Alex Saum-Pascual is exposing the hidden physical toll of our digital world

Alex Saum-Pascal, member of the Berkeley Center for the New Media Executive Committee, was featured on UC Berkeley News for exposing the hidden physical toll of our digital world. Alex Saum-Pascual is an associate professor of contemporary Spanish literature and of new media at UC Berkeley.

Here is an excerpt from the article:

"I tried to step away from using automatic generation because since everybody is writing with bots now, I think the challenge is not to make the bot sound more human, but for humans to sound less like bots.....

They have to click and then load and then zip and open, and then it opens a website that is interactive. You have to navigate through the different screens and find the hyperlinks or the hidden hyperlinks. As they do that, they see that the work itself is moving — it’s being copied, it’s occupying space, it’s using resources.

And I started learning to teach my students how to look at a work and say, “How was that made? Let’s see if we could make it,” and engage in that more hands-on practice around digital work and the literary."

Read the full article here!