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The history of surveillance in the United States is a long one. Our guest for the podcast on March 31, 2021, Dr. Chris Gillard, studies this very fact; Dr. Gillard’s scholarship focuses on digital privacy, institutional tech policy, surveillance capitalism, and digital redlining—a term that he defined on the podcast as “the creation and maintenance of tech practices, policies, pedagogies, and investment decisions that enforce class boundaries and discriminate against marginalized group.” As many of our Seminar guests have attested, too, access and relationships to contemporary digital technologies falls along racial, gendered, and classed lines, and the Internet—and the tools we use to access it—are made overwhelming by and for wealthy, straight white men in urban environments. And as Dr. Gilliard points out, access to the Internet is not the only thing historically minoritized groups are robbed of; these groups are also overwhelmingly stripped of their autonomy and privacy online. Although worries about CCTV and post-Patriot Act wiretapping seem especially twenty-first century, eminent scholars have recently illustrated how the very foundation of our nation, including its formation of racial and class differences, depended on the institution of surveillance. In her groundbreaking Dark Matters: On The Surveillance of Blackness, Simone Browne makes clear the connections between “the Panopticon, captivity, the slave ship, plantation slavery, racism, and the contemporary carceral practices of the U.S. prison system,” illustrating how contemporary surveillance technologies of all kinds have been formed and informed by the U.S.’s methods of policing and categorizing Black life under slavery (Browne pg. 43). This is evident all Read More

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When you read the phrase “Augmented Reality,” your mind might turn to something like Pokémon GO or the popular running app, Zombies, Run! In both cases, the user experiences a game that, while based in a real-world environment, includes computer-generated perceptual information—most typically visuals and sounds, but including haptic modalities, too. A Pokémon, GO player might make their way down a very real hiking trail or across a downtown street while their phones display that very same location—the only difference being a virtual Growlithe waiting to be captured atop a tree stump or storm drain. Augmented Reality is a term that’s been in the mainstream public consciousness for decades now; for example, AR in the form of what’s known as Heads Up Display (HUD), which allows airplane pilots to read information on a clear glass screen atop the windshield itself (rather than a separate display), has been standard in aviation for decades now. But only very recently, alongside the rise of smartphones and Artificial Intelligence, has the true potentiality of AR become a mainstream, everyday reality—allowing it to flourish most popularly in entertainment, fitness, and marketing and commerce. Pokémon GO and Zombies, Run! have been around since 2016 and 2012 respectively, and in that time a whole world of Augmented Reality experiences have popped up. Alongside the video games and fitness experiences, there’s the Warby Parker app that allows users to virtually try on glasses, an IKEA app that places virtual furniture into users’ homes, and Snapchat filters that turned a Footlocker advertisement into a 3D Read More

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Happy Black History Month! The Seminar does not have any scheduled guests or podcasts so far this month, and so an opportunity arises to highlight voices & publications beyond our venerable (& growing!) list of participants. During this strange & stressful February, I wanted to make space, as SE (Shack) Hackney did last year, within Information Ecosystems to highlight some incredible and essential work by and about Black voices, and—amid a global pandemic—how race overlaps with medicine, data, and concepts of cure. What follows is an absolutely non-exhaustive reading list on topics of Blackness, medicine, data, and technology. I offer these pieces & voices as profoundly important to how we should be thinking about medicine and technology within our current moment; it is difficult to understate the debt we all owe to Black scholars, activists, scientists, doctors, and organizers, particularly in digitally-oriented spaces—but lending an eye or ear to their essential contributions is a start. And indeed, as the long shadow of COVID-19 extends toward its year-long mark, we must take seriously the disproportionally devastating impact the pandemic has had on our nation’s Black communities. Today, while the rate of hospitalization and death per 10,000 sits at 7.4 and 2.3 for white patients, it is a staggering 24.6 and 5.6 for Black patients (source). Scholars from a wide array of disciplines have over and over confirmed that the U.S. has a long and difficult history of racism in medicine. And, as our own Seminar guests—such as Dr. Safiya Noble and Dr. Sandra González-Bailón—have also confirmed, the Read More

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In: Safiya Noble
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Happy Black History Month! (originally published February 2020) by S.E. Hackney On Thursday, January 23rd, Dr. Safiya Noble spoke to an overflowing room of students, faculty, and community members about her best-selling book Algorithms of Oppression. The thesis of the book, and of Dr. Noble’s talk, is that not only racism is actually built in to the search algorithms which we use to navigate the internet, but that the big players of the internet (Google specifically) actually profit off of that racism by tokenizing the identities of people of color. It does this by associating identity phrases such as “black girls” or “phillipina” with the sites with the most streamlined (aka profitable) SEO, which is often pornography. This is a system of classification explicitly based on the centering of the white experience and and othering of Black people and other people of color. However, as Dr. Noble spoke about in her talk, tweaking a search result or two to avoid offense doesn’t actually solve a systemic problem — one where white voices are treated as the norm, and others eventually become reduced to SEO tags to be bought and sold. This idea played out recently in Barnes & Noble’s miss guided Black History Month project, where public domain books where the race of the protagonist is not specified (determined by algorithm) have new cover art created for them, depicting the characters as People of Color. Rod Faulkner, who first brought this issue to widespread attention describes it as “literary blackface,” and points out, “Slapping illustrations of Black versions Read More