Category: Digital Watts

Any digital tool or platform that allows for an exchange to take place (whether it is a social exchange, an exchange of data, the sharing of research etc.) has the potential to facilitate “collaborative scholarly work.” We spent much of last class discussing the inadequacies of certain social media sites and how frankly, most attempts to co-opt them for scholarly use can read as unproductive or contrived in some way. I have been considering this question over the last few days and am not sure I have fully fleshed out how to combat my skepticism towards social media and academic practice. Rather than allowing my ambivalence to limit the potential relationships that might exist in the intersection between the two, I’ve tried to reconsider these sites and services in a more charitable, optimistic, and productive light. Below I have listed several social media platforms and the ways in which they might benefit a collaborative, academic exchange:

Facebook — As I will discuss later in this blog post, my anxiety about the intersection between my private (personal) and public (academic) web presence is perhaps the most significant reason for my skepticism. Though I am by no means a truly “active” social media user, I do enjoy the space I have curated on my account and the freedom to do, say, post, or comment at my discretion, without worrying about reading as “unprofessional.” My solution to this predicament is Facebook’s “Groups” feature. Facebook “Groups” are pages (public or private) in which a community of people can enjoy all the functionality of Facebook without necessarily being “friends” with one another. These Groups contain a wall, a messaging feature, the option to maintain the group as “closed” (an invitation to join the group is necessary to view its content) or open for public viewership. This function differs from a “Page” (i.e. one might “like” Gang of Four’s Facebook Page but would typically not join a Gang of Four “Group”) in that there is a more dispersed power / administrative functionality across all the members. One can see a list of members, upcoming events, share photos and files, post on a shared “wall,” comment on said posts. In essence, it lends itself to collaborative use, allows for a centralized topic or theme to be addressed, but still maintains a “distance” between a private account and the public forum in which it exists.

Pinterest — Though I personally do not use this social media tool any longer, I am familiar with how it works / operates. Often regarded as an aggregation of images ranging from twee bric-a-brac to cliche misattributed quotations overlayed on pictures of whitesand beaches or overly saturated starlit nights, I could see Pinterest being used in a potentially academic manner. The function that “underpins” this site is the ability to collect and organize material (text, articles, images, etc) into different “boards.” Its primary advantage over, say, Google Drive or another file storing digital space, is that one can “pin” anything one encounters on the web without having to visit the Pinterest website itself. Though meant to evoke a series of bulletin boards, Pinterest can also be thought of as a mental map, where one’s current interests, discoveries, and lines of research can be collected, organized, and shared. For instance, were I to do research on certain images in a family of medieval manuscripts or were I researching the illustrations in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience or were I interested in analyzing the rhetoric of midcentury typewriter advertisements, these images could be aggregated, organized, displayed, and shared — offering an insight into my own line of research and discovery as well as allowing for others to “like” or “pin” those same images to their own “boards.”

I don’t really know if I could define the line between “gimmick” and actual “productivity.” Though I have made the case here for two websites that might indeed be beneficial, I know that I personally have little desire to use either of these inside of an academic context. There are other tools that just seem more productive than these, such as Google Docs or email or even Tumblr for that matter. I think all of us in this class are asked to straddle a very blurry line between professional academia and young adulthood — this liminal space is problematic and rather than decisively crossing into the former (a step that I know must be taken at some point), I try to avoid the matter altogether by not mixing my private life as a student and the more public presence the academy seems to necessitate. I’ve gone so far as to use a consistent pseudonym on all my social media accounts (including Facebook who haven’t caught on that I’m using a false name) to further distance my public identity as a MA student and instructor from my personal life. Thus, the way in which this use of social media should be incorporated into a pedagogical / academic practice must in my opinion be voluntary. This might seem like a small, insignificant point but compulsory usage of social media stymies most of the benefits (a sense of collaborative, mutually beneficial exchanges) and instead becomes a coopting of a “popular” tool for the sake of seeming “hip.” If the participants in that space enter into it willingly and with an open mind and a conviction in its benefits, then I’d suppose it wouldn’t matter whether I or anyone else saw it as a gimmick — the people using that space in that way would stand to have a positive experience. Perhaps there is a vacuum in the realm of social media for purely academic spaces in which like-minded people can participate in collaborative work online (though if I remember correctly, there might be?) but regardless this is still an issue with which I am attempting to negotiate.

