Media Development 2020/1
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Stars on the digital Walk of Infamy are being awarded to world leaders. Former US President Donald Trump, current Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro, and current Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro have each received one. They have been admonished by Twitter and Facebook for posts that violate public interest policies and rules about misleading information.

Public safety and national security are two advantages of facial recognition technology. Law enforcement agencies use the technology to identify known criminals and to find missing children or seniors. Airports are increasingly adding facial recognition technology to security checkpoints. Unsurprisingly, the U.S. Department of Homeland Security predicts that by 2023 97% of travellers will be subjected to facial recognition.

Fifty-five years after the death of the French author Albert Camus, and at a time when Ebola was raging in West Africa, the British journalist Ed Vulliamy wrote a glowing tribute about one of the writer’s best-known books first published in 1947. “Of all Camus’ novels, none described man’s confrontation – and cohabitation – with death so vividly and on such an epic scale as La Peste, translated as The Plague.”1

By Philip Lee

A paradox was evident during the coronavirus pandemic. People turned to digital technologies to be in communication and yet felt increasingly out of communication. Self-isolating people became distanced from the socio-cultural environment in which they were accustomed to live and it began to appear alien. To adapt the well-known saying from L. P. Hartley’s novel The Go-Between (1953), the present became a foreign country, where they did things differently.