When have you been NUDGED the last time, that is, pushed to change your behavior? You might not even have noticed. Social Media companies and even governments track our every step on the internet, they might know more about us than our friends – but they are not our friends. While they can indeed make our lives easier, they can also endanger our privacy, misinform or discriminate us.
Artificial intelligence (AI), powered by Big Data, has taken over crucial decisions in the public sphere that used to be the responsibility of policymakers. Today’s powerful algorithms are neither democratically elected nor accountable, and few people understand or monitor them. This is a threat to democracy: social change and “development” gone wrong.
That is why we – four students of Communication for Social Change (ComDev) at Malmö University – started this blog. Big Brother is watching us, but we are watching back!
Originally from Germany, Christina is a journalist and photographer in North America with a focus on human rights and migration. She is interested in how decisions by politicians and algorithms impact the most vulnerable in society and how the latter develop agency to turn things around on their own.
For over ten years, Imran has been working in the field of marketing communication for predominantly commercial organizations. Intrigued by how the world is represented, consumed and shaped in and by new media, her aim is to discover the flipside of big data, digital platforms and its consequences for our society.
Katja Gru, originally from Estonia, is an ordinary corporative professional based in Stockholm. Being one of the millions fully booked with daily routines and simultaneously compelled to be part of “innovation”, “digitalization”, “automation”, had a chance to stop for a while and think about big data, algorithms, AI and generally about social media impact on humans’ perception. She, as a worried Earth citizen, offers some mental pabulum in order all together to reflect upon latest technological changes and their potential dominance in the society.
Raero Monteiro is a journalist from Santa Maria, Brazil. Currently, he is a Communication for Development Master’s Programme student at Malmö University (Sweden) and communication analyst in Pernambuco State Legislative Assemby (Brazil). He is also a former communication analyst at the Department of Policies to Fight Deforestation in the Brazilian Ministry of the Environment.
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