DOCSLIB.ORG

DIGITAL AMNESIA Why We Need to Protect What We No Longer Remember

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
DIGITAL AMNESIA Why We Need to Protect What We No Longer Remember THE RISE AND IMPACT OF DIGITAL AMNESIA Why we need to protect what we no longer remember Key findings from the study include: • Across the United States, the study shows that an overwhelming EXECUTIVE number of consumers can easily admit their dependency on the Internet and devices as a tool for remembering. Almost all (91.2%) of those surveyed agreed that they use the Internet as The results suggest a direct an online extension of their brain. Almost half (44.0%) also admit SUMMARY link between data available that their smartphone serves as their memory–everything they at the click of a button and need to recall and want to have easy access to is all on it. a failure to commit that data to memory. Kaspersky Lab • In addition, many consumers are happy to forget, or risk has termed this phenomenon forgetting information they can easily find–or find again- Digital Amnesia: the online. When faced with a question, half of U.S. consumers experience of forgetting would turn to the Internet before trying to remember and 28.9% information that you trust would forget an online fact as soon as they had used it. a digital device to store and remember for you. • Although dependence on devices appears high, when asked, most participants could phone the house they lived in at 15 (67.4%) as well as their partners (69.7%), children (34.5%), and place of work (45.4%). They could not however call their siblings (44.2%), friends (51.4%), or neighbors (70.0%) without first looking up the number. • Contrary to general assumptions, Digital Amnesia is not only affecting younger digital natives–the study found that it was equally and some times more prevalent in older age groups. The Internet and Internet-enabled devices have transformed our everyday • The loss or compromise of data stored on digital devices, and lives and relationships. We entrust them with our precious personal smartphones in particular, would cause immense distress, information including contacts and images and rely on them to connect us to particularly among women and people under 35. More than half of women (51.0%) and almost the same number of 25 to a vast repository of knowledge, anytime, anywhere. 34 year-olds (48.6%) say it would fill them with sadness, since there are memories stored on their connected devices that they would never get back. However, it caused the even younger As part of its commitment to help people protect what matters most in their participants the most fear. One in four women (27.1%) and 35.0% online-enabled world, Kaspersky Lab wanted to better understand how of respondents age 16 to 24 say they would panic: their devices digital devices and the Internet affect the way consumers recall and use are the only place they store images and contact information. information today – and what, if anything, they are doing to protect it. • Worryingly, despite this growing reliance on connected devices, the study found that consumers across America are failing to adequately protect them with IT security. Just one in three We commissioned research firm Opinion Matters to survey 1,000 consumers (30.5%) installs extra IT security, such as an anti-virus software in the United States, aged between 16 and 55+, split equally between male solution on their smartphone and one in five (20.7%) adds any security to their tablet. 28.0% doesn’t protect any of their devices and female. with additional security. Connected devices enrich our lives but they have also given rise to the potentially risky phenomenon of Digital Amnesia. Many people underestimate just how exposed their externally-stored memories can be, rarely thinking about the need to protect them with IT security, such as anti-virus software. Kaspersky Lab is committed to helping people understand the risks their data could be exposed to, and empowering them to tackle those risks. THE RISE AND IMPACT OF DIGITAL AMNESIA 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Introduction The research findings Kaspersky Lab is grateful to Digital technologies are not just transforming the way we live and The results reveal that the ‘Google Effect’ likely extends beyond online Dr Kathryn Mills, UCL Institute work; they are changing the way we think, learn, behave – and facts to include important personal information. of Cognitive Neuroscience, remember. London for her detailed review For many people, particularly younger consumers, connected devices of this paper and her expert The long term effects of digital device and Internet use are being have become not just the primary source of knowledge, but the insight and commentary. actively investigated by cognitive neuroscientists, psychologists and default storage space for their most important personal information, iii Kaspersky Lab would also like many others. Large-scale studies are still in their infancy (10), results including contacts and images . Around half of smartphone-owning to thank Dr Maria Wimber, can be contradictory, and their interpretation contentious (4) (8). 16 to 44 year olds surveyed for the study admit that their phone holds Lecturer, School of Psychology, Considerable attention is currently focused on the potential effect of almost everything they need to know or recall. technologies, such as gaming, on brain development, behavior and University of Birmingham, for The study findings show that the majority of these digital consumers cognitive skills (6) (7) , particularly among young people (1) (2). her expert comments. strongly depend on devices and the Internet as an extension of their Other studies have looked at the impact on brain functionality of brain; and suggest a direct link between data available at the click of always-on access to the Internet’s vast repository of information. A a button and a failure to commit that data to memory. seminal paper published in Science in 2011 (12) detailed research by Kaspersky Lab has termed this phenomenon Digital Amnesia: the Harvard and the Universities of Columbia and Wisconsin into memory experience of forgetting information that you trust a digital device to and Internet use. The study showed that the way young people in the store and remember for you. U.S. remembered information was changing as a result of being able to find information online: they retained fewer facts but could readily The study found evidence of Digital Amnesia equally among both recall where the information was stored. The researchers called this men and women and across all age groups. Contrary to general ‘the Google effect.’ perception, it is surprisingly prevalent among older respondents. For example, respondents aged 45 and older are more likely to head Using this as a starting point, Kaspersky Lab wanted to better straight for the Internet for the answer to a question, and write the understand how digital devices and the Internet affect the way fact down or choose to forget an online fact once they’ve used it on ordinary people of all ages recall and use information today – the assumption that it will always be out there somewhere. The data is and what, if anything, they are doing to protect the most critical discussed in more detail below. information and ensure they and their families can enjoy the best of the Internet’s intelligence without risk. “The overall trend seems worrying to some degree. In contrast to general knowledge that will always be retrievable from the Internet, Previous Kaspersky Lab studiesi have shown that many people personal information seems indeed very vulnerable if it is stored solely underestimate just how exposed their externally-stored memories on one electronic device, and if this device is used as a replacement can be. They don’t consider themselves a target and rarely think about for our autobiographical memory.” Dr Maria Wimber, Lecturer, School the need to protect their memories with IT security, such as anti-virus of Psychology, University of Birmingham software. “One of the reasons consumers might be less worried about As part of its commitment to help people protect what matters most remembering information is because they have connected devices in their online-enabled world, Kaspersky Lab commissioned research that they trust. In many societies, having access to the Internet to explore these issues across the United States. feels as stable as having access to electricity or running water. It would be interesting to explore further whether individuals in places where the Internet is unreliable (for instance, in cities where there are information or electricity blackouts or in very remote areas) feel greater need to remember contact details or facts, or have a different Research methodology perspective on information access.” Dr Kathryn Mills, UCL Institute of The quantitative research was undertaken by research firm Opinion Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London Matters, which surveyed 1,000 United States consumers, aged The results fall broadly into two categories: the recall of personal ii between 16 and 55+, split equally between male and female . The information and the recall of knowledge and insight. survey was undertaken online in May 2015. 4 KASPERSKY LAB THE RISE AND IMPACT OF DIGITAL AMNESIA 5 Mind my memories The study found that, across the U.S., an overwhelming number of Age consumers can easily admit their dependency on the Internet and devices as a tool for remembering. Base 16-24 25-34 35-44 45-54 55+ The results show that almost all (91.2%) of those surveyed agreed that Figure 2A: The emotional impact Sad–there are memories stored they use the Internet as an online extension of their brain, with little on those devices that I could 45.1% 40.3% 48.6% 47.7% 43.6% 44.8% variation across genders and age groups studied (for example: 89.9% of losing data or access to data never get back of men and 92.6% of women).
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Corpora: Google Ngram Viewer and the Corpus of Historical American English
    EuroAmerican Journal of Applied Linguistics and Languages E JournALL Volume 1, Issue 1, November 2014, pages 48 68 ISSN 2376 905X DOI - - www.e journall.org- http://dx.doi.org/10.21283/2376905X.1.4 - Exploring mega-corpora: Google Ngram Viewer and the Corpus of Historical American English ERIC FRIGINALa1, MARSHA WALKERb, JANET BETH RANDALLc aDepartment of Applied Linguistics and ESL, Georgia State University bLanguage Institute, Georgia Institute of Technology cAmerican Language Institute, New York University, Tokyo Received 10 December 2013; received in revised form 17 May 2014; accepted 8 August 2014 ABSTRACT EN The creation of internet-based mega-corpora such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (Davies, 2011a) and the Google Ngram Viewer (Cohen, 2010) signals a new phase in corpus-based research that provides both novice and expert researchers immediate access to a variety of online texts and time-coded data. This paper explores the applications of these corpora in the analysis of academic word lists, in particular, Coxhead’s (2000) Academic Word List (AWL). Coxhead (2011) has called for further research on the AWL with larger corpora, noting that learners’ use of academic vocabulary needs to address for the AWL to be useful in various contexts. Results show that words on the AWL are declining in overall frequency from 1990 to the present. Implications about the AWL and future directions in corpus-based research utilizing mega-corpora are discussed. Keywords: GOOGLE N-GRAM VIEWER, CORPUS OF HISTORICAL AMERICAN ENGLISH, MEGA-CORPORA, TREND STUDIES. ES La creación de megacorpus basados en Internet, tales como el Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), el Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) (Davies, 2011a) y el Visor de Ngramas de Google (Cohen, 2010), anuncian una nueva fase en la investigación basada en corpus, pues proporcionan, tanto a investigadores noveles como a expertos, un acceso inmediato a una gran diversidad de textos online y datos codificados con time-code.