I find this hashtag to be a much more productive space than #digped: it’s chaotic, diverse, populated, immediate — just as Twitter should be. There are conversations and sub-conversations that one can dip in and out of at will without feeling as though there is a single line of thought or discussion that I have to follow.  Pictures of people in their rooms sipping nips of Glenfiddich are interspersed between conference livetweets and links to resources and Voyant-manufactured word clouds. There is an unselfconsciousness and a levity to this hashtag — no one is “performing” a “Serious Academic Discussion” and yet I found the insights and the resources in this “conversation” (though I use this term very loosely) much more accessible and productive. I clicked on a link, read a blogpost, and only after finishing it realized it was part of the Digital Pedagogy Lab (the same group that hosted the digped discussion). HILT2015 was more successful in drawing me into the DPL site than the conversation hosted by them in the first place (http://bit.ly/1tkQIC7). Interestingly I also found a resource that is relevant to my personal, non-academic life as a freelance transcriptionist (a collaborative googledoc that lists 45 different transcription tools). The fragmented, spontaneous, nebulous nature of this “conversation” is what makes it feel more organic, less self-aware, and resultant from that is an enthusiasm and curiosity and willingness to “dig” that I found absent in the digped conversation.

P.S. Melanie, I just read your Tweet about Yik Yak — would love to discuss this today in class with you!

Please share a couple of the sources from your presentation yesterday that you think are particularly insightful:

“Do Artifacts Have Politics?” Langdon Winner (Daedalus, Vol. 109, No. 1, Modern Technology: Problem or Opportunity? Winter, 1980, pp. 121-136)

“Subversive Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Democracy” Andrew Feenberg (Inquiry, Vol. 35, No. 2/3, September/December 1992)

“Moralizing Technology: On the Morality of Technological Artifacts and Their Design” Peter-Paul Verbeek in Readings on the Philosophy of Technology

“Technological Ethics in a Different Voice” Diane P. Michelfelder in Readings on the Philosophy of Technology

1. It is difficult for me to conceive of Twitter as a place for meaningful academic work mainly because of my issues with fragmentation, character limits, and difficulty in readability (it’s simply hard to follow). In this way, the forum inevitably causes conversation, brainstorming, workshopping, and feedback to be brief and most of all, as Dr. Ryan said, ephemeral. Where I do see potential in Twitter, is in the promotion of other forums, articles, or blogs. Twitter is a great place to share a link of an article or blog post to an audience of people in your field who may be interested. For instance, if I was to come across some interesting artifact relating to Wendy Coleman at the Southern California Library, and were to digitize it, this would be a fantastic digital piece to share via Twitter with a professor at UPENN I heard present on Wendy Coleman’s poetry last year. In fact, Twitter could be a great place to share links to what we do end up digitizing from the Southern California Library with other Scholars interested in Watts, as well as with community members in South Central LA. The accessibility of Twitter is open to everyone and it’s a platform that reaches beyond academia, which serves to reach larger audiences. Because the this digital archiving project already has the aim of accessibility and the goal of making information available – Twitter might be a great way of getting that information out there. 

