Once upon a time, there lived a man, a woman, and a pesky fly. The pesky fly would buzz before the man’s face every day, positioning itself between him and the woman. This irked the man, to whom the woman — on the other side of the pesky fly —…

It’s been almost 2 decades since Taylor Swift released Debut, and a very long time since my sister and I lazed around in our shared room in Delhi all summer, Limewire-ing songs like ‘I’d Lie’ and ‘Should’ve Said No’. Much like the rest of the world, I have watched Taylor…

The Interview Methodology — Centering the ‘Human’ in ‘Human-Computer Interaction’

You experience a moment of euphoric understanding when you read a Toni Morrison quote (or George Carlin, if you are so inclined) and find that it perfectly describes what you’ve been meaning to say. You experience it when you observe a Monet and ‘get’ why his water lilies have become…

I blogged about purpose when I was 22. It was an honest, gentle, and introspective piece of writing. Here is an excerpt: See, as I reflect on the many ways in which I’ve spent my time, I realise that I really am happy. I’ve had the privilege of passion, of…

In this article, I write about the interpretation of media hooks by right wing political leaders in India as an overarching strategy in the propagation of political disinformation on Twitter. …

Six years after Instagram’s intransparent algorithmic processes first etched themselves into public memory, the platform has revealed how they function in a series of official communications. This article analyses Instagram’s posts about its algorithms from June 8, 2021 until August 19, 2021 and identifies three goals: (a) shifting agency from…

In “Escape the echo chamber”, C Thi Nguyen differentiates between echo chambers, which are robust social structures that occur when you don’t trust people from the “other side”, and epistemic bubbles, which are easily shattered informational networks from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission — i.e., you don’t…

I’m 22. I turned 22 in November 2020, and by the time I did, I had spent an inordinate amount of time reading books about facing your early 20s. Now, again, I’m 22, and none of these books accounted for a pandemic, or a broken government, or a daunting sense…