Digital parlance #77

  • Worldscraping : a portmanteau term that refers to capturing data about the world from wearable cameras and sensors, probably via glasses. Could be useful for various applications: “archiving every word of every article and book you read for searching later, cataloging the movies and TV shows you’ve watched, saving interesting outfits and clothes you notice in shops or on passers-by, mapping your social graph based on the people you talk to on social media and in the real world, recording your cycle into work in case you get into accidents, etc.“ (Source: Adrian Hon).

  • Robodebt : a neologism that corresponds to debts that appears when welfare services wrongly demand the repayment of benefits because of automated fraud detection algorithms failures. Although it can be found in the US and in European countries, the term comes from a debt recovery program in Australia that falsely accused members of the community of owing money to the Government. (Source: Algorithm watch )

  • Rubber band effect: in video games, the rubber band effect in dynamic game difficulty balancing, where computer-played characters with a more severe disadvantage are harder to beat and vice versa. Also refers to this undesirable effect of latency in which a moving object appears to leap from one place to another without passing through the intervening space; also called "warping" or "teleporting" (Source: Wikipedia).

  • Cyber Doula : “Being a cyber doula can take multiple forms, including demystifying internet jargon by reading terms and conditions for loved ones, or sending helpful articles to friends that encourage them to ask more introspective questions.” (Source: bitchmedia.org via Katharina Sand). See also the work of Olivia McKayla Ross.

  • Numérasse : a French neologism that describes the annoying and massive amount of digital forms (online or pdf) that one has to fill for bureaucratic reasons (Source this blogpost by Florence Maraninchi). The suffix “-ass” is often employed in French for terms with a negative connotation, feel free to create odd Frenglish idioms based on that (and please send me your proposal).