Digital Culture: Inequity, Innovation, Resistance
A chatbot that learns language via Twitter and, within hours, begins posting antisemitic, racist, misogynistic, and transphobic tweets. Algorithms that are meant to help provide support for children and families but instead end up targeting, surveilling, and criminalizing people living in poverty. Facial recognition software that can’t detect the faces of Black and dark-skinned people. There are seemingly endless examples of how digital technologies reinforce inequities and harm marginalized groups of people—even technologies intended to work around or remove the systemic inequities baked into our social processes and institutions. In this FYRS section, we will become familiar with some of these examples, and we will also look to individuals’ and groups’ ongoing innovation and resistance in order to imagine more just digital futures.
We’ll read, listen to, and view a range of texts in different genres and mediums coming from authors/scholars/activists such as Sasha Costanza-Chock, Meredith Broussard, Joy Buolamwini, Ruha Benjamin, Safiya Umoja Noble, and Virginia Eubanks.
Required text:
More Than a Glitch: confronting race, gender, and ability bias in tech by ISBN: 9780262373050Publication Date: 2023Broussard argues that the structural inequalities reproduced in algorithmic systems are no glitch. They are part of the system design. This book shows how everyday technologies embody racist, sexist, and ableist ideas; how they produce discriminatory and harmful outcomes; and how this can be challenged and changed
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Featured Books
Algorithms of oppression : how search engines reinforce racism by Call Number: eBookISBN: 1479833649Publication Date: 2018
Artificial era : predictions, problems, and diversity in AI by ISBN: 9780191965975Publication Date: 2023
Artificial Whiteness: Politics and Ideology in Artificial Intelligence by ISBN: 9780231551076Publication Date: 2020
Out of the Shadows, into the Streets! by ISBN: 9780262322805Publication Date: 2014
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Scholarly Articles
- “Actionable Auditing Revisited: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial Ai Products.”Raji, Inioluwa Deborah, and Joy Buolamwini. “Actionable Auditing Revisited: Investigating the Impact of Publicly Naming Biased Performance Results of Commercial Ai Products.” Communications of the Acm, vol. 66, no. 1, 2023, pp. 101–108.
- “Algorithms As Discrimination Detectors.”Kleinberg, Jon, et al. “Algorithms As Discrimination Detectors.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, vol. 117, no. 48, 2020, pp. 30096–30100., https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1912790117.
- “Bridging the Digital Divide: The Smart Tv As a Platform for Digital Literacy among the Elderly.”Wang, Cheng-Hui, and Chih-Lun Wu. “Bridging the Digital Divide: The Smart Tv As a Platform for Digital Literacy among the Elderly.” Behaviour & Information Technology, vol. 41, no. 12, 2022, pp. 2546–2559., https://doi.org/10.1080/0144929X.2021.1934732.
- “Digital Inequality Beyond the Digital Divide: Conceptualizing Adverse Digital Incorporation in the Global South.”Heeks, Richard. “Digital Inequality Beyond the Digital Divide: Conceptualizing Adverse Digital Incorporation in the Global South.” Information Technology for Development, vol. 28, no. 4, 2022, pp. 688–704., https://doi.org/10.1080/02681102.2022.2068492.
- “How Social Media Use Mitigates Urban Violence: Communication Visibility and Third-Party Intervention Processes in Digital Urban Contexts.”Lane, Jeffrey, and Forrest Stuart. “How Social Media Use Mitigates Urban Violence: Communication Visibility and Third-Party Intervention Processes in Digital Urban Contexts.” Qualitative Sociology, vol. 45, no. 3, 2022, pp. 457–475., https://doi.org/10.10
- “The Rise of Corporational Determinism: Digital Media Corporations and Narratives of Media Change.”Natale, Simone, et al. “The Rise of Corporational Determinism: Digital Media Corporations and Narratives of Media Change.” Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 36, no. 4, 2019, pp. 323–338., https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2019.1632469.
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