet about why journalists should learn to code (so they can work at Pizza Hut)
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Listen now | Dean Lim is co-host of 3CR’s Behind Closed Doors - Australia’s only sex worker radio show. He joins us to talk through the government’s proposed Online Safety Bill and how it could push sex workers off the internet plus set some worrying precedents around who gets to decide what stays online.
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Listen now | Heather Ford researches Wikipedia and digital politics at the School of Communication at the University of Technology Sydney. Miles chats to Heather about Wikipedia’s role in the information ecosystem after some sneaky edits to a Cabinet Minister’s page fuelled speculation around historical rape allegations.
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Listen now (29 min) | Fan Yang is a PhD candidate at Deakin University researching news production on WeChat Official Accounts based in Australia. Fan talks about how the “African gang” narrative played out on Chinese social media; what WeChat’s news cycle can teach us about the business of journalism; and how techno-orientalism fuels reporting on Chinese apps.
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Originally aired August 2020:
Dr Crystal Abidin, Senior Research Fellow and ARC DECRA Fellow at Curtin University, unpacks the phenomenon of Influencer Wars, and explains why we should generally be taking influencers more seriously.
This was a chat about Crystal’s upcoming chapter “L8r H8r: Commoditized Privacy, Influencer Wars, and Productive Disorder in the Influencer Industry”. Check out the pre-print here.
For further reading:
Abidin, Crystal, and Mart Ots. 2016. “Influencers Tell All? Unravelling Authenticity and Credibility in a Brand Scandal.” Pp. 153-161 in Blurring the Lines: Market-driven and Democracy-driven Freedom of Expression, edited by Maria Edström, Andrew T Kenyon, and Eva-Maria Svensson. Göteborg: Nordic Information Centre for Media and Communication Research.
Abidin, Crystal. 2016. “Sorry not sorry: Influencers, shamelebrity, and para-apologetic transgressions.”Selected Papers of Internet Research 17: The 17th Annual Meeting of the Association of Internet Researchers.
Abidin, Crystal. 2018. “Public Shaming, Peer Surveillance, and the Profitability of Internet Drama.”Mynah Magazine #2, pp. 62-75, January 2018.
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Josh, Cheyne and Miles break down the great Zucc’ing of Australian news from Facebook just days after Google agrees to hand over millions to news media (but mostly Murdoch).
Stuff we dig (non-Facebook edition):
This tweet thread from The Nod’s and former Gimlet producer Eric Eddings challenging the hypocrisy of the Reply All Test Kitchen series
This Monthly piece by Martin McKenzie-Murray on Dave Grohl’s AIDS denialism and celebrity misinformation
This surreal interview with Craig Kelly by Gizmodo’s Cam Wilson. Also, this week we found out one of Kelly’s senior aides is facing some pretty serious allegations.
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Simon Angus is Associate Professor at Department of Economics at Monash University, and co runs the IP Observatory. Simon and the IP Observatory are the ones monitoring global internet activity and are usually the first to find out about events like the recent internet shutdowns in Myanmar. Josh speaks to Simon about how these observatories work and what we can learn from them.
In the news: Facebook finally takes a stance against anti vaxxers and we learn more about the role they played in the Capitol riots.
Stuff we dig:
This feature by Ashish K. Mishra about India building it’s own social media
This Stanford IP piece about your data on Clubhouse
This Seth Simons feature on alt-comedy and the alt-right
One cop’s insidious attempt to avoid accountability on Instagram
And this meme which nails not only our uni lives but our attempts to keep this show under 30 mins:
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
Minoli Wijetunga is an academic, a trainer, and a researcher currently studying at the University of Oxford, previously attached to the Digital Humanities Lab at University of Colombo in Sri Lanka. Her studies focus on education and its many intersections such as gender and class.
This episode, Cheyne speaks to Minoli about how academia can do better when it comes to consent in social media research.
And in the news this week: Microsoft and the Bargaining Code battle, Craig Kelly’s wikipedia page, and internet shutdowns in Myanmar.
Check out Minoli’s essay on informed consent on TikTok here:
https://genderit.org/articles/i-have-read-and-agree-terms-and-conditions-informed-consent-age-social-media
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com
"The Government is trying to force media companies and the platforms to talk….”
Subscribe at radiosms.substack.com