2. The Twitter feed from #HILT2015 is demonstrating the potential to share useful information with other academics. For instance, one user referenced a “conversation about asking applicants to submit gender info” and then shared a link to an article titled, “New Categories Are Not Enough: Rethinking the Measurement of Sex and Gender in Social Surveys.” Another user posted a link to her article in “Inside Higher Ed” titled “Reflections of #HILT2015”. By sharing these articles, academics are able to keep a conversation going on a topic previously discussed in a class, conference, or other academic setting. Outside of sharing articles, one user posted a Word Cloud of William Byrd II’s “Virginia Diaries”. Sharing a Word Cloud via twitter is great because it is a fun, visual means of digital scholarship which is easy to evaluate and discuss. While these are only a few examples out of many, they demonstrate useful ways of sharing information on Twitter to those who either attended the course, or are interested in learning more about the subject.

3. Some sources on DH and Race/The “Digital Divide”: 
Richard Ohmann, “Literacy, Technology, and Monopoly Capital” 
Selfe, Cynthia L., and Richard J. Selfe, “The Politics of the Interface: Power and Its Exercise in Electronic Contact Zones” 
Moran Charles, and Cynthia L. Selfe, “Teaching English across the Technology/Wealth Gap” 

Before answering the explicit questions posed in this prompt, I’d like to devote some of my response to addressing the issues Dr Noble raised in her essay and the larger issues implicated in a discussion of technology, the hegemony, and the inscription of gender, racial, and socioeconomic identities.

To begin, while I found Dr Noble’s work on this subject to be so brilliant and well-argued, I also found it somewhat devastating. I’d like to think that I knew, that I have always known on some level, that ideology works through all systems and all institutions, and that we are interpolated by every “voice” that speaks through these hegemonic mouthpieces. I’d like to think that I knew that the internet (and technology more generally) is not and has never been a “neutral” space inside of this. And yet, I also know that on some level I was comfortable operating under the fiction (a known-fiction) that whether in its coding or in its hardware, technology might somehow be able to exist outside of the ideologies endemic in these hegemonic systems. Dr Noble’s work threw into sharp relief how misguided and even dangerous a belief in this fiction of technological neutrality can be. I, like many of you, not only use Google, but I actually quite like it as well: its algorithms have lead me to breakthroughs in my own research and it has helped me discover some incredibly productive databases, tools, archives, etc. I’ve only listed its academic uses here, the mundane tasks whose completion is predicated on Google notwithstanding.

All of this in itself induced a sort of existential dread at the realization that (yet again) no space is safe or devoid of the workings of the hegemony (and further, its endemic sexism, racism, classism, all manner of bigotry). I willingly participate in these systems because they are convenient and because I have been conditioned to rely on their use, i.e. I am wholly dependent on them. A sort of malaise lingered for a few days after Dr Noble’s address to the class. I am not mimicking the cynicism the prompt so rightly predicts for rhetorical effect: I felt (feel) all of this and more. So how best to combat this in a “younger, less knowledgeable audience?” I haven’t the slightest idea (though I noticed Gabe posted a very comprehensive response to this question, so I shall have to read his post after I complete mine). I do however have some theories as to how to “translate” these concepts and concerns into a language that young people / the technologically illiterate might better understand (though is it fair to conflate the two?). I see the biggest obstacle to this task is how “normalized” this sort of technology has become. Though I will be the first to admit that I am dependent on Google (and other instruments of the technohegemony) for so many day to day tasks, I can still remember a time before the internet. This is in fact not the case with the freshman I taught last semester. I will use them as my fictional “audience” in this post, as they are the only age group with which I have had any professional teaching experience. The internet (and technology more generally) has become so enmeshed in their social, academic, and professional lives that I believe there must be a process of “defamiliarizing” those technologies. Without exposing to them the inworkings of these platforms, attempting to convince them of their function in maintaining and perpetuating a dominant ideology would be akin to arguing that a toaster or a Kitchenaid is an instrument of the hegemony (which in itself could be the subject of another blog post). This means, yes, “deconstructing” these devices — explaining that while hardware, software, and firmware coalesce in a single “object” (be it an iPhone, Macbook, or tablet), they not only serve distinct functions but each is bound up with its own implicit ideological machinations. This presupposes some knowledge of how these component parts work. I would advocate for the need to teach CompSci classes throughout a child’s education or at least provide some exposure to it. In understanding how something “works” even at a most basic level, I believe one is better able to see and understand the “work” that it is doing.

