MEDIATING
<p>This eighth SDUK broadsheet takes <strong>MEDIATING</strong> as its theme, in parallel with the Blackwood’s virtual program <em>Running with Concepts: The Mediatic Edition</em>, to consider sites and practices of mediation in culture, technology, and media. Following SDUK07: TILTING (an urgent 2-part issue in response to the first wave of COVID-19), the series returns in 2021—albeit in a form that continues to be shaped by the effects of the pandemic—and launches simultaneously on the Blackwood website.</p> <p>For those who wonder, <strong>how are mediated circumstances changing our ways of relating and predicting?</strong>, excerpts from Tommy Pico’s book-length poem <em>Junk</em> (p. 18) offer a riotous convergence of land, love, and queer sexuality against the ever-looming backdrops of climate change, fascism, and settler colonialism. Reckoning with futurity in his continued engagement with economics, D.T. Cochrane critiques economic forecasting’s failure to model for uncertainty (p. 30).</p> <p>With tech companies holding monop-olies on internet infrastructures, some readers may wonder: <strong>What forms of technology critique and dissent are needed?</strong> A panel discussion with Meredith Broussard, Beth Coleman, and Shalini Kantayya reflects on the biases amplified in artificial intelligence and facial recognition technologies (p. 7); while Taeyoon Choi warns against repeating the inaccessible, racially-homogenous, and male-dominated norms of tech companies within the emergence of the distributed web (p. 4). Mike Pepi’s <em>Elements of Technology Criticism</em> aims to set baseline principles for broad-scale technology critique, and his accompanying essay reflects on a recent workshop where participants co-wrote and annotated responses to his text (p. 16)…</p>
Contributors: Meredith Broussard, Ted Chiang, Taeyoon Choi, D.T. Cochrane, Beth Coleman, Constance Hockaday, Shalini Kantayya, Feminist Data Manifest-No, Marika Cifor, Patricia Garcia, TL Cowan, Jasmine Rault, Tonia Sutherland, Anita Say Chan, Jennifer Rode, Anna Lauren Hoffmann, Niloufar Salehi, Lisa Nakamura, Emily Mast, Yehuda Duenyas, HOW ARE WE, Mike Pepi, Tommy Pico, Tiara Roxanne, Stephanie Syjuco
Print Designer: Matthew Hoffman
Web Designer: Alan Woo
Copy Editor: Joy Xiang