31 1 / 2011
Inequality in Accesing Archives: Prove your human?
We have all seen this flash before our computer screens before. Most of the time, it’s a security check to make sure that there is human on the other side that is able to respond to the generated tests.
It’s called a CAPTCHA – Completely Automated Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart!
Google It!
Captcha’s are used to ensure the response is done by a human and NOT a computer. There is a trivial response, where you type in the letters of the word and voila! your instantly lead to the website. Captcha’s rely on visual perception and needs a human to respond to it. It contains distorted text because a human can understand it!
Why should we care about this?
After reading about archiving and the ideas around the “digital divide”. It is clear that contemporary society has a vested interest for acquiring and more importantly selling information in the capitalist marketplace.
The vast array of new media technologies are allowing for “new possibilities” of how information is being governing in virtual archives. The gap between rich and poor is inevitable within our capitalist society. Will that gap magnify to the virtual world? I believe that it will and its already starting to happen.
THINK ABOUT IT …
Archives now are in public spaces and are readily accessible especially on user-generated websites, but what about other websites? Information can now be considered a hot commodity on the market, because it can become “governed by algorithms” that can easily be manipulated to a level of sophisticated intelligence depending on the “economic” value of information.
Captcha’s are then powerful because captcha’s are interpreted by humans to ensure that computers/robots can’t automatically generate / access accounts. It seems easy now to type in a distorted word, but what if captcha’s were manipulated in such a way that only a specific subset of the population could solve them? After all. they are tests … right?
Now it’s not just … Prove that you are human … it’s prove that you have a high intelligence in order to access this level of information in the archive.
or this?
or try this?
Or what if the captcha doesn’t even make sense at all? This has already started to happen … so does that just mean we can’t get that information? It’s just locked away until someone can crack it or attempt to fix it? It’s now lost in the digital archives!
Accessing information / digital archives seems easy right now! But the ways in which we take hold of certain knowledges is increasingly being enmeshed with priviledge to new media technologies and the level at which we can access them.
How we can use them, manipulate them and control the information that is on the internet today. IS paving the way for the gap (Digital Divide) to become magnified in the digital age as these algorithms can be created and configured almost immediately.
The scope for intelligence of new media technologies is becoming more and more sophisticated and priviledged to the people who posses the knowledge and the access for this information.
#bp
