After reading the section on RIP trolling, I was reminded of having visited a local funeral home’s website to view the obituary of a family friend and being disappointed after reading a post from a RIP troll.  This troll used his/her religious views as a tool to troll the family. The online guestbook page had several posts from out of town posters that felt an inappropriate need to add insensitive comments directed to the family of the deceased.

While I personally enjoy the memetic images that are often posted to Instagram, I understand how they may cause some ambivalent feelings for others.  Many childhood icons are transformed into humorous images that are confusing for today’s youth. Once such memetic image is that of the PBS “Arthur” characters. While I am familiar with the actual cartoon, most of the kids that view the memes aren’t and they truly do not understand the humor that is being expressed.  The true humor is lost on them. The characters from this cartoon are wholesome, designed to teach some sort of lesson, and would never say or do any of the things that the memes are portraying. I honestly think that most memetic images are far too complex for today’s youth, they often don’t understand sarcasm.

There’s a statement on page 156 of chapter 4 that I think sums up the theory of Digital divergences and runaway narratives. The statement basically states that each time a meme is made it is realigned to fit the needs of the audience, but in doing so it also transforms the item making it that much more ambivalent.  I saw a post today that was intended to highlight the inspirational actions of a certain group. While it was posted to elicit positive comments it instead invoked ambivalent feelings for me. I knew the intended purpose of the posting, but I still found the post humorous, which in turn made me feel like a jerk for laughing.

Work Cited

     Phillips, Whitney, and Ryan M. Milner. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online.

A question was posed in the middle of this article that questioned the role of publishing and online feedback by youth while they are in high school.  I think that the role that online feedback and publishing has in the lives of youth is very powerful, because if they are participating in this process at such an early age they will only get better as they age.  The use of online tools such, “Sugar Quill” provide excellent platforms for youth to engage in the sharing and editing process.

 

Heather’s web-based school newspaper is such a success because the youth that participate in its composition are able to relate to the articles that are written, because that can relate to each other.  I find that in order to obtain and retain the interest of today’s youth they have to connect with the text. Gone are the days of expecting our youth to read, retain, and explain texts that they simply cannot relate to.  Most of the participants were probably initially intrigued in the production newspaper because it was being produced via a digital platform. The critiquing of a peers work is something that they tend to enjoy as well it’s almost as though critiquing is part of the DNA.

Is the world really good or bad? Or is there another way to see it?

I remember when I was told that if I wanted a product designed to fit me perfectly, it would be very expensive. Expensive was code for bad. No one wants to pay more. We’re supposed to pay less according to the good/bad view, and less is good.

I remember the bell curves from standardized testing. I was told that “normal kids” scored in the middle. In the good/bad view, “normal kids” was code for good. The kids to the left of the hump were certainly bad at something. The kids to the right of the hump were probably known as weird — which, like expensive, was another way to say bad.

All of my memories have traces of some “that’s good, this is bad” type of segregation, each one pointing out that good, in the cultural, socio-economic, demographic, sense, was really another way of saying average. “Be a good boy so you can grow up to be a good man,” they said. And being a good boy meant “fitting in” and doing what the others were doing. Being a good man meant earning a stable income at a “good company” … that’s code for a company that pays well and hires thousands of people.

I grew up with this bias about the concept of good and bad and how that pertained to fitting in, career, success, customized products, standardized tests, and more. It was so engrained that even having this bias was considered good. Which meant that not having this biased, good/bad view of the world was a sign you were weird (again, a bad thing).

All of this changed when I read Language and the Pursuit of Happiness by Chalmers Brothers (Dr. Chelsey, pardon the extra reference … I’ll connect everything shortly). That’s when I learned to set aside the question, “Is this good or bad.” What if I asked instead, “Does this work or not work?” It was my first exercise in how the power of words can reframe a question (without biases, for example) and arrive at a completely new set of outcomes.

So when author Sarah Wachter-Boettcher describes how product designers miss the mark because they can’t relate to audiences, I’m particularly drawn to how the decision makers deliberately disregarded readily-available facts. When the author points out how Northpointe’s COMPAS software misidentifies potential recidivists to the point of being racist, it’s difficult to ignore how strongly the company intentionally overlooks factual evidence as they deny making mistakes. As the author reprints excerpts from tech company annual reports showing a published desire to diversify hiring but show no noticeable change in that pattern, I’m compelled to notice that these seemingly-brilliant people are ignoring the very facts they are printing and evidence that there are plenty of “underrepresented” candidates hoping to be hired.

Allison Parish highlights this willful ignorance of the results (results being particular types of facts) of a the popular hacker ethic. The people who buy into the ethic are presumed to be some of the smartest around, yet the results of their ethic-based actions effectively demonstrate that they destroyed the ethic. They ignore the results of their actions and continue their belief that they are champions of the ethic.