However, were this audience unable to understand the more technologically advanced cant resultant from “deconstructing” those devices, disrupting the idea that Google is in some way “neutral” would be a necessary first step. Perhaps likening “code” to our own “genetic coding” would be a helpful metaphor: while our genome is a random assemblage of nucleobases and hydrogen bonding, whose “mutations” and “genes” are selected for based on their advantageousness or viability, Google’s “genome” is designed, i.e. its “code” has been deliberately written. And could they imagine if someone — not an infallible deity and not chance, but a flesh and blood person with their own prejudices and assumptions and biases — were to “write their own code?” Would it not stand that what was being “encoded” would be the construct of an imperfect, ideologically-driven mind? Would it not stand that the product of such a mind would carry, however subtly, those same prejudices in its very genes? Andrew Feenberg’s essay “Democratic Rationalization: Technology, Power, and Freedom” posits this another way: “Technologies are selected… from among many possible configurations. Guiding the selection process are social codes established by the cultural and political struggles that define the horizon under which the technology will fall. Once introduced, technology offers a material validation of the cultural horizon to which it has been preformed. I call this the ‘bias’ of technology: apparently neutral, functional rationality is enlisted in support of the hegemony” (147). It is of course not “natural selection” to which he refers but a deliberate “selection” that is guided by “social codes” which participate in and stem from the dominant ideological ordering of the world.

I think the danger here is making this all seem so nefarious, so explicit and intentional: while this audience might resist a the claim that racial bias in Google’s search algorithm is deliberate, they perhaps would be more receptive to thinking of it as something operating outside of or perhaps below intentionality. In other words I believe figuring Google as some deliberately manipulative “Evil Corporation” would be met with resistance because it is such an essential and productive tool, so ingrained into day-to-day processes, that to insult Google would be to insult people’s dependence upon it. Further to this, in discussing the production and reproduction of “ideology,” I think most would assume that this is enacted by means of “repressive” instruments, or that which “prohibits” or “impedes” an exchange of information or belief, whereas Google is viewed by many as an instrument of “liberation” in this regard. It is too easy to eschew subtlety in favor of making powerful, impactful claims, especially when the process of fleshing out those subtleties can prove so daunting, but in making this a complex issue wherein Google at once participates in and reinforces the hegemony (footnote: I fully believe that the “hegemony” is a concept that can be explained to a “teen” audience, as I subjected my nineteen-year-old sister to a discussion of it last Easter break and my Rhetorical Arts class seemed to grasp the concept last semester), but perhaps does so on a level slightly below the deliberate instantiation of hegemonic values might better serve the audience we are attempting to address.

And if they are perhaps not so keen on the “genome” metaphor I’ve constructed here, perhaps it would be best to focus on the assumptions that they have about the way Google indexes websites, to dismantle the “vote and rank” supposition that is so prevalent in people’s minds. Regardless of the course, I think central to all of this is having conviction in the students’ ability to grasp this material. Complex issues, whether they are about technology or ideology or the way in which these two intersect, should not be reduced to platitudes or generalizations. Rather, they should be worked through in a language and with a patience that intervenes in a reductive “Google = Bad” narrative. Not because this claim doesn’t possess value or merit, but because attacking Google as a product or as a service might alienate those who are dependent on its use. Further to this, to suppose there are limits to what individuals are “capable” of understanding merely reinforces those same limits. As I said, I don’t think I can address latter half of this prompt. I’m effected by the same cynicism (though I’m not sure if its cynicism, so much as resignation and exhaustion) after having been forced to confront a fact I already knew to be true. If anyone has any ideas about how to help the “audience” we are meant to be working with here (or myself for that matter), I’d certainly be open to ideas!