    [Show full text]
  • Copyright Reform in the EU: Grappling with the Google Effect
    Copyright Reform in the EU: Grappling with the Google Effect Annemarie Bridy Sweeping changes are coming to copyright law in the European Union. Following four years of negotiations, the European Parliament in April 2019 approved the final text of the Digital Single Market Directive (DSMD).1 EU member states now have two years to transpose its provisions intodomestic law. The new directive, which is the most substantial change to EU copyright law in a generation, contains provisions for enhancing cross-border access to content available through digital subscription services, enabling new uses of copyrighted works for education and research, and, most controversially, ‘clarifying’ the role of online services in the distribution of copyrighted works. The provisions associated with the last of these goals—Article 15 (the ‘link tax’) and Article 17 (‘upload filters’) take aim directly at two services operated by Google: Google News and YouTube. Article 15 is intended to provide remuneration for press publishers when snippets of their articles are displayed by search engines and news aggregators.2 Article 17, which this article takes for its subject, is intended to address the so-called ‘value gap’—the music industry’s longstanding complaint that YouTube undercompensates music rightholders for streams of user videos containing claimed copyrighted content.3 The text of the DSMD nowhere mentions YouTube, but anyone versed in the political economy of digital copyright knows that Article 17 was purpose-built to make YouTube pay. The important questions to ask in the wake of Article 17 are who else will pay—and in what ways. This article offers a focused examination of Article 17 as public law created to settle a private score between the music industry and YouTube.
    [Show full text]
  • Contents Libraries and Google
    Waller http://www.uic.edu/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArt... First Monday, Volume 14, Number 9 - 7 September 2009 HOME ABOUT LOG IN REGISTER SEARCH CURRENT ARCHIVES SUBMISSIONS Home > Volume 14, Number 9 - 7 September 2009 > Waller This article explores the implications of a shift from public to private provision of information through focusing on the relationship between Google and public libraries. This relationship has sparked controversy, with concerns expressed about the integrity of search results, the Google Book project, and Google the company. In this paper, these concerns are treated as symptoms of a deeper divide, the fundamentally different conceptions of information that underpin the stated aim of Google and libraries to provide access to information. The paper concludes with some principles necessary for the survival of public libraries and their contribution to a robust democracy in a rapidly expanding Googleverse. Contents Libraries and Google The romance phase: ‘We have everything in common’ Cracks appear in the relationship Reality check: ‘We want different things’ The word ‘information’ Conclusion: Negotiating a healthy relationship Libraries and Google ‘To google’ has become a household verb, meaning “to search for information on the Internet.” [1] In the month of April 2008, Google handled 5.1 billion queries in the U.S. alone [2]. Its market share is almost 90 percent in the U.K. and Australia [3], 80 percent in Europe [4] and 70 percent in the United States [5]. By 2004 Google had indexed eight billion pages; in 2006 Google claimed to have worked out how to index billions more [6].
