Knowledge Media Design Institute

Digital generation: �山ǿ�� researchers work with UN to support children's rights online

Christopher.Sorensen — Mon, 15 Jul 2019 17:24:47 +0000

Digital generation: �山ǿ�� researchers work with UN to support children's rights online

Christopher.Sorensen Mon, 07/15/2019 - 13:24

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Faculty of Information researchers Sara Grimes and Leslie Shade are hosting workshops at �山ǿ�� to collect information on children's digital lives that will be shared with the United Nations (photo by Alex Potemkin via Getty Images)

Ann Brocklehurst

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Global Lens

Children

Digital Media

Faculty of Information

Global

internet

Knowledge Media Design Institute

United Nations

Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Information are holding a series of workshops with children to better understand how they use digital technology – information that will be shared with the United Nations as it looks to update its Convention on the Rights of the Child for a digital world.

The workshops, held tomorrow and Wednesday at the Faculty of Information, will see participants aged 10 to 18 sharing their thoughts and engaging in interactive activities like drawing pictures, voting in polls and filling out surveys. Directed by Associate Professor Sara Grimes and Professor Leslie Shade, the consultation is focused on issues like online privacy, identity, freedom of expression and equality.

Grimes says she’s particularly concerned with the practice of banning children from online spaces to “protect” them – children have to be at least 13 before they can create a Facebook account or start a YouTube channel – rather than finding better ways to support their rights and presence in the digital realm.

“Not only do many kids ignore these age restrictions, their parents will often allow them to do it because they think the bans are silly or unnecessary,” says Grimes, who is the director of the Knowledge Media Design Institute (KMDI).

The problem? When kids ignore the rules, they have no legal rights.

“Kids' content can be removed, their accounts suspended and their complaints ignored because they are not officially allowed to be there,” says Grimes, who sees a growing gap between regulatory policies and user practices. “Rules like not allowing kids to upload content to YouTube, or turning off the comment function on videos featuring kids, results in a big loss in opportunity for kids to engage and to achieve.

“After all, uploading a copyright-infringing cover of a Ne-Yo song to YouTube is how Justin Bieber became Justin Bieber.”

Grimes and Shade (left) boast considerable experience and expertise in the field of children’s digital rights and cultural participation. Their research includes studies on how young people develop strategies to protect their own privacy online as well as on explorations of children’s “folk understandings” of the complex legal concepts and relationships they encounter when they make and share digital content.

Grimes says children and their parents are bombarded with contradictory messages about the online world. On one hand, they’re told iPads are crucial tools for children learning to read and that educational apps can teach kids to code. On the other, there are ubiquitous warnings about how technology is turning kids into sedentary screen “addicts,” ruining their lives and their brains.

While Grimes acknowledges there are dangers online that understandably provoke emotional reactions, she says the “fears are greatly exaggerated and the risks for encountering the types of dangers sensationalized by certain news media are quite small.”

She believes that restrictions need to be balanced with children’s right to freedom of expression, and that the job of keeping kids safe online is being “put on the backs” of children, parents and teachers instead of on media and internet companies, which could invest more, for example, on moderation and tracking down people engaging in abusive behaviour. She describes current practices as a form of “labour exploitation” of platform and app users, who are asked to invest significant time trying to navigate “blackboxed business processes that gird children’s lives in the digital realm.”

Many of KMDI’s research initiatives are focused on supporting children’s rights as participants and cultural producers in digital contexts. Its work expands on the Kids DIY Media Partnership, a recently completed multi-year, Canada-U.S. research collaboration on the same topic.

Kids DIY brought together academics, child advocacy groups, platform developers, media companies and public broadcasters to discuss key issues relating to children’s digital media making and to collaborate on a series of related research projects.

Among its many recommendations: Terms of service contracts and privacy policies on children’s platforms must not be tilted in favour of business interests, nor infringe upon or omit children’s rights; that children have the same copyrights over their creations as adults; that concerns about safety and risk must be balanced with proper consideration of children’s rights and autonomy; and that age restrictions should only be applied if there is a real justification for excluding children.

The workshops Grimes and Shade are overseeing are similar to others being conducted in 24 countries in partnership with the RErights project, a collaboration between 5rights, Western Sydney University and the London School of Economics. Grimes says RErights was instrumental in convincing the UN of the need for this “general comment,” as the guidelines for interpretation of various treaties are known, and that its workshops are well designed and thought out. She will focus on facilitating the participation of the study’s younger study participants while Shade will focus on teenagers.

Participants’ written answers and ideas will be sent back to the RErights project team, which will analyze and compare them with results gathered from the other global workshops. The findings of this cross-cultural analysis will ultimately be compiled into a report to be used by the UN committee to write its general comment later this year.