Category: Technology

Keywords: pedagogy; programming; ideology; algorithms

(interestingly, the Library of Congress uses Google to search their own cache of Subject Headings)

Library of Congress Category: Information Resources, subclass ZA – either Information Superhighway (!), Electronic Information Resources, or Computer Network Resources

Library of Congress Subject Headings:
suggested: search engines, hegemony, neo-liberalism, computer algorithms (all 4 found!)

Here’s my lesson plan/outline for presenting some of Dr. Noble’s work with Google as a tool of hegemonic oppression, especially in the visibility of young Black women. Much of how I structured it was based on Dr. Noble’s talk, but more simplified and with more verbal and written prompts for student participation, which I find to be a little more compatible with the high school classroom.

I. Hook/Intro – Start with brainstorm (silently jot down responses/ideas in your notes):
        A. How has Google search changed our lives for the better? After a few minutes, field student responses (examples will probably include “easier access to information,” “satisfies curiosity” “more convenience, better planning in day-to-day concerns)
        B. How could Google search be having some sort of negative effect on people? What are the drawbacks to its ubiquity in our current culture? And, just like in A, field student responses (examples could include “we’re becoming more reliant on it for basic facts,” “we’re more and more likely to just skim things, look for simpler answers,” or something with Google’s commercial interests)

II. There are several things we don’t see/think about with Google, (much of which I hadn’t thought about before reading Dr. Noble’s article and seeing her presentation, so these are new concepts for me, as well).
        A. They’re a private company whose net worth was estimated at $82.5 billion. How is this revenue generated if the majority of Google’s top features (search, mail, etc.) are free? (field some guesses).
        B.  Google is a commercial search site run by a private company, not a public resource. Revenue is generated from targeted ads, particularly the ones at the side of our your search (show example with a harmless, generic Google search). As Dr. Noble points out, you are Google’s product, not their consumer.
             i. Are you familiar with the term ‘clickbait?” (Students explain/define the term, provide examples of clickbait headlines like “A policeman and a young black boy meet in the street. You won’t believe what happens next…”.) What’s the objective with these dumb headlines and articles? They generate revenue off of your web traffic, whether you were satisfied or not with the article itself.
             ii. Google search works in a similar way. The top results displayed are not the most popular, relevant, or authoritative sites, they’re the most commercially viable for Google.
                  a. This can undermine our belief in a ‘digital democracy,’ the belief that the internet, largely interfaced by search engines, almost exclusively Google at this point, can grant equal access to any content via search, privileging, just like a democratic system of government, only the content that is most popular, as measured by site ‘hits’ in this case.
                 b. In fact, results are sorted by vastly complex algorithms, which sort and list sites according to many, many different factors, in which site hits are just one.

        C. Google’s search engine is not a neutral tool. It reflects the biases, conscious and unconscious, of the engineers and other employees at Google who design these algorithms that make it run.
             i. To put it another way, see a quote from Siva Vaidhyanathan’s book “The Googlization of Everything” quoted in Dr. Noble’s article, “Rendering web content (pages) findable via search engines is an expressly social, economic, and human project”
             ii. We’ll examine the “N**** House” example from DeRay McKesson’s  tweet and we’ll listen to a clip from the NPR piece we listened to last week.
             iii. These are not glitches, they’re related to the demographic makeup of the engineers that design the algorithms. Look at this chart of info about Google’s tech employees in particular: http://www.pbs.org/newshour/updates/google-discloses-workforce-diversity-data-good/ (83% male, 60% White, 3% Black and Latino). How can these statistics show that these “glitches” are not outliers? How can these gender and racial breakdowns lead to problems like the ones we just saw? (Implicit, unconscious bias, no one in the room to speak up/examine how these algorithms can have negative impact or examine the potential bias they would propagate)
              iv. This kind of problem is not unique to Google or engineers. It happens in all seats of influence when leaders are not demographically representative of the public they serve or  interface with.
                  a. Briefly discuss women’s bathrooms in congress chambers: http://content.usatoday.com/communities/onpolitics/post/2011/07/house-womens-bathroom-congress-/1#.V0sJVPkrLIU How do female members of congress not get their own bathroom until 1993 (when there were 55 of them, over 10% of the House) and not get it expanded to 4 (4!) stalls until 2011, when there were 96 of them, close to 20%? When women are underrepresented in this body, commonsense problems like this get overlooked.

