Welcome to the second week of this Summer of DGST 101! First, a word about the schedule, since this one is a little different. With Memorial day falling on Monday, we officially don't have school. Instead, we're supposed to have a "makeup" day on Friday. This is an online class where you generally work at your own pace, but owing to the later start, nstead of everything for this week being due on Friday night, I'll give you until Saturday, June 1 to get everything done for Week 2.
This week, we'll be looking at Digital Culture first by exploring the physical side of digital computing. In your Object Lesson Project, you'll learn about the processes of production that go into each of our digital devices, and you'll choose one particular object to analyze with an archaeological approach to tell its human story.
Today, begin this process by playing a video game and reading an article.
Goals
- Learn about the life cycle of smartphones by playing "Phone Story"
- Learn about coltan mining by reading "Your iPhone was made by Slaves"
- Use Hypothes.is to annotate the article
- Discuss both of these in Slack
Phone Story
This is an "educational game" by Molleindustria, a studio well-known for games with rather specific political messages and educational goals. The message of Phone Story is easiest to understand it if you just play it, so I recommend you proceed to playing it with as little background as possible. It's available on Android, or you can play it in a browser on the game website.
And you really do need to play it. Watching a video of someone else playing it is not enough. Fair warning, though: it's a game that some people may find upsetting or difficult to talk about because it includes depictions of slavery and suicide.
To play the online version, you'll probably need to enable Flash in your web browser, which is a process that looks different whether you're using Chrome, Firefox or Safari. Chrome is probably the most straightforward, and in general I recommend Chrome for this class:
However you play it, make sure the sound is on, since a good deal of the information content is delivered through audio.
After you've played the game all the way through, find the conversation in Slack, and contribute your answers to some of those questions like:
- What does this game want you to learn about your smartphones?
- Why did Molleindustria make a game about this topic, rather than an article, video, or something else?
- What does this communicate through game mechanics that might be hard communicate through text alone?
Your iPhone was Made by Slaves
Image CC BY-NC-ND by ENOUGH Project
Next, read the article, "Your iPhone was Made by Slaves" by Kevin Bales, which is an excerpt from his book Blood and Earth: Modern Slavery, Ecocide, and the Secret to Saving the World.
The article discusses the econmics of coltan mining and connects the abuses there to "ecocide". His conclusion draws some interesting parallels to American slavery and its lingering persistence in the 20th century through "peonage" in the South.
Use Hypothes.is
As you read Bales' article, use Hypothes.is -- a browser-based annotation tool -- to highlight interesting or important passages and to add your responses, insights, and connections through annotations. For example, if you see something from the article that you know about from some other class or something you've seen online, annotate the relevant passage in Bales' article and add a comment with a link to that other thing.
Make sure to set those to "public," and please add the tag "dgst101" to make it easy to find each others'. Try for 10 - 15 annotations, including replies to other peoples' comments.
Hypothes.is sometimes takes some getting used to, but once you've had some experience with the workflow, it's very easy to join a conversation. There's a pretty good explanation on their website, and I'll add something to my video later today.
Discuss in Slack
Once again, return to Slack to discuss what you learned. Your discussion of these articles (and game, in today's case) is how I know whether you're reading and getting the ideas, which is important because I need to know if you're ready for more advanced ideas.
There's already a lot of conversation happening in Slack, so to help keep it organized, I want to try using dedicated channels for each topic instead of threads. Look for and join the channels "#discuss-phone-story" and "#discuss-slaves" to be part of the conversation.