GenderIT.org
There were countless reasons for a young, Malaysian feminist, internet rights activist, to be excited about RightsCon Brussels. Not least because Belgian waffle is the bomb, but I craved the adrenaline rush of compelling, inquisitorial and powerful discourse on human rights, gender and technology; the sort of interactions that would inspire and spark new perspectives, new ideas, and new friendships. Read the full article in GenderIT.org . Image from original work “Web Women Want...
If an object has a chip, it becomes smart, and by extension our houses become smarter – and so do our cities, hospitals, toys, phones. But what about the inventors, the creators, the owners, the users of all these smart and tiny things – are we becoming smarter? I am fascinated by the ubiquitous ability of internet technologies to animate things, transform them into hubs, bypass walls and diminish distances. I am fascinated by the fact that behind all this infrastructure of the internet a...
Twitter provides people with a platform to share their opinions, to interact with like-minded people (not always), and to communicate in real-time and on a global scale. Although Twitter has its downsides (trolls, for example), in this article I’m going to focus on the positives and identify 10 ways I believe feminist activists can make the most out of Twitter to achieve their goals. Read the...
Affordability is one of the primary barriers to internet access, and particularly to optimal use. Knowing this fully from our previous research, Research ICT Africa (RIA) conducted focus groups in Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa and Rwanda in November 2016. The task at hand for this Mozilla-funded research, part of the Equal Rating project, was to obtain qualitative information that refl...
I am AkiConterR and my companion is a “Pidgeotto” who I call “Pid”. I belong to Team Mystic; I am on level 7 and I have 53 Pokémons (72, actually, but some of them I transferred). Together we roam through Aguascalientes to fulfil my aim of becoming a Pokémon master. Pokémon the anime series arrived on Mexican television 20 years ago, on what was then “Canal 5” (Channel 5), and I ...
In 2011 a study by GroupLens revealed the gender imbalance on Wikipedia, and there was an outpouring of articles in the global media about the notorious absence of women in the world’s largest virtual encyclopedia. At that point the Wikimedia Foundation set in motion an ambitious plan to try to incorporate more women. Above all, user groups appeared, making it their business to get more women...
Elisabeth Jay Friedman offers a critical perspective of the use of the internet by feminists, arguing that the positive use of the internet for social change depends on shifting social contexts, and that the strength of the use of the internet – like any technologies – depends on its conscious and creative use to bring about social change. She argues that the internet is “no more inherent...
When once I registered for the 2017 Internet Freedom Festival in Valencia, I was added to a mailing list which had a constant flow of information on the festival and the activities related to it. Even before the schedule came out, the festival sounded fascinating, and distinctly different from other conferences, both national and international, which I have attended as of now. The board was div...
OTT services have become the main entry point to the internet for most users in the prepaid mobile environment that characterises most African markets. To entice price-sensitive users and to encourage new internet users, the availability of subsidised data – whether discounted or free – prompts questions of how internet access and use are affected. Does it enable access to the internet...
For International Women’s Day, some human rights and technology groups threw a benefit party for Chelsea Manning in Valencia, Spain as part of the annual Internet Freedom Festival. Chelsea Manning is an important activist in internet freedom for using the online platform Wikileaks to inform the world about classified US documents revealing corruption and civilian casualties. She was recently ...
Association for Progressive Communications (APC) 2018
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