Engineering Social Justice Presentation

The Internet and Social Justice

Rights, Justice, Freedom & Ethics: Towards Just and Sustainable Human

Communities

A presentation to

SOCY 234/MDEP 221: Engineering & Social Justice

Nasser Saleh

February 9, 2009

Angry online divorcee 'kills' virtual ex-hubby

A 43-year-old piano teacher's sudden divorce from her online husband in a virtual game world made her so angry that she logged on and killed his digital avatar

"I was suddenly divorced, without a word of warning. That made me so angry," the official quoted her as telling investigators and admitting the allegations.

The woman used login information she got from the 33-year-old office worker when their characters were happily married, and killed the character. The man complained to police when he discovered that his beloved online avatar was dead.

Agenda

• The Internet as a technology• The utopian and dystopian nature of the

Internet• Digital divide• Examples: Facebook and Wikipedia• Participatory design• Questions and comments.

The rise of the Internet

• The whole history of the Internet may be encapsulated into what amounts to a period of just about three decades.

• How it started?

• The Internet as a self-organizing system

• Was the Internet originally planned for the its current use?

The Internet in Numbers

Utopian Internet

• The widespread adoption of Internet technology, including extended democracy, personal liberation, enhanced powers of organization and coordination, and renewal of community.

Dystopian Internet

• Much less frequently, authors highlight the more negative vision whereby technology exacerbates human misery as individuals become increasingly controlled by what they fail to understand.

• Whilst the technological dystopians provide a useful counterbalance to the romantic visions of the utopians, both camps view technology and social change in a rather elementary and constricted way.

A look at the future"The future of information technology descends upon us in a swarm of

buzzwords: global village, electronic superhighway, information age, electronic frontier. Someday soon, cyberspace - the vast, intangible territory where computers meet and exchange information - will be populated with electronic communities and businesses.

In your home, a protean box will hook you into a wealth of goods and services. It will receive and send mail, let you make a phone or video call or send a fax or watch a movie or buy shoes or diagnose a rash or pay bills or get cash (a new digital kind) or write your mother. That will be just the living-room manifestation of what promises to be a radical - and rapid - transformation of commerce and society, the greatest since the invention of the automobile.“ Stewart (1996)

Stewart T A (1996) Boom time on the new frontier, in Kling R (1996) ed. Computerizationand Controversy, Academic Press, San Diego, 2nd edition, 67-74.

The Electronic Hive"Just as a beehive functions as if it were a single

sentient organism, so does an electronic hive, made up of millions of buzzing, dim-witted personal computers, behaving like a single organism. Out of networked parts - whether of insects, neurons or chips - come learning, evolution, and life. Out of a planet-wide swarm of silicon calculators comes an emergent self-governing intelligence: the Internet." (Kelly, 1996, p.76).

Kelly, K. (1996) The electronic hive - embrace it, in Kling, R. (Ed.) Computerization andControversy, 2nd Edition, Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 75-78.

The Electronic Hive - Refuse it

"Immersed in an environment of invisible signals and operations, we find it as unthinkable to walk five miles to visit a friend as it was once unthinkable to speak across that distance through a wire" (Birkerts, 1996, p.81).

Birkerts, S. (1996) The electronic hive - refuse it, in Kling, R. (Ed.) Computerization andControversy, 2nd Edition, Academic Press, San Diego, pp. 79-82.

Digital Divide or Knowledge Divide

• Digital divide: people who have .. and people who have-not

• A second wave of digital divide is emerging

• The rise of using ICT technology posed more questions about the nature of knowledge.

Example: Wikipedia

Wikipedia(English Language only)

• Content pages 2,730,784• Pages (All pages in the wiki, including talk pages,

redirects, etc.) 15,846,204• Uploaded files 834,114• Page edits 283,555,039• Average edits per page 17.89• Registered users 8,899,528• Active users (Users who have performed an

action in the last 30 days) 162,441

Utilitarianism and ICT

• Utilitarianism (from the Latin utilis, useful) is a theory of ethics that prescribes the quantitative maximization of good consequences for a population

• The Internet: A “utilitarian” distribution of knowledge or an “egalitarian” one ?

Facebook Phenomenon

• More than 150 million active users• The fastest growing demographic is those 30 years

old and older• Average user has 120 friends on the site• More than 3 billion minutes are spent on Facebook

each day (worldwide)• More than 850 million photos uploaded to the site

each month• More than 5 million videos uploaded each month

Source: Facebook Statistics, retrieved on February 7, 2009 from http://www.facebook.com/press/info.php?statistics

Nasser’s Facebook world• 114 friends• 21 photo albums• 174 posted links• 1331 notes • Member of 79 groups• Started 3 groups &

2 applications

What is the real world of Facebook Technology?

Participatory Design & Social Justice

What’s design

Designing for .. Or designing with..

• Designing through a lens of social justice will have an affect on what you design.

• User-centred design (UCD) as a process• Including the users in the design process and

not to test the final product.• If everyone could design .. Who is

the expert?

Principles of Participatory design

• Cooperation/ Co-working: an egalitarian principle for all stake-holders.

• Experimenting: in the space between new possibilities and current situation

• Contextualising: the context in which the technology is to be applied

• Iterating: a process of design and use.

Source: Four principles of participatory design , retrieved from http://domino.research.ibm.com/

Participatory action research

• Action research/design: where researchers/designers become involved as participants in planning and implementing change.

• Can non-scientific, non technical people contribute properly?

• Can political ideals be confounded with scientific/ technical ideals?

Participatory design for

social justice

Participatory design for

social justice

Designing ICT projects for Social Justice

• Participatory projects

• Social objectives and the finding agencies agenda

• A clear exit strategy

• Sustainability

Final Notes

• E-Participation can challenge E-Domination• E-Participation can empower cognition,

communication and cooperation processes of humans so they can jointly construct participatory social systems

• The Internet is not a technological system that determines social systems; it does not have linear one effects on society

Thank You

Source: http://www.digital-literacy.eu/_root/media/25056_born-not-downloaded.jpg