CuRAtOR: Challenging online feaR And OtheRing

恐惧文化可以通过包括媒体、政府、科学、艺术、工业和政治在内的广泛媒介有意或无意地传播。恐惧可以轻易产生，这意味着今天的社会仍然对不可能发生的伤害和危险极度恐惧。大量的社会恐惧源于对“他者”的不信任：这个术语用来描述“不像我们”的个人或群体。在这个项目中，我们明确地探讨了“他者”的概念，因为它发生在“他者”被视为“异常”、“特殊”或“越轨”的情况下，因此被消极地感知、污名化、排斥、边缘化和歧视。在英国，最近备受瞩目的“其他”做法的例子包括：当2014年初移民限制被取消时，“数以万计的东欧人”将进入英国，例如导致“犯罪浪潮”，以及广播电视上“贫穷色情”的描述，似乎整个社区都是“靠纳税人的收入生活的福利申领者”。这种做法可能导致缺乏容忍、尊重和包容，以及整个社区的实际恐惧、不信任和边缘化；这些影响对当地社区以及国家社会凝聚力产生了众所周知的严重影响。关于“他者”的行为如何转化为对真实人群和真实环境的影响，以及在线数字媒体在传播恐惧和不信任文化方面可以发挥什么作用，还有一些重要的未解问题。有了在线社交媒体，恐惧不再完全以自上而下的方式传递（例如来自政府和主流媒体）。相反，它现在也从基层传递，因此不知不觉地出现在用户生成的社交数据流中，我们从与网络的接触中吸收这些数据流，特别是与Twitter和Facebook等平台的接触。例如，最近对第四频道纪录片《福利街》的社交媒体讨论的观察，突显了节目中对社区的高度反感、愤怒和辱骂。大量新兴的数字应用程序、数据和服务承诺改善我们的生活，这些应用程序、数据和服务可能会不知不觉地、但普遍地传播恐惧；例如，公开犯罪数据的目的是增加对我们执法机构的信心，但其实际效果是增加对犯罪的恐惧，再一次使社区蒙受耻辱。这个项目的重点是通过网络传播的恐惧文化，以及这种文化如何导致随后对群体或社区的不信任。我们的研究将使人们了解在线媒体服务和平台的精心设计如何影响和反对恐惧文化，并产生能够积极地、战略性地减少或消除不信任和其他负面后果的移情文化。我们将积极与利益相关者合作，共同设计新的数字服务，促进与特定群体的广泛共鸣。这将包括与广播媒体组织积极合作，开发一系列与传统媒体一起提供的交互式数字在线体验。我们还将开展在线人种学和数据收集，在之前或现有的活动中，通过社交和传统媒体上的话语，以积极激发他人的方式描绘一个群体；在这种情况下，我们将设计并提供一套数字服务，以审慎的方式解决这一问题。

Cultures of fear can be spread, either deliberately or otherwise, by a wide range of agents including the media, government, science, the arts, industry and politics. The ease of which fear can be generated means that today's society remains inordinately fearful of improbable harms and dangers. A good deal of societal fear stems from mistrust of 'the Other': a term used to describe individuals or groups that are, quite simply, 'not like us'. In this project, we explicitly explore this notion of 'Othering' as it occurs in situations where 'the Other' are seen as "anomalous," "peculiar," or "deviant" and hence negatively perceived, stigmatised, excluded, marginalised and discriminated against. Recent high-profile examples of practices of Othering in the UK include the exclamation that "tens of thousands of eastern Europeans" would enter the UK when immigration restrictions were lifted at the beginning of 2014 resulting in, for instance, a "crime wave", and the "poverty-porn" portrayal on broadcast television of seemingly whole communities of "benefit claimants living off of taxpayers' earnings". Such practices can lead to a lack of tolerance, respect and inclusion, as well as actual fear, mistrust and marginalisation of whole communities; these effects have severe and well-known implications for local communities as well as for national social cohesion.There are significant unanswered questions regarding how acts of Othering translates into effects on real populations and in real contexts, and what role online digital media can have in propagating cultures of fear and mistrust. With online social media, no longer is fear delivered exclusively in a top down manner, (e.g. from government and the mainstream media). Instead it is now also delivered from the grassroots level and therefore insidiously present in the user-generated social data streams that we absorb from our encounters with the web, and, in particular, with platforms such as Twitter and Facebook. Recent observations of social media discussions of the Channel 4 documentary Benefits Street have, for instance, highlighted the high levels of antipathy, anger and abuse directed at the community portrayed within the programme. Fear may also be unwittingly, yet pervasively, propagated by the plethora of emerging digital apps, data and services that promise to improve our lives; for instance, the release of open crime data is meant to increase confidence in our law enforcement agencies, yet its actual effect is to increase fear of crime and, yet again, stigmatise communities.The focus of this project are the cultures of fear that are propagated through online Othering and how this leads to subsequent mistrust of groups or communities. Our research will generate an understanding of how the deliberate design of online media services and platforms can influence and oppose cultures of fear and result in cultures of empathy that can actively, and strategically, reduce or eliminate mistrust and negative consequences of Othering. We will actively collaborate with stakeholders to co-design new digital services that facilitate wide-scale empathy with specifically chosen often-Othered groups. This will include active collaboration with broadcast media organisations to develop a range of interactive, digital online experiences delivered alongside traditional media. We will also undertake online ethnographies and data collection, where prior or existing activities have portrayed a group in ways that actively provoke Othering as evidenced through discourse on social and traditional media; in this instance we will design and deliver a set of digital services to counter this in a deliberate manner.