ABC Glossary

Questionnaire

Welcome to the ABC Glossary* Questionnaire, an invitation to revisit your relationship to the internet and to reimagine how we collectively web through language.


Below are a set of exercises to help you locate yourself within a (local area) network in order to refuse harmful computing practices and to repair our connections with/between technology, community, and nature.


What words do we use to describe our electronic experiences?

What terms do you associate with the internet, computing, and cyber culture?

What words do we ignore?

What words do we need to use in new ways?


Submit a term with a newly redefined condition.* Draw an imagined map of the internet.

Begin a practice of refusal &repair

  • Map your local area network (LAN). We are all part of a local area network (A local area network (LAN) is a collection of devices (e.g. your cell phone, laptop, desktop, printer) connected together in one physical location (e.g. in a building, office, or your home). A LAN is made up of cables, access points, switches, routers, and other components that enable devices to connect to internal servers, web servers, and other LANs via wide area networks.). Who are you connected with and how? Are you wireless by way of wifi or hardwired by way of an ethernet cord?

  • Locate your server. We’re all archiving our data on a server. Where are you storing your memory? Look up the server for your personal website or for your photos on your phone.

  • Go for an internet walk. Where can you see the internet in your neighborhood or local area (e.g. cables, symbols)? what kind of infrastructure do you want to hold your community? if your community was an internet garden, what do you imagine it would look like?

  • Study your network. Our world is made up of (data) clouds, (software) bugs, (internet) gardens, and (server) farms. how are you tending to them online? how are you tending to them offline? What is the status of your connection?

  • Create a short manifesto. Develop a vision, guiding principles, and values for an anti-colonial Black feminist critical media ecology, a liberatory vision for our current and future of technology and cyber experience. How do you want to web together? How is your vision inclusive of our bodies and the land that resources our connections and lives with our data?

  • Imagine new “terms & conditions”. With each device, website, and application you agree to a set of terms & conditions predetermined by someone else for how you connect. Collect words or phrases that you use to think or talk about the internet, the web, and technology. Are there new terms and conditions for these terms you can dream of? What are the ways you want to be connected to technology, your community, and/or the natural world around you? What are the conditions that will help us create this world together?

Submission form

what’s your term?

what do you imagine is the condition of this term?

Contributor Name

Draw a map of the internet

Currently not available on mobile. Please use a desktop browser to draw.

*This ABC Glossary Questionnaire is part of a framework and glossary for An Anti-colonial Black Feminist Critical Media Ecology, or ABC Glossary for short, a growing reimagining of computing terminology from hardware to software — beyond the conditions of e-colonialism and toward abundant relationship between humans, technology, and nature.


*language from community submission form may appear in other places but will always be credited accordingly.


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