Estee Beck points this out again in the seemingly willful ignorance of social media companies to truthfully identify the word sharing as something distinctly different than what they are asking their users to participate in, which is truly prosumerism (you might say the user is being used).

In each piece, the authors expose biased viewpoints evident in the tech world they know so well. But Beck says it best when it comes to dissolving ignorance of facts, outcomes and results when writing, “I argue that it is up to educators, especially writing teachers, to sustain critical literacies in their classrooms in service of connecting, and possibly subverting, the market-driven prosumerism for an exchange benefiting humankind without financial incentive.”

In short: Words matter.

Beck implies that sharing, in the social media context, isn’t sharing at all. If users understood this, that literacy might reframe the whole concept.

Changing the words we use can ignore or include the facts. Changing the words used to frame a problem or solution can determine if there’s even a problem or solution to begin with.

The story in my head, as I read each article, is that all of the people, focus groups, executives, recruiters, and more looked at their products, hiring practices, marketing campaigns, and more and, at some point, said to themselves, “This is good.”

And that means good in the “how-I-was-raised-to-define-good” sense of the word:

• That means average is good, so build products for the average person.
• That means customization is expensive, and since expensive is bad, not customizing things to each individual must be good.
• That means “people like us” is good, so hiring practices that bring in more people like us must also be good.
• That even means buying into an ethic that destroys authority can be seen as good, because authority means the “top 1%” … essentially not average … and we’re defending the “average man” (See what I did there?) and that’s good.

Every person who built a product or acted with bias in any way quite possibly (or most likely) thought they were doing “good” in the good/bad view of how I was programmed to see the world.

This sense of good has its roots in the dawn of computing. “The Modern History of Computing” runs replete with examples of white men solving problems only white men had and probably saying, “This is good.” Because it was cheaper. Because it solved the “average” person’s problem (white men being the “average” person, of course). Computing is rooted in a time when this bias not only existed, it was reinforced in every way.

Today, consumers are diverse and, as Wachter-Boettcher states, the internet now the underpins all business in all sectors. Suddenly, in this context, the old way of looking at things starts to break.

Some online entrepreneurs tried on a new lens through which to see things. Let’s suppose some used the aforementioned work/doesn’t work lens. By changing the comparison from good/bad to work/doesn’t work, dramatic shifts of thought began to occur. We saw breakthroughs few sectors other than technology are capable of creating.

Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” tells of music retail services who looked at the brick-and-mortar model of promoting only mass-market hits and asking something like, “On the internet, does that work or not work?” It’s easy to think that the store model could simply be shifted online and top hits would be the most popular. But, as it turns out (and as Wachter-Boettcher points out), people aren’t average. They were only buying what was popular because that’s all there was available in the physical retail model. But music audiences that have every choice imaginable will choose exactly what fits them … because they can.

Is it cheaper? That’s not really the question anymore.

That question is part of the old good/bad paradigm. The new question is, “does it work or not work?” As Anderson points out, online audiences are collectively spending more money on music and movies than when they had only a retail option. So yes, it works.

Works/doesn’t-work-thinking is just one example of how framing the question can dissolve bias and lead to better-fitting products and services in an internet-connected world. Can I get exactly what I want instead of the average pop version? Sure, because that works. Can I pay a lot or a little? With lots of choices, pay whatever works for you.

These are answers the good/bad paradigm was incapable of achieving because good/bad thinking (that’s just one example) is inherently biased to what we were taught was good or bad. When our thinking is framed differently, such as in the works/doesn’t work approach, we are compelled to look at facts such as profitability, outcomes, and effects of our product designs, actions, and policies.

As Wachter-Boettcher, Parrish, and Beck eloquently demonstrate, the words we use to define the models (e.g. designs, policies, practices, and algorithms) we put in place can be more important than the models themselves. As they each point out, the majority of tech leaders describe the things they do and create as “good.” These authors are asking them if it works.

 

Brothers, Chalmers. Language and the Pursuit of Happiness. New Possibilities Press, 2005.

Wachter-Boettcher, Sarah. 2017. Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and other Threads of Toxic Tech.

