User:Nadiners/ unpublishingthesis

I would like to investigate the reverse of publishing – unpublishing – and compare its different impacts from large scale national content to individual cases. First I’d like to define the term, the verb ’to unpublish' only exists online. It refers to content that has been published online, and then made unavailable to the public. Print is harder to unpublish, it might be removed from shelves or destroyed, but once it is published, or distributed to the public, it would be harder to remove it from the public sphere. Let us not confuse removing content to deleting content, digital unpublishing relates more to the removal of a particular content. Deleting might refer to destruction, no longer available to anyone. Removal, refers to the public sphere not being able to reach the certain information.

This thematic comes from a reversal of my previous topics of interest, where I dealt with the revealing or highlighting unpublished or leaked documents. In one project I collected three different documents relating to drone attack, one being the instruction manual, the second a transcript from leaked audio files of pilots talking during an attack in Afghanistan, and the third was a list of the resulting number of deaths from each attack that was recorded. In another project I created a food wiki where I would collect processed factory packed foods and divide the information found on the packing (on the surface) to information about the corporation (under the surface) in order to make it easier for consumers to know what is in and where their products come from, at the same time revealing the industries secrets.

Bibliography:

• Viktor Mayer-Schönberger presents "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwxVA0UMwLY
• The Solace of Oblivion - Jeffrey Toobin from The Newyorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/09/29/solace-oblivion
• The suicide machine http://www.seppukoo.com/ / https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2.0_Suicide_Machine