    [Show full text]
  • The Google Effect: Transactive Memory
    GENERATION AND THE GOOGLE EFFECT: TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEM PREFERENCE ACROSS AGE by JESSICA SILER A thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Honors in the Major Program in Psychology in the College of Sciences and in the Burnett Honors College at the University of Central Florida Orlando, Florida Summer Term 2013 Thesis Chair: Dr. Peter A. Hancock ABSTRACT A transactive memory system (TMS) is a means by which people may store information externally; in such a system the task of remembering is offloaded by remembering where information is located, rather than remembering the information itself. As Sparrow et al. (2011) suggest in the article Google Effects on Memory: Cognitive Consequences of Having Information at Our Fingertips, people are beginning to use the internet and computers as a TMS, and this use is changing the way people encounter and treat information. The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether preference for TMS type (either with books or with computers) varies across age groups. An interaction between TMS preference and age was hypothesized. Before the onset of the internet age, information was primarily found in books and other print materials whereas now the internet is more frequently used, thus this shift in thinking and habit across generations was expected to emerge in the data. The study yielded a total of 51 participants, 32 from the young age group (ages 18-24) and 19 from the old (ages 61-81). A modified Stroop task and question blocks (for priming purposes) were employed to examine whether people are prone to think of book- or computer-related sources when in search of information.
    [Show full text]
  • Cloud Computing Bible Is a Wide-Ranging and Complete Reference
    A thorough, down-to-earth look Barrie Sosinsky Cloud Computing Barrie Sosinsky is a veteran computer book writer at cloud computing specializing in network systems, databases, design, development, The chance to lower IT costs makes cloud computing a and testing. Among his 35 technical books have been Wiley’s Networking hot topic, and it’s getting hotter all the time. If you want Bible and many others on operating a terra firma take on everything you should know about systems, Web topics, storage, and the cloud, this book is it. Starting with a clear definition of application software. He has written nearly 500 articles for computer what cloud computing is, why it is, and its pros and cons, magazines and Web sites. Cloud Cloud Computing Bible is a wide-ranging and complete reference. You’ll get thoroughly up to speed on cloud platforms, infrastructure, services and applications, security, and much more. Computing • Learn what cloud computing is and what it is not • Assess the value of cloud computing, including licensing models, ROI, and more • Understand abstraction, partitioning, virtualization, capacity planning, and various programming solutions • See how to use Google®, Amazon®, and Microsoft® Web services effectively ® ™ • Explore cloud communication methods — IM, Twitter , Google Buzz , Explore the cloud with Facebook®, and others • Discover how cloud services are changing mobile phones — and vice versa this complete guide Understand all platforms and technologies www.wiley.com/compbooks Shelving Category: Use Google, Amazon, or
    [Show full text]
  • 1 Indian Council of Medical Research New Delhi
    Volume 7 , No. 4 October–December 2010 INDIAN COUNCIL OF MEDICAL RESEARCH NEW DELHI 1 Google: impact on Libraries EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS EDITOR Dr. K Satyanarayana Dr. K V Ratnakar Dr. Rashmi Arora Dr. Chandrashekhar ASST. EDITOR Dr. D.K. Shukla Dr. Vijay Kumar Shri R K Pandey TECHNICAL SUPPORT Smt. Suresh Arora Shri Praveen Kumar Shri Laxman Singh Shri Satish Chandra Shri Avinash Kumar Rajesh Shri Ayekpam surbanta Meitei Shri Maneesh Patel Shri Yogesh Kumar Published by Indian Council of Medical Research V.Ramalingaswami Bhawan, Ansari Nagar, New Delhi-110029 2 3 Contents 1. Google: impact on Libraries…………. 2. New Arrivals………………………………. 3. News………………………………………… 4 Google: impact on Libraries Abstract The many ethical questions relating to Google and library values cannot all be addressed in a single article. The value of Google is Universal evident. The increased popularity of Google search engine in the daily routine in one's workplace and in the academic information seeking process is undeniable. 'Googling' challenges the traditional skills of librarians as information providers and the role of library and information service provision in the digital era. This paper seeks to show that elements essential to Google‟s success can be mapped directly to certain traditional library values. Because of this focus, most of the examples given here will indicate a positive correlation. Introduction Only now in the bright light of the Google Era do ways to use Google. It is now routine for the we see how dim and gloomy our pregooglian world romantically savvy to Google a prospective date. In was. In the distant future, historians will have a the dot-com world, nothing stays the same for long, common term for the period prior to the appearance of and it's not clear that Google will forever maintain its Google: the Dark Ages.
