Thinking Through Digital Media by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmerman

My work ScareMail was written about in the recent book Thinking Through Digital Media: Transnational Environments and Locative Places. The book, by Dale Hudson and Patricia R. Zimmerman and published by Palgrave MacMillan, “…offers a means of conceptualizing digital media by looking at projects that think through digital media, migrating between documentary, experimental, narrative, animation, video game, and live performance.” ScareMail is featured in the chapter on micropublics:

ScareMail asks us to question the normalization of compromised privacy as a part of everyday life in the context of a country whose international clout has been historically anchored to its democratic principles. It also reflects upon racial profiling within automated national-security protocols. The user’s comfort with having NSA keywords in private e-mails is contingent upon knowledge of their place within racial-profiling schemes.

I appreciate the authors’ highlighting of “comfort” as a component of the choice to use or not use ScareMail. Unquestionably this choice has different consequences for different people depending on their race.

Previously I worked with Dale Hudson when he and Claudia Pederson curated Viral Dissonance at Ithaca College last year.