Drama Centre students invited to perform durational project in Berlin

sgupta — Tue, 22 Jul 2014 10:46:25 +0000

Drama Centre students invited to perform durational project in Berlin sgupta Tue, 07/22/2014 - 06:46

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(All photos courtesy of the University of Toronto's Digital Dramaturgy Lab)

Rebecca Biason

Rebecca Biason with files from Kelly Rankin

Kelly Rankin

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Rebecca Biason with files from Kelly Rankin

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Stare.Print.Blue - Voyeuring the Apparatus

Stare.Print.Blue - Voyeuring the Apparatus is a durational performance-installation project produced by the University of Toronto’s Digital Dramaturgy Lab (DDL).

The project examines our relationship to time and technology. It explores elements of endurance and the movement of the body through time. And it explores the colour blue as it relates to our history and understanding of the world – particularly its appearance in most digital or technological devices.

In August 2013, Antje Budde, professor and associate director (graduate) at the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies, and founder of the DDL, started work on Stare.Print.Blue. It debuted on October 5, 2013 at Videofag’s storefront as part of the renegade Le Rues des Refuses programming at Toronto’s Nuit Blanche Festival. Later this summer it will appear in Berlin at Survival, the International Performance Art Festival organized by Open Space Berlin.

Among Budde’s collaborators on the project were three �山ǿ�� graduate students from the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies: Myrto Koumarianos, Michael Reinhart and Nazli Akhtari.

Each student felt a different connection to the work depending on their input, but all three felt that this practical work was essential in enhancing the academic nature of their work in the graduate program and in the field of theatre.

Here they discuss Stare.Print.Blue and how participating in this exploratory piece was a means for combining both the academic and practical side of their work within the theatre program.

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PhD student Koumarianos, who has worked with Budde on many occasions, is the performer in Stare.Print.Blue. She says the emphasis placed on duration and slowness with respect to time in the piece was intriguing.

“Whatever I did I needed to do it in slow motion,” says Koumarianos. “I had to find this fine balance between being ready to go and energetic, while remembering to move slowly. There was a rhythm to this piece that I could not break.”

She also notes that it was strange to experience elements of performance from both the point of view of the performer and the deviser. “I was essentially creating the piece and improvising; particularly towards the end,” adds Koumarianos.

Reinhart, a PhD student and Stare.Print.Blue’s choreographer, says he found the aspect of slowness just as difficult as Koumarianos.

“My role in the piece was to keep Myrto moving. It was interesting for me to watch the visual relationship we have to duration and time, and the frustration that can result from this,” says Reinhart.

Stare.Print.Blue’s emphasis on slowness was a challenge to perform because of how difficult it is to deliberately move our bodies so slowly. However, this wasn’t the only difficulty Kourmarianos faced.

Reinhart also discovered, while rehearsing and performing the piece, that other obstacles arise from working with technology in this way.

“I would find myself ready to perform but the technology wasn’t ready to go, so much of it required human attention, as did the analog chair that I performed with throughout the piece,” says Koumarianos.

Reinhart also mentions that, by performing the piece in Videofag’s storefront and subjecting Koumarianos to the critical gaze of the public, they were evoking the element ‘Stare’ that appears in the title.

“There was never a sense of certainty that you get with other pieces that you know are rehearsed over and over again,” says Akhtari, a master’s student and assistant on the project.

“You never knew how Myrto was going to respond to her environment, it was intriguing,” she adds.

The idea of altering our perception of time and reality is further played out with the final elements of the piece, ‘Print’ and ‘Blue’ as Koumarianos meticulously documents time by dipping her hands in a bucket of blue paint and imprinting them on a wall.

“The documentation of time with the blue handprints on the wall was something I really connected with as it was ‘screwing’ with time in a way that forced the audience to look at it through a different frame,” says Akhtari.

The painstaking movements of the performance confront the viewers’ expectation of time and duration while the blue handprints reference the blue glow of the digital devices that have become so familiar to so many. The coupling of these contradictions, the slow movement of the body versus the instantaneity of the digital accentuated the accelerated experience of our everyday lives.

Although ‘Blue’ emphasizes documentation and time, for Koumarianos it also represents joy and relief.

“When I got to the bucket of blue paint it was pure joy,” she says.

“The tactile nature of the paint, the fact that it was cool to the touch, was so inviting after working and becoming entranced in the stark whiteness of the space.”

The students also said that working on Stare.Print.Blue was a great opportunity to practice their craft, to learn the theory behind theatre and performance and to work in partnership with programs such as �山ǿ��’s Knowledge Media Design Institute and the Digital Media Program at York University.

“This is a really exciting time to have pieces come out of the Drama Centre that are more exploratory in nature,” says Reinhart.

Budde, Reinhart and Koumarianos are currently in Berlin preparing for the festival. Their participation is partially funded by the German, European Research Study Fund of the Faculty of Arts And Science, University of Toronto and the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies.

Rebecca Biason is a writer with the Centre for Drama, Theatre and Performance Studies. Kelly Rankin is a writer with University Relations at the University of Toronto.

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