    [Show full text]
  • The Google Effect
    The Google Effect DRIVE PERFORMANCE BY FOLLOWING THE LEADER JOHN FREHSE Google does one thing, and they do it very well. It is hard to see clear- ly what this singular task is however as we are busy talking about their Labor Strategy Expertise; products and the great perks employees get for working there. Whether Employee Engagement it is through Google Search, Gmail, YouTube, or any other platform they & Cost Reduction Focus own, Google consistently does the same thing: They provide access to in- formation in a useful format. It’s that simple. The problem is that your [email protected] employees have grown accustomed to having this information. They can +1.212.534.0539 Direct get answers to anything. If they need to fix something, they can watch a tutorial on YouTube. If they want to know how many kilometers are in a mile, they can Google it (the answer is 1.6, FYI). Conversely, what happens when they show up to work each day? Chances are they find themselves in the dark with little access to the relevant information necessary to enable success. Does your company provide employees with access to information in a useful format? The answer is probably no. Whether an hourly employee or a salaried one, everyone wants to win. At the end of each day, it is not the money that drives satisfaction but one’s ability to have an impact, make a difference, and drive results. Without access to information in a useful format, employees struggle to be effective, have visibility on results, and to feel genuine satisfaction.
    [Show full text]
  • IP & Antitrust
    July 2019 This newsletter contains an overview of recent publications concerning intellectual property issues. The abstracts included below are as written by the author(s) and are unedited. IP & Antitrust Plugging the two-claim double-patenting loophole Mark R. Carter (Journal of the Patent & Trademark Office Society) Working Paper https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3415676 Much of the antitrust critique of patents rests on “double-patenting.” “Evergreening” is the extension of a patenting past its normal term, twenty years from filing, by patenting a quite similar invention. This paper shows there is no justification for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office’s practice of forcing patent examiners to search for extra references before issuing obviousness double-patenting rejections by examining the history of 35 U.S.C. 101 and double-patenting doctrine. FRAND and antitrust Herbert Hovenkamp (University of Pennsylvania Law School; University of Pennsylvania – The Wharton School; University College London) Working Paper https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3420925 This paper considers when a patentee’s violation of a FRAND commitment also violates the antitrust laws. It warns against two extremes. First, is thinking that any violation of a FRAND obligation is an antitrust violation as well. FRAND obligations are contractual, and most breaches of contract do not violate antitrust law. The other extreme is thinking that, because a FRAND violation is a breach of contract, it cannot also be an antitrust violation. Every antitrust case must consider the market environment in which conduct is to be evaluated. SSOs operated by multiple firms are joint ventures.
    [Show full text]
  • An Interactive Visualization of Google Books Ngrams with R and Shiny
    An interactive visualization of Google Books Ngrams with R and Shiny: Exploring a(n) historical increase in onset strength in a(n) huge database Julia Schlüter, Fabian Vetter* University of Bamberg, Germany *Corresponding author: Fabian Vetter [email protected] Abstract Using the re-emergence of the /h/ onset from Early Modern to Present-Day English as a case study, we illustrate the making and the functions of a purpose-built web application named (an:a)-lyzer for the interactive visualization of the raw n-gram data provided by Google Books Ngrams (GBN). The database has been compiled from the full text of over 4.5 million books in English, totalling over 468 billion words and covering roughly five centuries. We focus on bigrams consisting of words beginning with graphic <h> preceded by the indefinite article allomorphs a and an, which serve as a diagnostic of the consonantal strength of the initial /h/. The sheer size of this database affords us the possibility to attain a maximal diachronic resolution, to distinguish highly specific groups of <h>-initial lexical items, and even to trace the diffusion of the observed changes across individual lexical units. The functions programmed into the app enable us to explore the data interactively by filtering, selecting and viewing them according to various parameters that were manually annotated into the data frame. We also discuss limitations of the database and of the explorative data analysis. Keywords Data visualization, corpus linguistics, historical phonology, historical linguistics,
    [Show full text]
  • The Human Digitalisation Journey: Technology First at the Expense of Humans?
