Today’s Daily Create asked us to illustrate an idiom. I immediately went to a favourite one from my childhood used to define untrustworthiness – “Quedar bien con Dios y con el Diablo”. In English it would be something like “You cannot have it both ways” and if you try, then you will not be trusted. The literal translation is: You cannot please both god and the devil at the same time.
This made me think about a horrific article I read this morning about Kids’ You Tube written by James Brindle in which the profit motive mingles uncomfortably with parents who sit their kids in front of autoplay videos. James defines this as infrastructural violence – something that comes from the mix of ‘someone or something or some combination of people and things […]using [the internet] to systematically frighten, traumatise, and abuse children, automatically and at scale.’ The article is terrifying in itself, but his conclusion is even more terrifying to me: naming in one sentence much of the background discomfort I have felt about using the internet for teaching in the last couple of years.
So I brought together my new favourite word ‘infrastructural violence’, the daily create prompt, and social media into a wee cartoon.