Parrish, Allison. 2016. “Programming is Forgetting: Toward a New Hacker Ethic.” Open Hardware Summit presentation. http://opentranscripts.org/transcript/programming-forgetting-new-hacker-ethic/

Beck, Estee. 2017. “Sustaining Critical Literacies in the Digital Information Age: The Rhetoric of Sharing, Prosumerism, and Digital Algorithmic Surveillance.” https://wac.colostate.edu/books/social/chapter2.pdf

“The Modern History of Computing.” 2000. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/computing-history/

Anderson, Chris. 2004. “The Long Tail.” Wired Magazine. https://www.wired.com/2004/10/tail/

According to Sara Wachter-Boettcher, the tech industry is a multi-billion dollar industry that’s built upon the backs of the misogynistic thought and presumptions that limits the field to like-minded people. Diversity in the tech industry is mere rhetoric, and while corporate bangs the diversity drum, it also beats the tune of exclusionary practices. Although the statistics proffered were at a higher level than I would have imagined, the overall sentiment did not surprise me.

Having spent many years in the marketing department of a Fortune 100 company, the amount of high level executives continues to skew toward the white male, and while there have been strides to extend diversity in the corporate workplace (of which we primarily speak when we talk about IT functions) there is an overwhelming amount of status quo that continues.

Wachter-Boettcher speaks of personas, the stereotypes that are created for marketing whatever is being “sold”, this too extends to the people that corporations want to “fit” into the position, or even the environment. This too is the default position of the hiring manager and HR. Consider the stories of people hired because of their skills that do not share anything in common with the people with which they spend 40+ hours a week with. These situations are often short-lived. Our worldview is conditioned, but these can change. Although there may be conditions that one finds uncomfortable, actions can often counter these preconceived ideas, and lend to a bigger world-view by all. For example, historically men were secretaries, but at the turn of the twentieth century these roles transitioned to women. It must have been a growing experience for those who had been male secretaries, or men that had male secretaries, to see this role “relegated” to “women’s work”. Preconceived ideas even play a part when avoiding stereotypes, such as when Wachter-Baettcher discusses the casting for Rhime’s production company in that they “cast whoever feels right” (48). Great idea, but what is that really but a form of bringing in “what I think is right”.

Everything, and nothing, is normal; as Wachter-Boettcher says, “The only thing that’s normal is diversity” (47). Normal is a limiting factor in seeing beyond the parameters of status quo. It also supports the ideals of “fit” and “right”. What is right for one, isn’t right for another. What is right for most, isn’t right for all. I remember a meme that was out in the 80s, “Why be normal”. I embraced this sentiment, and  have continued to do so. That said, I still prefer to spend the majority of time with people that think, and act, like I do. Why would technological mind-set be any different? As we read in Ambivalent Internet, this kind of adherence to the known excludes too many others that do not fit into a singular mode, where “[w]eird content outnumbers ‘normal’ content at a 2:1 ratio” (8), and the importance of understanding the extent and ramifications of this weirdness proceeded to develop a “Weird Internet panel” to determine what is indeed weird, and what weird really means. That is fascinating! Yet, will there ever be consensus?

As we think about old tech and new tech convergences, it becomes an interesting prospect. Old tech isn’t that old afterall, but as Jenkins examines this phenomenon, he uses a word that fits what we see in Wachter-Boettcher’s piece, this word is “collide”(2). Jenkins is speaking specifically to media, which of course is an arm of technology, but I think we can extrapolate that thought to the technological industry as a whole. Old thinking must be used alongside new thinking as culture demands it. Technology is no longer a workplace phenomena, it’s impacting the law (as seen in recidivism prediction), education (a highly diverse population), religion, politics, etc. Jenkins states, “Media barons of today will be grasping to hold onto their centralized empires tomorrow” (5). Again, he singles out media, but this is what Wachter-Boetter asserts is happening in the field of technology. Old school power and money want to run the show.

Power is not easy to give up once it is held. We see “the edge” or “the stress” seeking that same power.  Tech leadership’s “meritocracy” is a mentality of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. We are seeing a move toward “it is broke, so let’s fix it”. But how do we fix a megalithic conglomerate with many tentacles? Understanding that fit is important but is not without exclusionary components, and diversity is about more than gender or race; it’s about decentralizing group think, and integrating cultures to reflect as many of the populist as possible in order to expand said fit, while not forgetting that culture is a two-way express lane. If we cannot navigate the road together we will crash and the biggest vehicle wins – but at what cost? A lot that we have read so far speaks to technology’s need to consider the creator, and the user as co-voices, and co-creaters. Can this happen? Is it achievable? Or do the masses prefer to be dumbed-down, relying on a default – whatever.

Works Cited

Image: VoxEurop.eu. Accessed 6 Mar 2019 https://voxeurop.eu/en/content/cartoon/4946327-playing-chicken

Jenkins, Henry. Convergence Culture: Where old and new media collide. New York University Press, 2006.

Phillips, Whitney., and Ryan M. Milnver. The Ambivalent Internet: Mischief, Oddity, and Antagonism Online. Polity Press, 2017.

Wachter-Boettcher, Sara. Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.