    information Article The Human Digitalisation Journey: Technology First at the Expense of Humans? Hossein Hassani 1,2,* , Xu Huang 3 and Emmanuel Silva 4 1 Research Institute of Energy Management and Planning, University of Tehran, Tehran 1417466191, Iran 2 Department of Business and Management, Webster Vienna Private University, 1020 Vienna, Austria 3 Faculty of Business and Law, De Montfort University, Leicester LE1 9BH, UK; [email protected] 4 Fashion Business School, London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London, London WC1V 7EY, UK; [email protected] * Correspondence: [email protected] Abstract: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic has enhanced the impact of digitalisation as a driver of transformation and advancements across almost every aspect of human life. With the majority actively embracing smart technologies and their benefits, the journey of human digitalisation has begun. Will human beings continue to remain solitary unaffected beings in the middle of the whirlpool—a gateway to the completely digitalised future? This journey of human digitalisation probably started much earlier, before we even realised. This paper, in the format of an objective review and discussion, aims to investigate the journey of human digitalisation, explore the reality of domination between technology and humans, provide a better understanding of the human value and human vulnerability in this fast transforming digital era, so as to achieve valuable and insightful suggestion on the future direction of the human digitalisation journey. Citation: Hassani, H.; Huang, X.; Keywords: human digitalisation; human value; human vulnerability; technology dependence; Silva, E. The Human Digitalisation artificial intelligence; intelligence augmentation Journey: Technology First at the Expense of Humans? Information 2021, 12, 267.
    [Show full text]
  • Exploring the Google Books Ngram Viewer for 'Big Data' Text Corpus
    Exploring the Google Books Ngram Viewer for ―Big Data‖ Text Corpus Visualizations SHALIN HAI-JEW KANSAS STATE UNIVERSITY SIDLIT 2014 (OF C2C) JULY 31 – AUG. 1, 2014 2 Presentation Overview As part of the Google Books digitization project, the Google Books Ngram Viewer (https://books.google.com/ngrams) was released in late 2010 to enable public querying of a ―shadow dataset‖ created from the tens of millions of digitized books. The texts are from a 500-year span (1500-2000+), with new texts added fairly continuously, and there are a range of datasets of different text corpuses (and in different languages, like Italian, French, German, Spanish, Russian, Hebrew, and simplified Chinese). The name of the tool comes from a computer science term referring to strings of alphanumeric terms in particular order: a unigram (or one-gram) consists of one entity, a bigram (or two-gram) consists of two entities, onwards. (Its precursor was a prototype named ―Bookworm.‖) Users may acquire the (de-contextualized) word or phrase or symbol frequency counts of terms in books—which provide a lagging indicator of trends (over time), public opinion, and other phenomena. The Ngram Viewer has been used to provide insights on diverse topics such as the phenomena of fame (and the fields which promote fame), collective forgetting, language usage, cultural phenomena, technological innovations, and other insights. The data queries that may be made with this tool are virtually unanswerable otherwise. The enablements of the Google Books Ngram Viewer provide complementary information sourcing for designed research questions as well as free-form discovery. This tool is also used for witty data visualizations (such as simultaneous queries of ―chicken‖ and ―egg‖ to see which came first) based on the resulting plotted line chart.
    [Show full text]
  • Crisis in Darfur”
    Geoforum 40 (2009) 535–545 Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Geoforum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/geoforum Digging into Google Earth: An analysis of ‘‘Crisis in Darfur” Lisa Parks Dept. of Film and Media Studies, UC Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA 93106, USA article info abstract Article history: Google publicists have suggested the Crisis in Darfur is an example of the Google Earth software’s ‘‘suc- Received 20 February 2008 cess at tangibly impacting what is happening on the ground.” Yet whether or not Google Earth’s interface, Received in revised form 17 March 2009 along with a medley of other media representations of the conflict, have impacted events on the ground or led to coherent policies of humanitarian intervention remains open to debate. This article draws upon critical approaches from media studies—namely discourse analysis—to analyze several aspects of the Keywords: Google Earth/USHMM Crisis in Darfur project. While this project was no doubt developed with the noble Google Earth intention of generating international awareness about widespread violence that has recently occurred in Darfur the Darfur region, it is important to evaluate how representations of global conflicts are changing with Political violence Satellite imagery uses of new information technologies and whether such representations can actually achieve their Geopolitics desired impacts or effects. The article begins with a discussion of the Crisis in Darfur project’s history, Humanitarianism proceeds to analyze some of the press coverage of the project and then moves to a critique of the layer Neoliberalism using four categories of analysis: (1) the shifting role of satellite image; (2) the temporality of the inter- Critical analysis face; (3) the practice of conflict branding; and (4) the practice of ‘‘information intervention.” Throughout the article, I explore how the presentation of Darfur-related materials through Google Earth reproduces problematic Western tropes of African tragedy and misses an opportunity to generate public literacy around satellite images.
    [Show full text]