record

Thesis Info

LABS ID
00273
Thesis Title
Beyond Stereotypes: Finding Highly Nuanced Ways of Working with Consumers, Users, and Citizens
Author
Tarek A. Fahmy
2nd Author
3rd Author
Degree
Master of Science: Communication Design
Year
2009
Number of Pages
140
University
Pratt Institute - Manhattan
Thesis Supervisor
Tom Klinkowstein
Supervisor e-mail
klinkows AT mediaa.com
Other Supervisor(s)
Language(s) of Thesis
English
Department / Discipline
Graduate Communication Design
Languages Familiar to Author
English, Arabic, & French
URL where full thesis can be found
conceptualdesign.net/Tarek-Thesis/FINAL-THESIS-Tarek-Fahmy(5-8-09).pdf
Keywords
Stereotypes, Genocide, New Media, Typecasting, The Press, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, Anthropotypes, Counter Stereotypes, Positioning Hypothesis, 9-11, Propaganda, misinformation, datamining, dataveillance, Public Sector, Private Sector, Machine Learning,
Abstract: 200-500 words
Stereotypes are a form of cultural reduction, created mainly as an attempt to simplify, understand, and communicate. Stereotypes can be used on a personal or a cultural level. The danger lies in their mass cultural use, with the tendency of the private sector and the state to understand and communicate with the populace using stereotypes. This mass communication has had a history of objectifying and vilifying and, at times, it has been the cause of wholesale citizen slaughter. In the present world, stereotypes are the backbone of new technologies aimed at further understanding, classifying, and communicating with consumers, users, and citizens. Data mining and dataveillance are two techniques that help the private sector and the state’s security apparatus in accomplishing these three aforementioned goals. Since these data gathering, assessing, and communicating techniques are based on the distorting stereotypical model, it is the position of the present research that they need to evolve and become more nuanced and less broad. The thesis argues that people should not be objectified and profiled for commodity and security. The thesis further argues that, to protect citizens, consumers, and users further, the private sector and the public sector need to be separate, especially with the advancing digital mining technologies of the information age. When the state and the private sector secretly exchange stereotypical citizen profiles, privacy is endangered. This paper attempts to find a new, more nuanced, and more personal model to use when classifying, understanding, and communicating data on a mass cultural level. That model is called anthropotypes, and it is shown to be feasible by its use with Facebook and Pandora, both of which are considered below.