Katie Mackinnon
Biographic Data
| ID | 6844146 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Katie Mackinnon |
| GIVEN NAMES | Katie |
| FAMILY NAME | Mackinnon |
| SIGNATURE | MACKINNON K |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Toronto |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0928-5172 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 6 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 3 |
| WORKS AS AUTHOR | 6 |
| WORKS AS EDITOR | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2020 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Governing by dismantling
The ongoing consolidation of state and techno-economic power worldwide calls for the development of a new critical vocabulary. At this juncture, the concept of tech oligarchy has been proposed by s
Infrastructural consent
For the past 30 years, the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP, or robots.txt) has functioned underneath the surface of the web as the most efficient and widely used mechanism stopping web crawlers indexing or scraping data from a website. Recently, this plain text file took on a new role mediating how AI industries access massive amounts of publicly available web data. Robots.txt became touted as the best tool to prevent AI data scraping, producing w…
Dispatches From the Early Internet
This panel charts disparate histories of early internet formations: building from and contributing to the growing body of work which operates across technical interfaces, infrastructures, and cultures of use to paint a more complete picture of how internet and computing cultures, as we now know them, came to be. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, these accounts work against hegemonic, top-down, “revolutionary” narratives of historical internet…
The death of GeoCities
GeoCities was once one of the most popular platforms on the web. This free web-hosting site was a place where people from a range of geographic and socio-cultural locations could build their own websites and communities online. In 1999, Yahoo! acquired the platform in a historic USD$3.7B transaction, but the following decade saw the platform decline into a state of near total non-use. In 2009, it was taken offline. This paper demonstrates how the…
Ethical Approaches to Youth Data in Historical Web Archives (Dispatch)
My doctoral research focuses on the experiences of young people learning about and exploring the World Wide Web from Canadian homes, schools, libraries and community centres between 1994-2004. While there are many intersecting facets of my research that include federal policy interventions, public discourse in Canadian media, and oral interviews, I engage significantly with web archives in order to provide perspectives from young and marginalized…
Every Click You Make
Critical digital literacy comprises subsets of medium- and content-related skills necessary for digital privacy and digital citizenship. Frameworks for defining and evaluating digital literacy proliferate in academia and policymaking; however, in a networked climate subsumed by dataveillance, algorithmic bias, political bots, and deep fakes, these frameworks need to be updated. Algorithms may be the greatest determinant in sociopolitical online i…
The death of GeoCities
GeoCities was once one of the most popular platforms on the web. This free web-hosting site was a place where people from a range of geographic and socio-cultural locations could build their own websites and communities online. In 1999, Yahoo! acquired the platform in a historic USD$3.7B transaction, but the following decade saw the platform decline into a state of near total non-use. In 2009, it was taken offline. This paper demonstrates how the…
Ethical Approaches to Youth Data in Historical Web Archives (Dispatch)
My doctoral research focuses on the experiences of young people learning about and exploring the World Wide Web from Canadian homes, schools, libraries and community centres between 1994-2004. While there are many intersecting facets of my research that include federal policy interventions, public discourse in Canadian media, and oral interviews, I engage significantly with web archives in order to provide perspectives from young and marginalized…
Every Click You Make
Critical digital literacy comprises subsets of medium- and content-related skills necessary for digital privacy and digital citizenship. Frameworks for defining and evaluating digital literacy proliferate in academia and policymaking; however, in a networked climate subsumed by dataveillance, algorithmic bias, political bots, and deep fakes, these frameworks need to be updated. Algorithms may be the greatest determinant in sociopolitical online i…
Ethical Approaches to Youth Data in Historical Web Archives (Dispatch)
My doctoral research focuses on the experiences of young people learning about and exploring the World Wide Web from Canadian homes, schools, libraries and community centres between 1994-2004. While there are many intersecting facets of my research that include federal policy interventions, public discourse in Canadian media, and oral interviews, I engage significantly with web archives in order to provide perspectives from young and marginalized…
The death of GeoCities
GeoCities was once one of the most popular platforms on the web. This free web-hosting site was a place where people from a range of geographic and socio-cultural locations could build their own websites and communities online. In 1999, Yahoo! acquired the platform in a historic USD$3.7B transaction, but the following decade saw the platform decline into a state of near total non-use. In 2009, it was taken offline. This paper demonstrates how the…
Dispatches From the Early Internet
This panel charts disparate histories of early internet formations: building from and contributing to the growing body of work which operates across technical interfaces, infrastructures, and cultures of use to paint a more complete picture of how internet and computing cultures, as we now know them, came to be. Taking an interdisciplinary approach, these accounts work against hegemonic, top-down, “revolutionary” narratives of historical internet…
Infrastructural consent
For the past 30 years, the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP, or robots.txt) has functioned underneath the surface of the web as the most efficient and widely used mechanism stopping web crawlers indexing or scraping data from a website. Recently, this plain text file took on a new role mediating how AI industries access massive amounts of publicly available web data. Robots.txt became touted as the best tool to prevent AI data scraping, producing w…
Governing by dismantling
The ongoing consolidation of state and techno-economic power worldwide calls for the development of a new critical vocabulary. At this juncture, the concept of tech oligarchy has been proposed by s
Computer Science (4 works) · World Wide Web (4 works) · Internet privacy (3 works) · Sociology (3 works) · Political science (2 works) · The Internet (2 works) · Child Development and Digital Technology (1 work) · Citizen journalism (1 work) · Citizenship (1 work) · Corporate governance (1 work)