        D. Google search results, just like other media images, can affect our worldviews, especially regarding disenfranchised groups.
            i. What images pop into your mind when you think of the word ‘beautiful?’ (jot down examples, share: sunset on the beach? Yosemite?) Then compare to Google image search. What impact will these results have on young people (girls AND boys)? Field student responses.
            ii. Do the same with the “black girls” search (with much of the content censored out for a high school classroom, of course). Discuss the impact of these search results on young Black women looking to find themselves represented, congregated on the internet, perhaps looking for feminism or empowerment, but they don’t have that vocabulary yet. Note, discuss the fact that the vast majority of us (show of hands in the room, mine included) don’t venture past the first search result page on Google.
            ii. Note that Google, of course, does not create these social inequalities, but it does perpetuate and over represent them within our society at large. Read them this quote included in Dr. Noble’s article: “Search technologies themselves and their design do not dictate racial ideologies; rather, they both reflect and re-instantiate the current social climate and prevailing social and cultural values. As users engage with technologies like search engines, they dynamically co-construct content within the technology itself.”(Christian Fuchs, “Labor in Informational Capitalism and on the Internet,” The Information Society, emphasis mine”). Discuss last part, how do we “co-construct” content on the internet? (clicks perpetuate more content like it, vicious circle of revenue and marketing)
            a. If these search results are put forth as the dominant narrative about young black girls, other critical voices and ideologies are rendered invisible, as well as the suppression of these other views.

III. So what can we do about this? Brainstorm concrete actions to combat these suppressions and propagations of biases with your partner. Share some with the group (Ideas could include: start a petition to pressure Google into making algorithms public/hiring more diverse staff of engineers along gender/racial lines, emphasizing noncommercial alternatives to search engines for finding information about underrepresented groups,  increasing public awareness about how Google’s invisible commercials interests affect results)
        A. Shock, discouraged, disillusioned by this context and the “man behind the curtain?” Remember, Google is private company, and reinforcing biases through product marketing is the driving force of their search engine business model (when trying to locate revenue and profit margins and revenue for just Google’s search engine, I was unable to pin down numbers on this as Google works very hard to keep these statistics hidden from the public view. The first three articles that come up in the search “Google search engine profits compared to other divisions” just discuss how Google is dominating the market over Bing and Yahoo https://www.ventureharbour.com/visualising-size-google-bing-yahoo/).
            i. Even if we don’t have concrete solutions YET, awareness and skepticism is the first step even as we engage with this technology**. All this information is new to me, too. I’m not sure what’s the best path forward in my own conscientious consumption of Google products, but it’s important to ask these questions of the largest corporations in our lives and of ourselves as daily consumers of these products.
            ii. Exit Slip (a few sentences, turn in response as you leave): What’s the one aspect of today’s talk that impacted you most and why? How might you use Google search or view your Google search results differently moving forward?

**Full disclosure: my high school is heavily invested in Google products. Every student has a Google run email, since the company provide free email servers to any school that chooses to use them. Every student is enrolled in at least one class that uses Google Classroom, an online class management and homework submission system with a blog-style interface very similar to our Digital Humanities WordPress. All the computers in our three mobile computer labs are Google Chromebooks (the 12 in the library are Google Chromebox desktops), and we’ve partnered with them in our 1-to-1 computing initiative started this year. By 2018, all enrolled students will be using their own Google Chromebooks in class daily.