CuRAtOR: Challenging online feaR And OtheRing

恐惧文化可以通过媒体、政府、科学、艺术、工业和政治等广泛的媒介传播，无论是有意还是无意。恐惧很容易产生，这意味着今天的社会仍然非常害怕不太可能的伤害和危险。很大一部分社会恐惧源于对“他者”的不信任：这个词用来形容那些“与我们不同”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“反常”、“奇特”或“离经叛道”的情况下，因此被负面地感知、污名化、排斥、边缘化和歧视。最近在英国高调采取其他做法的例子包括：2014年初取消移民限制后，“数以万计的东欧人”将进入英国，从而引发“犯罪浪潮”；广播电视上对看似完整的“福利申索者”群体的“贫困色情”描绘，这些群体依靠纳税人的收入生活。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具有严重和众所周知的影响。其他行为如何转化为对真实人口和真实背景的影响，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，这些都是重大的悬而未决的问题。有了在线社交媒体，恐惧不再完全以自上而下的方式传播(例如，来自政府和主流媒体)。相反，它现在也是从基层传递的，因此潜移默化地存在于我们从与网络的接触中吸收的用户生成的社交数据流中，特别是通过Twitter和Facebook等平台。例如，最近对第四频道纪录片《利益街》的社交媒体讨论的观察，突显了该节目中所描绘的针对社区的高度反感、愤怒和辱骂。恐惧也可能在不知不觉中被许诺改善我们生活的大量新兴数字应用、数据和服务所传播，这些应用、数据和服务承诺改善我们的生活；例如，公开犯罪数据旨在增强人们对执法机构的信心，但其实际效果是增加对犯罪的恐惧，并再次使社区蒙羞。该项目的重点是通过在线其他方式传播的恐惧文化，以及这种文化如何导致对团体或社区的不信任。我们的研究将有助于理解刻意设计的在线媒体服务和平台如何影响和反对恐惧文化，并导致同理心文化，从而从战略上积极减少或消除他人的不信任和负面后果。我们将积极与利益相关者合作，共同设计新的数字服务，以促进与特定选择的经常是其他人的群体的广泛共鸣。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互动、数字在线体验。我们还将进行在线民族志研究和数据收集，在这种情况下，先前或现有的活动描绘了一个群体，其方式积极挑衅他人，如在社交媒体和传统媒体上的论述所证明的那样；在这种情况下，我们将设计和提供一套数字服务，以刻意应对这种情况。

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.