Tero Karppi

University of Toronto | U of T · Institute of Communication, Culture and Information Technology

In recent years, attention has become a matter of increasing public concern. New digital technologies have transformed human attention materially and discursively, reorganizing perceptual practices and inciting debates about them. The essays in this special issue emerged from a set of panels focused on attention at the 4S conference in New Orleans...

The needs and desires to disconnect, detox, and log out have been turned into commodities and found their expressions in detox camps, self-help books, and ‘offline’ branded apparel. Disconnection studies have challenged the power of commodified disconnective practices to create real social change. In this article, we build on the notion of affectiv...

One of the paradoxes of disconnection is that social platforms like Facebook frame it as a threat to our prosperity while critics associated with “the techlash” maintain that quite on the contrary it is the only thing that brings back the possibility for good life. Disconnection means different things for different actors and these differences mani...

This article investigates the public confessions of a small group of ex-Facebook employees, investors, and founders who express regret helping to build the social media platform. Prompted by Facebook’s role in the 2016 United States elections and pointing to the platform’s unintended consequences, the confessions are more than formal admissions of...

This paper examines a case where Amazon’s cloud-based AI assistant Alexa accidentally ordered a dollhouse for a 6-year-old girl. In the press, the case was defined as a technical recognition problem. Building on this idea, we argue that the dollhouse case helps us to analyze the limits of current AI applications. By drawing on the writings of Gille...

In this paper, I use The New York Times’ debate titled, “Can predictive policing be ethical and effective?” to examine what are seen as the key operations of predictive policing and what impacts they might have in our current culture and society. The debate is substantially focused on the ethics and effectiveness of the computational aspects of pre...

The health industry is investing in robotics because it has the potential to optimize workflows and reduce the workloads of healthcare professionals. However, these optimizations come at a cost. By looking at three different robot systems and their underlying control architectures, this paper will describe some of the dynamics generated by the migr...

In October 2012 a group of non-governmental organizations formed a Campaign to Stop Killer Robots. The aim of this campaign was to preemptively ban fully autonomous weapons capable of selecting and engaging targets without human intervention. The campaign gained momentum swiftly, leading to different legal and political discussions and decision-mak...

The recent proliferation of wearable self-tracking devices intended to regulate and measure the body has brought contingent questions of controlling, accessing and interpreting personal data. Given a socio-technical context in which individuals are no longer the most authoritative source on data about themselves, wearable self-tracking technologies...

‘@AP: Breaking: Two Explosions in the White House and Barack Obama is injured’. So read a tweet sent from a hacked Associated Press Twitter account @AP, which affected financial markets, wiping out $136.5 billion of the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index’s value. While the speed of the Associated Press hack crash event and the proprietary nature of the al...

In this article I focus on both the actual operations and actions of trolling and how trolls are or are not defined by Facebook's various discourse networks from FAQs to Risk Factor documents and surrounding newspaper articles. The empirical cases are discussed in the context of affect theory and Gabriel Tarde's social theory which has been recentl...

Playing games has a crucial methodological role within the study of games. At the same time, detailed overviews of how academic playing is conducted are difficult to find. In this article, the authors begin with Espen Aarseth’s outline of playing research and offer some updates to it in order to build a more context-aware approach. To exemplify the...

http://www.transformationsjournal.org/journal/issue_20/article_02.shtml