CuRAtOR: Challenging online feaR And OtheRing

恐惧文化可以通过各种媒介传播，无论是有意还是无意，包括媒体、政府、科学、艺术、工业和政治。恐惧产生的容易性意味着今天的社会仍然对不可能的伤害和危险感到过度恐惧。很多社会恐惧都源于对“不信任”的不信任：这个词用来描述那些“不像我们”的个人或团体。在这个项目中，我们明确地探讨了“他人”的概念，因为它发生在“他人”被视为“异常”，“奇特”或“越轨”的情况下，因此被负面地看待，被污名化，被排斥，被边缘化和被歧视。最近在联合王国的其他做法的引人注目的例子包括：2014年初取消移民限制时，“成千上万的东欧人”将进入联合王国，导致“犯罪浪潮”，广播电视上的“贫困色情”描绘似乎是整个社区的“靠纳税人的收入生活的福利申请人”。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和国家社会凝聚力有着严重而众所周知的影响。关于他者行为如何转化为对真实的人口和真实的背景的影响，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。随着在线社交媒体的出现，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，它现在也是从基层提供的，因此不知不觉地存在于我们从网络接触中吸收的用户生成的社交数据流中，特别是Twitter和Facebook等平台。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出表明，节目中所描绘的社区遭到了高度的反感、愤怒和辱骂。恐惧也可能在不知不觉中，但普遍存在，通过大量新兴的数字应用程序，数据和服务来传播，这些应用程序，数据和服务承诺改善我们的生活;比如说公开犯罪数据，本意是为了增加对我们执法机构的信心，但实际效果却是增加了对犯罪的恐惧，该项目的重点是通过在线他人传播的恐惧文化，以及这如何导致随后对群体或社区的不信任。我们的研究将产生一个在线媒体服务和平台的故意设计如何影响和反对恐惧的文化，并在共情的文化，可以积极地，战略性地，减少或消除不信任和其他负面影响的理解。我们将积极与利益相关者合作，共同设计新的数字服务，以促进与特定群体的广泛同情。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互动数字在线体验。我们还将进行在线民族志和数据收集，如果以前或现有的活动以积极挑衅他人的方式描绘了一个群体，通过社交和传统媒体上的话语证明;在这种情况下，我们将设计和提供一套数字服务，以故意的方式对抗这种情况。

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.