Inequality in the Digital Pandemic – Items

amarashar's bookmarks 2020-09-04

Summary:

A useful start may be shifting the emphasis from public space—often framed exclusively as an achievement of design—to publicness—as a sociopolitical practice. How do people “do” public space online, and under what conditions? Who dictates these conditions, and to what ends? What kinds of digital spaces feel “public” to their occupants? What are the thresholds of participation? Who is in, who is out, and who is somewhere in between? Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods powerfully remind us of the inextricable link between place, segregation, and oppressive inequality, particularly when it comes to race.6 Ruha Benjamin notes that technology’s (re-)production of racism is just one side of the coin, and that race itself is a technology in the sense that it, too, is productive.7 Our reading of the “practice of publicness in digital space,” therefore, is incomplete—if not itself complicit with injustice—without centering the productive forces of inequality and oppression, and racial oppression specifically. These forces work on a macro-level, but the pandemic has shown how localized they are.

Link:

https://items.ssrc.org/covid-19-and-the-social-sciences/society-after-pandemic/inequality-in-the-digital-pandemic/

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Ethics/Gov of AI » amarashar's bookmarks

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Date tagged:

09/04/2020, 10:27

Date published:

09/04/2020, 06:27