User:Nadiners/ unpublishingthesis

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This thematic comes from a reversal of my previous topics of interest, where I dealt with the revealing or highlighting unpublished or leaked documents.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