User:Nadiners/ unpublishingthesis

9th November 2017

Title

The Unpublishing House (I even bought the domain, but trying to sort it out!) http://unpublishing.house/

argument (1 sentence)

The act of unpublishing or the intentional disappearance of content from the online public sphere, and the asymmetrical power structures not permitting this very act to exist.

how to introduce the topic (1/2 sentence)

(think about the reader) define the verb ‘to unpublish', how it did not exist before the internet times, give different examples of different ways and power structures can unpublish content, from individuals to companies, to states to robots.

why do you want to write your text (body of text, scope)

Today there is so much (digital and analogue, but more digital) content produced in the world, recurrent topics such as archiving and big data are dealing with this issue. But I would like to deal with the opposite, unpublishing, removing or destroying this excessive amount of nonsense we bring into the world. However what I notice, is by doing that, you in fact bring more attention to what is being ‘removed’ thus producing more content, a vicious cycle is created, and we are doomed. And this is what I would like to talk about, the very fact that today what I would like to talk about is in fact an impossibility, a paradox, a never ending story.

How will you go about writing it

The Unpublishing house will be a place for discussion. I will write a manifesto integrated to the thesis, disguised as titles, all the while being relevant, of course. An idea: to use imperatives. instructions/commandments. a form of power, which might then dissolve in the following text.

subquestions

Remove those drunken photos you uploaded of yourself back when you were 16 and you thought it was cool.

This chapter will talk about the right to be forgotten, the EU law, and state the fact that even though you might have gone through the process of removing your content, it can still be out there.. once it’s gone viral, it’s impossible to find all the sources and delete them, let alone to unseen them.

Deactivate Trump’s twitter account for 11 minutes. An eternity online, and you will storm the internet with reactions.

Trying to shut someone up will only make them react more, psychological effects.

counter-argument

Give and example of digital content that can be destroyed: the guardian destroying Snowden’s files

what supports your argument

But then so many reactions came to life from the Snowden story, so even if the original content is destroyed, all the mediators and reactors made this destroyed content come to life in a different larger form.

conclusion that recaps point

If a subject would like to remove something about oneself, they bring attention to the content by asking for it to be removed. If a corporation deletes it's own content, it will eventually be discovered by journalists bringing attention to the public as the mediator, the public will then react on social media and the subject will get viral. In another case if something has been removed yet attracts no particular reaction then it is proving its worth. Reactions don't have to be immediate, they can also appear long after the act, but in the online world things happen much faster than we can follow.

suggestions opening up

So does this verb that didn’t exist a decade ago, can it ever exist?

bibliography

Bots:

• http://canicrawl.com/

Twitter Trump

• https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/nov/03/experts-warn-about-security-after-donald-trumps-twitter-account-briefly-deleted

Snowden destroyed files

• https://www.rt.com/news/guardian-destroy-snowden-video-490/

Facebook content Monitors:

• https://www.theguardian.com/news/gallery/2017/may/22/sex-and-nudity-in-art-see-facebooks-rules

Artwork by Eva and Franco Mattes:

• http://0100101110101101.org/abuse-standards-violations/
• http://0100101110101101.org/dark-content/
• https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/26/arts/design/illuminating-the-dark-web-and-content-monitoring.html

more:

• http://poeticcomputation.info/chapters/ch.2/

first ideas

Unpublishing

Begin with a clear mission statement, a sort of manifesto (which could also be part of the project)

I would like to investigate the reverse of publishing – unpublishing – and compare its different impacts from large scale national content to individual cases. When a certain material goes offline, it sparks up reactions, meaning the content that has previously been published, only attracts more attention once it has been intentionally removed.

This raises the question, does unpublishing exist in the online world?

This can be investigated in a variety of cases. If a subject would like to remove something about oneself, they bring attention to the content by asking for it to be removed. If a corporation deletes it's own content, it will eventually be discovered by journalists bringing attention to the public as the mediator, the public will then react on social media and the subject will get viral. In another case if something has been removed yet attracts no particular reaction then it is proving its worth. Reactions don't have to be immediate, they can also appear long after the act, but in the online world things happen much faster than we can follow.

definition

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.

previous work

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.

unpublishing in history

Large scale: Burning books

Individual scale: ?

relevant points

The right to be forgotten only applied in the EU

Self Publishing

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
• https://personaldata.io