tactics in Kelty, Bodo & Allen 2018
s of search engines and the algorithms of social media. We
need new, large scale systems to help people filter and rank the information on the
open web. In our current situation, according to media theorist dana boyd, “[t]he
onus is on the public to interpret what they see. To self-investigate. Since we live
in a neoliberal society that prioritizes individual agency, we double down on media
literacy as the ‘solution’ to misinformation. It’s up to each of us as individuals to
decide for ourselves whether or not what we’re getting is true.” (boyd 2018)
In closing, I’ll return to the notion of Guerrilla warfare that brought this panel
together. While some of our collaborators and some in the press did use the term
‘Guerrilla archiving’ to describe the data rescue efforts (Currie and Paris 2017),
I generally did not. The work we did was indeed designed to take advantage of
tactics that allow a small number of actors to resist giant state power. However,
What if We Aren't the Only Guerrillas Out There?
31
if anything, the most direct target of these guerrilla actions in my mind was not
the Trump administration. Instead, the action was designed to prompt responses
by the institutions where many of us work and by communities of scholars and
activists who make up these institutions. It was designed to get as many people as
possible working to address the complex issues raised by the two interconnected
challenges that the Data Refuge project threw into relief. The first challenge,
of course, is the need for new scientific, artistic, scholarly and narrative ways of
contending with the reality of global, human-made climate change. And the second
challenge, as I’ve argued in this paper, is that our systems of establishing and
signaling trustworthiness, quality, reli
tactics in Fuller & Dockray 2011
et know how to handle or recognise. This may be related to the lament
for the classic disciplinary road of deep reading of specific materials with a
relatively focused footprint whereas, it is argued, the net is encouraging a
much wider kind of sampling of materials with not necessarily so much depth.
**SD:** It's partially driven by people simply being in the system, in the
same way that the library structures our relationship to text, the net does it
in another way. One comment I've heard is that there's too much stuff on
Aaaaarg, which wasn't always the case. It used to be that I read every single
thing that was posted because it was slow enough and the things were short
enough that my response was, ‘Oh something new, great!' and I would read it.
But now, obviously that is totally impossible, there's too much; but in a way
that's just the state of things. It does seem like certain tactics of making
sense of things, of keeping things away and letting things in and queuing
things for reading later become just a necessary part of even navigating. It's
just the terrain at the moment, but this is only one instance. Even when I was
at the university and going to libraries, I ended up with huge stacks of books
and I'd just buy books that I was never going to read just to have them
available in my library, so I don't think feeling overwhelmed by books is
particularly new, just maybe the scale of it is. In terms of how people
actually conduct themselves and deal with that reality, it's difficult to say.
I think the issues are one of the few places where you would see any sort of
visible answers on Aaaaarg, otherwise it's totally anecdotal. At The Public
School we have organised classes in relationship to some of the issues, and
then we use the classes to also figure out what texts
Display 200 300 400 500 600 700 800 900 1000 ALL characters around the word.